Baby names

I got a call from my aunt last week, saying that my cousin has a photography show in Philadelphia, so she will be coming to Philadelphia next week, along with her six-week-old baby and my aunt to help babysit.* So I get to see the baby next week - yay! Oh yes, and my aunt and cousin as well. My reaction reminds me of when K was two weeks old and we called up some friends to see if they wanted to go out to dinner and we heard our friend ask his wife, "Do we want to have dinner with K and what's-her-name and that other guy?"

The baby's name is Adriana Gabriella [our grandmother's first name] [mother's last name] [father's last name]. My first thought on hearing that was that when that poor child has to sign all of the documents for her first mortgage, her hand is going to fall off. Not that we can really pass judgments on long names (K is Katherine Harper Hyphenated-Lastname. Although in our defense, we feel really bad about how long K's name is and we were trying to find a short first name to balance out the hyphenated last name). Although since they didn't hyphenate the last name, she won't have as many problems as K will, since you can have as many middle names as you want without impacting your everyday life. K, on the other hand, is stuck with a 16 character last name in a 15-characters-for-last-names-on-forms world.

I'm finding myself wondering if really long names are a new baby naming trend. I have two other cousins of that generation with two middle names each. Are more parents giving their children four or more names, or are my cousins just terminally indecisive? My (admittedly brief) survey of baby name sites has turned up a lot on popular first names and not much on middle name trends.



*I'm in general not a bitter infertile. But if you ever want a situation to really test that, try having a 41-year-old cousin who conceived last year with absolutely no trouble.