"What's in a name?"

"That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." ~Shakespeare

Juliet may feel that way, and as true as this statement can be, I am very difficult to work with when it comes to settling on names for our children.

Having worked with so many children over the years, I associate names with other kids...not all in a good way. I also don't want a name that appears on the top 100 baby names list from the previous year. I also want the name to be spelled phonetically correctly and although possibly unique, not something that goes beyond all recognition. As a teacher, I came across several names that I couldn't pronounce or couldn't tell whether the child was a boy or girl before they entered the classroom. This, too, I tried to avoid for our own children. Finally, and this cannot be avoided at times, I didn't want names that would lead to nicknames or shortened versions of their names. I'm sure at some point (and it's happened already with Fletcher) they'll be called something other than their given name. Anyway, this is where we begin with the naming process, and that's just me. Jesse has other things he looks at as well.

When we came to naming a second boy, we also had to consider how his name would hold up next to Fletcher's. We didn't want something super common, and we needed something strong. We looked at our previous list of boy names and it's interesting that it was only two years ago that we viewed these considerations, because this time around, we weren't overly excited about a lot of them, even those in the top five. So, we basically started from scratch and went back and forth over a couple for various reasons.

Here's how we came up with Holden Malloy's name...

Back in the fall, we were going through some things and I came across copies of food ration cards from The Great Depression that belonged to my great-grandparents, Holdine and Fred. I asked Jesse, "What do you think of the name Holder?" He replied, "I like it, but I like Holden better." I said, "Oh...well...that works better because I was trying to think of a way of changing Holdine to a boy's name. That's the only great-grandparent that I really knew."

Quick sidenote: Jesse and I never intended to use family names for our children once I was pregnant the first time. However, when I was home for Christmas that year, I had asked my mom who was in the pictures in this calendar that my aunt had made my dad. She pulled out the family tree and on that list, I saw Fletcher (who was my great-grandfather) and thought it was cool and different. A couple months later, we settled on it. Now, a couple years later, we felt like we needed to incorporate a family name into this child's name too.

We kept coming back to Holden as we went through several other possibilities.

Now, on to the middle name. With Fletcher, Davis was the one name on our list of boy names that seemed to flow nicely. It was a bit more complicated with Holden. We consulted our list of names and started switching the order and would get sidetracked and drop the whole discussion time and time again. We had several Irish names on our list, many that started with F in case we gave our children the same initials, but we wanted something that carried meaning for us too. As you know, Baby Boy #2, or Holden, I can call him, was created in Ireland. So, I went over the map that we drove and looked at the places we stayed, sights we saw, restaurants and pubs we went to, etc. That only added to our list of possibilities. Malloy was one of the options. We had gone to a pub named Matt Molloy's in Westport. (He was a famous flautist of The Chieftains.) We liked the spelling better with an a. In the end, Holden Malloy is what we settled on.

When I checked the popularity of Holden vs. Fletcher, Holden is much more popular. In addition, I know it's popping up here and there...almost enough for me to want to change it. But Jesse really likes it and I do too, so I'm hoping that once he enters Kindergarten, there aren't three or four other Holden's and he won't have to go by Holden W. all the time. But that is just something we'll deal with if we have to...our boy will be our cherished boy, regardless of his name!