Still No Name

Here we are, 34 weeks along our 40 week journey, and we still have no name for Baby Burnett. A number of people have responded to this information with knowing smiles, saying, "Ah, of course! You really have a name, but you just want to keep it a secret, so you're just saying that, right?" Nope. It's true that if we had a name, we had planned on keeping it a secret until the baby was born, but it's also true that we still haven't decided on a name.

Early on in the pregnancy, we had chosen a family name that we thought would be perfect, but as we asked around, we discovered that name had a negative emotional connotation, so we threw that option out. That left us back at Square One, and we've been there ever since.

We looked at a few Baby Name books and the endless lists of names on various web sites on the Internet. That research method is proving to be fruitless, because there are so many names in these lists, and so many of them just "won't work" for our kid, or for any kid, for that matter. Just because someone out there named their kid something funky, doesn't necessarily make it a "good" name. The school and teenage years will be difficult enough, and we are trying very hard not to make it worse for our kid.

When we're looking at lists of names, it's inevitable to associate a name with a person we've known in our lifetime. Most of the names remind us of "that one person who..." I've got 10 years under my belt of working in various school districts, so many of the names I tend to reject almost immediately because I am reminded of a snotty or bratty or bully kid I once knew. Dan has his own list of names in his head that remind him of a smarmy sales person or a nerdy techie person he has known. We're trying to move away from these biases, in the hope that this new being we've created will forge his own identity in another time and place than these other people we once knew.