Since we now have a writer’s board, each week (for awhile) I’ll post a fictitious name story that I wrote.
This week’s family is [name]Michael[/name] and [name]Amy[/name] [name]Walker[/name]. Since they have such common first names, they didn’t want anything too ordinary for their children. In late 2007 [name]Amy[/name] discovered that she was pregnant with the couple’s first child. For them they came up with a girl’s name after not too long, but they had a harder time with a boy’s name. About a week before her due date and still no boy’s name in mind, they were browsing through a phone book (for name ideas and other things) when they ran onto a name they fell in love with: [name]Sullivan[/name]. Although usually a surname, they thought it would make a neat first name for a boy. On [name]July[/name] 24, 2008 [name]Sullivan[/name] [name]Michael[/name] [name]Walker[/name] (his middle name being his dad’s first name) was born. When his name was announced, some thought his first and last name sounded like a law firm, some thought it had an “upper class” feel, some didn’t like it along with the other trendy surname names abound, while others really liked it. For [name]Sullivan[/name]'s parents, they thought it was cute calling him by something that is usually a surname. One day when they took him to the doctor, the doctor thought that [name]Sullivan[/name] was his last name and wondered what his first name was. His parents clarified the confused doctor by saying that it was his first name (on the other hand, the doctor did something much worse: retracted him - his parents left [name]Sullivan[/name] intact because of a botched one done to his father).
Disclaimer: Any resemblance to any real people is purely coincidental. I did model this somewhat after our own [name]Pam[/name]'s story with her first child: Easy to choose a name for one gender/difficult for the other (although reversed in the story), and turning to an unusual source to make the final decision (in [name]Pam[/name]'s case the boy’s section of her name book after having a girl, in this story’s case the phone book and going for a surname as a first name).
[name]Edit[/name]: Now that this feature is back, I updated this story to include the “intact” line in the original story body. I also deleted the additional posts I had made to mention that and the question on whether or not the “intact” content was okay.