First, I should say that picking baby names does not come especially easy to me and Josh. With our first child, we found out that we were having a girl at the usual 20-week mark and we went right down to the wire (i.e. the birth) without a definite name selected. When she was born, though, we just looked at each other and both said "Ella Camille" and that was that.
With our son, we found out early, at just 13 weeks - must have been a looker on ultrasound! - that we were having a boy and then spent the next 26 weeks agonizing over his name. We agreed on practically nothing. On one particularly memorable car trip, we each made a list of our top 10 boy names and then did a head-to-head challenge with each of our names against the other's names. We had some sort of ranking system that I now forget but it assigned points basically on how little we hated each name relative to the others. It was fairly painful and not very fruitful.
I had always been interested in using the name Rowe, which is the name of my maternal grandfather, but neither of us thought it sounded quite right as a first name, especially with Cohen as the last name. Too many o sounds for everyday use but it was high on the middle name list.
In between all of our fights over various first names, we did, however, keep coming back to Dashiell. We first came across the name in the book "Cool Names for Baby" which we read cover to cover when I was still pregnant with Ella and it was the only name in the whole book that stuck with us.
A plus for choosing Dashiell was the obvious nickname of Dash which Josh just loved. From the beginning, he knew he'd call him Dash.
One day at a bookstore, I was reading yet another baby name book and came across this entry which further fueled our enthusiasm for the coolness of the name:
We decided that our kid was cool enough to pull it off.
We weren't sold, though. It wasn't even in the top 1000 list of names at any point in the last century. It has no real meaning. People might mispronounce it (and it turns out, they do).
When Dashiell was actually born, just after dawn on December 7, we spent several hours in the hospital before we settled on his name. We debated names all morning and finally made the call just after noon. The fellow who delivered him came upstairs at the end of her shift to find out his name. His hair was just so unique, she said, she had to know what we finally decided to call him. Our nurses were generally positive about his name although most of the excitement about him had to to with his golden hair which elicited quite a large number of visitors from the floor. We did have a few worries about our name choice in the hospital, though, mostly when various hospital workers came in and called him "Duh-SHEEL".
Much like it goes for any name, though, a year later and we can't imagine him with any other moniker. He IS dashing. He IS unique. He's our Dashiell Rowe.
