What The Trisha Paytas Baby Name Drama Taught Me About Motherhood
It was 2:14 AM on a Tuesday, and I was wearing Dave's oversized college hoodie that smells faintly of old garlic and desperation, sitting on the cold edge of our bathtub because Maya (who's FOUR, oh god, why is she...
The absolute brutal reality of choosing unique baby boy names
I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, charting vitals in the pediatric wing, when a mother proudly told me she named her newborn son Khaos. Spelled with a K. I smiled professionally, noted it in the chart, and walked out of the...
Top Baby Boy Names 2025: From Vintage Charm to Nature Trends
I was sitting on my back porch in 103-degree Texas heat, seven months pregnant with my oldest, sobbing uncontrollably into a spiral notebook. My husband had just walked outside with a glass of ice water, taken one look at my...
How to Choose Cute Baby Girl Names Without Losing Your Mind
We're sitting in the parking lot of a Texas Roadhouse in the dead of August. I'm 38 weeks pregnant, sweating through a maternity shirt I bought on clearance, and absolutely sobbing into a to-go container of buttered rolls. Why? Because...
The 3 AM Meltdown That Finally Taught Me How to Name a Human
It was 3:14 AM on a Tuesday in mid-August, and the air conditioning in our apartment had completely surrendered. I was 37 weeks pregnant with Maya, wearing my husband Mark’s hopelessly stained college lacrosse t-shirt, and I was crying so...
My 3am breakdown over finding genuinely rare monikers for daughters
It was 3:14 in the morning, the glow of my MacBook illuminating the half-eaten Hobnob resting dangerously close to my wife's massive, third-trimester bump. We were locked in a vicious, whispered argument over whether "Lyra" sounded too much like "liar"...
The Absurd Quest for Baby Boy Names Unique Enough Not to Be Steve
My mother-in-law cornered me by the kettle at week twelve of the pregnancy to insist that strong, traditional English names like Arthur or George were the only guaranteed way to prevent a child from a life of petty criminality, while...
The Agony of Choosing Unique Baby Girl Names at the Registry
The pen was hovering over the official birth registration form, my hand physically shaking, and not just because I was running on four minutes of broken sleep and half a stale Hobnob. We were sitting in the fluorescent purgatory of...
Decoding baby names for boys: A dad's naming algorithm
Line 74 of my Google Sheet was flashing neon green. I'd written a custom script to highlight any moniker with a standard deviation of less than 5% in popularity over the last decade, filtering out anything that spiked due to...