Today my famous Uncle Paul wrote a very funny diatribe post on what I should name my wee little baby. You know, after I find out it’s gender. (I have an ultrasound today to determine how far along I am and all that jazz, and I’m gonna ask ’em to look real close and see if perhaps my child has developed it’s genitalia early. Just in case.)
What Uncle Paul may not have realized as he was writing said post was that once again, I have got this wrapped up. Both my babies were named MONTHS before they were born. Bobby and I had that all wrapped up and nailed down. We called the babies by their names as soon as we found out whether that kid had a pee-pee or a vajayjay. As a matter of fact, when we had our 20 week ultrasound with Sophie, and found out she was a girl, we didn’t quite have her name finalized yet, and I told Bobby we could not leave the doctor’s office until we had decided what our daughter’s name would be (we were pretty sure, so fortunately it didn’t take long.)
So, that’s how we roll. We already have a couple ideas that we (well, I) really like for this baby, but it’s not decided yet. However you can bet your sweet bippy it will be engraved in stone by July.
Then, there are some people (read: EMILY) who not only don’t find out the baby’s gender, they also have no name picked out before the blessed child arrives. Even though they have had NINE MONTHS to think about it. I will say in Emily’s case, that with both her babies, she at least took a SPREADSHEET of possible names with her to the hospital. While this is totally nerdy, at least she had it narrowed down to more than the entire contents of the Book of 10,000 Baby Names.
Now, continuing with her sister’s maddening tradition, my beloved cousin Anna is also carrying a nameless child. HOWEVER! She does know that it’s a GIRL, which is very exciting for me, because it means that I also know it’s a girl, and I am not DOOMED to wonder until she gives birth. But although she and her hubby have known the baby’s gender for um, EVER, they still haven’t picked a name. As you may have guessed, this is driving me bonkers. So I thought I’d take a page from Uncle Paul’s book and suggest a few of our family gems from Emily, Anna’s and my shared family history. At least you can add these to the spreadsheet, Annie.
America – our great-great grandmother’s name. Patriotic! And since the baby’s gonna be born in July…I think it’s a lock. Or, you could name your daughter what America named her daughters -Florida and Alabama. (Florida was our great-grandmother.) That way your kid’s name can represent family history, Disney World, and the deep South all at once!
If you don’t like those, you could always name her after Grandma’s Aunt Shin. Everybody loves a good baby-named-after-a-body-part. Elbow, Clavicle, Uvula, I think you’ve got some good options there.
And of course, there’s always Jenny. I mean after the late 70’s, I am pretty sure no one is ever gonna name their kid that again EVER, so at least she’d be unique for her generation!
But if you don’t like any of my suggestions, feel free to check out Uncle Paul’s post and steal some name ideas from the other side of the family!
How about you my dear readers? Did you name ’em months in advance or not ’til you saw their perfect little faces?
I’m callin’ him Lefonius regardless!
UP
My Wife and I are planners, so we found out gender of our upcoming child and had a name ready to go. However, I will admit that the name we first thought we’d use if we were having a girl was changed once we had to commit to a girl’s name. Now, we have her name hung on her wall so there is no going back.
My husband named our son, Johnathan. I picked the middle name, Reilly. With Paige, I had over 130 names, which I weeded down to 60 when I went to the hospital. She was still nameless after she was born…and for a day or two after. It felt weird calling her “baby”, so I caved and we decided on Paige.
I really wanted to name her Campbell Paige or Gemma Elisabeth or Ruby Paige or….I won’t keep going.
Naming is so much fun!
Hehe, that depends- we did a little of both. Unique names were the only priority for us because like “Jenny” there were a million and one “Michelle”s running around. . We were pretty sure we were having a girl the first time around and B found the perfect French name “Aceline” which we coupled with my middle name “Bernadette” (French again of course). We decided to take a boy’s name along just in case the ultrasound tech was wrong and picked “Connor Banning”. Our second child was named before conception because I had a dream that I was nursing a beautiful little girl named “Brenna”. I liked the name so much that I talked B into using it and once again we took along the name “Connor Banning” with us “just in case”. Brenna however did not receive her middle name “Marie” until she was 2 days old- we just couldn’t decide. By the third, we had so many ultrasounds that we had no doubt in our minds it was a boy! Finally time to use our boy name, right? NO! My hubby did not like it anymore because people started pointing out that our children would be named in alphabetical order and “Connor” had become more common. So while I should have been able to relax and just call him what we had decided on almost 4 years prior, we were scrambling through the baby book. It wasn’t until I was 7 months pregnant and everyone had given Christmas presents to us addressed to “Connor” that B finally gave in! So now we have our A,B,C kids, two of whom do NOT like their unique names because no one can pronounce/ spell them, and one who just does not care that there is always someone else around with the same name.
My 1st son is named after his father so he was named as soon as we walked out of the ultrasound room… My 2nd son wasn’t named until he was born, BUT I had no idea what I was having… If he had been a girl his name would have been easy because I only had one… but we had 3 boys names to choose from when he came! We named him about 30 minutes after he was born.
Congrats on y our pregnancy! My friend finds out this week is she’s having a boy or a girl, exciting! (it ALMOST makes me want one more…. almost…)
Jenny I am just like you. I can’t handle not know what is under the Christmas tree much less not knowing what I am having. So with me extensive experience with this. HAHA (I feel like having 4 kids gives me this right 2 of which were born in less than a year apart.) I agree with you. I want a name right away. I want the nursery done shortly after so I am prepared for everything.
We had our names picked by usually the 6th-7th month despite not knowing the gender with either of our girls. Growing up with a last name that people couldn’t easily pronounce and that our school used as a spelling word (do you remember that Jenny?), we decided that we wanted first names as least that could easily be pronounced by just looking at them (which we kind of missed with Josie….people can’t decide if it is pronounced Jo-C or Jo-Z, but in the end it doesn’t matter too much. We intended it to be pronounced Jo-Z). Another requirement was that there wasn’t an inherent nickname. Both DH and I don’t use our “legal” names (Julia, Benjamin) in daily life, so we wanted to name the child what we wanted to call them. Anyway- in the end, we decided to go with my family’s tradition of naming the girls with the name letter as the mom’s first name and boys after the 1st letter of the dad’s name. That narrowed our choice quite a bit. We tended to obsess about the middle name the most (which is funny because how often do you use that name except at graduations and weddings?) as I wanted them to be family names, and I also was obsessed with making sure the name didn’t have the sounds in our last name. So, we ended up with Jenna Ruth and Josie Lorraine. Our boy name was Brant for both pregnancies (middle name was Fredrick for the 1st and Ryan for the 2nd) after one of my husband’s favorite historical characters (Joseph Brant…whose native american name was Thayendanegea…I thought Brant was a better compromise- lol). Good luck with naming- it is so fun!!
We weren’t able to find out our baby’s gender (although we tried, because my husband wanted to know. I was cool with not finding out.), so we had a boy name and a girl name picked out. However, we didn’t tell anyone what the names were beforehand. That did not sit well with my control-freak mother. I kind of liked it that way. 🙂
I’m like you. I HAVE TO KNOW what I’m having. With my daughter, we had her name picked out before I even got pregnant. This time around, though, we know we’re having a boy and CANNOT pick a name to save our lives! I just don’t like boy names (at least none that sound good with our last name or that my sister/friends have not already used!) It’s frustrating not being able to call my baby by his name!
I also thought I’d tell you that I had an ultrasound with this one at 12 weeks. The ultrasound tech said that there is a wives tale type thing to help you determine the gender. Apparently, at 12 weeks, they all still have a little “thing”. The myth says that if it’s sticking straight up, it’s a boy and if it’s sticking straight out it’s a girl. Well, at 12 weeks, our little guy’s was straight up, and it’s definitely a boy, now that we’ve had our 20 week ultrasound. Maybe you can at least get a preliminary prediction! Good luck!
Can I just say, I’ve been mentioned TWICE on your blog in the past week and I’m feeling pretty famous.
“I want to have kids while I can still be a young, hot mom. We already have the names picked out. If it’s a girl: Bookcase or sandstorm or hat.. but hat is more of a boy’s name.” Cerie from 30 Rock
I’ve been obsessed with what I will name my children ever since I was in middle school and thought I was going to have a BOY named Angel (what??) However, I never ever expected to have a husband so opinionated or thorough, and we went down the wire still not coming to any common ground. We had a spreadsheet as well, that had complicated FORMULAS that I couldn’t understand that somehow ranked his and my choices. That still didn’t help. I had an emergency c-section at 37 weeks and we named him in the recovery room (I never expected to be that person finally deciding after the birth!) Maybe he felt sorry for seeing me cut open like that, so he gave me my number one name… and maybe I felt generous from being doped up and his gesture, so I let him pick the middle. And that’s how we got Jesse Cole.
Since we didn’t find out the gender we had both names picked out and then 2 weeks before I was due I panicked and went and bought the 10,001 baby names….now with that said since I was old enough to remember I wanted the girls name of Josephine Beatrice and call her Josie B. Well Mike came along and said he was NOT naming his daughter an old lady’s name….so since I had that name picked out for YEARS I really started panicking! But we decided since we were both Irish we would put a little bit of that in and I was still able to keep Josie as a first name or Josephine as a middle. So we came up with Josie McKenna or Ian Michael…..so instead of having a Josie B…I have a Josie Mac!
p.s. I SO remember the lovely spread sheet of said Emily!!!! hey, whatever works man!!
Good luck!!
We had a very short list of possible names but didn’t decide for sure until each of the girls was born and we could see what name fit. I think I knew pretty much the whole time I was pregnant with Becca that if she was a girl that she would be Rebecca, but we didn’t ‘officially’ decide until after she was born. I have no idea what we would’ve done if she hadn’t ‘looked like’ a Rebecca, lol. By the third girl we were definitely running low on girl names that we could agree on. 🙂
First, WOOHOOO! Second, we also had our names picked the moment we found out. It’s much easier to yell at your kid when she makes mom throw up if she has a name, you know? “Hey, fetus, stop with the shenanigans” just doesn’t have the same effect. Alessia is being popped out on Thursday and I’m sure she’ll give me an earful (and diaperful) for all that. 🙂
For some reason I feel like I have to know the baby’s name before its born or the name just doesn’t feel right. It takes me several months for it to come out of my mouth naturally. My kids were both named the day we found out their gender. But if they had been girls that wouldn’t have happened because I think girls names are so hard. So Jenny, here are my suggestions: girl-Gemma boy-Weston or Laton(you told me you would like to use that name if you had another baby but you were NOT having one.) I am so excited for you and I love how all this gender finding out/name thing bothers you!! I think its so funny!!
My husband was always upset when he was little that he wasn’t Daniel Blood Smith IV. See Blood, while being super cool to a little boy, is also a family name. Colin’s grandaddy was Daniel Blood Smith the I and so on, but being the second boy he wasn’t let in the DBS club. He is still sort of upset about it!
I’m the worst of all words…an uncommitted planner! I named my baby months in advance but when he came I realized it was all wrong! (Well, I didn’t realize it right away, it was more after my big brother pointed out how the given name was going to get the kid beaten up on the playground that I started having second thoughts). We actually had to re-file all the birth certificate forms (and by “we” I of course mean my husband). Opps!
With our first, we did exactly what Emily did and Erin Elizabeth was born a couple short months after her Kate. However, we started with the 10,000 baby name book and narrowed it down from there, thank goodness both sets of parents live two hours away, it gave us something to do on those car rides…we had three sets of names for boys and girls. How was that helpful? We only had to pick out three girl names for the second, because we still had our boy names, when we found out (which was inevitable because I had to have ultrasounds every week for my last trimester) it was a girl, we shelved the boy names and welcomed Alexandra Grace to our family. Surpise, number three on the way a few short months later, we figured, if we do not find out and it is a boy, we are a little, you know…unprepared and sure enough, we had to dust of a third name book (we marked them all to pieces and had to always start from scratch) and Delaney Michelle was born in December. Now that I am pretty sure we are done (or a doctor owes us a settlement), we can offer up our boy names for help:
Phillip Michael
Phillip Joseph
Joseph Phillip
Michael Joseph
or our other girl choices
Bethany Ann (Beth Ann)
Reagan Michelle
Caroline Jean (C.J.)
Good luck, cannot wait to hear!
I did have a great-great-grandmother named Missouri, but I digress….
We’re like you. We always have to find out the gender, and the name is picked out super early. I have friends that like to be surprised and they keep the name secret as though it was the plans for a government supported nuclear reactor. But having two little ones already at home, we thought it would be nice for Ethan to KNOW that he’s getting the brother he always wanted and his name would be Ezra (whose name was chosen the last pregancy in case of a boy). It was fun to see both kids talk to Ezra in my belly, read him stories, and prepare for his arrival. It made for a less-traumatic homecoming with baby. Besides, it gives your friends the opportunity to give you all that personalized baby stuff that says you’re way more proud of your kid’s name than anyone should be. =) We LOVE monogrammed outfits! =)