April 11, 2008

Choosing a Name

Choosing a name for this baby has been a nine months long process. It's been so hard for Dominic and me to decide on names but we've finally made our decisions. With this baby, for the first time, we decided to not discuss our name choices with anyone. From our experience with the other children, when you tell people your name choices before the birth, there will always be a few (usually family members) who will not agree and will suggest other names or try to make you change your mind. I think it's hard enough for a husband and wife to agree on a name; when other people want to have a say in naming the baby it becomes impossible to make everyone happy.
Over the last months I've presented lists of names to Dominic and asked him to vote. He would return the lists with just about all the names crossed out. We finally found a couple of names we both like so those are the ones we are going to use.

Did any of you have difficulty choosing names for your babies? How did you and your spouse decide? Did you choose to hide the name from everyone else until the baby was born or did you like to call it by his/her name even before (s)he was born. I'm curious what your opinions are.

4 comments:

Briana nanimom@outlook.com said...

Shane and I actually picked out Audrey, Cyril, and Cyprian before we were married so we'd already agreed on three of the names we used. That made it easier. Kateri we decided on in the last few weeks. We didn't have such a hard time agreeing on a name as coming up ones either of us liked in the first place. Girl names I find harder to find. We don't keep names a secret but usually everyone else's tastes are different so there's no name stealing, that I know of and we don't care what anyone else thinks. Currently we only have a girls name left on our list so hopefully the next on is a girl. But I'm always on the look out for new ones.

Kelly said...

We haven't had a super hard time agreeing on names. They seem to just hit us both as the right thing. Julia Roberts steals our baby names though. That wench.

Irina S. said...

Looks like we're having a harder time than other people choosing names.I think it's because in our case we have to choose international names (or names that work in both English and Romanian) and that really limits our choices. Dominic wanted Teddy to be named Patrick, but back then it was too American for me. Also, he wanted Alex to be named Ioan, after his great uncle, soon to be beatified (we hope) Bishop Ioan Suciu. I totally would have used the name as a first name IF we lived in Romania but from my experience, I know how hard it is to live with a very ethnic name that you have to spell and explain to everyone. It just gets tiring. We did end up using Patrick and Ioan as their middle names, which was a good compromise.
The name Cecilia, however, we decided on way before we got married. We always knew that our first daughter would be named Cecilia. We were even calling poor Teddy, Cecilia for the first 5 month of his life in utero, since we were convinced he was a girl.

The Rhones said...

Choosing names is quite difficult, and you are so right about not telling anyone the name before the baby is born. Someone will either hate the name, or your mum will be crushed that you did not name your baby after her! We still have a boys name chosen, if Thomas ever gets a baby brother, but after having so many girls, it was really hard for us to decide on a girl's name.Finally we thought Trinity would be perfect, but couldn't think of a middle name at all. Once she was born, and we could hold her and really see her, Gregory asked if I liked the name Perpetua. I loved it. (Named after Sts. Felicity & Perpetua)
Felicity Angela
Eva Alexandra
Mary Margaret
Thomas Michael
Heather Jane
Grace Helen (This made my mum, Helen, very happy! lol)
and
Trinity Perpetua.