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[quote=Anonymous]My kid has a more popular (top 100) name and it did not occur to me to give her a very unusual name. Like I didn't think "I will give her a popular name", it's just when we made our name lists, they were all basically recognizable names of varying levels of popularity but nothing that someone would say "wait, I didn't know that was a name." I haven't looked, but I'd bet most of the names we considered were in the  top 1000, probably more like top 300. I've also noticed that a few of what we considered to be more unusual names at the time (this was 2016) are now the names of kids I have encountered in my child's classes and activities. Names like June, Beatrice, Thea, and Josephine. These were names on our list in part because they were names we liked that we'd never known anyone to have, but now I know kids with all these names. So even when we thought we were branching out, we were still very much within the zeitgeist of what people were doing with names.

Having said that, over the years I've encountered kids with much more unusual names and while it felt out there at first, I've come to really like and enjoy them. Some are names that if you'd suggested them to me when I was pregnant, I would have though "oh, awful", it turns out are pretty great names once you experience them as assigned to a child you actually know. I've also realized that a lot of names that sound unusual are actually very similar to names that sound "normal" to me. Like I met a little girl name Beauty and thought "really?" and then realized that I know people named Hope and Grace and those names seem downright basic to me, so why not Beauty (she was a very pretty child, for the record). I met a kid named Indiana and that felt out there, and then realized that he could be named for the state or the movie character, so actually it's kind of normal. And so on.

The process of naming a kid is weird an I found it intimidating -- I didn't want to screw it up. Which is probably why we defaulted to a narrower universe of known names. And I have no regrets -- I love my DD's name and so does she. But what I've learned is that naming kids isn't as hard as I think I made it out to be. Kids really do just kind of make their names their own, and as long as the name is normalized and embraced by the family and the broader community (we live in a very diverse community where criticizing an unusual name would be considered pretty bad), it works out. I probably could have loosened up about our name process a little bit, and if we have another, I will.[/quote]

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