Name that Baby!

Pretty soon after we found out it's going to be a boy, we started picking out names. We were too lazy to start picking before then, so we figured we'd wait and rule out half of them.

One thing we discovered pretty quickly is that most names suck, at least the ones you find by googling 'baby names'. After looking through literally thousands of names, I came up with only 10-12 that I liked, and only a few of those that I really liked. For some reason I really like 'J' names. My strongest picks were Jack, John, and James, but Anna vetoed Jack and James. She really liked Timothy, but I kept thinking of South Park (Timmy!), so I vetoed that one. Then there were a bunch of names that I kinda liked, but didn't feel too strongly about:

• Joseph
• Dean
• Lance (okay, this really only works if your last name is 'Armstrong')
• Neil
• Philip
• Henry
• Stephen
• Vincent
• Patrick

Because of our last name, all names that start with 'W' are out: William Woodling, Wally Woodling, etc. Same thing for 'K' because of the middle name (Kevin): Kent Kevin Woodling, Cody Kevin Woodling, etc. Gene is out, because that's already taken by the one famous Woodling (baseball player).

All pretentious-sounding names are out: Sage, Ashton, Blake, Chase, etc. My apologies to anyone who has those names; I don't really think they're pretentious-sounding. Okay, well yeah, I do.

So we finally narrowed it down to our top two: Nathaniel and Jonathon. With Jonathan, we get both Jonathan and John. I'm not too hot on Nathaniel (I keep thinking "Hawthorne"), but I like Nathan and Nate. I think Alexander may still be in the running as well. Right now we're slowly making our way through a book of 50,000 baby names, so we'll see if we come up with any other candidates. Judging by what we've seen so far, I'm not too hopeful, but we figure we may as well be thorough.