Can the end of summer really be so near?  It feels like just yesterday, Washington DC was digging out of the February snowstorms.

Speaking of the February snowstorms, we were at the city’s summer concert series on Friday night and we’re anticipating A LOT of November babies.  One expectant mom was kind enough to tell me they’re naming their baby-on-the-way Maxwell, but mostly I’m looking forward to a pre-Thanksgiving wave of birth announcements.

Speaking of waves of BAs, there were so many Hollywood births in the past week that I’m putting them first:

• Annie Wersching, of 24 fame, welcomed a son, Freddie;
• Songwriter/producer Ryan Tedder and wife Genevieve are new parents to son Copeland Cruz;
• General Hospital’s Rebecca Herbst is now mom to three. New son Emerson Truett joins Ethan and Ella Bailey at home;
• Singer Luke Bryan also announced the birth of a son, Tatum Christopher, called Tate.  Tate joins big brother Bo – Thomas Boyer;
• And the sole girl to make her debut this week was Chaplin Haddow, a daughter for Ever Carradine.

Is it me, or are gender-neutral names truly staying neutral?  Conventional wisdom was that once a name had “gone girl” it would never be considered for a boy.  But many of these celeb names are solidly ambiguous – and still used for sons.

Which reminds me:

• For Real Baby Names spotted a boy named Addison Alex;
• Nancy uncovers the true story of Johnny Carson’s name-changing sons: Christopher kept his name, but Kim Arthur, distressed that he was meeting so many girls with his given name, became Richard.  Son Barry became Cory, apparently just because he liked it better;
• Legitimate Baby Names gives us Laine – a two-syllable feminine appellation in Estonia, but this side of the Baltic, inevitably mistaken for a respelling of single-syllable gender-neutral Lane;
• The Name Lady weighs in on whether you can honor a beloved brother by naming his niece Jacob.  Well, not exactly – they want to put Jacob in the middle spot.  The Name Lady says yes, and for once, I find her answer absolutely wonderful and agree completely;
• But if you want to be sure your son is all boy?  For Real reports that Georgia parents went with Remington Colt for their little gunslinger.  In the same list you’ll find Dusty Phideles.  Could it be a play on “Adeste Fideles,” better known in English as “O Come All Ye Faithful” – could it!?
• Equally unthinkable, brought to us from the Yahoo! Answers community – is Twitter a good name for my daughter? – via That’s Crazee;
• Babynamelover has a sweet little list of less common girls’ names that end in -a, from the exotic (Svea, Raja) to the throwback (Ida, Flora) to the new (Gala, Vega) and everything in between;
• I spotted a tweenager reading one of these books the other day and kept meaning to Google it, but Laura Wattenberg beat me to the punch – check out her post on Theodosia.

I dragged a very reluctant Aly to shop for school shoes today and was delighted to overhear a father calling out Hasting.  It was in the Nordstrom’s at the Annapolis Mall – you sort of had the impression the kid might’ve been Something Hasting Something IV.  It’s possible I misheard, and he was Hastings, as in the Battle of, raising the possibility that his parents are experts on the Norman Invasion.

That’s all for this week.  As always, it wouldn’t be worth writing if you weren’t here.  Thank you!