[name_f]My[/name_f] husband and I are finally having a baby after 3 years of infertility! We are both so excited. We were finally successful after an IUI!
I’ve always loved names and have had name lists ever since I was a kid. I thought it would be easy to name a baby with my long list! However, looking at the names now I’m having trouble picturing a real child with these names instead of them just being names on a list that I love.
Did you struggle with naming a child from your list of names you’d carefully chosen for years? How did you differentiate between names you love and names that would actually work well for your child? Did anything help you finally find good baby names that felt right?
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I’ve loved names for as long as I can remember and started keeping a list of names as early as 5 or 6 years old! Of course my list has changed a lot over the years but when my bf and I started trying for a baby, names was one of the first topics we started talking about right away. Turns out we had a lot more time to talk about it than we thought we would, since it took over a year to become pregnant. I thought that since I had a running list of names already it would be easy to pick a name and we’d have one right away, but now it’s less than 2 months til the due date and we’re still not 100% certain which name we want to use. One thing that we did recently was narrowed the names down to our top 3 and then made sure we nailed down which middle name we would use with each also. Then we wrote the names down on a piece of paper, each of us writing each name in both regular handwriting and cursive. Then we hung the paper in a spot where I knew we would see it often (right in front of our toilet lol). Seeing and saying them often really helped.
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Congratulations! Im not sure if i ever want kids, but i separate my list into usable & GO by thinking if I would want the name. 
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First of all, congratulations!
I’m currently 3 weeks away from having our third girl. Honestly, none of my kids’ names I would have imagined 10+ years ago I would have used on my children. It’s one thing to like certain names, and another to have to work with another person on naming a child that is part of both of you.
In my case, I’m a White American (various European heritages) with a family who only speaks [name_f]English[/name_f]. [name_f]My[/name_f] husband was born in Mexico, with indigenous heritage. His family speaks both Spanish and a language called Nahuatl. Our oldest’s middle name is [name_f]Xochitl[/name_f], the word “flower” in Nahuatl. I never would have come up with that on my own! For our kids’ names (besides Xochitl) they had to be able to be pronounced in [name_f]English[/name_f] and Spanish because my family knows very little Spanish and his family that are still in Mexico know no [name_f]English[/name_f].
When I was pregnant with my oldest, I wrote down a whole list of girl names and boy names, and then my husband said which ones he liked and didn’t like. For each pregnancy, we went over some of the same names and I threw in some new names. He didn’t give many suggestions himself.
We’ve had a name for a boy picked out for over 7 years, which was the name of his grandfather. Again, I would not have come up with the name on my own, as I had never heard it used before. (The name is Zenón, which I had only seen on a Disney movie as a female character pronounced differently).
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Congratulations!
Although I’m not a parent yet, I am looking at real possibilities for my future kids. I may or may not be having a family on my own in the somewhat near future, so any and all names are being looked at as first names for my kids… just who I’m honoring and how with the middle names is up in the air (only slightly). If I have a family with someone, then my possible names may change, but who I want to honor won’t.
As I’m looking at names for future kids I may be having on my own, I have found that upon finding a name that catches my attention, I let it sit for a bit and see if I can’t let it go or if it is a passing thought. I have only found a few that have grasped me and held onto me over the years. Those are the names I am choosing for my potential children.
For example, even though I’ve had one girl’s name at the top of my list for years, another one moved slightly ahead due to the significance of it in my life. The biggest indicator for me that it moved up my list was when I heard a news report and, though the story was amazing, I couldn’t stop seeing myself introduce my daughter by that name alongside her siblings.
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If you could find a movie or tv show with the names you love you would get to here the names used in a everyday way rather than just names on a list.
[name_f]Hope[/name_f] this helps.
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I would maybe start a new list for the baby and just use your other names for inspiration of your style. A real name that other people will use on a real person is a lot different than a private list lol.
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I don’t have kids, but most of my combos I consider usable! I currently have 2 favorite sibsets, one for NB and one for real life. The difference is for nb I choose pretty names with middles that flow well and coordinate. For future sibsets, I like and use both the firsts and middles as firsts and they all have meaning. (Jeremiah Driftwood vs [name_f]Natasha[/name_f] Gwendolyn). I also think about how the combos sound with surnames. They aren’t always as picturesque and as flowy, but they are more special
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Congratulations!
I don’t have any advice to offer because I’m in the same situation! Collecting names as a hobby versus finding a name for a little human definitely has been surprisingly different. I wouldn’t consider almost any of the names or combos on my pre-pregnancy list as guilty pleasures, but somehow they don’t feel quite right anymore. I still love my carefully curated list (and will probably always collect names for fun) but our actual baby’s name probably isn’t on that list.
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Congratulations!
I went thru my very large list and thought about each name and whether or not it sounded natural for me to use in real life. Baby Name Test Drive : BabyNameGenie.com can help with that!
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