Labor Strike

I was trying really hard to put myself into labor yesterday. My sister Amy thinks that this is just a matter of walking "a good mile." I think she's the only one for which this works. I walked that good mile, and then I did all the dishes, and then I played hide-and-seek and I got my contractions to come pretty strong every 3 minutes. Then I sat down to play bubbles with Nora and they stopped. Like that. Lame.

It would have been really convenient to have the baby last night. I have a paper due on Friday, but it's mostly already written, so it would be almost a week before I have anything due. I was also ignoring the fact that the doctor thinks I'm only 34 weeks and would probably try to stop my labor if I went in. (According to my ultrasound, I'm 36 weeks, but the doctor somehow doesn't believe in changing my date. Thirty-six weeks sounds much better and I just pretend that that's how it is.)

Anyway, as I was planning how this was all going to go yesterday, I realized that the baby still has no name. Of course, I knew this, but the full weight of it hit me as I was scrubbing the pans.

The baby has NO NAME. I pictured the L/D nurse standing there with the little card, looking at me over the rim of her glasses with her sharpie poised and me saying, "I don't know... um... I haven't had enough time to think about it...?" (Incidentally, Lillian calls them "pointies" which I find unbearably cute.)

The problem is that when we named the girls, I had a gut feeling about the names. Lillian came right off the bat. I KNEW that was her name. Nora took a little while longer, but I could FEEL that her name was Nora.

This baby... there's names that I like, and names that Tyler likes, and a few names that we both sort of like... but none of them are THE name. I tried the the Nymbler again this morning, but after suggestions like Alpin and Tiernan, I gave up.

I feel like we're looking for a house all over again. When we were going around with our real estate agent, he kept asking me what I was looking for so he could help narrow down the options without us having to look at every single one. I couldn't tell him because the list of things I wanted was so undefinable and certainly googleable: I wanted all the bedrooms to be on the same floor so I wouldn't have to trudge up and down the stairs in the middle of the night. I wanted the bathroom to be far away from the living room because no one wants to hear you doing your business. I didn't want to be able to see the TV from the front door. I wanted the kids' bedrooms to be far away from the play area.

See what I mean? I want a name that's common, but not too common. A name that sounds fresh, and yet everyone will have heard of it before, but that doesn't sound too dated. And, most important of all, I want it to be THE name. Is this too much to ask?

So far, my front runners are Brigham and Collin (although, I'm souring on Collin), Tyler likes Ethan but since he decided he liked Ethan in 2006 when I was pregnant with Lillian, EVERYONE has named their son Ethan. This isn't a problem for him, but I can't get on board with it.