Hey Berries,
I’m wondering if you are sharing your name ideas or your final choices with family and friends. We have names picked out and I’m a little hesitant to get a flood of opinions from people actually in my world and not just anonymously on here! What are you all revealing??
[name]John[/name] [name]Stephen[/name]
Or
[name]Bronwen[/name] [name]Frances[/name]
[name]Stephen[/name] [name]Bronwen[/name]
or
[name]John[/name] [name]Frances[/name]?
I am not pregnant but I will not be sharing the names when that day comes. I don’t even tell friends/family my current favorites.
[name]Hi[/name] [name]Ferdinand[/name]! We did not reveal the names we had chosen with our first, and are doing the same this time around. I find myself not wanting the opinions of friends and family to change how I feel about a name, so in order yo save myself from hearing something I may not want to hear, our chosen names are ours alone until the baby arrives. Everyone will have an opinion, and it’s much harder to be citical of a name when holding a tiny new bqby!!
I haven’t decided yet (won’t be having kids for at least a year or so). I haven’t really shared my favorites right now, but every time someone I know has a baby, I hope they don’t use a name I like, haha. So far so good but a bunch of people I know are pregnant now! At least I have a decent list of names going so if a friend uses a name I like, I still have others I love. Plus most of the people I know that are pregnant aren’t good friends, so I’m not AS worried about using names if these people use them.
I’m also not 100% sure if we will decide the name before the baby is born. I like the idea of narrowing it down to a few choices, then seeing which name the baby “feels” like. So that might be what we do. But like I said, we have plenty of time to decide!
I can’t think of one good reason to share your names ahead of time. No one has a problem sharing negative opinions before a baby is born, but most people will not say anything bad about a name once the baby arrives. Also, people might “steal” your names before your baby comes. I don’t discuss names with anyone but my husband.
I share on here and I share with my best friend and with my mother. I know my mother will be totally honest without hurting my feelings. She’ll tell me she doesn’t like something without being so negative it hurts.
If you do choose to share, don’t share with everyone. [name]Share[/name] with the people you know will give you constructive criticism and positive comments and not just “omg I hate that so much!” It’s good to get negative comments [name]IRL[/name] you just don’t need them to be so negative that you change your mind. Try not to let what other people say effect you too much.
I agree with dantea. It is difficult to not share, for me, but at the same time I really dislike it when (on the occasions I have shared) I mention a name I love ([name]Ronan[/name], for example) and no one but me likes it. “Oh, that’s a horrible name!” “People will always misspell/misprounounce it.” REALLY, people? And unfortunately, I’m a people pleaser. So that is definitely something for me to take into consideration. I only share with my husband, my mom and my [name]MIL[/name]. All give good opinions and constructive criticism without being mean. Everyone else can find out afterward.
Not pregnant yet, but will be TTC soon! We will absolutely NOT be telling anyone our names, nor do we tell anyone what we like now. The only person I’ve shared my names with is my 10 year old niece, who I’m very close with, and she knows how special it is that she’s the only one I share with =) I learned the hard way. We told people we loved [name]Sloane[/name] for a little girl and got such awful reactions that it completely turned us off from using the name. I was so bummed because I just LOVED the name!
We are definitely not sharing! I’ve already tried sharing a few with the future grandmothers which has ended up scratching a few off our list, at least temporarily anyway. I think people just naturally assume by asking their opinions we are asking for possible negative reactions!!
I am not remotely interested in sharing. It is hard enough to battle out a name I like, then agree on a name DH likes too.
No way am I adding anyone else into that equation.
In the end (miracles willing) our baby will be named with great care and love, and if other people don’t like our choice then they can go have their own child and name that. LOL
emiliaj
Not pregnant yet (but trying! OMG it’s frustrating…) but I’e narrowed my list to two boys names and two girls names.
I’ve shared them with some friends, but not others. It helps that we already have one daughter, and I know from last time what sort of things people said about our name choices. So this time around I know who to tell what!
BTW, choice are…
[name]Annabel[/name] [name]Claire[/name]
[name]Bethany[/name] [name]Ann[/name]
[name]Liam[/name] [name]Richard[/name]
[name]Hamish[/name] [name]Michael[/name]
When we have children, we’ll likely be keeping our mouths shut. I know I have a unique taste that my mother doesn’t share so I don’t want to open that nutshell, and if I don’t tell my mother, it’s really not fair if we tell anyone else. So nobody is going to know! Except us of course, and as someone else said, it’s hard enough to finalize a choice that we both like! Much less adding in everyone else! Once we find something, we are keeping it under wraps!
That being said, our top names right now are…
[name]Odessa[/name] [name]Jane[/name]
[name]Corisande[/name] (Middlename pending!)
[name]Althea[/name] [name]Caro[/name]
([name]Jane[/name] and [name]Caro[/name] being the first 4 letters of each grandmothers name, both names on their own so it’s perfect!)
It only took me sharing one name with my mom back in 2006 when I was pregnant with my first (the name was [name]Adele[/name], the reaction was “Like the farmer in the dell” - eyeroll, eyeroll) to decide I would never again share names with people in my circle before the baby was born. Names are like art - what is beautiful to me is not necessarily beautiful to you, and we don’t have to agree. Naming a child is hard enough between two people, without adding the unhelpful opinions of a whole league of folks whose thoughts, frankly, don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
I named my second child (daughter) [name]Virginia[/name]. I knew my mother would hate it, and I decided I didn’t care. It made for a much less stressful process to just decide we were going to choose names for us, not to please others.
I’m not pregnant, but I am a name nerd. Sometimes I share names with my family or close friends and the reactions vary. My Dad is probably one of the only people I like sharing names with because he likes a lot of the same names I do and even if he doesn’t like it he finds the positives about it. My mom is a little less positive (I told her about the name [name]Genesis[/name] and she flipped out). I also tell my best friend but she doesn’t have the same style and openly told me that she didn’t like most of the names I like. (I told her my favorite name in the whole world was [name]Cyril[/name] and she told me she’d always call my kid Cereal. Oh well, I still love that name and am going to use it anyways.) If and when I ever do get pregnant I’m not telling anyone until after the kid is born.
I can’t tell. I wish I didn’t care but I do. My husband told someone tonight and they had a negative reaction… and the name slowly fell in my mind. Never knew how much of a people pleasure I was until this baby naming adventure came along!! 
We don’t anymore. We did with our first, and not that many people disparaged our choice, but we weren’t 100% certain about it and we got lots of monogrammed gifts. After that were like, “OK, I guess that is what he’s going to be called!”
I have learned my lesson with my 4 previous children that people can ruin names for me. So when we get pregnant next time i will definitely not be sharing our name(s). Hopefully People will keep their opinions to themselves when the name is attatched to a child.
We shared our individual long lists (we kept separate lists in the beginning) with our friends and family pretty early in the process and asked for their thoughts, but told them up front that we didn’t plan take their opinions too seriously. As it got closer to the due date, we did reveal our short list to our families, but told them that they wouldn’t get more than that until after the boys were born. It wasn’t hard to stick to that because we didn’t decide on their names until they were 2 days old anyway.
I really liked getting feedback from people around me, but I think doing it early in the process with huge lists was beneficial. That way we weren’t too attached to any single name yet and there were LOTS of names for people to comment on so they got the picture that it was very preliminary and they were all just names we liked but maybe weren’t going to use (there were definitely some “dreaming” names on there). Presenting it in that light got us productive feedback, and no one was too negative. But we could also have just been really lucky.
I discuss my names with others, so I guess I’m in the minority. I enjoy getting feedback from people, even when it’s not positive. It’s easy enough for me to brush off negative comments if I can write them off as a matter of different tastes, and sometimes people have actually pointed out unfortunate associations or potential pitfalls I failed to consider. Plus, I just enjoy talking about names with people.