My parents had three girls and for some reason thought that this time it would be a boy and didn't have a name picked out. My birth certificate actually says 'see attached rider' where the name should be because they took some time to choose one. My older sisters all have beautiful names, whereas I ended up with the run-of-the-mill name that was on the top of baby names list for years. It was the only one my parents could agree on; neither one hated it or loved it. There were five of us with the same name in my elementary school class. BTW, Jane is not my real name.
I wasn't for the first week of my life. Mum had forgotten to think about a name. Dad thought naming was the mother's job. When the nurses asked Mum what name to put on the wristband, she couldn't say, so they wrote 'Baby Harcourt.'
A week later (1956), Mum read in the Women's Weekly that Amanda was the most unusual name. So she named me Amanda. It turned out later that in that year Amanda was the most common name for baby girls.
