#someone go tell that tiktokker who predicts influencer baby names that she's fired

[livwritesstuff]

I need to know how you chose the names for steddies kids bc they are 👌 perf

hello can I just say that I've been dying to be asked about this bc literally it was borderline detective work on my part istg and I'd love to share the thought process.

Moe's name was the easiest for me to decide. I was already using Maureen as Eddie's mom's name (and believe it or not I really wasn't planning on this series turning into a kid-fic but here we are). A bit later I learned that my younger cousin has a friend named Maureen who goes by Moe and I just thought there was something very Steddie about that. I felt like Steve would adore the name Lucy the second he heard it, and Lucy Maureen flows well so I went with it.

Like with Moe, I already had the middle names for the younger two (Robin and James) picked out early on. Their first names were way harder bc I had to get analytical about what names Steve/Eddie would be likely to like and choose given that they liked and chose Lucy.

(Major thanks to the social security baby name records because you can narrow the stats down by state woop woop)

According to my research, Lucy ranked #306 in MA the year she was born (2001), seeing its previous peak in the late 1800s before slowly falling off – so a relatively unpopular name that they would have jumped on right before a rapid gain in popularity (it was #48 in 2022 – 2023 list hasn't been released yet). As was discussed in ch. 1 of plant a seed, Lucy is also somewhat of a compromise between Eddie's suggestion of Luciana (very Shakespearean) and Steve's desire for their kids to have "normal" names.

SO – whether Steve and Eddie know it or not, their tastes combine into:

old, uncommon names that are about to see a resurgence and are also vague diminutives of names seen in classic lit

From here, my search began.

Amelia's name was absolutely the most difficult for me to figure out by a landslide. She was originally Eleanor, which I liked but didn't love. Then she spent the entire first draft of Plant a Seed as Madeline, but I really didn't like the flow of Madeline Robin (and I see Steve as someone who absolutely full-names his kids when they're acting out so that was definitely something I considered). From there I landed on Amelia.

Amelia ranked #111 in 2003, so it was a little more mainstream than Lucy (which is part of why I didn't just go with it from the start tbh but that's just me being nit-picky). It has links to Evangeline, which Ed would have adored and Steve would have thought was too dramatic. Amelia would have been a solid compromise, and I think Amelia Robin flows really nicely.

As for Hazel, it just seems to me like a name Steve and Eddie would hear and immediately both like, especially paired with James. Hazel was ranked #467 in 2006 and over the next decade, its popularity increased exponentially. It's now regularly within the top 50 names in the US.

And then, after all that work, they go by nicknames 🙃