Trying to name your child is a lot like house hunting. You know, it starts out really fun and you just can’t get enough of it. But eventually the shine wears off and it’s just another chore. It’s just another case of adulting camouflaged in a fun package.
We’re expecting our second child, and while we do have a while before we NEED a name… we are going to eventually have to come up with something. I mean, can these kids leave the hospital with no name? Because that’s where I’m at currently. It may or may not be hormone-related, but there is literally not a name on this planet that I like right now. There’s not a list out there that has a name on it that I like. I’ve thumbed through thousands of names. It just all seemed so much simpler back before I actually started growing humans. I had all kinds of great names picked out.
So I’ve been doing some thinking about why this is such a difficult task for parents, and I might have figured a thing or two out.
First of all, you’re choosing a name for a child that you haven’t met yet. You haven’t seen their little face. You have no idea what kind of personality they’re going to have or if they’re going to grow up hating the name that you worked so diligently on picking out for them. So there’s that.
I’m in a season of life where all of my friends have kids. And I have a huge family. I just know a lot of kids… and consequently, I know a lot of kids’ names. So trying to avoid recycling a name is difficult. And we all have that one friend who stole our favorite baby name before we had a chance to use it, whether they knew it or not. *Sigh* Mine knows who she is, but I still love her.
Can we talk about how invested fathers are when it comes to baby names? I never dreamt my husband would have such strong opinions on baby names until we were expecting our first. I was shocked at the kickback I was getting. I mean what in the actual heck? I know that some mamas are like “I’m carrying this child and I’ll name it what I want,” but I just couldn’t live with choosing a name that I knew my husband hated. Marriage compromise number… infinity.
Then there’s the problem of choosing a first name that goes with your last name. We have a strong “H” last name, so for me, any “H” first names are out (which, of course, means I’ve come up with several H names that I LOVE). I don’t think this is the case for all matching initials, but in our case, it just doesn’t work. We also have a one-syllable last name, so I think that one-syllable first names sound incomplete with our last name. I’m shaking my head because none of this was ever an issue when I was naming my imaginary kids. Oof.
So. Y’all. There go all the baby names. You feel me?
I’m hoping for some divine intervention like we got with our daughter (a random nurse on our hospital tour unknowingly named our daughter). I’m sure that sometime within the next 4 months we will come up with *eye roll* something. And perhaps I’m being a tad difficult, as pregnancy sometimes does to us.
Did you have trouble naming your kids or did you have a name waiting in the wings? Anybody not have a moniker for their kid until they were like, 3 days old? Asking for a friend.
Naming my kids was hard. Especially when I had the twins and had to do two at once! I have always been of the opinion that part of our personality is shaped not inly by our name, but more by how people react to our name. Maybe because I grew up in a town that had only ever heard the name ‘Natasha’ (my name) in an old cartoon! There was a book that I read while pregnant that confirmed this. It is called “The Baby Name Survey Book”. They surveyed like 100k people to get their inital reactions to names. It’s what I used to name my kids. I actually founf it really helpful and fell in love with names I had initially rejected. P.S. My daughter left the hospital without a name. Although I wouldn’t recommend it. Getting her name on birth certificate, etc., was a pain.
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