And Sophie is still mine, bitches

Since finding out that Baby Half Caff is a girl, the name selection frenzy has set in. I’m spending half the day, every day, on this website called Nameberry, run by the two ladies that wrote the Beyond Jennifer & Jason and Cool Names for Baby books. (If you are looking for a good baby name book, I seriously recommend Cool Names for Babies. I’ve owned and or checked out of the library probably 25 baby name books over they years and most are lists of crazily obscure names. Cool Names for Baby narrows it down to just the good ones.)

Anywhoodles, I am a sheep and I do whatever those Nameberry chicks tell me to do. Like reading the London Telegraph birth announcemants. If you need to kill 7 hours in one sitting feel free to check it out. Once you start looking you cannot stop. But Nameberry is right, there are some gorgeous names to be stolen from those announcements. Like Daisy Beatrice Antonia (adorable!) and Anais Pearl (tres chic!)  and Amelia Beatrice Grace (classy!).

They apparently love the name Beatrice in London.  Which makes me love it too. The problem is, I don’t live in London and if I named a kid Beatrice and then sent it off to public school here where we live, there would be teasing and lots of it. Also, I don’t care for the nickname Bea. Because of Bea Arthur. I can’t give my kid a name that makes me think of an imposing white haired old TV star every time I say it.

The London crowd also, more often than not, give their kids three names. I like the three name idea. I had already been thinking about adding an extra name this time around, just because I have so many favorites left over from the last two babies. So I’ll stick a third name in there to use up one of the extras from my extensive list.

Nameberry also directed me to Theresa Strasser’s blog Exploiting My Baby where the comedian hilariously chronicles her first pregnancy. In a recent post Strasser discusses the trouble she and her husband have finding a boy name that they love for their baby and the possessive nature of expecting parents regarding their name choices:

“…Pregnant women don’t usually share the names they’ve chosen for their babies. That may be a smug choice, sure, but I think I get it now. You let the name cat out of the bag, and everyone judges the cat, they swing the cat around by the tail, they project their own issues onto the cat and now you want to put the whole incident in your emotional litter box and bury it so you can still like the cat as much as you used to.”

It’s so true. I hate revealing my favorite names to people. I just can’t take the judgement. Also, I usually have no idea what we are going to name a baby until show time. And sometimes even that can change. We called my belly Sophie for two months before Avery was born. Then she came out and she didn’t look like a Sophie. And I’m not quite sure how we ended up with the name Avery, because it wasn’t written down on any of my lists, but I was on a lot of morphine following the C Section and somehow she became Avery and now I love it.

My friends and cousins and I all made each other promise that certain names were off limits to each other. We claimed them as our own. It’s a good system, we don’t end up with duplicates and no one has their feelings hurt by an unscrupulous name stealing relative.  So everyone knew that Caroline was mine, and I know that I can never use the name Frances because my girlfriend Diann will need it when she has a girl (it was her grandmother’s name). Carissa, Jacqueline and Brooke were also claimed by family members.

I’m not going to reveal any of my favorite names here, but know that I am looking everywhere I can for inspiration and some of you have daughters with beautifuul names that I love and I am not above poaching a name.

But since we know for sure that our new babeh is a girl, feel free to steal the name we would have used if it had been a boy: Ashton Kutcher.

Yep, if baby Half Caff had been a boy he would have been christened Ashton Kutcher Maselli. Doesn’t that  have a nice ring to it? It just flows off the tongue. Also, I think a baby named Ashton Kutcher Maselli would be highly respected and have lots of friends. The real Ashton Kutcher has over a million followers on Twitter. That has to count for something.

We can’t use it now, so you expectant moms out there can go ahead and snap it up. 

And please shout out your name suggestions in the comments. I need all the help I can get finding a name for this baby. And if you are expecting you should definitely check out Nameberry. They’ve paid me nothing for this little plug and in fact they have no idea who I am, but they’ve given me all this free baby name guidance, and they are awesome so I wanted to give them a little love.