I sort of wish I still had some baby name books.  I know the Internet is a much better resource in many ways, but there’s something about thumbing through the pages and circling things that’s lost in browsing a website.

A preliminary list will be forthcoming in the next week or so.

Since I started this blog, all kinds of things have happened. I am 40 now, and we’ve started attending an Orthodox church. The former makes me a little less certain about our chances of adding any more children, and the latter is just a factor that might influence my lists in the future.

I had a dream last night that I was going to have a baby, and we’d decided on a name for a girl (Mary Elizabeth, with the nickname Betsy) and were trying to decide on a name for a boy. When I woke up, I thought that ‘Mary Elizabeth’ would strike a lot of people as sounding very Catholic. (And that’s really ok with me, actually.)

I am not sure about Betsy. I think it sounds really cute and maybe a little old fashioned. I just wonder if it would sound like an old lady name to other people… And I wonder if I really care what other people think. It’s not exactly a bizarre name, and if I met a little Betsy, I would think it was a refreshing change of pace. But I will admit that my opinions about names are not necessarily widely shared.

I don’t really remember if we’d decided anything about a name for a boy. We were throwing around other good saints’ names like John and Peter. I don’t know if I would use either of those in waking life, though.

And in other news…

We’re moving forward with baby plans for ourselves, with a backup plan. We’re waiting to try until September, since our family (immediate and extended, on both sides) is an insane traffic jam of birthdays in April and May. That gives me some time to lose more weight, too.  We’ll see how it goes.  There are a number of factors that make it extremely complicated. (It’s going to require outside help in one fashion or another, for one.)

For now, I am rekindling my interest in names for my own use. There have been additions around the family that have made some changes to my list, as well as having had my mind opened and/or changed by conversations with people close to me.

If anyone is out there, is Erasmus more of a first name or a middle name? I’ve been discussing this with a friend who likes it as a middle name, for formal purposes, but in less formal use as the nickname “Ras” (or “Raz”). I kind of like that.

The first thing is that one of my adult children called to tell me that I am going to be a grandmother, which makes me feel a little silly thinking about adding one more child to our family.

Click this for her name list at BabyNames.com. (Opens in a new window.)

Also, the naming landscape of our family has change a little bit. My sister-in-law just had twins a month ago, and took the name James off the table.  The other baby is a girl named Trinity, after the mountains where they live in Idaho.

Lastly, despite what I said above about feeling a little silly, there’s a bit of a chance, a long shot, that I might get to use one of the names on my list in the next year or so, without giving birth myself. That’s all I can really say about that at this time, though. Like I said, total long shot.

Before I launch into the list du jour, I have a snarky little comment for which I hope you will forgive me. Over on Baby Names World at Parents Connect, there’s a little “guess this baby’s name” box in the sidebar. Lately, I’ve found that I am almost always right if I pick the name that looks like it was a typo.

Ok, onward!

Tabitha is at the top of my list for girls. Edmund remains at the top of my list for boys, but I am waffling on the spelling issue.

Other top of the heap names for girls, in no particular order:

• C/Katherine – I like the C, but my husband has a strong preference for K.
• Adelaide – At the top of MY list. My husband would need a lot of help getting into this one, though.
• Elizabeth – Classic, and enough nicknames to have a different one every month.
• Clara – It sounds sweet, and there’s a family story that goes with it.
• Phaedra – Carried forward from last year’s lists. I still love it
• Sabrina – No, I am not on a “TV’s young witches” kick. This is more Audrey Hepburn in my mind, but somewhat less popular than Audrey itself.
• Tova – I still like this, but it’s just not #1 material. (… this week.)

Middle names for girls? Right now I am hung up on Jane, Mirabel and Leocadia, or alternatively Katherine or Elizabeth behind a … *ahem* more creative… first name.

For boys:

• Jonah – I guess Old Testament names have been a trend for a while, but this is honestly one of my favorites.
• James – Solid, classic, and not overly represented in the family.
• Charles – Exactly the same reasoning as James. The downside is that my niece, Charlotte, is already called “Charlie”.
• Harold - I have a feeling some people will see this as the dog of the list, but it’s a solid, masculine name with family connections.
• Henry - I seem to be running into a fair number of little ones named Henry, but I just love it.
• Wyatt -  No excuses. I just like it.
• Kevin – Don’t laugh. I’m feeling nostalgic for my youth.

I still think Edmund Jericho is my favorite combo for that name, but otherwise, I have no clue what to do for a middle name for any of these. Not a blessed clue!

I am feeling a lot more open toward names in the Top 100 now. I have never really shunned popular names for boys, but I used to be very prejudiced against popular names for girls. This is something I’ve been re-thinking. I am not going to choose a name from those lists specifically because they are popular, but I am not going to reject names that I happen to like just because they are on there either.

I would just like to avoid names that are going to be dated later. I don’t want to do that to anyone.  My parents named me Sherry in 1971. Been there, done that, changed my name.

I plan to start new lists from scratch. I think my time away from making lists and reading naming blogs will be a benefit. I want to take a fresh look at what names I might want to use, in theory, without being overly influenced by what other people like and hate.

I’ll post later this week. This is just to say that I’m back.

The spelling of Irish can be pretty intimidating, until you get used to it, and there’s nothing intuitive about how to pronounce them for English-speaking Americans. My husband is sensitive to spelling issues, so this relegates these names to “guilty pleasure” status, or perhaps middle name territory at best.

Here’s a short list of some of my favorites:

Aoife

Caoimhe

Saoirse

Laoise

Muireann

Róisín

Ríonach (and a note on pronouncing it)

Despite the popularity here in the US of Irish and Irish-inspired names for boys, they don’t rank quite as highly with me. I have a Liam already, so I guess that was enough. (And why Liam for him? It was the only thing we could agree on at the time. We never did agree on a name for a girl, so he’s lucky he’s a boy, or we’d probably still be arguing about it.)

I’m not pregnant and won’t be for a minimum of 6 months at this point, so worrying about names isn’t exactly an emergency.

Unlike other people, my interest in names is a two-pronged thing: I am interested in names that I would use, and I am interested in creating fictional naming systems that fit my constructed languages.

I’ve given in to being a little snarky, but the truth is, I don’t care what people name their kids in general. If Mr. and Mrs. Christmas think it is a good idea to name their daughter Mary, that’s not really any of my business. And I don’t know that I’d even find it very surprising at this point.

So, anyway, on to my top picks as of today. Off the top of my head, I’m going to say that Edmund has moved up to #1 for a boy, and Tabitha is probably my #1 for a girl.

Jonah is really appealing to me right now. Malcolm remains a strong contender. Henry has probably fallen down below those. Kai is a favorite, and I’ll let that round out my picks, but I don’t know that it has what it takes to stand up to our 3-syllable last name.

I still like Wyatt, but saying it a few times with our last name, it doesn’t work so well. (It goes great with my maiden name though, which is just about useless.)  Jethro and maybe Jasper are possible replacements for Wyatt on my list.

The other contenders in the feminine category are Phaedra, Daphne, Carmen and Claudia. I just like those best right now. Who knows how I’ll feel next month. Like I said, I’ve got all the time in the world.

And everything after this point is of little or no interest to baby name enthusiasts, but is intensely interesting to me, so I am going to post it anyway.

I had mentioned much earlier in this blog that I invent languages as a hobby, and part of that has been finding ways to adapt real world names to my fictional languages, and also inventing naming systems for my languages.

I have maybe 3.5 language projects that have developed into something more than a very preliminary sketch. One of those (Myjador) is dormant, one is semi-dormant (ea-luna), one is in active development (Teliya Nevashi) and one new one that hasn’t really been named yet and isn’t quite ready for its debut.

Of those, ea-luna probably had the most personal names floating around in my notes. Some were translations of “real” names, others were names just adapted to the sound system of ea-luna (often to the point of mangling– “Fred” would end up something like “Puredu” when adapted), and some were “native” to the fictional culture of the language (such as “Keawakadi”, which is actually a smooshed together phrase that could be translated as “Wintersoul”).

Myjador had a number of “native” feminine names, mostly referring to the time of day of the birth of the child. The only one I can think of without looking it up is “Shesari” (“Born In The Evening”). I think where I was going with that was that in that fictional culture, a person would have two given names– a very common one related to the circumstances of his/her birth (time of day, season, weather, war or peacetime status, etc), and then a more specific one picked just for them.

Teliya Nevashi is a newer project in very slow development. My plans for this one is to develop a list of naming elements that can be combined to create names with different meanings that mostly stand out from other words in the lexicon.  The only Nevashi name I can think of that has been used so far is Tajítsha, which means “Little Marigold”, and for better or worse, that’s really just a word with a diminutive suffix on it. That’s not the way I want to go for most names, though.

I’ll probably have a combination system for the unnamed language project, which I intend to be a collaborative project in the long run. Right now I am just building a framework and I need to get the online infrastructure in place for the collaborators to work and share in, but I do think it would be cool if people coming into the project could build their own names. We’ll see how that goes.

As I said much earlier in this blog, I don’t mind made-up names, as long as it means something to someone, somewhere. Lots of now-legit names (e.g., Wendy, Vanessa) were invented for literary purposes. On the other hand, I may not be so much a fan of “it doesn’t mean anything, it’s not a reference to anything, it just sounded pretty.”

The #1 combos are Henry Stuart and Tova Leocadia (still), and that puts Henry and Tova in the top spots for individual names as well.

The other four for girls, in no particular order: Daphne, Phaedra, Tabitha, Audrey.

The other four for boys are :  Harold, Edmund, Malcolm, Wyatt.

Edmund is my solid #2, I think, with Edmund Jericho being my favorite combo at the moment. Yeah, I know Wyatt is really popular. I likes what I likes.

As far as the feminine side, Audrey is on very shaky ground there, but the other three are pretty solid. Audrey has Carmen, Beatrix, Sabrina, Susan, and even Claudia and Eden nipping at it’s heels.

I’d love to see some fresh, new combos for any of these, including the runners-up on the girl’s list. I’d really like to see a combo with Daphne and a middle starting with ‘M’ that isn’t Marie or Maria. I’ve just had a hard time coming up with anything satisfactory. (Thanks in advance for anything you suggest!)

1) My son had the longest (full) name in his class. The salutatorian came in second, at four letters shorter. (They both have hyphenated last names).

2) Due to the ethnic diversity of his graduating class, there are a lot of names out of languages other than English.

And now for some individual names–

The valedictorian was named Melody. (Middle name? The demure-but-predictable Anne.)

The young lady named Charlotte Aletha probably had a name ahead of its time.

There was one young man named Olexander, but when my daughter mentioned him, she called him “Alex”.

Demashia wasn’t pronounced De-MAH-shee-ah, as I’d imagined when I read it. It was De-MAY-shee-ah.

One of my son’s classmates was named Ikea. Yes, like the furniture store. No, I’m not kidding.

Another was named Fantasia.

Yet another was named Myriah Karrey, pronounced “Mariah Carey”.

You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Michael, or a girl who had Ashley as a first or middle name. Samantha was also popular that year, and there were a couple of Ambers too. Likewise, there were a few boys named Marcus, and (being ethnically diverse, as I previously mentioned) there were a couple of boys named Jesus as well.

Marie was a wildly popular middle name. I wonder if it still is, or if Rose is the new universal middle name. Speaking of which, there was a girl with Rose in the middle there too, but only one. There was only one girl with the middle name “Breeze” also, but that’s less surprising.

And on the personal opinion side: 

My favorite name of the day (other than my son’s) was probably “Maria De La Luz”. I know it’s in-your-face Spanish (and perhaps in-your-face Catholic), but it’s got a lovely ring to it, IMO.