Women really get worked up about baby names

[DrewDevil]

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My first reaction to Oscar was "ugh," but it's growing on me. I guess my reaction probably stems from the fact that I'm Jewish, and with Jews, pretty much any name that is different/gentile sounding/yuppie sounding is frowned upon.

For our child, we wanted the first name to start with an "A" to honor my wife's late father. We had the first and last name picked out for a boy (middle name was after one of my grandfathers), but it took us a while to settle on a girl's name, and as fate would have it, we had a girl.

We chose Alena because a) it started with an "A" and b) we liked it. I guess the usual spelling is "Alaina," but we thought the one we chose looked better.

Oddly (to us) tons of people think the spelling is strange, although it seemed pretty normal to us (it's not like we had never seen it before). Even more strange is that lots of people can't figure out how to pronounce it based on the spelling.

It's UH-LAY-NUH. People have pronounced it UH-LEN-UH and UH-LON-UH. Even AY-LEN-UH. WTF?

FWIW, I call her Lainie (although I'm not sure how I should spell it) and Lanes.

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It's a pretty name but she's going to have a lot of 'splainin' to do over the course of her life.

My cousin is named "Alana" (sounds like Atlanta) and nobody ever gets it right.