Baby names

I know I enjoy telling the story of how my girls came to have their names, so I would love to hear if you have chosen names for your kiddos and how you arrived at them. Are you still searching for the perfect names? What's your process?

My husband and I started talking about baby names very early in our marriage. I've had Alexis picked out as my first daughter's name since childhood and we went back and forth for years choosing other names to add to the list. Finally we had two names picked out for each gender: Alexis Grace, Samantha Clare, Nathan Ray, and Colin Kelly.

Lo and behold, three years later we had ID girls! I have to say, I wonder if we got pregnant again if I would get to use both of my boy names as well...

Your turn!

 

I love hearing how names were chosen. One thing that was important to us was to use family names.

When I was pregnant with my oldest DD, we had a few names picked out for her, girl names that is. One was Emilie, Emilie is a family name that goes back 5 generations in my family. At that time I wasn't sure I wanted "another Emilie" (my sister is Emilie, it's my Mom's middle name, I have an Aunt Emilie, etc). But I wanted to use it because my Great-Grandmother (her name was Emilie) died 8 months before I got pregnant, she was 99 1/2 years old and was so important to me. So we decided Emilie would be the middle name. We then liked Caroline so we named her Caroline Emilie. We later found out that my Great-Grandmother's Great-grandmother's name was Caroline. So we were pleased it still was a family name. The boy name we had for her was Trevor.

5 years later I got pregnant with the twins and found out we were having a boy and a girl. None of my siblings had used the name Emilie yet (there had been 3 cousins born in between) so we knew we would use Emilie for the girl, so Emilie Michelle (Michelle is my middle name) and our boy name was still Trevor, so Trevor File (File is DH's middle name, his Dad's middle name and it was his Grandmother's maiden name).

So both first and middle names for all 3 of my children are family names. :wub:

 

The names Sophia and Reese are family names on my husbands side and I LOVED both of them!!
When we found out we were having boy/girl twins we decided I would name the girl and dh would name the boy and Reese and Ryder are what we came up with.
As for the middle names, we picked Lynn for Sophia's middle name, it sounded nice and it happened to be Seth's sisters middle name. So when we had twins we decided to use our other two sisters middle names Reese Nicole (my sisters middle) and Ryder Lee (Seth's other sis's middle).

 

I have my own grown up twin one.

Our parents didn't know we were twins. They had Constance Mae and Jeffery Grant picked out. Constance is a family name and Connie May was my grandmother's doll's name. They just like Jeffery and Grant is a family name. At some point mom heard Kendra and the girl name became Constance Kendra.

They found out it we were twins 4 hours before we were born (at 41.2 weeks) and it turned out to be two little girls. First out got Constance and they brought back Mae. Second out got Kendra and then it was decided that since Constance would be called Connie anyway and Connie and Kendra both have 6 letters that she legally would be Connie Mae. Dad came up with the 3 letter Ann middle name for Kendra Ann.

I once asked what the second name would have been if we'd been boys and mom sad probably Keif William.

 

For my oldest son I really wanted Parker, it was my Great-Grandmother's maiden name, she was still with us when my oldest was born, and out of 8 Grandchildren, 14 Great-Grandchildren and at the time 1 Great Great Grandchild, no one was named after her or her late husband. My now ex would not go for Parker. So we decided on Donevan as his first name and to use family names as his middle names. He got David as 1 middle name which is after my father, Grandfather on my father's side and my brother. His second middle name is Arthur after my ex's father and my Great-Grandmother's late husband, so Donevan David Arthur he became. For the twins, I was hoping that at least one would be a girl, so we had picked out Kayleigh as a first name and Anne which is after my Great-Grandmother and my mom's sister. Turns out I was destined for 2 more boys. I tried for Parker again, but was shot down. Baby A got Nathaniel, Daniel was a family name that was used in the last 5 Generations on my ex's side, his brother is a Daniel, and he has a nephew named Daniel, so I spun Nathaniel as a family name to him to get him to agree to it. Nathaniel got his father's name as a middle name, so he was named Nathaniel Scott. Baby B, who ironically has his name before his brother got William, after my maternal Grandfather, however the name is a family name on both sides. His middle name is Alexander which had been used in my family on my mothers side every generation since the early 1800's however in the last 3 generations it was not, so I decided to use it, so William Alexander he got.

 

For all three of our girls, we started with middle names first. Leigh is a middle name for 9 girls in my maternal family tree so I pretty much made it a condition of marriage that our first girl had to have the middle name Leigh. After a bit of debate, my husband and I settled on Vivianne as the first name. (My paternal grandmother happens to have Anne as her middle name so she got a little bit of each side of my family.)

For the twins, we had batted around a few first names but settled on Marie and Jane as middle names. From there we found two first names that we were both willing to use (Livia and Sophia). So we've got Livia Marie and Sophia Jane. The Marie and Jane came from my husband's grandmother who was named Mary Jane.

I really like using the family connection for one name and doing something unique for the other. I feel like that works well for us.

 

We chose middle names first also. My husband's name is Adrian, and his dad and grandpa have the same name, so I wanted to keep the tradition, but we decided to use it as a middle name. So then I was thinking about middle names for her, and I was deciding between my grandmothers' names, I chose Maria, since that's my middle name also, I was named after my grandma.

About the first names, we had an agreement that each of us has veto rights. Each girl name I was bringing up, Adrian was using his veto right for reasons such as: "I knew a girl named ***, she wasn't nice, or she was ugly or blah blah", anyway, weird reasons like that to veto the names. So one day while I was driving I thought about Vanessa, when I got home I told him "How about Vanessa as a girl name?" He said "Vanessa from highschool was hot", so that's why he agreed with the name . I liked the name since I was the one that came up with it, so I was happy .

Then with Max, we had a lot of issues, we were calling him NoName, we kept going back and forth with names, I thought naming him was harder. We decided to name him Max, because it was the only name that we both liked and it goes better with our last name. For the record, I didn't go to highschool with any guy named Max .

 

LOL Monica, I also have an association thing with names, so I totally get where your DH is coming from.

Judaism has a very strong tradition of naming after relatives who have passed or people who you admired during their lifetime. Neither DH nor I have any family names right now (my kids have 3 sets of great grandparents!!) so we have stuck to naming after people we admire.

My daughter Rivka is named after Rivka Holtzberg, the Rabbi's wife who was killed during the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. It was a very personally significant name for us because we went on our first date the night the attacks started, so we kind of felt like we owed the couple some homage.

My twins are named after the mother (Chana) and wife (Chaya Mushka) of a very special rabbi, and they were both also very special people in their own right.

We also have a bunch of boys names picked out for whenever we manage to have a boy

 

My dd is Jessa Louise - Jessa b/c I loved it when i saw it soon after we started ttc in a baby book and b/c I'd never heard it before. And Louis is my mom's middle name (my middle name is May after her mother and grandmother, so I kept the middle name after grandmother thing going!)

My ds is Davis Matthew - family names too! Davis is a last name on both sides of my husband's family - though evidently not related! and Matthew is my dh's middle name.

I really liked picking family names, made it special. We've got a first name sort of picked out for our new baby, and it's most likely a family one too. though the middle name has yet to be thought of!

 

With my first my ex-H and I loved Phoebe* (not easy for the Dutch hahahah) and I wanted to name her middle name after my very special Grandma Dorothe...didn't like that name butt my best memories are of the summers in her cottage in Madison CT.
So her name is Phoebe Madison*. Not knowing that Madison was a very popular name in the States

Then came Berber Kiara. Berber is a very old Dutch (Frysian)name...butt gave memories of our vacation in Marokko. Kiara we just liked.

Ten the twins
Cosmo Anakin...both loved Cosmo and Anakin (we made the local newspaper hahahah)Butt I was afraid Anakin would be shortend to Ana..Anne (is also a very old Dutch boys name)

Keagan Brandon.
I wanted an Irish name because my birth mother has Irish in her. And Brandon is the town I was born. Brandon Manitoba
And I sooooo hoped he would have green eyes like me..:-(