Baby names....

kidtechnical

There are tons of sites out there if you google. However, take it from someone with 2 kids, whatever name you decide upon, keep it to yourself. You can keep some of the people happy some of the time etc etc & there will always be people out there saying 'oh yeah thats lovely' or 'oh no that's awful' and it does put you off. When we picked our 2nds name we didn't tell anyone till baby was born, no ones going to tell you they don't like the name once it's/they're attached to the little darling

Bun

Rachie77 - 2 babies in one year - wow! Love both your babies' names - we went old so unusual. Wanted Bub to know his name existed but not to actually run into any of them. And can't agree enough on the keeping the choices to themselves.
We did have a Neo in the baby section of the paper last year though...

jellyhead

i got a baby name book from the charity shop but it's full of wierd flower child names lol! we had jasmine on our list of names we liked then somebody said it's a chav name ?!!!

hubby, 8 year old son and myself all hate each others choices lol! so we drew up a list and take it in turns to cross off whichever name we find most offensive. hubby crosses out mine, i cross out hubby's and son crosses out both of ours, the baby is bound to end up with one of sons choices, all very common and popular names, i didn't want that because i hated sharing the name sharon with half of my class but i suppose it's better than having one of my biblical names or hubby's science fiction names lol!.

Becles

If you have more than one child, don't call them by names that begin with the same letter.

I did that with mine, and I often say the wrong name, especially when I'm mad with them and it ruins the effect

jellyhead

lol! some people deliberately choose the same letter though, there's a family of 4 kids (all at spuds primary school), all 4 of them have first and middle names starting with j, hopefully they'll all move out before they're old enough to get mail of their own lol!

mother-in-law asked if we'd chosen a name when we saw her at the weekend, when she had my hubby she was in a bed next to a woman with married name 'case' naming her child 'justin' lol! i know an alan key, that always makes people giggle.

some guidelines i read somewhere, maybe in emma's diary suggest not having a name that ends in the same letter/sound the surname begins with (e.g. horace sssssssssmith). although it might sound okay when you include the middle name nobody at school will be calling a child by their full name.

one of my thoughts on naming took into account that my baby will be born in summer and will start school very shortly after his 4th birthday, i think it'll be easier on him if his name only has 3 letters, lol! there's a woman at school with 2 dyspraxic sons and they're grateful to be called sam and tom :-)

didn't some celebrity call their child heaven leigh? i saw it on the bounty website too, was surprised at its popularity. i remember reading a book at my gran's house one holiday though (a virginia andrews one, i loved flowers in the attic but this one wasn't quite as good) where the main character was called heaven leigh, but that was probably 15 years ago. when i was in high school and some of the girls were having babies they all seemed to be named 'destiny' - i see that vicky off little britain mentions destiny quite a lot, i wonder if there are lots of 17 year olds with that name? still, it can't be as common as being named sharon in the early 70's :-)

Plasticman

Thanks to everybody for the feedback so far and especially to Becles for the offer to send us a book. My sister-in-law is bringing some books round tonight so we will save the cost of postage - many thanks though. This will be our second child so you would think that it would be easier, but if anything we have found it harder to decide! My wife has pre-eclampsya (hence the planned caesarean) which has made things more difficult this time and has probably distracted us from concentrating on names.

Some of the websites look excellent. I think that we will end up with a more traditional name but maybe we will just have a few names in reserve and make our mind up when he arrives. Whatever we choose I think you are right - we will keep it to ourselves until it's too late for any of our family to object!!!

jellyhead

whatever you choose will be lovely :-) hugs and stuff to your wife! my son was born early due to pre-eclampsia and i had no idea about boys names so i just let my mum choose a name, very lazy of me lol!

Plasticman

jellyhead wrote:

whatever you choose will be lovely :-) hugs and stuff to your wife! my son was born early due to pre-eclampsia and i had no idea about boys names so i just let my mum choose a name, very lazy of me lol!

Don't think I'll let my mum choose or he'll probably end up being called Bernard

Apologies to any "Bernard's" who are reading this

Plumpud_3

I think choosing a child's name is very difficult, and gets harder the more children you have. Naming girls is possibley easier than boys as there is a wider choice of non-naff names.

If you want something more individual for your child, I would suggest looking in the births section of your local paper to see what is currently popular locally, you can then avoid those names. If you continue to live in the same area, they will be your child's contemparies at nursery and school.

I was given the name Tracy, which I have always loathed. My parents called me that because they didn't know anyone else with that name! I didn't meet another Tracy until I was nearly eight, when we moved (with the exception of a little girl who was named after me). I was put in a class with 2 other Tracys. When I got to senior school there were loads of us - my best friend was also a Tracy. So my theory in the paragraph above doesn't always work.

If you choose a more traditional name, your child will probabley thank you if you stick to traditional spelling. Everyone always spelt my name with an 'e', I got fed up with spelling my name out. My old boss was a Martyn, it used to drive him mad spelling his name too.

If you do choose a classical name, check that the originator of the name was a nice person. We quite liked a very unusual biblical name, when we found out about her, she wasn't a very nice person at all, so we decided against it.

With regards to initials, I would very strongly recommend not chosing names with the same initials as someone else in the household. I used to deal with self employed people at the Inland Revenue. The amount of times we issued refund cheques that weren't received, that had actually been cashed by the other person. Typically father and son, or in one case, twin brothers.

If you don't want to draw up a shortlist of possible names, you should at least draw up a list of names you wouldn't want. There is nothing worse than one of you really liking a name and the other associating it with the class weirdo/school bully/strange relative. I have known a number of Ruths, but two of them were horrible people, so I would never choose that name.

The only other thing is to watch for unfortunate names, either combinations or what they are shortened to. The poor lad in my class called Jonathon, from whom everyone tried to borrow a rubber. Or the poor girl called Gaynor Profit. A woman I knew called Anita who married a Mr Pyle. Kids hate being teased and once the other kids know that they don't like it, they tease them all the more.

We are having our fourth sometime in the next 6 weeks. We have some idea of possible names which we've only discussed with each other, but we shall wait and see what the baby looks like. It is true if you tell people the names you are considering they nearly always have something negative to say about them.

I hope it all goes well for you.

jellyhead

true, plenty of people criticised my choice of name for young spud (tabitha). they all associated it with cats or a baby witch lol! mum chose the name 'ciaran' but i really like it, so does he. hubby wanted roxanne if our baby was a girl (it's not) but all i think about when i hear that name is prostitution :eek: my favourite name was ruby but hubby associates that with old women playing bingo.

by all means run possible names past a couple of trusted people but not everyone, if the first time people learn of your chosen name is when they're holding a sweet little baby they will associate the name with the baby rather than hearing it beforehand, hating it and rudely telling you so. i don't think anyone hates ciaran's name but plenty of people tell me i should have spelled it differently, one of the variations beginning with k.

i don't seem to have much choice about naming this new baby of ours but i'd prefer something that's a real name, in the most popular 200 maybe, but not something in the most popular 5 perhaps, i know what tracy means about her name but sharon was much worse lol! we went away to music school once with the church and out of 9 girls in a dorm 6 of us were named sharon and 5 were sharon louise! it was horrible.