Slappy

My friend Hallermann raised a good question about whether Brian and I have zeroed in on any baby names yet.
The short answer is: yes, sort of.
But a longer explanation is required about why I'm hesitant to share them on the blog. Brian and I discovered early on that there's a lot of criticism that comes up during the baby-naming process.
One of the first things we did after finding out about the baby was start pouring through a names book. Heck, even before the baby became a reality we'd spend time on long car rides batting around name ideas.
We're lucky to have a girl's name that we both like: Eleanor, which is Brian's grandma's name. We'll likely call her Ellie or Ella, maybe even shorten it to Nora... if we end up with a baby girl, that is.
And we started to narrow the field of boys names that we like — though there wasn't a whole lot of common ground on names that we both connected with.
We put a lot of time and energy into our names discussion, so it was really hard when we started sharing those with family and friends only to get our ideas shot down. Now some people were polite and would respond with, "Oh, what a great name," or something similar. But others would come right out with criticism.
I'd been warned by siblings and friends not to share our name picks because of this very reason. But Brian and I are so excited about everything with this baby, it's hard to hold back.
In the past few months we've learned to hold back. Or, if we do share our name choices (which aren't even finalized yet) we always preface the conversation with this type of background... so people know that we don't really want to hear negative feedback.
It's still funny to me that some people need to be reminded that this is our decision, not theirs.

But I guess now that I've put in this disclaimer, I may as well share our top choices for boys names. Leading the pack right now is Charles (we'd call him Charlie) or Samuel (we'd call him Sam). There's still others in the running and we may change our minds completely over the next few months.

For now, one of my co-workers has decided "Slappy" is the perfect name for the baby. I can't quite remember where this joke originated from. I think it stemmed from the suggestion that I create a baby naming pool at work and just let the winner decide on the name. We probably won't be doing that based on the suggestions thrown out.
But most of my phone messages at work these days are left for "Slappy's mom."