The most stressful aspect of pregnancy

So, I've been thinking about this... pregnancy in general is full of stress and uncertainty. You have a ton of choices to make, you feel things you've never felt before. You are solely responsible for making sure your child(ren) arrive safely into the world. The idea that you are carrying another life around in your body can be pretty overwhelming, if you really stop to think about it. But all of these things don't compare to the stress of naming your child(ren).

A name is what comes to define your child. It is what he or she will be known as for the rest of their lives. They will know (eventually) that you are the one who gave them their name, so if they don't like it -- they will resent you for the rest of their lives (OK, maybe a bit dramatic, but I'm sure it's happened somewhere). It is one of the first questions you get once people find out that you are expecting -- usually preceding or following the question "do you know what you're having?"

There are people who, no matter how much their friends and relatives beg and plead -- will never reveal their names, for fear that someone will "steal" them. Most people think this is ridiculous, but it happened to my grandmother. I don't know if I have the story completely correct, but it went something like this. Her sister-in-law was expecting and my grandmother shared with her the name that she would give a girl, should she have one at some point in the future. The name was Nancy. Low and behold, when her sister-in-law introduced my grandmother to her newborn daughter, Nancy -- my grandmother was less than thrilled. She found a new name and revealed it to nobody. She also created a unique element, to avoid the chance that if someone ended up naming their daughter the same name, it would still be just a little different. When my grandmother gave birth to my mom in April of 1943, she proudly named her Gille (pronounced Jill). Little Gille endured many years of being called "Gill-ie" -- and she was most scarred by a doctor whom she saw as a young child whom she would hide from. The doctor would chase around his office looking for that "darn Gill-ie." Needless to say, when my mom turned 18, she had her name legally changed to "Jill."

Naming our twins has become a family affair. Geoff and I came up with some preliminary names that we both liked, but then we went to our mothers for their input. We got some good recommendations -- but we are still hesitant to pull the trigger and settle on their "official" names. I think we both want to wait until they are born to see if their names "fit them" --whatever that means. In the meantime, our families keep asking -- "so, have you finalized their names yet" and all we can say is "not yet." I fear that we are heading down the same road we travelled when we named our dog.

We adopted a dog from a local no-kill shelter in the summer of 2006. She came with her shelter name "Primavera" -- not an easy name that you can yell out the back door when you catch her eating your flowers. We decided that we needed to find a new name for Primavera -- but what? We took over a month to finally settle on "Roxie" -- and even when we decided this was a good name, we gave it a "test week" to make sure it was going to work. After that week, Geoff decided that he didn't want to name his dog the same name as his neighbor's dog from when he lived in Rockford. That dog is an "ankle biter" and his next door neighbor would whip open the door and scream "ROOOOOXIEEEEEE" and he couldn't get that out of his head. At that point, I really liked Roxie's name, and there were no other names we both liked as much, so we agreed to keep her name Roxie and finalized it by going to PetsMart and getting her an engraved name tag -- the birth certificate for dogs.

So until our precious daughters make their grand entrance sometime early next year -- we can tell people, we have a list. That list contains about 8 names, some with middle names, some without. It is a work in progress and it is still open for discussion. Nothing will be made final until we have to put their names on a birth certificate -- and hopefully once that is done, we will be happy with our choices and confident that they will not resent us for the rest of their lives.