I wanted my 3 kids to have uncommon names and made lists of my favorites. But I couldn't choose until I held them in my arms.

• I thought endlessly about what I'd call my children before they were born.
• I wanted them to have uncommon names and made lists of names while I was pregnant.

When I first learned I was going to have a baby, I panicked a little, and not about common things you might expect. No, I felt like I was going to crumble under the pressure of having to choose a name for another person — something they'd theoretically carry with them for the rest of their lives. After all, I didn't even know this person yet.

I'd never really thought a lot about it before, but suddenly I started stumbling across articles that discussed how our names can influence everything from our personalities to important life decisions. There were so many of them out there. How was I going to choose a good one?

I loved my name as a kid, and I still do

I started with what I knew about my own. Growing up, the name Tiffany was not unknown, but it also wasn't common. (I was born slightly before my name hit its peak popularity.) In my classes at school, no one ever had the same name as me, and I always felt bad for the multiple Megans or Jennifers who had to use last initials or nicknames so that everyone knew who was being addressed by the teacher.

As an adult, I still don't often run into people with the same name. It's rare enough that when I do come across another Tiffany, it's a bit startling. I leaned into the fact that I have always loved the individualism my name provides me, and I wanted to give that to my kids as well. So, I did.

I had fun choosing my kids' unusual names

I treated the task of choosing a name for each of my three children almost like a work project. I spent an inordinate amount of time Googling things like "popular names in the 1860s" or "names no one wants to use" with mixed results. I scrolled through the Social Security Administration's website as a hobby. When I found something I liked, I would cross reference it by checking how popular it currently was and how popular it had been in the last decade. If it was in the top 500 names for popularity, I crossed it off my list.

Using these methods, I slowly but surely built a list of names that I adored. But even armed with all my data, I couldn't bring myself to choose "the one" until I saw each of our babies. For each child, my husband and I narrowed my lists down to between two and four options. All of the names were unusual, and I would have been happy to use any of them. But as each baby was born, it became immediately apparent which name best fit them.

Thankfully, they all like their names

We get a lot of compliments on what we went with — Isa, Errol, and Ender — and all the names we opted for had a literary influence. If you've ever read Orson Scott Card's book "Ender's Game" or seen the movie of the same title and are wondering, yes, that was the influence. Some on the shortlist that we didn't pick included Wren, Arlo, Harlan, Elouise, and Otto.

To me, my children's names are like my own. Uncommon, but not unknown. We've yet to run into other children, whether it's school programs, enrichment activities, or neighborhood friends that have the same name as any of them. Plus, our children all seem to really like what we've called them — for now, anyway. As someone who worried about getting the name right from the early days, I'm open to letting them change their names in the future if they decide they don't like them after all. In fact, I have a short list ready to go if they are looking for inspiration.