On Saturday evening, immediately after vetoing 18 of my 56 names, Shelly remarked that it was silly to still have so many names on the list when we both know a lot of them aren't serious contenders. Let's go through it again and pick out the ones that we really think have a chance, and not just names that we think are a little bit cool, she suggested.

This process actually went much quicker than the previous run-through. It consisted of me reading out a name, and if one of us said, "Yes," we kept it. When we didn't say "Yes," we usually said not "No" but "Eh...," meaning that we didn't hate the name, but we didn't love it enough to speak out on its behalf. Some very lovely names fell by the wayside, simply because we weren't in love enough with them.

And thus we ended up with a list of 19 names. But a couple of them were suspect. Monica, for example, struck both of us as a name that was fairly popular in our generation ("Do you know any Monicas younger than Lewinsky or older than Gellar?"), and might sound like a "Mom" name to a girl born in 2010. This is an important consideration. So Shelly went downstairs and quickly looked up each of the 19 names on the Baby Name Voyager (of which I'll explain the virtues in a later post) to determine their popularity history. When she returned with the results, four more names bit the dust, based on the fact that they had dramatically risen and fallen in popularity a few decades ago, leaving a spike that will forever brand it as a "Mom" name for our children's generation: Julie, Laurie*, Monica, and Wendy. Four beautiful names.

The result? We have our Fifteen Contenders. We're both pretty much agreed that our daughter's first name will be one of these names, though I don't know what the next step in the process will be.

Faith
Georgia
Hazel
Jane
Jenna
Julia
Katherine
Leah
Maria
Mary
Melanie
Paige
Rachel
Sarah
Tessa

At the end of this process, I said, "I would like to make a prediction. I'm not necessarily advocating this, but I am predicting, based on all of our conversations tonight, that the name will be Sarah, Rachel, Leah, or Julia. Those are the names we seem to agree on the most."

We'll see...

* Lauren was the name on the original List of 56, but we changed it to Laurie because we both liked Laurie better. Shelly remarked that she might even like to spell it "Lori," but I reacted strongly and negatively to that suggestion. "Names that end in '-i' are by definition white trash," I said. (Of course, this does not necessarily apply to people with such names. One of my dearest high school friends, who bears such a name, isn't even white!)