The name game

Although I wore this shirt to my last appointment with Dr. Fantabulous, I didn't actually ask the question. I'm 35 weeks today and my next appointment is a week from Wednesday (36w2d), so at this late date it's pretty pointless to ask about the baby's sex. I'm amazed I resisted the temptation, frankly, especially when it became clear that choosing a name for a boy was going to be a lot harder this time around than last - and it was hard enough last time. A girl's name was easy - basically I told R what I wanted and he recognized the futility of resistance - but boys? I don't know why it was so hard, but we just put off the boy's name during the Small Boy pregnancy. Then at 34 weeks I almost went into labor (part of the curse of New Year's Eve) and realized we have no name if it's a boy. After a few days in the hospital Dr. Fantabulous sent me home and I insisted that we come up with a boy name ASAP.

We made lists. R made an excel worksheet with our choices, where we overlapped, how we each ranked the name, and the meaning (because he's a computer geek like that). In the end we had ten boys' names to choose from. We picked a first and middle name for Small Boy (and may I say we chose a fabulous combination) and good thing, seeing as how he turned out to be a small boy and all.

Fast forward to this pregnancy and once again we have the girl's name (the same one) and are struggling with the boy. I found the lists we made when trying to name Small Boy, the one with the eight other names that we in theory liked and agreed on and of the eight? Yeah, I don't like them anymore. Which makes sense as my heart knows they are names I turned down once. So we're back to the drawing board picking boy names. We're making some headway, but I don't know why we have such trouble with male names.

I think most parents put a lot of thought and energy into choosing names; it's a big deal after all. And it's hard to come to terms: your favorite name reminds him of the guy who stole his milk money every day in the forth grade, his favorite name is your brother's name, your sister gives birth and uses the name you picked out (the hazards of keeping these things secret). You just don't like it, he just thinks it's funny. You want to name her after your grandmother, he wants to name her after his. The first name has to work with the last name; if there are older children the names should sound nice together. There's a lot of negotiating.

On top of the standard naming issues, R and I have an additional consideration: the name has to work in English and German pronunciations and in US and Swiss cultures at a bare minimum. (It's bad enough that R's last name uses an umlaut, which the US social security administration cannot accomodate so his name and Small Boy's are spelled differently on US and Swiss documents; I never changed my name when we got married, in some small part because of that pesky umlaut.) Although our current plans and R's career trajectory see us living in Switzerland well into Small Boy's school years, and probably this Player-to-be-Named-Later's as well, we've never ruled out moving if the conditions were right; moving to the US or moving to an interesting third country. So names that translate, names that are at least recognizable in multiple cultures, names that don't change genders when you cross borders (Jan, anyone?) are important to us. This leaves us with some really nice classic names, but it also rules out a lot.

For example, one of my favorite Swiss names for a boy is Beat - and all my English-speaking readers who just rhymed that with "feet" in their heads have demonstrated why that name won't work for somebody who will be living half of his life in English. It's pronounced "Bay-aht" in Switzerland. R and I happen to know a Beat who, as luck would have it, is married to an American woman, and he pretty much spends his life correcting the mispronunciation of his name. For an adult it's an annoyance (for that matter, R's name is no piece of cake in the US either - it's very Swiss) but can you imagine if we move to the US just in time for a son of ours named Beat to enter, say, the fifth grade? Fun times on the playground for sure.

Then there are the names that just sound funny when pronounced in German or are too Swiss - see above, Beat - for the US. Or too American for Switzerland. And then there is the nick-name issue. The Swiss, they loooove the nicknames. If your name is Jane, the Swiss will find a way to give you a diminuative. Jacob becomes Kobi; Sebastian becomes Sebu; Christian becomes Chrigu; Konrad becomes Konu; Thomas becomes Thomu. As an adult it's possible to get people to use your full name, but you couldn't get a Swiss teacher to call a seven year old boy "Sebastian" for love or money. He would be a Sebu. I like some of the nicknames - personally, I like Chrigu well enough - and dislike others. I love the name Sebastian - Sebu, not so much. Konrad, yes; Konu, eh. Every time I think of a boy's name, I ask R for the nick-name (and there is always a nick-name). And half the time it leads to scratching another name off the list. If there had been one reason to ask Dr. Fantabulous to tell us the baby's sex, it would have been on the off chance we'd get to avoid the whole boy name issue. It's taking up rather a lot of mental energy that I don't really have to spare.

All that having been said, however, if I gave birth to a boy tonight we could name the baby. It's quite a relief.

(But a blog pseudonym I still don't have...)