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T-shirts? Holiday newsletter? Pregnancy test Halloween costumes? An actual bun in the oven? Whatever the announcement, finally, the peanut gallery will be satisfied. You can just sit back and bake that baby of yours and they’ll shut the hell up. Thank goodness. Except they’ll inevitably have one burning question they’re just dying to know: what are you naming the baby?
    Before I had children, I always found it annoying when people would mysteriously answer that question with “We know the baby’s name, but we’re not sharing. You’ll have to wait.” It seemed like such a pompous attitude—the grown-up version of singing “nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.” You know the answer to what you are being asked but are refusing to share? When would that not be considered rude?
    But then I got pregnant and totally understood. Once you are with child, unsolicited baby-name feedback can surface a hidden rage deep inside of you. When pregnancy hormonesabound, hearing a mere stranger tell you that your baby name is a poor choice serves as a completely valid reason to lose it on them. Cross your fingers for a female judge, because only she would appreciate that this is clearly justifiable homicide. Please, people: if you ask what parents-to-be plan on naming their child, be prepared to respond with “Wonderful choice!” no matter how awful the name. Or be prepared to be butchered. Really, you asked for it.
    The day I found out I was having a girl, I made the most important purchase of my entire pregnancy: The Baby Name Bible . Aside from a few particular pages in Judy Blume’s Forever the summer of my eighth-grade year, The Baby Name Bible saw more action than any other piece of literature in my entire life, probably more than all the others combined. Jeff and I took it out on dinner dates and thumbed through it while watching TV. I took it to work to devour over my lunch break and it accompanied us on vacations, weekends away, and trips to the bathroom. Countless hours were spent studying it and obsessing over it.
    Like most females I know, years and years before I was ready to start a family, I’d picked out the names I would give my future children. Of course, I was young and naive and thought that all that went into a baby name was my own personal taste. Silly me. Once the time actually came, there was so much more that played a role in the decision: the Jewish tradition of naming after a deceased family member, the way names sounded with my married last name, what initials the names formed, what relatives had chosen . . . never mind Jeff’s opinion (not that his mattered all that much).
    For me, a girl’s name needed to be beautiful, but not common. Unique and original, but not unheard of. We highlightedthe names that we liked in the Bible and they were endless. Juliet, Ella, Isla, Mia, Amelia—feminine names were just so . . . feminine and we agreed on so many. We could easily name triplets! Octuplets, even. Narrowing them down was agonizing, but once we saw the name Lily, our decision was made. It went perfectly with the middle name we had chosen to honor my grandmother and it was sweet, pretty, and timeless. Unless she grew up to be some sort of butch motorcycle racer, it was highly unlikely that she’d resent us for the choice. What could you hate about Lily? When she was born, the name seemed perfectly fitting and there wasn’t a moment of regret. It was the way a baby naming was meant to be.
    The experience of naming the boys was an entirely different one. I read The Baby Name Bible constantly but found a problem (albeit maybe not the most rational problem) with each and every name in the book. One afternoon, seven months pregnant, I cried to a neighbor about the lack of unflawed boys’ names. We’re never going to settle on one, I moaned. “How about Benjamin?” she suggested. Benjamin. It wasn’t an awful name, I thought. The initials didn’t combine to create anything laughable or offensive and there were