Atticus! Atticus! Atticus!

Well, we've finally agreed on a boy name! As you can probably tell by the title of this blog post, the name we decided on is Atticus. Yes, like the father in To Kill a Mockingbird.

We decided on it last night, just before 7:30 PM while we were at Applebee's. I think both Emily and I had thought about that name previously, but once we thought about it more last night, we finally decided that it was the one. We still don't have a middle name, but I think it'll be easier to think of a middle name now that we've thought of the first name.

I don't think Atticus is a name that you can easily make fun of. Sure, it's not a very common name, but that's about it. With Maizie (the girl name that we thought of), there's all kinds of ways to make fun of it (Crazy Maizie, Lazy Maizie, etc.), so that's something that she'll just have to deal with.

Maizie Chain

Before I say what I'm going to say, let me assure you that Emily is still not pregnant.

Every once in a while, we talk about baby names so that once Emily is pregnant, we won't have to spend so much time thinking of baby names; we'll already be done with that.

Emily has been watching Spooks (also known as MI-5), and on that show there is a little girl named Maisie. Emily asked me what I thought of that name and I said I liked it. I know that name from Uncle Buck, except it's spelled like "Maizy" instead of "Maisie". We looked up the meaning of it and it means "pearl". Sure it's not an amazing meaning, but it's a lot better than the meaning of "Tristan", which is "sad" and originates from a story about a doomed romance. Once we decided that we both liked the name, we talked about how to spell it. I wanted it to have a "z" instead of an "s" so that people don't read it like the word "mace" with a "y" on the end and Emily wanted it to have an "ie" instead of a "y", so we decided on Maizie.

So last night we made our first final decision on a baby name -- Maizie. We made the decision sometime between 11:00 pm and 12:00 am. Now if we end up having a daughter, we can tell her how and when we thought of her name.

Today I was texting Emily and I tested out the various spellings of Maizie in my phone to see which ones my phone already knew. The only one it knew was "Maizie", so it must be meant to be! Now we only need to think of a middle name for Maizie and then a first and middle name for a boy. Then we'll have a boy name and a girl name on reserve and we won't have to think about another baby name until much later.