Ever named a kid? (part I)

Ever named a kid?

Not exactly something you think a lot about if you haven’t, but as my wife’s pregnancy in 2000 was moving forward, we knew two three things for sure: we were scared to death of the prospects, we knew it was going to be a girl, and we knew we had to name her.

So, we would sit up at night, literally, thinking about baby names for girls. This is what happens in the few short weeks until the due date; at least for us.

We had been given several name-your-baby-type books, and we kind of laughed. People…that was just toooooooo easy. No, we had decided that we wanted a hard name that could be made simple.
Call that criteria number one. It had to be very unique and able to be shortened if she chose to go that path as she got older.

More talking and criteria number two had set in. We wanted it to be ethnic but not Scandinavian or Italian, since that would make half of her grandparents less satisfied. We had travelled so much, it just felt like fun going through maps and looking at names of places. The atlas became our baby book.
Then our third thing we decided, with less than two weeks to go before the due date… we had to have it in common.

Now this was the riddle… odd name that could be shortened, geographically-based, and we had to have both shared memories there.

From there, we really got into it. We started looking at subway maps in our collection from cities we had visited. And, by the way, this was a lot of fun. Just start taking subway station names and putting them together! The problem with this… we had great, I mean fantastic, boys’ names all over the place. (In fact, one particular is still in reserve and I feel like it should be trademarked or something.)

Anyway, less than thrilled with that part, we were a week away from the due date. Only the two of us knew we were naming a girl because we had told no one the sex of the baby. Zero. Nada. This had become the most purely entertaining thing we had in those last, hard, days of pregnancy: we knew it was a girl and we had to name it.

Then, one day I was looking at our boxes and boxes or travel stuff and it hit me…

We had both lived on St. Annalaan in Maastricht.

We didn’t live there at the same time, but we both lived there when Emerson College had the European Institute for International Communications (EIIC). Plenty of memories and you could shorten it up to Anna, I mean, well, if she wanted to someday. I made a pitch less than 48 hours before the kid was due. My wife, Pilar, said she’d have to “think about it.” The “aa” was a quandary worth sleeping on.

The next night it was decided. She would be Annalaan Berkeley LeMay. (Berkeley Street was where we both lived in college in Boston.)

Annalaan in action

How’s it gone?

Well, in sports they call her “Anna” and I kind of understand that. But I haven’t met a kid yet that is tripped up by her name. It’s almost funny, but it’s grownups that fiddle with it more in their heads. She is kind of fierce in keeping it “Annalaan” all the time in the classroom and in general public.

For her mom and me, it’s just a little indulgence to remember how much we both loved our time in Maastricht. We’ll take her there at some point (she just got her first passport!). But after more than nine years, I can’t even fathom she would be named after a street in any other place in the world.

By Eric LeMay

Eric LeMay lives in the US with his wife and their daughter Annalaan.

Related article: Dear Annalaan