How about some originality in those baby names?

I was 16 weeks pregnant when my level III ultrasound revealed that the little orb in my belly had a “phallic.” I turned my jellied bellied self toward my husband and said, “We have our Truman!” We had chosen our “boy” name more than a year before we even started trying to conceive. The girl name was never decided upon.

When we excitedly told our friends and family that we were pregnant with a “Truman,” we were met with blank stares. I even got a, “No, really….what are you going to name him?” I even had an aunt suggest we call him John. Considering I had gone out with three “Johns” during my 29-year dating history and all three turned out to be losers, the name John simply wasn’t an option.

As the story goes, we were enjoying a nice cabernet in what we jokingly called the “library” of our old house and – this is when my biological clock was beginning to make all that racket – we were toying with baby names. We decided to consider names somehow linked to books and, preferably, a Southern-based book, for whatever reason. So that ruled out Rumi and Chaucer. My eyes fell on To Kill a Mockingbird, and we began to go through the characters’ (and author’s) names – Atticus (no, we actually have a good friend named Atticus, believe it or not), Harper (no, an acquaintance’s daughter got that one), Scout (no, too Demi Moore-y), Dil (no, too pickle-y), Boo Radley (Rick said no, unfortunately). And then I shouted, “Truman!” And that was that.

(The first person to make the To Kill a Mockingbird-Truman connection gets a prize. Honest.)

The plan was to call our boy Truman or Tru for short. Kind of like my name – I’m Jennifer or Jen, depending on what slips past one’s lips first. Both sets of grandparents have taken on the nickname Tru for our son, but he’s pretty much Truman to us.

For the five minutes we considered having a second child, we talked about names again. One name we both kept coming back to was Leiden, pronounced LIE-den. When I was Truman’s age my family lived in Leiden, Holland for a year while my father worked on his post-doctorate fellowship. So it’s not like we were making up the name – which Rick was completely opposed to. However, we ended up ruling the name out. Rick pointed out that, when shortened, the name became Lei…and our two kids would be known as Tru and Lei. Talk about setting a child up for failure! Yikes! At any rate, we got over the second child notion pretty quick – or rather, I did. I still love the name Leiden, though.

Then one day we were dining at a cozy local Italian restaurant, Gianmarco’s, and the waiter started telling us about his son, who is a week older than Truman. His son’s name is Leyden, pronounced LAY-den, and I finally get around to asking about the origin of his son’s name. He said his wife’s family is from Holland and they named him for the town her family had lived in – Leiden. I was like, “but it’s pronounced LIE-den,” and he said, “No, it’s pronounced LAY-den.” It turns out, after a quick visit to Wikipedia, that we are both right, somewhat. And I think, too, if you fake a Dutch accent, you can make Leiden sound both like LIE-den and LAY-den at the same time. Try it.

So if you’re like that Duggar family and have a mess of kids and are running out of baby names, or just trying to name baby number 2, take it from the girl who had the same name as five other kids in her class growing up – think up something original. Don’t make it up, but find something fun. Need help ruling out the common names? Visit the Social Security’ Administration’s Popular Baby Names site. Oh, and guess what! The name Truman was actually ranked (albeit at the very bottom) in the top 1,000 baby names for the years 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007. So there!