Long before we found out we were pregnant, we would occasionally have conversations about what we would someday name our children. It's funny, because we nearly always agreed on girls names -- I'm sure we had a list at least ten names long -- but could never agree on a single boy's name. In the weeks leading up to finding out that we are having a girl, in a complete reversal, we found a boy's name that we both really, really liked and at the same time sort of fell out of love with every single girl's name we had previous agreed on. Is that what you call irony? If not irony, it's at least extremely inconvenient.

Now that half of our list of prospective names has been axed, the conversations have really ramped up. An SMS conversation we had last month has still produced the funniest naming option we've come up with yet:

So now The Captain has a new fake first name: Wish. Captain Wish Bojangles.

Getting back to the subject of actual names in consideration, we've been getting a lot of questions about what names are on the table, and I've always thought of it as a kind of personal question. I know some people decide on a name that they love and announce it long before the baby is actually born, but I don't think that's really something we're comfortable doing. We both feel that a name is highly personal and that while we may have some options we really, really like, we aren't going to lock one in for certain until The Captain is safely delivered and in our arms. We want to get to know the kid for an hour or so before we give her a name she's going to keep for the rest of her life. Maybe run it by her and get her opinion on it first.

And if she doesn't like the name we pick out, she always has Wish to fall back on.