With the first kid, we came to an agreement right away.
With the second one, I kept suggesting names and he would be like “I knew a Cathy in school i didn’t like” or whatever.
It got to the point where I was suggesting names I didn’t even like that much.
At some point I made a list of 10 names I liked and told him to pick one and get over the people he used to know. He said okay but I get to pick the middle name (after his mom). Done deal.
When the older DD was asked what we should name the new baby, she replied “Batman”
My baby naming story with D1:
We did not know the gender of the baby. We mulled over various names for each gender. We decided a boy’s name first: Jesse. We had narrowed it down to 3 possible girl’s names. We went camping for a week in my 8th month at Acadia National Park in Maine. We had a picnic on rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean and during it, wanted to arrive at a final decision if it was a girl. So, we said, should be it X, Y, or Z? A seagull was perched on the rock. The seagull started chirping the first syllable of the Z name over and over. I didn’t want to tell my husband I thought the seagull answered our question. But then he must have thought the same and said, the seagull just said the first syllable of the Z name! It was a sign. So, then and there, we decided that if the baby was a girl, we’d name her the Z name. We took a photo of the seagull. She indeed was a girl and we named her the Z name! We had the photo of the seagull enlarged and framed it and hung it by her crib, and it eventually was hanging in her room her entire childhood…the seagull who named her.
I agree with @Hanna who urged parents to not try to come up with unusual spellings for their kids’ names! For D2, there are a few spelling options of her name. We picked the most common one, which was the one in the boldface entry for the name in the baby name books, and actually is phonetic as well. People still spell it wrong. Also, some see the name and visually switch the order of the letters and pronounce an entirely different name, likely because that different name is the name of a famous singer. Once my D got an award and the MC said her name in this out of order spelling of the famous singer’s name, even though it is not spelled the same, nor is it the same name.
My good friend’s dad decided on the way to register his new baby girl that he preferred Carol to Natalie. He came home and broke the news to his wife. She is Carol to this day. Honestly, it’s a much better name for her than Natalie. He and his wife seemed perfectly happy for their whole married life, so I guess his wife got over it.
When we were expecting our first, we chose my grandfather’s fairly uncommon name should the baby be a boy. She was a girl. By the time baby 2 came along, it seemed like every toddler boy in our area had the same name as my grandpa, and it was clearly experiencing a renaissance. Much as I loved my grandpa, his name no longer worked. We never found out the sex of either child in advance, so we were thrilled with a boy this time.We named him something entirely different from my grandpa’s name.
My husband’s first name is spelled with 2 “r”; for 99.99% of those with this name, it only has 1 r. Our Jewish last name has a couple of spellings, or those not familiar with the correct spelling, spell it phonetically! We live on a street with an unusual spelling, so we can not give our information without spelling every word! This was why my children both have names that are hard to misspell
Ryan’s Hope was my first soap. I remember Maeve, Siobhan, Frank and Delia!
My H was obsessed with the name “Brenda.” As I don’t have any fond opinions of any of the Brendas I have met, I quickly settled for the next name he liked as a way to shut off the Brenda discussion. Now I love D’s name, which is an older name that hasn’t been rediscovered yet.
Both of my kids go by their middle names. Each is four letters. No alternate spellings. Very normal but not common. There were no other girls with my D’s name in school and only one boy that I remember with an elongated version of my S’s name (think Jake and Jacob).
When we were discussing names for our second, S1 (who was two at the time) announced that he would name the baby. And the name would be either Elmer or Beandip. Fortunately for S2 wiser heads prevailed. Although S1 has S2 as Beandip in his phone, and will call him that on occasion.
DH and I hadn’t decided on either a girl’s or boy’s name when my water broke 5 days early. (He had vetoed my longtime favorite, Monica, early on). We agreed on a girl’s name while walking the halls of the maternity floor, waiting for things to get going. Fortunately we had a girl (our only, so no more name issues to tackle).
We had decided ahead of time that the middle name would be my Mom’s or Dad’s first name, since the baby would have DH’s last name (I hadn’t changed my surname. Both his and mine are ethnically dense, so hyphenation didn’t make sense).
The only footnote is that when we told my folks the name we chose, my Mom was disappointed since it’s the feminine version of a guy I thought they were friends with, but apparently not…I’m sure that’s long forgotten but I felt bad at the time.
I remember being 4 years old and despising the girl name my parents chose for the 3rd child. Fortunately it was a boy, and a perfectly acceptable name.
It’s weird how the popularity of names comes & goes in waves. I have an unusual name, I have never met anyone else with my name, but it’s similar to common names, I never minded the mis-spellings, etc. We wanted something traditional yet uncommon for our kids. With kid #1 we picked a classic name with a nickname we like, think Rebecca and Becky, but DD is not an “ee” ending kid and goes by her full name, which was apparently quite popular that year due to a gorgeous soap opera character on a show I never saw! According to SS, it’s a top 4 name all through the 80s, I guess she’ll be like the Ethels & Mabels are now when she is 80!
Kid#2s name was in the 100s in the 80s and topped out in the 50s, so not too bad, the nickname issue with this one was that I despised the easy nickname and we all called kid2 by the whole name until a ‘close friend’ and family began using a variation of the nickname I despised, before that could spread, I signed up kid2 for all school stuff and sport stuff with our family nickname, which took. Anyone who calls kid2 by the legal name is someone from before 3rd grade. That name is only in the top 1000 in the last 30 years. I’m much happier with how that worked out than D1’s name being so common.
Frightening to look back, but with D3, I liked Mariah, before Mariah Carey was famous, thankfully she did not “look like a Mariah” so was saved that fate, but she did have a good friend, Ariel, born before the movie came out. Her name was in the top 1000 for a few years, but it’s been in the top 100 and as high as 15 in the last 10 years, guess she’ll always sound younger.
It’s unpleasant to think about how movies and pop culture can ruin a name’s good feelings.
My DH is caught in one of the “always named after the grandfather” loops but in his case it’s ended up being back-to-back. I did not like the name, or the common nickname, before we met. Having three generations with the same name also irritates me. Before we married, I traded naming rights for S for the agreement to call him by his middle name and garage rights. We have been happy with this deal for over 20 years.
For my only son, we used his mother’s maiden name for his first name, which we agreed on almost immediately. Didn’t settle on a middle name until he was born, and then it was raining on the way to the birth center so Noah seemed appropriate.
Pop culture is so out of our hands. When D3 was born, we chose a name for her (not on our list and not what I had been thinking of at all…) and it turned out to be the name of a TV person for a show that started the next year. A show that became wildly popular but I never watched.
No! I didn’t name D3 after that character, and I had to answer that question a lot. It never picked up as a baby name so it ended up OK. D3 likes that show and wanted a boxed set of all the seasons, lol.
There’s a lot we just don’t have control of. Wasn’t there a florist somewhere whose company was called Blue Ivy? And then Beyonce named her child Blue Ivy, yikes.
I’m just glad our kids like the names we gave them. I feel bad for kids and parents when the kid hates his/her name. H really wanted to name S “Arnold” after Arnold Palmer. My mom and sibs protested that was the name of the pig in “Green Acres,” so S was NOT given the name of Arnold but instead got a name he and we like just fine. By co-incidence, there were 3 guys who attended our wedding who have a shortened version of his name with our last name though none were related to H and fortunately we liked all of them.
DS doesn’t have anything unusual with his names - first and middle English and Hebrew names all have initials that honor the memory of the four great grandfathers.
But when DS went to get his driver’s permit, he was advised that someone with the same first name, middle initial, first five letters of the last name, and date of birth had been cited for underage drinking in a different state across the country. Therefore they wouldn’t issue a permit without confirmation from the other state that it wasn’t DS. Since the other kid was a minor, the records were sealed. I was able to talk the other state into telling me the date and location of the offense. I then had DS’s high school write a letter confirming he was at school on that date and the following date, so that he could not have been in the other state. The other state accepted this and wrote a letter of clearance, which our state accepted. Whew.
Fast forward 13 years. DS gets an email advising that his personal information may have been hacked, from a medical service in that same other state where he coincidentally now lives. But - middle name was shown in the email and was completely different from his, and last name only had five letters (DS’s last name has six). I googled the name and found his record - sure enough, same DOB so undoubtedly same guy. I did contact the company that issued the email to advise them that they were contacting the wrong guy and they were very appreciative.
I thought i was picking names that couldn’t be messed up. They can’t be shortened into nicknames either. And my son is named what is now a very popular, very Irish name. And we spelled it the conventional way. It is almost always misspelled. He just texted me, his name plate at work has his name spelled wrong. It’s OR not ER people. ER is a last name. OR is a first name. Rant over.
I have a friend whose name is very similar to Clark Kent. When somebody warned his mom at the time that this was Superman’s alter ego, she responded that in a few years nobody would remember who Clark Kent is. That was almost 60 years ago.
When I was a teenager my parents friends from across the country whose last name was McCartney had a baby they named Paul! I was aghast. Who would want their named commented on like that all the time? My parents kept saying it was fine. He might even like it!??
Anyway I gave little Paul very little thought as i didn’t see these people often. My parents would visit the family but not me. So about 8 years ago my mom says “The Mcartneys boy Philip just got a very big job in our city.” And I was like Philip? I thought his name was Paul. And my mom told me he’d hated his name and had changed it when he started high school ( to his middle name) ! AND he chased his last name to something akin to Miller ( his moms maiden name) when he graduated from college because he " was still getting comments and it bothered him!"
