urbanana — 2009 September

Another Beach Panoramic

September 29th, 2009

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My skinny sister at Virginia Beach during Labor Day Weekend.

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Eric and I have had baby names picked out for years. We always said that we’d name our first girl Winona and that we’d name our second girl Nina. If we had a boy, we wanted to name him Miles or Lane. But these names were suddenly inadequate when I actually became pregnant.

We didn’t like the unavoidable nickname “Winnie” for Winona and we thought the euphony of Nina Lin Newman sounded silly when spoken (like Ned Flanders’ nonsensical jabbering). For a boy, Miles Lane Newman didn’t flow as well as Lane Miles Newman, but Lane sounds too similar to my sister’s name – Elaine. So we started looking for new ideas.

I read dozens of baby naming blogs and skimmed through thousands of names during those first few months of my pregnancy. I even made spreadsheets. We compiled a list of names including those of distant and unknown relatives, obscure celebrities and musicians, and characters from our favorite books and movies.

Eric vetoed many of the names that I suggested (Charis, Loretta, Carradine…), but I vetoed some of his as well (Dorothy, even though it was the name of both of his grandmothers). Even before the first trimester ended, I dreaded that our baby would be born and we still would not have selected a name.

Finally, just before the 20-week ultrasound when we learned that the sex of our baby is male, we agreed on the name Beatrix (or BB) for a girl and the name Dashiell (or Dash) for a boy.

Dashiell is the name of an American author, Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the detective novels The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I remember reading The Thin Man during the first summer after Eric and I were married while we still lived at his parents house. We sat on the sofa in his parents’ living room and read the book aloud to each other, swapping at the end of each chapter.

Choosing a middle name from our list of names that survived the months of deliberation was difficult because we liked many of the names enough to use as first names for future kids. We chose Emmett because it sounds so compatible with Dashiell due to its similarity to the author’s last name – Hammett.