Oy a Boy (maybe)

Hello.

This is my first post in a while so I wanted to start with a simple greeting. That, and Ivy kept us up all night, it's 8:17 pm, and I'm ready to pass out. 8 pm is Ivy's bedtime; 9 pm is mine.

The main point I want to express in this web log (did you know that's where the word "blog" came from? Learn new things every day) is our frustration over boy names. Why are boy names so awful? Since we aren't going to find out what we're having (although human has been confirmed, unless our doctor is switching the ultrasound pics on us like in V - not a good show, BTW), we have to be prepared with boy and girl names. We've thought of multiple good girl names (and knocked it out of the park last time with Ivy), but boy names are really, really hard. Even the name we thought of last time around for if Ivy was a boy doesn't seem like a good choice to us any more, so we are back to square one.

The thing with boy names is, you gotta keep it simple. Girl names can be pretty and long and fun, but boy names have to be compact (especially when your last name is Silverstein). A long frilly boy name is just an invitation for the kid to get beat. But a lot of the good short names are already taken by current Silversteins: Mike, Pete, Paul, Steve, David. (Not counting Bruce here, as there's no way in hell we would name our kid Bruce - sorry Bruce).

Also there's the "S" factor. There are a lot of S's in "Silverstein," so I'm a little hesitant about giving the kid a name with too many S's in it (in case he lisps), or with an Sh sound (like Josh Silverstein just wouldn't work - it would come out Josh Shilvershein). Of course, many of the dead relatives who we would name the kid after have S names, so we're a little behind the eight ball there (it's Jewish tradition to name a child after a dead relative and never after a living one). If we get really desperate, we might have to knock off one of our living relatives who has a good name, although I doubt it'll come to that. Though I'm not ruling anything out at the moment.

Slight tangent: Since so many people name their kids after dead relatives, now all these old man and old woman names are becoming trendy names for little kids. One girl name that we really liked (or at least I liked) we recently ruled out because it's become too trendy, even though for all intents and purposes it's an old woman's name. (It was not Ethel; Ethel is never coming back).

So feel free to send us suggestions for good boy names and we'll tell you why they've been ruled out already. We are shooting for specific first letters based on relatives we'd like to honor, but I don't want to reveal them at the moment. Suffice it to say all the letters we're considering have been used at least once in this blog post so far.

Of course, we could always come back to the old standby, the most popular boy name in the world: Muhammed.

Toodles,

Mike