Girls baby names

I know it's really, really early, but we already have names picked out.  Odds are these will change of course.  I mean we still have 5 or 6 months before we have to fill out birth certificates but here's how we went about the selection process.

I've kind of been thinking about what I would name a girl for years.  I really like girls names that shorten to boys names.  Oddly enough, even though I was convinced I had a boy on the way, I have not been able to come up with a boys name I liked to save my life.  I must have known on some level I wasn't going to need one.

By the way, Alex was not a name given to me by my parents.  I adopted it when I started hanging out in chat rooms online in 1993 and it became clear that announcing yourself as female was just a bad idea.  So I adopted a name that would work even after I got to know someone well enough to let them know I was female.  Then when I moved away from home, I started introducing myself as Alex, it just stuck.  I legally changed my middle name to Alex just under a year ago.

So yeah, I want to give my kids names that can be shortened in several different ways depending on what personalities they turn out to have.

Something else to consider - our last name "Remon" is often mispronounced.  People just want to make it more exotic than it really is.  Our name sounds exactly how it's spelled, it rhymes with "Lemon".  But I get a whole lotta people on the phone asking for Mrs. Ramone with a lovely rolling R and a Hispanic or Italian accent.  No big deal if our kids are mistaken for a race they don't happen to belong to, except that K and I are so friggin white that there's just going to be no doubt about the fact that our kids are plain old white.  I have blond hair with hints of strawberry (if you really look for them) and I have freckles, K was a typical ginger kid with the flaming red hair (which is now "blond" since he's gotten older) and freckles of his own.  So odds are, our kids are going to be so white they'll be practically see through and will have unmistakably red hair.  As a result, any name that hints at an ethnicity other than some version of lily white, and the kids will never have their last name pronounced correctly and will be getting that momentarily puzzled look from teachers calling roll their entire lives. Think about it, if you call out Maria Remon (and you think it's pronounced Ramone), you're going to be confused for a moment when a ginger kid raises her hand to say "here!"

Middle names - my middle name is Alex, K's middle name also starts with Al so we decided to keep that pattern going.  Besides, we really liked the name Alicia.  And you can't have 3 out of 4 family members with a pattern.  That's just not nice to the 4th.  So while we're not married to it yet, we think the fourth middle name will be Allison.

Narrowing down first names - I want actual names, but I'd rather not have names that are so popular that there will be a dozen of them in every group my kids belong to.  But names like Apple, Shiloh, Troubadour, not for me.  Those are a little too weird.

So here's what we've come up with.  One of them is rather popular, or at least it was in my generation, but I really like it anyway.

You ready?  You all prepared to tell me why these names suck?  I'm certain at least somebody will.  We don't know which middle name goes with which first name, but here are the first names followed by the nickname I will call them and other nickname options that they can grow into if they choose.

Charlotte - Charley.  Other options - Sheri, Cher, Char, Cherry (probably against her will if she's a redhead), Lotty, Dotty, Dot

And her sister

Christina - Chris.  Other options - Chrissy, Christine, Cristin, Tina, Christie

Whatddya think?