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“Oh, it’s a boy? Congratulations! I guess now you can start narrowing down names, eh?”
I’ve heard this several times, and I laugh. Because we had our first son and first daughter named before Perfect Husband was even a Perfect Fiance. We worked it out in our first year of dating.
I forget how it started – some idle remark in conversation – but once it did, we couldn’t stop. We’d come out with it at the oddest times. Driving home from dinner with his folks, walking down the street with grocery bags in our hands, or from the bed in the silence and the dark of night, one of us would say “Brian?” or “Alice?” and the other would respond. Watching the credits after a movie, we’d ask each other,
“Gigi?”
“Julio?”
“Seriously – Owen?”
I vetoed a couple of his top favourites, and he vetoed some of mine. I thought his suggestion was too popular – I knew way too many people with that name – and he thought mine was too old-fashioned, and sounded like an old lady’s name. I didn’t like any of the nicknames that came with another suggestion, because if a name CAN be shortened, people WILL shorten it (ask my father’s family, who actually thought they could name their son Lawrence and have him go through life not being called “Larry”). He didn’t have good associations with my next suggestion. There were a couple of names we were both lukewarm on, but not enthusiastic about.
But there was one boy’s name on my list that PH liked and approved of, and one of my top girl’s names sounded right to him, so we settled on their names and they became real to us, as named people. We would talk about our future son and daughter by name frequently.
It was so much fun, though, that we never really stopped. We still sit through the end of the credits of the movies, saying stuff like
“Geefwee. Let’s totally name our son Geefwee.”
and “Burt! Can we name our kid Burt?”
“Okay, but only if it’s a girl.”
“Sold.”
When I hear about couples who can’t decide on a name until days or even weeks after the birth, I’m baffled. It’s so much fun to talk about, and I think we both felt that it was important to decide such things before we took a step as big as marriage. After all, what if we had gotten married, only to discover that one of us wanted to name our son “Shaggy” and our daughter “Velma” or our son “Chivalry” and our daughter “Chastity”*
I mean, that could be a deal-breaker right there.
*Apologies out there who have kids named after Scooby Doo characters or obsolete virtues. It’s just not our personal style.
If By Yes 
I posted about this back in March: http://kenanddot.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/the-naming-of-tots/
Ken and I had quite a lot of difficulty deciding on the name Frank. Our principles for naming are similar but our tastes don’t totally overlap, and we’d used up our best common ground on Hugh. We disagree on lots of things but we got married anyway:-)
I hope Geefwee enjoys being called Geefwee.
I used to think that picking out names would be fun, but that was before I tried picking them out with Mike. We started talking about names before Violet was concieved, but we had to stop because it we ended up in fights more often than not, so we decided why fight about it when the baby in question isn’t even there yet?
I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do if this next one is a girl, because Violet was litterally the only girl name we could agree on. We’re even saving our boy name from the last time because it is the only boy name we could agree on. Since we’re not finding out the sex before hand, we still have to come up with another girl name, and it’s getting tiring already because I feel like we already had this conversation, except now there are certain names that would be acceptable, were it not for the fact that Violet is named Violet. No flower names, or “V” names because I refuse to have my children’s names “match.” I was joking with Mike last night that we’re going to have to get the nurse on duty to name our baby if it turns out to be a girl. Or name her Blood Pressure Monitor Donovan.
Well, there goes “Velma” for an option.
We have the opposite problem. We have alternate girl names but alternate boy names are a real difficulty. So if we have two boys we’ll be in the same boat.
The boyfriend and I have also ruled out any obsolete virtues (I love how you put that) as potential future baby names. In the boyfriend’s words: “only strippers are named Chastity or Honour”.
And only terrible people are named Charity.
Sean and I have been talking about names since forever, but it has gotten us exactly nowhere. The problem is I hate all names ever created and he is only slightly less picky. Every conversation we have on the subject results in a new rule about what we will not name any future child. We hate common traditional names. We hate crazy made-up names. We hate names with weird, illogical spellings. We hate names that are real English words. We hate names that are clearly stolen from languages or cultures we don’t belong to. We hate juniors. Sean is especially adamant about not naming children after anybody at all, living or dead, real or fictional. We hate names that remind us of other words or names that we hate.
At this rate, Greg’s old suggestions of Snail or Not-A-Horse are looking pretty good. Except for that no-English-words thing.
What about names from other languages?
Then again, you might want to consider your “no normal names” rule!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128113244.htm
I read of a study that said that people with uncommon names were far likelier to be famous or have uncommon jobs. Correlation is not causation. It’s not that we want something terribley unusual, but we do dislike anything that sounds stuffy and old-fashioned, strongly biblical, very common or trendy. Sooo…yeah, I guess that does cover anything “normal”. But we hate the weird ones too.
I like lots of names from other languages, but feel pretentious stealing them. Plus, I know how annoying it is to have to teach every single person you meet how to spell and pronounce your name if it doesn’t follow English rules. And my name is only missing an “e” from the common version. With Sean’s last name being Lithuanian, getting too fancy with the first name seems like asking for the kid to be called “hey, you!”.
There are a few names I don’t hate, but none of them feel particularly special and they are never the same ones as Sean’s.
In the end, I suspect someone else will end up naming my children, and 99% of me will quickly love the name because I associate it with someone I love. 1% will feel guilty and embarrassed forever, because that is what I do.
This is me procrastinating. I am supposed to be doing my taxes. From two years ago.
Nah, one day you’ll spot a name and think “that’s it”, or your baby will be born and you’ll look at her and go, “Oh, it’s so-and-so.”
My husband and I started talking baby names long before we were even trying. The problem is we were good about boy names but picky on girls. I’m still hoping for a girl one day, though, and still hoping he’ll concede to my favorite, Maggie.
I have made numerous jokes about naming a girl Serendipity since our son is named Chance.
No, I really won’t do that.
We didn’t have TOO hard a time with baby names — nothing near what Corinne went through, or what Amy’s saying — but it took time. Chris’s boy name list included (I kid you not): Christopher (Ummm, no. No “Juniors” for me, either.), Matthew (Are you kidding me? Name our baby after my ex?!) and John (No thank you. And not just ’cause of Jon. Because it just sucks.) So, yeah. Thankfully, Chris yields to me on things a lot. 😛
I also dislike weird spellings or anything too trendy, though Liam was quite popular his year, but we had agreed on that one LONG before and both loved it, so I didn’t care. Having to always spell my name for people, I wanted my kids to have an easier time of that. I also wanted to avoid family names and any kind of namesake situation for the first name, so even though I liked the name James we didn’t consider it because his stepdad is Jim. And I had to avoid names ending in the “is” sound because of our last name, which kinda sucked once I realized how many I liked (Lucas, Ennis, Sirius as a middle name, etc.). The middle names, though, I wanted to be unique. I wanted to avoid double middle names, but in the end, Liam got two because I really wanted the unusual name AND wanted to pass on the one family name I DID care about. Then I stressed over whether Jonah should also have two middle names for “balance”, but in the end figured boys don’t care about any of this crap as much as girls, so we’d just give him his unique middle name. That was chosen because it is also a constellation, not (as some people have thought) because of any Harry Potter reference. My two star babies. 🙂