Tired now.  More info on the name soon.  Tomorrow?  Who knows?  Only Sean.

Now, I won’t say our tournament is quite as prestigious as, say, Wimbledon, but with over 70 voters, I must say it was a more successful tournament than I had expected.

Now, without further ado, the winner of the First Annual(?!) Baby Name Face-off:

Amelie

Amelie faced a host of tough competitors, but when it came to the end, she took care of Natalie without even breaking a sweat. Along the way, poor Natalie even got replaced on our lists by Natalia (thanks, Swati!).

We’d like to thank all the names for participating in the tournament. Yes, even you, Claudette.

And, Amelie, I want to remind you that winning this tournament doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be on our baby’s gift certificate. It’s kind of like winning the people’s choice awards. At the very least you will always be our “couldabin”.

I feel I should take this opportunity to point out that Amelie was on my list of names, not Sarah’s. I’m not trying to suggest anything by pointing that out… I’m just sayin’ is all.

(please note: the picture above is of 2006 Wimbledon Winner, Amélie Simone Mauresmo, not our yet-to-be-named daughter.)

According to my uncle, they grew up as “Garg”.

It’s a long story… and I’m still not sure which parts of which story are true.

Anyway, with that information in hand, we figured if my dad could make up his last name, perhaps it made sense for us to change both of our last names from Hutfless and Gupta to something else.

We had a list of names, but the one we kept coming back to was Jalebi. We thought that would be very funny.

“Sarah Jalebi”

Good, no?

Obviously we didn’t do it then… but it’s not too late now: Jalebi Gupta?

Jalebi Gupta.

I like it.

(And for those of you who don’t know: Jalebi, picture above, is an indian sweet—deep-fried, syrup-soaked batter.)

I’m not much of a gamer.

Though I’ve owned every Nintendo console since the original, I’ve played each one less and less leading up to the last console, the Gamecube, which I probably play once every 6 months. So when the new Nintendo came out, the Wii, I decided that there was no reason for me to drop the $250 (plus $50 for a 2nd controller) to get one. Well it might also have something to do with Sarah being “in the family way” and money being tight.

Anyway, I was in Seattle on business, staying with my cousin Vikas. He had purchased a Wii for Sumedha (his wife) for Valentine’s day, but decided to give it to her a week early. I’m sure that wasn’t just so that he could play it. Either way, since I was there, I got to play it… and I LOVED IT! So much so, that Vikas said that if I could find one before I left Seattle he’d buy it for me.

I couldn’t. He didn’t. Lucky man.

So I’ve pretty much been moping around the apartment, trying to trick anyone I can into buying me a Wii. Got pretty close when Cathie-mom was in town for the shower… but no dice.

Coupled with my Wii-malaise, I’ve had some stressful days of work. Sarah suggested (probably mostly to get me out of her face) that I go down to the exercise bike (which is in the basement of our aparment building, in the laundry room, down the hall from the mail room) and work out some of my stress. So I did.

Well, I went downstairs, anyway. I usually check the mail before I ride the bike and hopefully find something interesting to read. On this day, I found something *very* interesting. So interesting, in fact, that I skipped the bike altogether and ran upstairs (elevator-ed upstairs, techincally) to show Sarah what I received.

Backing up a bit: Every six months or so I receive $12 check in the mail for some of the acting work I did in LA. Since that is money I technically earned *before* we got married, Sarah lets me keep it for my very own. Sometimes, however, this backfires on her.

Like it did this time. The fine folks at WB sent me a check for $275! Just the right amount to cover a Wii and sales tax!

JUBILATION!

This was on Monday.

Since then, I’ve probably spent about 24 hours calling stores, bidding on eBay, and bribing children trying to get my hands on one of those stupid game systems…

Still with me? Here’s where I tie this all in to the (im)pending SLP.

There’s a store in town called Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM). It’s huge. It’s like 4 buildings. They have any kind of furniture you can imagine. Can you imagine a couch? or a table? or a credenza? Whatever you’re imagining, they have it. They also have huge appliance and electronics department.

What can you find in electronics departments? Wiis.

What can you find in furniture departments? Cribs.

Where did we go first? Furniture.

Where should we have gone first? Electronics.

After looking at cribs for an hour and a half, we popped into the electronics department (which was in another building), to discover that the last Wii had *just* been purchased, that “there’s a kid walking around here with the last one right now.”

If we had gone to the electronics department before we went to look at the stupid cribs I would have had my grubby paws on a Wii last night!

So, for the first time, the wee one, that screaming little person, got the better of her old man.

Tyrannus. Tyrannus Gupta. That is she.

coda

I found one today. I win.

Whaddya think of that, baby Gupta?

I figured we’d find out the gender today, thus saving me from having to go head-to-head with Sarah over two gender’s worth of names. But, nooooo, “I’m comfortable like this and I ain’t movin’ my legs for the likes of you!”

So you know what? I’m not playing.

Punk kid thinks it can misbehave!

IT!

]]> http://theguptas.screaminglittleperson.com/index.php/2006/10/18/todays-name-it/feed/ 1 http://theguptas.screaminglittleperson.com/index.php/2006/10/03/todays-name-jesus/ http://theguptas.screaminglittleperson.com/index.php/2006/10/03/todays-name-jesus/#comments Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:32:17 +0000 Rahul http://theguptas.screaminglittleperson.com/index.php/2006/10/03/todays-name-jesus/ Yesterday we were hanging out with our neighbors on our back porch–ended up doing a little aparment tour. It’s pretty cool living here, lots of cool, friendly neighbors.

Anyway, since Sarah and I are going to be out of the Omaha area until the New Year, one our neighbors, Christy, wanted make sure we were going to be here (in Omaha) when the baby was born… ’cause she wanted to see the baby.

My response: “You only get to see the baby if you bring a casserole or diapers.”

So Sarah said we should name the baby Jesus. That way anyone who came to see the baby would be bearing gifts anyway.

It’s a pretty good idea, but frankincense and myrrh aren’t worth what they once were.

I guess I’ll have to figure out another way to capitalize on this kid.

Wait! Gold was one of the gifts, too, right? Hmmm… “Jesus Gupta”–this might work out after all.

It’s exotic.

It’s family friendly.

Even better, “Rafiki” means “friend”.

Our rationale within the dream was that if he and Sarah hadn’t been roommates that Sarah and I wouldn’t have become friends, which means that we wouldn’t have gotten married which means that we wouldn’t have had a baby.

So, as far as tributes go, this post may have to suffice.

(Also in the dream we were storing baby Amir in one of those rotisserie chickens containers.)

Okay, I’ve come a long way since “Pegasus”, so hear me out. Now, you’ll want to stay international with this one, and I mean in a nondiscriminatory sort of way. Sure, your baby could look Indian or s/he could look Norwegian. But, the birds and the bees, whistling and buzzing as they do (as in, it takes two…usually), you very well could have a green, or maybe even grey child. In that case you should steer clear of, say, the Krishna’s and the Jonathan’s, and opt for something much more color-blind and Asian-fusion. This becomes tough with single names, so you’ll need at least two names to work with.

As a helping hand in my search, I found Google to be quite helpful. For example, let’s consider “Ram Beau Gupta”. It traverses the world! Ram means…well, I don’t know, but it was listed on a website as an Indian name. And Beau of course…is French…and…you guys went to Paris. The States come into play in saying the first and middle names together, and I think it just takes me back to Sylvester Stallone’s younger, more lucrative days. Speaking of which, you could just name him “Rocky”. Or her. It doesn’t matter these days. People are naming girls “Jordan” and boys “Jesse”, so the line has already been erased. Think of it as being liberated from the days of choosing gender-specific names. Hell, have a girl and name her “Robert Marie”. She could go by “Bobbi” or maybe just raise her as a tomboy. You could just as easily have a boy and name him “Barbie Thomas”. He could go by Barb (it would sound like Bob in Boston), or you could enroll him in theatre and give him a cape. In that case I would prefix his name with Ssuper.

As a final alternative, you could go Access Hollywood with the whole thing and combine your names. I should say, hypothetically one COULD do that. All I have are “Sahul” and “Rahrah”, so I’ll leave that up to someone else.

Okay, maybe I’m not much help, but I have come to three conclusions during this much-too-long post: (1) THINKING about naming a child is exciting, (2) ACTUALLY naming a child is tiresome, and (3) I plan on simply indexing our children by birth order.

So cheers to “Gupta-1?: may your aqueous life be warm & cozy, and may cookies and shakes flow freely and abundantly through your umbilical cord.