No, My Baby Is Not Named After An Atlanta Suburb
Although I generally refer to her as "Baby G" when blogging, my baby girl's actual first name is "Georgia," a venerable, time-tested name. It's the feminine form of the name "George." While the name remains relatively uncommon in the U.S., it's a top 50 classic in England, Australia and Canada. It's also a beloved name for Greek baby girls.
When choosing Georgia's name, we thought about the name's history, and also about other Georgias, like Georgia O'Keefe. As far as real-life popularity of the name, we only know one other little Georgia in person - she's in elementary school and lives in our neighborhood - although I suspect that the name has gained some traction lately in hipper locales than ours, since it occasionally makes lists of hipster baby names.
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The one thing we never thought about when deciding to name the baby Georgia was the possibility that people would immediately assume that we had named her as part of a trend I didn't know existed on such a wide scale, which is to give babies names related to geographic locations that are in some way special or meaningful to the parents. Apparently, celeb parents like Ashlee Simpson-Wentz and Pete Wentz (baby boy Bronx), Posh and Becks (baby boy Brooklyn) and Garth Brooks (Taylor Maine) have been choosing their kids' names to honor some meaningful element of the parental love affair that took place in a specific locale. In some cases, parents come right out and say they chose the city, state or other geographic moniker because that's the spot where their baby was conceived.
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Now I know that as a blogger, I talk about some pretty personal things. Perhaps I reveal more about my life than you would be comfortable revealing about your own. But I can assure you that one thing you will never read about when I blog are the intimate details of my marital relationship. I am pretty private about sex stuff, except with my close friends. So the idea of publicly naming my child as an homage to the spot where he or she was conceived is really distasteful to me. Or, if I did do that, I certainly wouldn't ever tell anyone what the deal is with the name. It would be something private between my husband and me.
For Katie's description of how some slightly clueless folks respond to her baby's name, read Baby's First Year.
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