Baby Name Search

Yesterday, Daniel and I went to Chapters to find inspiration on ah jai's name. (Why would anyone pay $15 for a book containing nothing but thousands of names and their meanings, sometimes dubious, is beyond me.)

We sat down near the parenting section, went through the baby names books, and each came up with a list of potential matches.  Daniel got bored with the names and went to look for inspiration from music and math books.  We eventually started going through The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics -- thus came "Concave Ho" and "Convex Ho".  (I argued "Convex Ho" doesn't even make sense, but apparently it does.)  Also, "Laplace Ho" (Daniel: do I hate my son that much?), "Mersenne Ho", "Pigeon Ho", "Stochastic Ho" (Daniel: again, do I hate my son that much?), "Lipschitz Ho" (Daniel: as much as I hate Laplace I'd prefer it over Lipschitz...), "Markov Ho" (Cindy: Nooooo~), "Dykstra Ho" (Daniel: Nobody's gonna know how to spell that name)... you get the idea.

For more inspiration, we looked at names of places we like, but that is a little difficult as name of places are traditionally feminine in Western culture, and outside of that, the names would be too foreign ("Hanauma Ho" anyone?).  We also checked out famous Canadians.  (Cindy: Terry Fox?  Daniel: I would've picked it, but don't like names ending with "y".)

Then, we went over to the Starbucks inside the store and started many rounds of elimination.  First, we checked out each other's list crossing out a few names.  Then, we individually rated the names and eliminated the bottom half.  Armed with a list 14 names, we again individually ranked the names.

I then realized, as much as we both liked the name "Jasper," it probably will be banned by my family for its association with an unfortunate event.

We added the rankings up and eliminated the bottom three.  We were down to ten -- technically nine, since "Jasper" was still on the list.  We decided to step away and continue the search at a later time.

We revisited the list today, and looked at our top three choices -- they were all biblical names!  We subsequently decided to drop "Noah" from the shortlist because we thought it just doesn't have as good a ring to it as the other two.

We were down to two choices.

Daniel: Which one should we go with?
Cindy: I dunno.  Flip a coin.
Daniel: WTF?
Cindy: Well, we're down to two, and neither really stands out much from each other.
Daniel: ...
Cindy: OK, let's try something else.  Which one do you prefer more/less?
Daniel (thought for a few seconds, and answered slightly hesitantly): I like I guess.
Cindy (affirmative): Alright it is then.
Daniel (still unsure): Huh? You cool with that?
Cindy: Let's try calling him for a few days and see if we like it.  If we don't, we can go with then.
Daniel: Sounds good to me.
Cindy: Now let's work on the middle name...
Daniel: Do you want Chinese name or English name for middle name?
Cindy: English, definitely.... how about we just use our second choice as the middle name?
Daniel: Um... but I don't like the fact that these two people are related.
Cindy: True... can we use "Mersenne" then? :D
Daniel: Errr... No. :P

15 seconds later, I burst out laughing.
Daniel: ?
Cindy: You know you said you like Terry Fox but not the name Terry right?  So I was thinking "what if we use Fox as middle name instead"... Fox Ho!  Hahahahahaha~
Daniel: Hahahahaha... "Fox Ho"!!!
Cindy: Yeah, "Fox Ho", "Pigeon Ho", "Rabbit Ho"...

So, yeah, we are still nowhere near on the search for middle name yet...