What are some odd ways parents choose baby names? I know my uncle’s name was chosen by my grandparents literally picking it out of a hat. What about when you can’t decide between two names? [name]Flip[/name] a coin? Consult a magic eight ball? Skim through a magazine and choose whatever word your finger lands on? We’d love to hear your stories!
We write them down. Hundreds of times. Somehow that helps solidify a choice for us. I’ve started going to http://www.finestationery.com because there you can try out a name on anything they’ve got offered, which is awesomely cool. But yeah, that’s how we narrow them down, determine what goes together and which ranks what on our lists. The more fun we have writing it out is a plus too, since you do end up writing their name out fairly frequently over the first 20 years.
My niece was named after her mother was flipping through the magazine and saw a model named [name]Paige[/name]. Yet, my nephew got his first and middle names from both his grandfathers. it’s kind of funny when you compare one method to another. I wonder how many others are out there.
My British sister in law [name]Joanne[/name] was named for a character in an American detective story. It’s pronounced [name]Jo[/name] [name]Anne[/name]. My dad tricked my mom with my brother’s name. She liked the name [name]Thomas[/name] so they agreed on that for the first name. His middle name is our dad’s middle name–[name]Aubry[/name] (misspelled, our dad’s is [name]Aubrey[/name]). Our mom thought there were no Thomases in our family (for the first name she didn’t want him named after anybody). Turns out my dad’s favorite cousin was [name]Thomas[/name] [name]Aubrey[/name]. My mom didn’t know that because he was always called “T. A.”.
My sister was going to be either [name]Kimberly[/name] or [name]Kayla[/name], and my parents asked me which I liked best (I was 2 at the time). I guess I said [name]Kimberly[/name], although I don’t recall this, and so, her name is [name]Kimberly[/name]!
I was joking with my husband one evening about how weird it would be if named all of our kids by opening the Bible to a random page and using the first name we found. I grabbed a Bible to demonstrate, expecting to get a bizarre, hard-to-pronounce name, but ended up with the name [name_m]Silas[/name_m] instead. I had never even considered the name before, but it has become one of my favorites. He also likes the name, so who knows, we may end up using it after all.