Too many Jennifers

 My daughter didn't have a name for several days after she was born. Her wrist band said, Baby Old.  

Why? Because we had only arrived at the hospital with boy's names because his mom insisted that their family only had boys. Well, she was a girl. I waited until my husband came to visit us in the hospital so we could discuss girl's names and we settled on Jennifer. So I called down to the hospital register's office and told her we'd decided on Jennifer and it was spelled.... She stopped me right there. Very patiently she told me that she knew how it was spelled. How? Because of a popular movie in 1972, Jennifer was the top baby girl's name.  

Jen had 5 Jennifers in her elementary school class, over 25 in her middle school class and graduated high school with over 100 Jennifers. !!!

Popular baby names of 2013

Attention Picture Book writers. When you are thinking of names for the children in your stories, you might consider checking out the various lists of popular baby names because by the time your book is published, those babies will be old enough to enjoy your picture book.

What were the most popular baby names in 2013?
Here is a link to one list in an article on the Huffington Post website created from a place called "Nameberry" which states: "Nameberry’s popularity lists are tabulated by ranking the unique page views each name attracts out of the over 20 million total views of our baby name pages in 2013."

A lot of the names are new and unusual, names that I have never seen before.  New to me as well is the list of names that were given to BOTH boys and girls.
Since this list is based on most popular names searched for on Nameberry's web pages, I don't know how valid it is, because parents search a lot of names before actually choosing the perfect one.

I believe that the official list of baby's names registered with Social Security will come out in January. If I remember, I'll backtrack to this blog post and put the link to it here as well.  (or if someone has found it before I do, feel free to let me know.)