Saturday, September 29, 2007

What are you going to name him?

Whether or not I ask someone what they are going to name their child usually depends on my mood. Do I feel like I can hold in my laughter and then tuck the gem away for later use, or would I rather save myself the trouble and not know?

A long string of rather interesting baby names led me to look up a list of the top 10 baby names for the past year. I remember when these lists used to be made up with names like Matthew and Katherine and I was horrified that 5 of the top 10 boy names from 2006 were:

Aiden
Braden
Cayden
Jayden &
Hayden

Seriously? What are you people thinking? This really makes me further reconsider my already shaky thoughts on having children. As someone with a rather common name that usually had to share it with least one other classmate, I cringe at the thought of my son coming home with his birthday party list of rhyming names. Even worse, how would I be able to keep all these kids straight? "I'm not Aiden, I'm Braden and he's Hayden". Oy vey.

5 comments:

Fe said...

I once had 5 of these in a class! No Braden, but there were two Haydens... that was out of 20 students, 7 of whom were male.

The ridiculous thing was that there was no reason for these kids to be all together, they were randomly assigned!

And the worst bit? It was in my last term of teaching before going on maternity leave! I struggled with nouns in general, those names did not help at all!

Rebecca said...

Haha, I love it when people name their kids stuff like Aidan and Caleb (two I hear aaalll the time).

My family had a Cocker Spaniel named Caleb when I was growing up, because it meant "dog" in Hebrew. :P You named your child dog?

Now we have a foster Border Collie named Aidan, because it is a super-common traditional sheepdog name. Sure, it is an 'old human name', but I can't help but think of sheepdogs every time I hear it.

kimmerkc said...

This is why we named our eldest Arizona. Turns out there was an "Aaron Jonah" in his class. *sigh*

mewwsical said...

I purposely AVOID popular names for just this reason! I don't understand why more parents don't think about this before they give their kids these names :-/

MV said...

Hehehe. I've wondered the same thing. Unfortunately I love common names, but definitely prefer more traditional ones.