Curious About the Most Popular Baby Name of 2011 or About What Your Teacher's Did With Their Free Time

How many years have I been obsessed with the baby naming site Name Voyager?  I think Bridget introduced it to me when we were in Jordan pregnant with G-Bear  So somewhere in the range of 5 1/2 years I've been following this site.  When it comes to baby naming sites it is the premier.  Forget those name books, this puts them all to shame.  You can look up names, their meanings, their trends, her blog about baby naming phenomena, where names are most popular, and good names that go with the kids names you already have.  This is just the free stuff! I've used it with three of my four children.  Even when I'm not pregnant, even when I think there is probably little more then five percent we will have any more children, I still love looking at this site.  Recently Laura posted the top 1000 names in the United States for 2011.  Seeing as I added a child that year I was definitely interested in the trends.  Her name actually happens to be on the rise...of course seeing as it isn't even close to the top 400 girls names I think it is safe to say she's not going to have to worry about sharing her name in any of her classes anytime soon.  She also did this awesome run down of some of the trends she noticed. Thanks Twilight for changing the direction of names for an entire generation.  Sort of makes me appreciate those totally ridiculous Harry Potter names.  Also how about a push for the name Nellie...I can't be the only person who finds that name adorable.  And then in NPR news there was this article about the latest partisan divide, turns out young conservative moms are the ones coming up with the crazy, I mean unique names.  The irony here being my names are getting less traditional as I get older, what does that say about me?

In non baby related news, who doesn't love a little teacher action.  As the child of a teacher I started to suspect in high school that someone would have to be a little cracked to deal with other people's minions for so little money and respect, and here's just a little more proof.  Sweater guy is by far my favorite.  For a big guy he's got some pretty smooth moves....