Hello, parents and parents to be! I need your help!

[Anonymous]

All the names I chose for my girls were just ones that I liked the sound of, that evoked a classy image, and were consistent with my Anglo heritage (i.e. I liked many Hebrew and Hispanic names but thought they wouldn't fit with my last name or with my pasty white kids). Unfortunately, no great meaning behind any of them.

[Anonymous]

We also debated a long time - including discussing the middle name during labor. We had several qualifications:

-No religious names: we are agnostics, and I didn't want that association
-No names currently in use in our families or from our grandparents. I personally have problems with naming a child after someone: my parents named me after my maternal grandmother, and I always felt they wanted me to be HER not ME. (This was a very difficult task, by the way as we both come from large families.)
-My husband has a trans-gender name and has hated it all his life, so we wanted a clearly male/female name.
-For middle names, we were discussing names of famous people we admired. William for Shakespeare, Thomas for Thomas Paine, Truman for the president, Elizabeth for the Renaissance queen, etc.

There were some other factors such as what the initials spelled out, if the name could be used to tease the child, and recognition (especially for a boy as my husband had read that boys with unusual names are more likely to end up in prison or unemployed).

By the way, we had a boy and settled on Brent.

Best of luck with your writing, and I hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

We read every single name on the Social Security 1,000 most popular names list. For both sexes, because we didn't know what we were having! Anything that one of us liked and the other one at least didn't *hate* made it onto a short list. And I mean short. Out of those 1000 names, we had maybe 12 girls and 4 boys names. Then we ended up picking one that wasn't on the list -- it sounded a lot like a name my husband loved, but that I had bad associations with (knew an obnoxious girl with this name when I was growing up). I switched a consonant, et voila. The name we picked is a "real" name, though -- it has meanings in Greek and in Hebrew, and we get asked if we are Greek or Jewish (or Russian or Italian) because of it. But we're none of those -- just like the name! And it was good we had a girl, because we never did really agree on a boy's name.

[Anonymous]

"After all, my mom gave me my name because it was so "unusual," but it ended up being the most common girl name in America for like 20 years after I was born. You can probably guess what it is. "

Jennifer?