And she needs how many names?

After finding out what variety of genitalia Hieronymus possessed, my husband and I were able to cross our chosen boy's name off the list. This is probably a good thing, since we literally barely agreed on it and it was a pretty good chance that we were just going to call the baby No Name if we'd come up with boy bits. The girl name we've had for a while, so it was good to go.

I made the mistake of mentioning awesome, now we don't need to plan a bris or have a few good rounds of debate on circumcision since the lack of a penis kind of precludes that. Then he's all ...oh yea, but she needs a Hebrew name. Oh, okay.

Here's what I know about Judaism: they wandered around in the desert for a while, wrote the original half of the Bible, and apparently produce a lot of great entertainers. You can't eat bacon cheeseburgers. My husband is probably going to hell because of that. Their mourning rituals make a lot of sense. And someone, for the benefit of idiots like me, wrote jewfaq.com

Before I get accused of being insensitive, I know approximately the same amount about Catholicism and I was raised Catholic. I did not convert when Steven I got married because a) it was disingenuous to do it JUST because he was and b) I'm a shitty Catholic. I would not be a better Jew.

All of this means I am totally the right person to say "Hey, our baby needs a Hebrew name." I have awesome google-fu; why not? How hard can this be? I suggested we use my husband's Hebrew name since it's unisex, I like the sound of it, and it means happy.

Except you can't use the name of someone living. Which I didn't know because as we established above, I know NOTHING.

All right, how about using his nana's name? That would be fine, except he doesn't know it and my MIL guards it like a state secret. That leads me to believe she doesn't know it either. No go there. We could use Esther, his grandma's, but I'm kind of meh about that. Back to Google, at which point he tells me he's kind of burnt out on names. I'm hoping that means I can just pick one and go with it.

At least if we baptize her, we can just give her my baptismal name. The standard for Catholics is pick a saint, there are a million, and they all died horribly, so you can't go wrong.

That kind of leads me into I have no idea quite how you go about the whole naming tradition. I understand the bris, we have friends who have been there and done that, and my stepson had one when he was born. But there doesn't seem to be a clear cut ritual for girls. Our friends' advice was to talk to a rabbi, but that brings up another issue. We don't belong to a temple; how do you find a rabbi?

Of course, we're sort of in the same boat about having her baptized since we don't exactly belong to a church, either. To be honest, I'm not about to join any kind of religious edifice just to have Hieronymus blessed. I think the plan was to have the awesome reverend who married us (in a lovely, non-denominational chapel, by the way) bless her. 

Oh well. I'm sure jewfaq.com will rescue my proverbial ass again. Thank God for that.