No, We Cannot Name Our Baby “Crocus”

Not All Flowers Make Good Baby Names

We had a name picked out for a boy only hours after finding out we were expecting. That evening my husband said, “Maybe we should name the baby [redacted] if it’s a boy” and since it took months of me trying to come up with a name he didn’t hate for our firstborn, and since I don’t hate the name [redacted], I immediately said, “Yes, let’s do that.”

Sunday evening I said, “You know honey, we haven’t thought of any names for a girl yet.”

Micah’s first step was to head to the bookshelf and pull out our copy of Tolkien’s Silmarillian. I didn’t worry about this because he did the exact same thing when we were looking for a name for our firstborn daughter. I know by now that all I have to do is wait it out.

“How about Morwen?”

“Sounds too much like Arwen.”

“What was the name of that girl that Turin liked?”

“Um, you mean his sister?”*

“No, the other one. The elf.”

“No elves. I don’t like elves. They’re preppy and stuck up.”

“Yeah, I guess ‘Finduilas’ would be kind of a weird name anyway.”

We put The Silmarillian away after Finduilas was rejected, and Micah started looking up flower names on his phone. Not flower names, actually: he just googled “flowers”. We found some real contenders, like:

“Scabious”

“Common Daisy”

“Tickseed”

“Touch-Me-Not”

“Black-Eyed Susan”

“Leadwort”

“Orchid” (we would call her “Orc” for short)

“Skunk Cabbage”

But our favorite by far was “Crocus”.

At this point, we decided that, for the good of our yet-to-be-named child, we should probably go to bed.

*Note: In fairness, he didn’t know she was his sister. This is Tolkien, not Game of Thrones