My husband and I are expecting our first child in June and are going through this right now. We're trying to find a balance between honoring family and finding something that's traditional, but not too stodgy. Also, we're trying to balance our own ideas of too common or too uncommon (I was always Sarah K. in school; my husband has met about two people in his life who share the same first name.)

I've spent a lot of time on this site: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

It tracks naming trends across decades, plus the companion book is pretty interesting, too. (Note: I don't work for them, just found both site and book helpful.)

But overall, it's hard! We're getting closer to a decision, but we don't have it figured out just yet. I'd be interested to see how others made their choices.

My own name is unusual and I've lived most of my life with people calling me the wrong name. So we chose names for our kids that we thought we easier to pronounce. We tend to lean towards Irish names, because my H is of Irish descent, so we chose Maureen over Aisling because of the pronunciation issue. And we made sure their initials didn't spell any bad words.

Well, we ended up asking my OB. We had to pick 2, since we were having twins. The girl name was easy, but the boy was a problem. Every name we [picked had been converted to a girl's name, or was too common. At one of my last visits, I asked the doc. I gave her the list of the 3 "finalists" and asked her if she was seeing a lot of any of them. One, she had not. Might only be good for "local weather" but for the most part, the common name issue is worst at the school level.

Never heard this approach; interesting idea. And I definitely had a much harder time picking a boy's name, too.

Funny! I had a hard time picking a girl's name option for both of my pregnancies. Boys names were easy! I always thought that maybe subliminally I knew I was having boys and that's why?!

For my boys, I looked for names that I thought were uncommon but that people had heard of. Of course, that didn't necessarily remain true as both of their names have gone up in popularity since they were born.

We chose family names fairly easily for our son (3) and our daughter (6 mo.), but our big rule was to keep the names a secret until the babies arrived. Before the birth it is way too easy for well-meaning (or just annoying) friends, family members and strangers to tell you why the name is too common, too weird, has a bad association or ought to be changed to their name (I'm looking at you, Grammie). When you introduce it as a done deal, people seem to be more accepting, or too distracted by the new little cutie to argue.