Babble

Since joining the Legion o' Parents and meeting all sorts of other hip new mater/paterfamilii, I've learned of lots of great names with great stories behind them.  How did you pick your children's names?

Since we decided our twin Lads would have my surname, we wanted first names from my wife's family, which is where we got Miles and Porter.  A lot of folks just assume we're jazz fans (which is also true -- I burned a Miles Davis/Cole Porter mix CD called "The Birth of Da Cool Lovely Lads" in their honor).

We wanted fun middle names, and since I'm a Romaphile, and my wife was actually in Rome (without me, alas) when she realized she was pregnant, and they were twin boys, they became Porter Romulus and Miles Remus.  (Several of my wife's more precocious middle school students pointed out that Romulus killed Remus, but perhaps history won't repeat.)  I think whimsical first names are iffy -- how long is the joke funny to the bearer? -- but having fun with the middle name is cool, since use is optional.

Anyway, here's a fun related link on baby naming...

Picking out names was the hardest thing to do, in our house.  We didn't know the baby's gender until she arrived, so we had to have two options.  For a girl name, we settled on Jillian Scarlett.  My husband simply loves the name Jillian and my favorite book of all time is Gone With The Wind, so Scarlett seemed about right.  I was pushing really hard for Minerva June, after my paternal grandmother, but no one, anywhere, liked that idea.  Whores.  Anyway, we settled on that name 'round about month five of the pregnancy.  At the time, I was pretty sure it was a girl anyway so I wasn't sweating a boy name.

 Until two weeks before the baby came.  I had heard all the old wives' tales about how to tell if it's a girl or a boy and all of a sudden, my certainty that I was carrying a girl went right out the window and we found that we had NO ideas for boy names.

My husband suggested Thaddeus and Valery while I suggested Alexander and Augustus.  Two days before the actual birth, we settled on Liam Alexander, but we were presented with a Jillian Scarlett instead.  Whew!

Since we're Jewish, we also got to pick out Hebrew names for her, and those were surprisingly much easier than her actual name.  We named her Gavriella Channa, which means "strength and grace."  So when she's 15 and hating her name and thinking it's stupid because she's the only Jillian she knows, she has three other names to choose from.

When we found out we were having a girl, we knew right away we'd call her Nell, after my husband's grandmother, who was a really amazing person (lived over 90 years, through both World Wars in London the whole time, opened her tiny home to blitz survivors who'd lost their homes, wonderful sense of humor, etc, etc.). 

But we also knew that Nell was really a nickname, and we wanted to give her a more grown-up name to grow into, so we chose the obvious progenitor of Nell: Eleanor.  We also chose it because of associations with great Eleanors & Elinors of history & literature: Queen of England & France, Mrs. Roosevelt, Elinor Dashwood, et al. 

She's got two middle names, Ayelet (Hebrew for doe or gazelle) and my surname, followed by her dad's surname.  We chose Ayelet mostly because it's pretty, but also because it's related to the Hebrew name of the mutual friend who introduced us.  We're flouting tradition a little bit by choosing it, as it's supposed to be offensive to name a child after someone who's yet living, but I don't care, and neither did our friend, who was touched. 

 I could talk about baby names all day.  I read baby naming guides for fun, and am a devoted fan of The Baby Name Wizard -- both the Name Voyager & the blog. 

I'm 4.5 mos pregnant right now...my third pregnancy in a year. So, we've had plenty of opportunity to discuss names with the two failed pregnancies before this one.

We had originally decided on Sophia for a girl with my last pregnancy, but when I found out I was pregnant again and very, very nervous of miscarrying again, I got other ideas for the baby's name, should she be a girl...

 I did a lot of pagan-type rituals designed to help me feel better about strengthening this pregnancy, and during the time I was studying ritual and "communing with nature", I had several dreams involving the willow tree and the image of the willow showed up EVERYWHERE in my reading, on tv, online, etc. It was uncanny, really.

So, I sort of got the hint that maybe this babe should be named Willow...and we agreed on:

 Willow Annabella Whitley R***...Annabella for my husbands great-grandmother (and the only member of his family to ever really like me, LOL) and Whitley for my mom's last name.

 If we have a boy, he'll be:

 Wyatt Scott Anthony R***....Wyatt because we like it, Scott for my husband's best friend and Anthony after my husband.

We should know in about a month which name we'll be going with...



 

Good luck, Daisy!

 We're Jewish, so although we decided on the names before the baby was born, we told absolutely NO ONE because of all the wacky Jewish superstitions my husband grew up with.  That's another reason why we didn't find out the baby's gender and we had NO baby items in the house until a week before the baby arrived. 

RachelZ -- Those are all very cool names.  We considered Augustus and Octavian as Romaphile middle names, too, but all produced weird initials: MOO, POO, MAO.  (My wife lived in China for a year so I found the last rather amusing, but still, killed millions of people.  Probably not so cool.)
 

The initials thing was something we talked about, too.  Originally, I wanted to name the baby Paige Ezra (or Page Ezra if it ended up being male) because our last name starts with Z and the baby's intitals would have been PEZ.  As a Pez collector, the idea of that just tickled me.  We did discuss naming the kid Liam Ezra, but the initials would have been LEZ, and... no.

What struck me during the whole process is what an awesome responsibility it is to choose another human being's name.  I've named countless cats and dogs and stuffed animals and my car, but picking a name for another human is just an amazing thing.

We thought long and hard about the right name for our unborn son. We wanted a name that honored my husband's grandfather and my father (both deceased.) We also wanted a name that wasn't so popular that there would be three or four kids in his class with the same name but we're both a bit traditionalist, so we picked a name from the Old Testament. We thought we were being extremely clever and unique, but have met quite a few Calebs in the neighborhood! Oh well. I guess you can't have it all.

 

I think Miles and Porter are great names :) 

So I'm sure it was just the hormones, but I had this epiphany of a dream while I was pregnant with my first about 5 years ago. I was struggling with the whole name thing. I grew up with 7 other Jennifers in my grade school classes. There's even a baby name book called Beyond Jennifer and Jason - guess what my little brother's name is? Yep, Jason. So needless to say, I wasn't going to give my little girl the same curse. But on the flip side, I didn't want a name that would be a tremendous challenge. So I needed that balance of different and classic. My husband started to gravitate toward McKenna - a beautiful name. I was still a little hesitant - it just didn't feel exactly right. One night, in my dream, a man (no idea who this guy was) told me that since daughters in many cases will resemble their mothers (in personality, stature, interests, etc.) I should choose a name that fits me as an adult. That seemed completely logical to me. I'm not a McKenna. But I could be a Meredith. And Meredith is just the perfect mix of classic and different (or at least it was until Grey's Anatomy reintroduced it). Of course with our second, we threw all that out the window and chose a name that has appeared on the top 10 baby names list for a few years now - Olivia. Just wait...10 years from now it will be Beyond Meredith and Olivia...

We didn't have much trouble with our kids.  Alexander Birch comes from a character in 'The Brothers Karamazov' named Alexei (but we went with Alexander) and Birch is my husband's middle name (which I love).  We met in a russian lit class so the Dostoevsky tie-in seemed appropriate.  The soon-to-be Ariadne Elise is straight from the greek myth.  Ariadne helped Theseus out of the labyrinth and ended up marrying Dionysus.  I'm assuming that this would explain the annoying red wine cravings I'm having.  Elise just sounds nice with Ariadne, no deep meanings there.  

We also have twins, a boy and a girl. Our son is named Henry, a solid unfussy man's name which is uncommon these days. It's my wife's paternal grandfather's name and her brother's middle name. We both liked the name regardless of family tradition. My father, James, died a year before the twins were born but my sister has a son who is his namesake. My son bears his grandfather's middle name McGuigan, my grandmother's maiden name. I'm Scottish and sons are generally named after  their grandfathers.  It may not be this way anymore, but the tradition became so reductive that Scottish men  were left with only a handful of names, like John, James, Thomas or William. The custom in Glasgow is to call any stranger Jimmy, as in "I'll have another pint Jimmy." Odds are you may be right.

Henry's twin is named Elizabeth, for my mother, but we call her Libby. A nod to Libby Dole as my wife is a Kansan. Our newborn daughter is named Margaret, for my maternal grandmother, and we call her Maggie. Obviously we're traditionalists and reject many of the current trends in baby names. Just asking but when did gentiles begin using traditional Old Testament names usually reserved for Jews like Noah, Joshua and Jacob?

Stephen Connolly:

Just asking but when did gentiles begin using traditional Old Testament names usually reserved for Jews like Noah, Joshua and Jacob?

I'm not sure that these names were ever "reserved" for Jews. I've known plenty of Adams, Jacobs, Sams (Samuel) etc. who are gentiles. I chose an Old Testament name for my son because I liked the name and I really believed that it wasn't that common of a name. Imagine my surprise when we saw that in 2006 that the name we thought would never reach the top 50 names, was in the top 10 for 2006. Yikes. So much for being original without making up a name!

Am enjoying this this topic, and like so many of the names here. Iphegenia is great! When we knew we were having a boy last year, I really wanted to find a name starting with "H" to honor my dad who died in 2000, whose name was Herbert. But I really didn't like any H name at all, with the possible exception of Henry, which is my close friend's son's name so that seemed weird to use (and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Stephen, but in my urban aging hipster demographic, Henry is quite a common name these days). It's sad, we pondered everything from Hugh to Hubert to Hiram to... well, anyhow, no H names presented themselves.

Anyhow, we wanted a name that was not in the top 100, so that it would be unusual, and at the same time a name that was traditional... The goal was the kind of name people would hear and immediately know how to spell or pronounce without it reading as "weird" and yet be unusual enough so they'd maybe think "Oh, I forgot that great name existed til now, but what a great name!" (Why yes I am a bit overthinky, why do you ask?)

Our 2nd choice, unused, was Jonas, but we settled on Theo (well, Theodore, but I'l be heartbroken if he grows up and decides to go by Ted or Teddy). We waited to meet him and he seemed more a Theo than a Jonas. I'm pretty happy with it... have met one or two other Theos but I don't think it's ever going to be ne of those names like Ruby that 100 people I know all thought was original and somehow all thought of it at the same time. But who knows? Do any of you all know any kids named Theo?