My husband is a huge Rams fan, especially Grant Wistrom. He asked if the Rams won the Super Bowl, could we name our son, Grant? Well, sure enough they did in January 2000! Our son was born the following month in February.

In the very first photo taken of Grant in the hospital, he is wearing an outfit with the words “Rams Baby” on it.

With my oldest son, we were originally going to name him Patton (as in George S. Patton) Alexander (Alexander the Great). That was all good until everyone declared they were going to call him Pat (ugh), though my Dad’s nickname for him was Little General. Neither of us could stand the nickname of Pat so we changed his name to Alexander Thomas (Thomas after my FIL). Weeks later, everyone tried to talk us back into Patton Alexander because they now LOVED the name as well!.

With my second son, I wanted to name him Nicholas and my husband vetoed the idea. I finally did win (after 3.5 months of back and forth with my hubby)with my next name of Mason Robert (Robert after my father) Of course my dad had a nickname for him too, half pint, which quickly turned to gallon jug after how quickly he grew! This time, we did not tell anyone what we were naming him until after the birth certificate paperwork was filled out. Just like last time, everyone turned their noses up initially but soon fell in love with the name.

When I was pregnant with our first, and only child my hubby didn’t seem as excited as I was. Suddenly out of the blue he told me he wanted to name our child Skye if it was a girl, and Skyler if it was a boy. I thought about it, and loved the idea. It’s hard to find a name to go with Grotz. So we ended up with Skyler Louis Grotz. Louis is after my hubby’s grandfather, who he was extremely close to. I couldn’t love his name any better, and it always reminds me of the day his Daddy first got excited about him coming.

Knowing how cruel kids can be, I picked a name that couldn’t be turned into a taunt and didn’t sound uppity or fake, also didn’t sound bad if it was shortened to a nickname — Jason, Jay or Jase for short. It worked. Nobody ever made fun of his name.

My wife and I wanted our children to have names that are different but aren’t too out-there at the same time. Originally our son’s name was going to be Edik Soren. We found Edik by watching a Discovery program on feral children. Soren was a name we both liked, and their intrinsic meanings (strong - powerful) complemented each other. Then one day we were watching another TV program where a person had the middle name is Theorie (I assume a play on the French name Thierry). We both tell in love with adding Theory in front of the other two names. So his name, sans the familial name, is Theory Edik Soren, which gives him four names, just like me (Thomas Brian Hanley). It’s neat to not only give him a name that is different and yet not too extreme, and at the same time starts a tradition of four names for first-born sons.

I was in an auto accident when I was pregnant and we went to the hospital to make sure the baby was all right. As we were waiting, a couple came in to the ER with a little boy who had fallen and had a goose egg on his head. My husband and I both turned towards them to find out if the little guy was ok, then we heard his name was Colton. Later in the hospital, we found out we were having a boy and he was just fine from the car accident. A short time later we were at a local pizza place waiting for our order and catching part of a college football game. I was stressed over boy names and told my husband it was up to him to name our future son. At that very second the Texas Longhorns had just scored and he said “Colt”. (Referring to Colt McCoy) We later remembered the little boy at the hospital whose name was Colton the same day we discovered we were having a healthy boy and knew it was destiny.

My kids are too big for the prize but I love the way my daughter’s name was chose. We adopted her from India and she came home at six months. Just like our son, my husband changed his mind more than a woman on her name! I finally had him talked into Sydney. Then we got that little one inch square black and white photo and she was not a Sydney. We started looking at Asian Indian names. We finally chose Maya as it was an Asian Indian name and an American name, kept Rinkia as it was the name she came home with and added Marie as it is a family name on my side for many family members, either first or middle names, so she could be given part of the family and she became Maya Rinika Marie.

I named my son, Seth, because of it’s biblical reference and as an origin in the lineage of Jesus. His middle name Daniel is after my grandfather, but since it has biblical references also, and I loved the flow, it solidified his name, which I had for well over 10 + years before I had him. For our daughter, Seth actually selected her name. He and I poured over baby books and since we had never found out ahead of time the sex, we looked at both boy and girl names. DH would just agree or disagree with the names we picked out and the name then went on a list of acceptable names. I had originally went with another name, Shalyn (not long A), but the night before the scheduled arrival, my mother mispronounced the name and I didn’t want her going through life having to correct the name. We had a second name as backup and that was Marissa, which is what Seth had picked. So now, we have a daughter, Marissa Danae, that we share that not only did her brother pray for years for a baby brother or sister, but he actually named her too!

God blessed me with my daughter, more than I ever could’ve realized at the time. I was living a completely unhealthy life of addiction and other unmentionable disgraces. I was not in a stable healthy relationship with her father and I was moving from friend to friend in order to keep a roof over my head, at the very least. I got clean and sober when I was six months pregnant with my daughter as that was when I first felt her move inside of me. At that moment, I decided to get clean for that baby and stay sober until she was born. Now, eleven years later, I am still clean and sober and have made many more accomplishments that I can really be proud of. I gave my daughter the middle name of “Grace” which means “gift from God. Because she truly was. She saved my life.

My children are, also, too old for the prizes but I wanted to share what a true miracle my daughter’s life has been for me.

When it came time to name our first child, my husband and I wanted to have as few disagreements as possible and end up with a name we both liked. We had three criteria: (1) it had to be a “real” name; (2) it could not be the name of a close relative; and (3) it could not end in “o” (which we agreed would be a bad combination with our last name). So instead of talking about the names we liked, we downloaded the social security administration’s list of the top 1000 baby names for the decade and each alternated crossing out the names we did not like. We started off by crossing out the names of close relatives and “o” names, then we switched off crossing out a few hundred names at a time. During the process we did not talk to each other about names we liked and we did talk about names we were striking from the list. Eventually, we ended up with 40 names both of us liked. So, we printed off the list of 40 names and we each picked our favorite 15 out of the 40. Then, it was just a matter of choosing between the 6 names that were on both of our top-15 lists. So, we looked up famous people with those names, the meaning of the name, and all that other stuff. We put the list aside for a week or two and when we came back to it we both knew which one to pick… Miles.

We followed a virtually identical process with our second child, due April, 2009. However, we put our top 64 names into NCAA-style brackets and are letting our friends and family figure out which name “wins”.