Here’s the first post, where we lay out the game as we’re going to play it, but the gist is that we are pretending we have a baby to name, and that the baby MUST be given a name starting with a certain letter. From there, you can play it by whatever rules are most fun and least stressful for you, with as little or as much explanation as you prefer. And remember, it doesn’t have to be a name we’d ACTUALLY want to use: we’re just choosing our favorite from an artificially-limited batch of names.

Today’s letter is Y! I found it challenging: apparently in the U.S. we don’t use very many names starting with Y. I choose Yvonne for a girl and Yates (in honor of Sally Yates) for a boy. I initially chose Yasmine/Yasmin/Yasmeen for a girl, but then I was practicing using it (imagining calling my daughter to come downstairs for dinner, for example), and it didn’t feel right for our family. Yvonne is not what I would usually choose, either, but it felt comfortable to use. I’m a little concerned that Yates would be perceived as a misspelling of Yeats, but this is just pretend so it’s okay.

Commenter Mara mentioned on the last post that she used to play an alphabet game with baby names where she’d choose her top favorite names for each letter. I am still feeling too mentally scattered to post normally, but the idea of this game appealed to me and I thought it might also appeal to others and that we could play it for awhile. I’m going to go in reverse alphabetical order, because it’s not fair that the beginning of the alphabet always gets to go first.

At first I was thinking we’d do several letters at a time, in batches: our favorite names starting with X/Y/Z, that sort of thing. But then I started working on the day’s letters, and found I was overwhelmed and inclined to give up. So perhaps it will end up being too SMALL a bite, but let’s just do one letter at a time and see how it goes. For a letter like Z it won’t take long, but just wait until we get to letters like J and M and E!

Here is the game as I plan to play it: I am going to pretend that I am naming a baby and that the name MUST start with the letter Z, so I will need one Z name for a boy and one Z name for a girl, or else one name that would work for either, EVEN IF I don’t like any of the Z names enough to Actually In Real Life choose them. I’m not planning to play that the name has to fit with the names of my other children or with the surname, though this would be an option for anyone who would LIKE to play it that way; I think I will have more fun if I pretend it is a stand-alone baby and that the surname is not an issue, though I may change my mind as we go. (If I narrow it down to a few options and can’t decide, I might use siblings/surname as a tie-breaker.) It is also fine to narrow it down to a few finalists without getting to The One Name. We can also all make our own decisions about whether the names have to be ones we think we’d ACTUALLY USE in that hypothetical scenario, or just our FAVORITE names starting with that letter, regardless of whether we think the names are practical; I am not sure which way I will play it, and I might not be consistent. If you already have a child with a name starting with the letter we’re working on, you get to pick again from all the names that remain; you don’t have to choose your child’s name as your favorite just because it WAS your favorite: this is a FRESH baby. And you can do as much or as little explanation as you like in your comment: you can just list the names, or you can explain your process/preferences/reasoning/runners-up, or whatever is most fun.

So today’s letter is Z! And I find my inclination today is to choose the names I would actually pick if I had a real baby and were required to use a Z name—but without it having to go with the sibling names. I think I would choose Zinnia for a girl, and Zeke for a boy. The girl name was easier (though I hesitated at Zaria and Zelda and Zola); the boy name was more difficult because my own preference is to use full names and have the option of a nickname, rather than using the nickname as the given name—but when I narrowed it down to a few that met my preference (such as Zachary), Zeke was still the name I most wanted to use. And this is pretend, so it’s fine.

Now you! If you want to! Only if it’s fun and not stressful! Feel free to adjust the game-play to be fun and not stressful!