My kids have the weird names!

Being the oldest daughter of an oldest son, I tend toward the traditional. My husband, while being a second child, so much more non-traditional than me, is the oldest son in his family. He also took on a bit of the father role to his two younger siblings when his father was no longer in the picture. So he tends to be a bit more traditional than a lot of middle children.

All of this to say that we picked fairly traditional names for our two children: Mark and Molly. They never get asked how to pronounce their name by the teacher the first day of class. Each name has only one or two spelling variations, but since we picked the most common spelling for each name, they usually get their name spelled correctly.

But oddly enough, they have the weird names in our family and in their school. There is not one other Molly in their school of 400 students. And I don’t think there is another Mark, either. On the other hand, there are two Reece’s (well, one Reese, and one Reece) – a name that you never heard until the last decade or so. And in my family, while my nieces and nephews have very nice names, they are anything but traditional.

My youngest brother and his wife just had a baby. He tends to be more conventional, like me. So while I expected my sister to name her kids artsy monikers – she is a fashion designer and her husband is an artisan in wood, after all –  I did not expect a hereto unheard of name from my brother and his wife. Again, it is a very nice name. But upon hearing it, I looked at my kids and said, “Sorry, I guess you have the weird names in this family.”