Namin' dat chile

I'm feelin' a Sistah T list coming on. This one is inspired by my 12 pregnant friends (includes people who have given birth within the past three months). Many of the conversations I have had with these individuals have circled around baby names, and during these conversations I realized that there are names that I could never name my children - and it is not for the reason that you think. It's not that I don't like your taste in names or anything - the primary reason is that I have to think of the people in my life who would never be able to properly pronounce certain names and my children would never know that they were being summoned. Got think about everyone here. Don't get me wrong, we have good language skills in my family, but there are names that will present difficulties. So I present the following:

Sistah T's List of Names That Cannot Be Used For Her Children

• Stephanie or Tiffany. My mom gets these mixed up CONSTANTLY. If you say your name is Tiffany she'll call you Stephanie. Or vice versa.
• Craig or Greg. See above.
• Drew. It usually comes out sounding like "drool" or "zoo"... or a combo of both.
• Joseph. When I was a child I referred to Joseph as "Joe-fuss"... oddly, this weird habit has kind of stuck with me and I still have to think twice when I meet someone named Joseph.
• Grace. Again, old childhood habit - I used to call my friend "Grease" when I was little. Don't have to think about this as much as "Joe-fuss", but you get the idea.
  
• Anything that sounds authentically Spanish. Ask Mom to order anything at a Mexican restaurant and you'll know what I mean.
• Daniel. I personally love the name, but it always comes out sounding like "Danielle"... and we are not French. Or it comes out like "Dan-YO", which is not much better.
• Names with a combination of multiple L's or N's, i.e. Nancy, Lilly, Nola, or Lana. This is for my dad's side of the family - they interchange the letters L and N in words constantly. Ask my dad to say the word "lunar" and you'll see what I mean.
• Children in my family will NOT have rhyming names. This would drive my parents crazy if my kids had rhyming names (i.e., one kid named Tim and another named Jim) - no one would EVER respond when summoned.
• Derivatives of my name. Perhaps I'll include these as middle names, but it would drive me and my parents nuts if I named a kid after me. Plus I'm not quite egotistical enough to do so. There's already one Sistah T - that's usually enough for most people to handle. ;-)
• Derivatives of my spouse's name. Again, this has middle name possibilities, but any "spouse jr." would confuse and drive my family nuts.
  

In case you didn't figure it out - this list is also a way to avoid telling you what I do want to name my children. I'm sick of people stealing my preferred names!! :-)