Do you remember the anticipation leading up to the birth of your first child? When at every baby shower, last-day-before-maternity-leave lunch, or extended family brunch, someone would lean in conspiringly and ask if you had a name picked out? Your great-aunt or your new colleague, whose name you kept forgetting, would say something like, “Oh you can tell me. I won’t tell a soul.”

Maybe you knew exactly what the little person inside of you would hear at every first-day-of-school roll call for the rest of her life. Or maybe you were frozen with panic about picking the WRONG name? Maybe months of people’s unsolicited feedback had worn you down. Comments like, “I knew a Paul. He was so awful” or “Grace, how nice” even though you can tell from the look in her eyes, she doesn’t think the name Grace is “nice” at all.

What if you still didn’t have the perfect name picked out, when your red faced, screaming miniature human made his grand entrance? How long did you get away with calling him “baby”? (more…)