The helpless blog of a first time dad: Finding a baby name not used by every Tom, Dick and Harry is hard to do

Hannah had a lie in on both days. We went out for a meal on Saturday before going on to the theatre. I managed to squeeze in a game of rugby and a game of football live on the telly.

Admittedly, I raised my voice when my wife did her usual trick of asking me to turn off the football at the hour mark and “watch something else.” If you’re only going to allow me 60 minutes of a live match tell me at the beginning. That way I’ll watch it from 30 minutes onwards and know the final score. We didn’t contemplate leaving the theatre two thirds of the way through and it’s the same with me for football.

But this is a trifle in the great scheme of a peaceful weekend in which we did whatever we chose to do. In six weeks’ time last weekend may be looked upon rather wistfully.

It was also the first weekend since Christmas we haven’t been to a hardware store to get something for the bathroom/nursery/downstairs toilet/kitchen.

As mentioned in previous blogs, we are preparing for the arrival of Junior like we would a visit by Tom Hiddleston (I would normally say Her Majesty the Queen but the way she purrs watching The Night Manager I reckon my wife would more willingly run the hoover round for Tom than royalty).

This has meant regular visits to B&Q and Homebase, some more fruitful than others (the weekend before last we filled up a trolley of bathroom accessories and got to the till and realised neither of us had brought any money with us. Baby brain is clearly contagious).

But it wasn’t due to this embarrassment that it might be a while before I can get Hannah to go in either of our local stores again.

The builder putting in our bathroom phoned me at work last Wednesday to ask me where the taps for the new bath and sink were.

At £600 I thought they would have come with the bath and sink but apparently you have to buy them separate. He said he couldn’t continue without the taps (it needed to be plumbed in before he started tiling) so I needed to pop to Homebase/B&Q that evening to get some.

Unfortunately, I was working late that night so I text Hannah, who is a primary school teacher, and told her she needed to go to Homebase on her way home from work and pick them up. She phoned and asked if it was really necessary and I told her to stop whining and get over there.

What I had forgotten was that it was “Pyjama Day” at her school to raise money for Sport Relief and she had gone to work in her pyjamas and dressing gown. So there she was, seven and half months pregnant and looking like she had just got out of bed, wandering around Homebase looking for taps.

But her embarrassment didn’t end there. Homebase didn’t have the type we wanted so she had to drive to the nearby B&Q – where she bumped into a guy she hadn’t seen for over a decade who used to fancy her at school.

I bet he was thinking that was a narrow escape!

This story is deflecting me from what was meant to be the main focus of this week’s blog, which is baby names. And it doesn’t take much to distract me.

Forty days and nights from Junior’s entrance into the world and we still have no idea what we are going to call him or her (if it’s a him, Junior is actually in the running now).

The problem is two-fold, one, my wife is a primary teacher and associates about two thirds of boys’ names with naughty children she has taught and, two, having only previously named cats and hamsters I can’t take the process seriously.

Part of this is because of the weird and wonderful names other people give their children which appear on websites for suggested baby names.

We’d quite like something unusual but it’s impossible not to laugh at the thought of introducing Lothario Smith to the world. Or Adonis. 338 people in America called their baby son Micheal last year, which means 338 US birth registrars resisted the urge to say “No, don’t be so pretentious and saddle your son with a lifetime of saying `no, it’s E-A-L’ every time he has to spell out his name.”

Marrying into a half-Jewish family I can only imagine the reaction of Hannah’s dad if we presented him with a baby Aryan (no. 919 on the list) as a grandchild.

In a book of baby names which Hannah has purchased (more expense) it actually suggests that due to the “white supremacist connotations” it may be better to spell it Arian. I think the better advice would be to not go near a name with “white supremacist connotations” at all because if our son has blonde hair and blue eyes like both of his parents I’m not sure swapping a `y’ with an ‘i’ is really going to sit well with anyone of a liberal sensibility and half a grasp on 20^th Century history.

Girls’ names are a little easier although I do have a (quite possibly annoying) habit of trying some of my wife’s suggestions out in an accent from America’s Deep South to see if they pass my “could this name end up as a deranged character in a film in future” test.

Lorilee, Emmaline were dismissed for this reason. Similarly Cletus for a boy, although that was never a serious suggestion. Scarlett is borderline.

Of the others in the Top 1000 names baby names list, Lizbeth seemed to be the female version of Micheal (it’s like someone from the Consonants Preservation Society took umbrage at the amount of vowels in Elizabeth and came up with their own version) and my semi-serious suggestion of Journey was dismissed out of hand because my wife said I would irritate her every time we left the house. “Journey, we’re going on a journey,” type thing. It was probably a fair comment.

I wouldn’t name my child after someone famous partly because you never know how that’s going to turn out (anyone in their 30s or 40s named Rolf can appreciate my reticence) and also the only shared “hero” Hannah and I have is Mo Farah after we saw him win gold at London 2012 (we also surprisingly found ourselves in Moscow and Beijing at the same time as he has been running the 5000m in the 2013 and 2015 World Championships, but that’s another story).

But much as we have very fond memories of Mo and have his autograph on our wall at home I’m not sure where we are with Islam and naming a secular child Mohamed.

In summary, we still haven’t settled on a girl’s name but I did finally agree to my wife’s impassioned plea for a boy’s name.

Then we went to our first NCT class and our instructor introduced us all to her dog and it was back to square one.

We wouldn’t call our child Rover so why on earth would you call your dog Tom?

The helpless blog of a first time dad: Baby Brain leaves us all in high spirits