There are a handful of things during a pregnancy that one’s friends and family often wait with baited breath to hear about.

There’s the initial announcement, of course, commonly getting a lot of “I knew it!” responses from those who suspected. There is, assuming the parents wish to find out and/or share, the news of the baby’s gender (and much guessing and predicting about it beforehand). There’s the Big Day, when baby arrives.

And then, assuming there isn’t an assumed tradition involved (William Charles Kingston IV, at your service), there is the big revelation of baby’s name.

When we were pregnant with Tucker, his name, once decided, was the one thing that we knew, but didn’t share with anyone else until the day he was born. It was nice to have one last little surprise, but to be honest we also learned quickly that when it comes to naming your child everyone has an opinion that they often can’t help but share, and every name carries different baggage to different people.

“You’re naming him Scott? My ex-boyfriend is named Scott!”

“Wow. Damian? Seriously? That’s terrible. It sounds like he’s a demon child.”

“Ethan? There was a kid in my class named Ethan and he beat me up a lot. Thanks for rubbing salt in my wounds, jerkface.”

“His name is going to be William? It’s so nice of you to name him after me/my father/son/grandfather.”

“Pennywise?! You’re naming him after an evil clown from a Stephen King novel?! Have you considered maybe Damian instead?”

So, we kept it a secret, and will do the same with Boo’s name.

If we ever decide on one, that is.

We’ve been spending time bandying about potential names for him, of course. A lot of time, actually. But for some reason, this time around has felt much harder to me than when we decided on Tucker. Anna thinks I’m misremembering how far along we were before we settled on the name Tucker, and she may be right. So maybe I’m just anxious to start privately calling Boo by his real name.

Frankly, we feel like we hit it out of the park in naming Tucker. Not that naming your baby is some sort of contest, but we seem to get fairly universal approval of the name as a good choice. Maybe some people were biting their tongues (after all, it was too late, right?), but we’re very happy with the choice. Once we knew he is a boy, we talked about many ideas for him, but when we thought of Tucker we both knew right away: “That’s it. That’s his name.”  We had great girl names in mind too, which we shelved for the time being.

When we found out we were pregnant again, we went back to the girl names we liked, and though we weren’t completely decided, we had a couple of great ones that we still loved and hoped to use. Then we found out Boo is a boy, and had to put those away again.

We’ve discussed some of the other boy names we had in mind before settling on Tucker, but there’s something that just doesn’t sit right in using one of his “non-starters” for Boo. Maybe that’s not fair to Boo — surely he’ll be mad the day he finds out he couldn’t be named Optimus Prime just because of Tucker – but we’ve largely eliminated those names now.

There have also been some “rules” we’ve been trying to stick to, for the most part. Names that end in “er” like Tucker have generally been nixed as being a little awkward when said together, even though there are a lot of them we really like otherwise. Similarly we’re eliminating names that are just too common/popular, names that friends or family have used, and names that just sound awkward with my last name.

Of course, Anna has the ultimate veto power, so awesome names like Ozymandias and Thor have been summarily rejected. And she doesn’t seem too enamored by any hobbit names for some reason. Go figure.

I think we’re getting close though, and I’m quite happy with our current shortlist. The final choice may never replicate the “success” of Tucker, but I’m still looking forward to introducing the world to my son by name.