Duel for the Names

So my one of my best friends played an evil trick on me this past weekend. This guy was my roommate throughout college, and like women who match their menses when they live together, our social lives often matched. We call ourselves "Bad Boys" since he is like the cool guy Will Smith, and I am like the goofy Martin Laurence character. We would have girlfriends at the same time, and would break up with our girlfriends around the same time. Anyways, like the past, he and his wife got pregnant about 2 weeks before we did and are also having a boy. One thing that we forgot to do was to claim names from the beginning. I never thought it was a big deal if we had decided to call our kids the same name, but my wife obviously thought different. I don't want to say the name for the sake of anonymity, but we will call it M. We have been calling our baby M for some time, but I never told my friend about it, because it just never crossed my mind(typical guy, right?). However, when the wives talked recently, they discussed their options for names and found out they were considering M for their baby too. We had been telling family about the name, and my wife had been telling her friends. Fortunately, at the time, my friend and his wife were also considering another name and were leaning towards that other name.


Then my friend calls me up this past weekend, and tells me they decided to call their baby M also, and their baby was going to be born first. I initially thought that was cool we would have kids with the same names, but when I told my wife, oohh yeah, not pretty!!! She was floored that my friend would take the name after we had essentially called it, and that our kids could not have the same name(avoid competition, etc). (Its not that names can be owned and my friend had a right to call his baby the same name if they wanted to). After she stopped stomping around the house with hair on fire(it was not that bad), we started to think of different names again. Of course we had to go to Borders and check out the name book again and go over name after name after name again. In the meantime, we stopped calling the baby M, and termed the baby Jelly Bean until we could find another name.


Anyways, my friend calls me back the following day and tells me he was just kidding, and that he wanted to get a reaction out of my wife and I. I sort of figured this actually since he has played jokes like this in the past, but my wife was giving him the fist!!! She is Christian so she won't give the finger!!! :) She had to smile though later about it. Anyways, we are back to calling the baby M and now this joke got us to start thinking of other names, but we will probably stick with M. My friend and I now have claimed the names for our future children so this would not happen again. Who would have thought claiming names could be such a big deal. I am psyched though that our kids will hopefully be best friends like their dads in the future.