The Name Game

One of the more fun activities we've enjoyed as a newly pregnant couple (well, truly we've been playing this game for years, even before we decided to have kids) is tossing around various name possibilities. Fortunately, we have lots of fun heritages to choose from--German, Chinese, and East Texan. And, David's affinity to all things Latin American has thrust many Latino names to the top of the list.

So, on our way home from sharing the news with David's family, we returned to this fun game. Shockingly, we sort of settled on a boy name and a girl name and couldn't come up with a name that we both liked better. As I'm sure is the case with many couples, we find that we have different tastes in names as well, so the list of names we both really like is quite short. But, one thing we do agree on is that we want a name that isn't particularly popular, so that our kid won't share the same name with 3 other kids in the class. The two we came up with, Diego and Sofia.

Well, not so fast. I was a little nervous that Diego of Dora fame may have popularized that name too much. So, David checked the social security administration website and discovered that Diego was the 58th most popular name in 2007 and has been rising dramatically in the past 15 years. Even more shocking to me was that Sofia is the #35 name on the list. More problematic is that Sophia is #6 and Sophie is #82. As David put it, we're just a couple of lemmings...