Baby Names ...

So I thought I'd bring this to the only place I can go to get answers.
Mrs. Rhody found out she was pregnant (I guess we didn't pray hard enough). She just hit the 12-week mark and while we're not out of the woods yet (Mrs. Rhody is a diabetic, but her mother - who had five kids - feels we're going to be fine, telling her "I prayed for miscarriages with all of you and it never happened") we're both pretty excited.
The name game has come up and it wouldn't have been a problem, but ...
My friend stole our name.
After we had been dating for a while, we talked about how many kids we want and names. I loved the name Colton because we had a local kid with the name and his last name was one syllable and so was mine. It flowed nicely. The middle name would be her father's, so Colton Raymond (Rhody) it was.
My friends and I had talked about this and one of my buddy's said he and his wife had talked about Colt. I causally said, oh, that will be cool - we'll have a Colt and a Colton.
Fastforward to last year when he and his wife had their first child, a son, and they named him Colton.
He told his wife it was Colt McCoy's first name (false) and that's why he liked it. She was oblivious to our exchange, but every single one of my friends had the same reaction: "Oh, he took your name."
I still want the name because I loved the way it flowed. Wife isn't a fan because someone else took it.
My argument is we only see my buddy a handful of times a year (he lives out of state) and I've only seen his kid twice. My wife still hasn't seen him (she hasn't been around when they've come to visit) so it shouldn't matter. They're rarely going to be around one another and if they are so what. Plus, my father's good friend named his son after my father and then 10 months later, I got the same name and that was never an issue.
I really like the name and it was my first option (of course, my first option for a middle name was "Awesome", but that didn't fly) and don't see why we should give it up.
Would it be wrong to use the name? It's not that I don't like our other options - she likes Jackson and Brady and I'm trying to talk her into Cooper - but I don't see why the No. 1 should get tossed aside.
As for girls names, well I keep telling my wife don't bother. My plan is to go boy, boy, boy, girl - or as I like to call it, center, left tackle, defensive lineman, princess.

 

Your wife prefers one of the other names and she's looking for any excuse possible to get to her preference.

 

Your wife's mom sounds AWESOME.

 

We don't tell anyone names we're considering when expecting. No way. Hell, even ourselves. In fact, for the first one, we basically decided on the way to the hospital what a boy's name would be, and even then it still seemed tentative. And only for a boy. If it had been a girl, she was just going to have to hang tight for at least a few hours.

I stick with really traditional names. We won't be having any Brooklyns or Coltons or Codys or Aidens or Liams or MacKenzies.

 

And the next generation of sports copy editors, assuming there is one, thanks you.

 

If they are chips off the old block, that will be a moot point.

 

Clubber Slang

 

A friend of mine told me the two rules to naming kids. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I thought they were funny...

For boys, don't name them anything than ends with the last three letters D-E-N.

For girls, don't name them anything that could be construed as a stripper or a porn star name. Considering how many Madisons and Savannahs there are out there, not many people follow this advice.

 

I used to worry about covering inner-city games because of all the spelling land mines planted on the roster, and how much time I knew that it was going to take to type in the box score.

Now the suburbs are just as bad.

 

Yes, by all means: 1. choose a name that is a name, and 2. spell it in a standard manner.

My cousin adopted a little girl a few years back. She was 2 at the time and her name was spelled Nicolle. They had to get a new birth certificate made. I told him hear me now, believe me later, change the spelling. They didn't, and now she is in the third grade and he bitches because nothing ever has her name spelled right the way they chose to leave it.