A rose by any other name....

We named Zoe before she was even conceived. We were on a long drive in Zambia (Oh did I really travel to exotic places? With no mac-n-cheese packets in the suitcase?) and we weren't seeing much. My mind was wandering and it wandered to baby names (for the record, we were married at the time and we had agreed that we both wanted a family at some point in the future. So it wasn't totally out of the realm of reason to be thinking of baby names ALL THE TIME from time to time.) I was thinking how much I love the letter Z and how much I've always liked the name "Zoe" and so I turned to my beloved and said: "What do you think of the name Zoe?".

And he said, suddenly suspicious, "for what?"

"For our possible daughter, you know, someday."

"Um...... I like it fine."

Fast forward a couple of years and we found out we were having a baby girl. And her name was Zoe. From the very beginning.

Now we are at a loss. Another girl is joining our family and no name feels quite right yet. I liked having Zoe's name from the beginning. I talked to her, wrote to her, imagined her - all with her name attached. I felt like I got to know her through her name, though that may sound backwards.

Naming a person feels like such a huge responsibility. She will say and spell and hear her name for the entirety of her life. Her name will often proceed her, conjuring an image, telling people a story. What will that image, that story, be?

So I do what I always do when I need answers or feel stuck: I read. I scour through pages and pages of baby name books. The range is amazing: from the drab (does anyone really name their daughter "Beige" or "Tame"?), to the possibly damaging ("Harlot"?!? For real?) to the obvious ("Fashion" which means- who would have thunk it?- "stylish") to the strangely fan-based ("Manilow", um WHY?).

We have a list of names we like. We have thrown out more than a few names that the other likes. We are still at a loss.

We want what most parents want in a name: that it be beautiful, easy to spell and pronounce, recognizable as a name but not too common. Our last name is short and consonant heavy so we like names that have more than one syllable and are not too guttural. Both of us are have German stock but with our last name, a German first name sounds... WAY German.

How important is it that it sounds good with "Zoe"? How important is it that it sound good with ALL our names? How popular does a name have to be for us to rule it out?

If, hypothetically of course, one of us dated someone with a name we are considering, does that automatically rule it out? (Dude, CG dated some girls with GREAT names. JERK.)

I have no answers but "Lima Bean" does have a certain ring to it!