The Name.

I have always spent an inordinate amount of time thinking of names.  Names for hypothetical children of my own, of other people, of pets, of other people's pets, etc.  Since I know that everyone obsesses about names like I do (Ha!), I will tell you how we finally picked our baby names.  

If I had a child when I was under the age of ten (let's suspend rational thought for a moment), I would have named it Carson.  It worked for either one!  I liked this concept, as evidenced by my gender unknown pet parakeet at the time, Parker.  

Around fourteen I would have named my twin girls Autumn and Tatum.  I no longer have anything to say about those names.  

I loved names like James and Edward at this point for boys, but where is the fun in that?

Around sixteen I switched to Wesley, Trent, and Spencer.  

And then you marry someone and realize that they might not agree that their child should be called Nico or named after your great Aunt Gert (I don't believe I actually have a great Aunt Gert, but I did have a great Grandma Myrt).  And so you have to come together on names in some way.  Had Sergio had a child at any time growing up, it would have been called Jake.  Nothing wrong with that, but it never took hold with the both of us.   At first, it was easy.  We loved the names Aiden and Isabelle when we first married.  But then the whole world named their children these names.  Okay, how about Wyatt, Jasper, or Henry.  Same thing.  

Not only all of that, but we are not the first to have kids in our families.  Not by a long shot.  On one side of my family alone I have roughly thirty young cousins, nieces, or nephews that all have two names each.  Can't use any of those!

So, in response to all of this Sergio and I began taking action a couple of years ago.  We wanted traditional names that could stand the test of time.  We wanted names that we could see our children growing into as adults.  We wanted names that told a story, that could work for a professor, an author, an athlete, etc.  And we wanted it to be unpopular.  

In order to accomplish this we spent lots of time taking any name that struck our fancy and plugging it in to the social security administration baby names website.  This site tells you how popular a name has been in the last 100 years.  This process is remarkably hard for boys since the names "B" and "Linda" have been in the top 1000 boy names over the last 100 years.  Just finding a boys name at the bottom of this list is good.  And that is how we finally settled on three options for our kids.  Rosalind (isn't on the list), Burl (hugely unpopular), and Amos (on the list, but low).  And there you have it.  

I have lists of names for everything from dogs to ferrets to rats...in case anyone ever needs an idea for anything.