The Modernish Father

After four years of figuring out the whole parenting thing and doing what we believe to be a reasonably okay job, The Wife and I are contemplating having a second child. This, of course, lead us to the most important consideration when making such a decision – could we come up with decent name?

Girls’ names aren’t a problem. We’ve pretty much narrowed it down to a single first name and a couple of competitive middles names. (Completely different names from what we would have named The Boy if he had been a girl, btw…)

Boys’ names…well, as Shakespeare would say, therein lies the rub. We only had one male name that we could agree on and The Boy took that one. Unless we want to go the George Foreman route, it looks like we might have a long and arduous search process ahead of us.

The problem is that there seems to be only three categories of male names: ones I like, ones she likes and ones that nobody should like. Unlike girls’ names, there’s no “cool and unique” group of boys’ names. There’s just the plain vanilla group, the names that are unique because they’re so god-awful and the names that aren’t unique anymore.

Now, before you get all huffy and point out the plethora of trendy boys’ names that you’re seeing all over the place, let me point out one thing: you’re seeing them all over the place. We really don’t want any prospective child having to share his name with ten classmates in the first grade. Ideally, we’d like something like my own name – something that’s uncommon enough to stand out but normal enough to not be weird (Junior is definitely not an option though!).

A recent trip to the local McDonald’s playground with The Boy uncovered three Jacksons, a pair of Connors, two Jacobs, a couple of Brandons and even a Fisher. I felt like I was in the middle of a daytime soap opera. The Boys’s pre-school class has two Adens. Whatever happened to Thomas, William and Robert?

During our trip to the Golden Arches, I asked The Boy what he would name a little brother. His response was swift and stunningly brilliant:

“Lando Bart”

“Lando”, because I was actually advocating it briefly in a discussion with The Wife and “Bart” because he thinks that name is the funniest thing in the entire world. (Must be a four-year-old thing.) Good enough for me.

The Wife, on the other hand, would like a name that compliments The Boy’s name and has a vaguely Eastern European/Russian ring to it. Unfortunately, her suggestions of things like Viggo, Luka and Viktor are a bit too “straight off the boat” for me. Plus, the fact that she’s pulling these names from her actor/character fantasy list doesn’t sit too well with me either.

I seem to have a preference for Irish names, which don’t gel with our last name at all and seem to be the nexus of the overexposed trendy name universe. My two favorites, Conan (as in O’Brien, not the Barbarian) and Lando are not viable options for reasons that are apparent even to me.

In an attempt to find some middle ground, The Wife and I both came up with lists of names we like and then shared them with each other (alas, a “no making fun” rule was in effect). We discovered that we had listed exactly zero names in common and that, the two fine examples of Conan and Lando aside, my list of names was far more conservative than hers.

It all may be a moot point, however. Somehow The Wife concluded that since we both readily agreed to give The Boy one of my family names as a middle name, she now has complete naming rights to any second child. I seem to remember making an agreement that she would have the top hand in the second child’s middle name, but obviously the mommy-haze has obscured the truth. So, conceivably I could end up with a son named Viggo Fluffernutter Shabazz III.

With all this excitement, I can’t wait to actually go through the process of having and raising little V-Fluff.