During pregnancy it took us a while to start thinking about baby names, in my head I already had a little boys name picked out ‘Oliver’ but when we had our 20 week scan we discovered that we would be having a little girl, just to make sure we also booked in to have a private gender scan. It took a week or two for everything to sink in, we were going to be parents to a little girl and our little girl needed a name. It wasn’t an easy choice to make, after all this would be the name our little girl would be known by, the name she would live with for life.
Now the Mr being his typical laid back self, gave me free roam on the name, ‘it’s up to you’ he said. He soon changed his mind when I started reeling off the list of names that I thought would be suitable for our little girl. It really wasn’t as easy as just finding a name that I liked, it had to sound right with the surname and then there was the option of having a middle name to.
It’s safe to say the Mr was not impressed with my choices and I was soon becoming frustrated, he still would not look at names himself and insisted that I pick one, only to be shot down with my choices.
We knew that we wanted a traditional sounding name, nothing too modern. We also toyed with gender neutral names. Some Popular neutral names to choose are beautiful, like Robin (which was a serious contender for us).
I think I finally snapped one evening when he dared sneer at my new list of names, I forced him to agree to look at girls names together. So for the next few nights when we headed off to bed, the Mr would read his books ‘A blokes guide to pregnancy’ and ‘A blokes guide to babies’, I would scour the internet in search of the perfect name. I liked the sites like Bounty where meanings of the names were given and they also had a name generator which was easier than going through a big list of names. We actually picked our baby name from that name generator, a name that we both agreed on and that we instantly knew would be perfect.
Isabelle Louise, was the name we had settled on after months of quibbling and irritation. I know for some people they have their perfect names picked out long before they become pregnant. In school some of my friends knew what they wanted to name their children and even how many children they were going to have. Others name their children after family members or even have traditions to pass names down through the generations. People name their children after celebrities or from characters in films. I’ve known parents to have a name picked out but completely change their mind when they see their child for the first time and then there are people like me, the ones who just don’t have a clue……
How did you choose the perfect name for your child?
Mary Keynko
at 11:46 amScan’s didn’t pick up on baby gender when my babies were born. We had just always assumed our second would be a boy and never considered girls names! When the midwife announced her gender – the first words out of my mouth were ‘are you sure?’. From out of the blue he said ‘Genevieve’ and that was it – done and chosen, it felt right and it suited her. We had no idea why though, turns out the film of that name was on the TV when we both snoozing during early labour so he must have taken it in on some level! Her middle name – we let her big brother choose as it was an in law family tradition