What's in a name?

Oh, you have to read this. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118247444843644288.html?mod=most_viewed_day

Just when you think we haven't succumbed to enough silliness as a society, we now have baby-naming consultants. Don't get me wrong, it's a difficult and weighty decision, but paying a ton of money to someone to determine your favorite name's numerological vibe is, well, huh???

Naming a child makes planning a wedding seem like a walk in the park. You're saddling some innocent new life with something he/she has to carry through life, and you have to come to agreement with someone who may have a radically different view on the matter than you do.

We still didn't have a name when Emily was born. I'd brought up the topic several times throughout our pregnancy, but John kept saying how we didn't need to worry about it yet. Suddenly, at 36 weeks, he got a burr in his saddle about it and proclaimed that we had to come up with the list that weekend. (Not a moment too soon, as it turns out, since she decided to show up 3 weeks early.) I'd already made a tentative list of first and middle names based on things we'd tossed around over the years, but he had something different in mind.

Ever the enginner and electronics nerd, John came home with--I kid you not--an Excel spreadsheet. In and of itself, that didn't surprise me. The multiple pages with different iterations of the aforementioned spreadsheet did. He had various pages on which he'd matched the favorite first names with all the different middle names so we could see how they looked and sounded together. There were columns for his names (straightforward A, B, and C list) and my names (A, A-, somewhere between A- and B, B, B-, 'C-ish' list) and the names were given scores depending on where they were. X number of points for being on John's top tier, same number for my top tier, etc. Then they were given a combined score.

After that, though, he did the same with the middle names and made additional spreadsheets where he combined the names and it took a life of its own from there. The names wound up with various scores depending on how much each of us liked the first name individually, the first and middle together, the first and last together, and the whole shebang. However, these were then weighted depending on the relative importance. In other words, how much we liked the first and last name together was weighted more heavily than first and middle.

And after pages of spreadsheets and statistics, we wound up with... well, pretty much the same list I had sketched out in my laissez-faire, touchy-feely way.

While zipping up the Autobahn just before The Great Naming Weekend, I casually mentioned to John that, "I wish Eowyn were an actual name, you know? It's so beautiful, and she is far and away one of my favorite literary characters... strong, feminine, loving, brave." For anyone who knows John, this next part should come as no surprise, given his obsession with all things Lord of the Rings; watching the movies--extended version, of course--involves the use of the Tolkien atlases and other reference materials. After several quiet kilometers, he looked at me and said slowly and in a measured voice to carefully restrain his excitement, "Soooo... is that saying that you would consider 'Eowyn' for the baby?" How could I say no to that? Yeah, we considered it. Quite seriously, as a matter of fact. But I just couldn't do it to her, knowing she'd forever be explaining it and spelling it for people who were somewhat less obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien.

But we still couldn't decide on a final one. We wanted to wait until we saw the baby and see which one of our short list fit. I'll post the story of her birth some other time, but suffice it to say I was not conscious for it and didn't meet Emily until quite a few hours later after we'd been stabilized. When she was finally brought to me and held where I could see her, I gazed at her face for the first time and waited for the light to shine, the angels to sing, and the epiphany to descend. It didn't, much to the consternation of the German hospital staff, who was shocked that the child had not been previously named or, for that matter, delivered on her due date.

We wound up naming our daughter Emily Grace, a name we had both loved since I'd had a dream about it while John and I were dating. But it was hard. With names like "John" and "Amy", I really didn't want to saddle my daughter with the most popular name for the last umpteen years. This frustrated me, because I've loved this name all my life. But we just kept coming back to this name for our child. And despite my hesitancy in naming my child a popular name, saying it throughout the day makes my heart sing. And I suppose that's worth quite a few points on an Excel spreadsheet.