So my daughter just turned one and I’ve been long considering changing her everyday name from her legal first name to her legal middle name. I want to take the plunge and start calling her by her middle name but am curious which is a better strategy… announce that we’ve been mulling the idea over and want to go by the middle name? Or just start using it and hope it catches on? Everyone seems to love her first name, and we do too, but we’ve struggled with a nickname for her and te growing popularity of her first name makes us prefer her rarer middle. We don’t plan to legally change the order or anything, just what we call her on a daily basis.
For now I’d leave her legal name as-is and just call her by her middle name. If once she’s old enough to express an opinion she’d rather have the name switched around you can legally change it then. At over a year old it’s probably too late to just “amend” the birth record without going through the legal process, so as long as the name change is done before she’d start having any records relevant in the adult world (e.g. high school, driver’s license, first job, etc.) there likely won’t be much if any practical difference later in life between a name change done anytime between now and when she’s in middle school or so. If you’d like to save her the hassle of saying she goes by a different name in school, it can likewise be changed at that point.