Baby name madness

For fun, Eric and I decided that we were going to invite friends and family to help us with choosing a name for the baby boy who continues to bake in my belly and should be arriving late March or thereabouts.

We decided to use a March Madness-style bracket system* for the baby name competition. Over four rounds, we get from 16 contender names down to 1 winner, and we see how the names polled along the way. Feel free to weigh in here if you haven't already.

We've already gotten a lot of feedback on these names:

• "Are these all REAL considerations?!?"
• "You can't name your child after a vodka" (from three separate people)
• "You can't name your child Rufus. That's a dog name. You might as well name him Fido or Spot. If you name him Rufus I refuse to call him that - I will call him Joe or Bob or some normal name."
• "I knew a [insert any contender name here] once and he was [choose one: horrible, missing teeth, fat, irritating, too touchy-feely, racist, my plumber, a pedophile]."
• "You guys are insane."

What we've learned so far is that for every name that someone loves, someone else hates it violently. We've also learned why people don't usually share the names they are thinking about before it is too late for anyone to weigh in with feedback. There's a lot of strong opinions out there! So we keep reminding people (and ourselves) that this is just for fun.

And this is just Round 1! Three more rounds to go.


*Full attribution and mad props for this idea goes to Margaret and Tony Ross who did this prior to naming each of their two children.