So this should keep you all guessing as to what the names we kept were.  The requirements Nathan and I had were very different.  I wanted a name that was different.  I don't want our children to be one of 3 or 5 or more in their class with the same name and be forced to take a nickname to be different, like being called Frazier.  And the name has to have a good meaning, personally or traditionally.  Personally I mean like paying tribute to someone close to us, like Lauren's middle names Maxine and Beryl our paternal mothers' names (I think that's right, our grandmothers on our fathers side).  Traditionally like Lauren meaning "the bay or laurel plant" and she really has lived up to that name.  Laurels are some fast growing plants and she is a fast growing girl!  I wanted her to be strong and resilient with deep roots and high aspirations.  So my requirement was that the name couldn't have been in the top 20 (really I would have liked the top 50) in the last 5 years. 

Nathan is much more a traditional kind of guy when it comes to names.  And also his perception of unique is much different than mine when it comes to names.  Growing up in Australia he didn't meet another Nathan until he was older, where as Nathan here was a pretty popular name.  He also grew up in an area with a large Jewish population so there were a lot of typical Jewish names, (even more Jewish than his own Nathan David) which are not very common to me at all, but he was quite used to.  So when he went to school there weren't a lot of kids with the names James, Rachel, Jessica, David, Jennifer, Ryan, Robert, etc compared to those I went to High School…well you all know how many there were you may be one of them, I was at least only one of 3 in my graduating class, instead of one out of 10 but it was still annoying.  So Nathan's requirement, it can't be TOO Unique, something in the top 50 would be nice.

So I didn't keep a list of the names Nathan suggested, but James, Rachel, Jessica, David, Jennifer, Ryan, and Robert, were among them.  I think Kelly, and Allison were also in there.  The names I suggested were: Aspen, Edison, Forrest, Cedar, Bracken, Isle, Marine, Lakelann (Lochlan), Oceanna, Marcail, Dailey, Gael, Mallory, Kagan, Murel, Cress, Baradine, Ashby, Heath, Dundas, Hamilton, Merrit, Tuart, Elsie, Hazel, Fletcher, Porter, Werner.  All vetoed by Nathan.  Too strange, too hard to spell, too hard to pronounce, didn't want to name a child after a paddle (I really liked Werner, and their paddles are nice too), too easy to make nicknames up for (like Cooper, or Tucker) and most of them are well outside the top 50 names, some of them outside the top 100 names, and some aren't on the list at all.

We did settle on names, one girl, one boy with at least one middle name as well.  What are they?  Not saying…but they are between the top 20 and top 50 most popular names according to the SSA for the last 5 years.  So there ya go, if you are looking for a project, you can go through the names from the last five years and see what we picked, but we won't tell you if you are right or wrong until after July is born!