How did you choose your kid's name?
I recently read an article that said most people choose their child's name because they heard a celebrity with that name and they liked it. That usually means your kid will start kindergarten with the same name as 6 other kids in the class.
When I was pregnant for the first time we kicked around family names. For a girl, I liked Amy Bernadette (Amy is my best friend, Bernadette was my grandmother). For a boy we didn't want a Junior, so we changed one letter in Mr Sunshine's name. When Sorority Girl was born I actually chose her name from a song I liked (here's a hint...Elvis Costello) and her middle name is the same as my sister and my mother-in-law.
We looked at the baby name books. I didn't want anything too popular. Cape Cod Kid was #26 in 1985. In 2010 he wasn't even on the list. Sorority Girl was #47 in 1988. In 2010 it was #51. My father-in-law had one request..."please choose a name that will be dignified when they are 65"
Some parents are naming their kids after some of the girls on a TV show called "16 and Pregnant" (which is a whole other topic). Explain to your child how you chose THAT name. If we had chosen names based on TV characters of the time, my daughter might be Winnie (Cooper from The Wonder Years), Sue Ellen (Ewing from Dallas), Murphy (Brown), Darlene or Becky (from Roseanne). My son could be Ben (Seaver from Growing Pains, but there were already 3 Bens in the family) Norm or Cliff (from Cheers) or Bobby (Ewing from Dallas, but there were already 2 in the family)
We also decided to rule out all the ones that rhyme with our last name, so none of my kids are named Gerry, Harry, Kerry, Larry, Mary, Sherry or Terry.
Out of the 2010 popular names I actually like the girl's Top 5...Sophia, Isabella, Olivia, Emma and Chloe. The boys are Aiden, Jacob, Jackson, Ethan and Jayden.
I knew of a kid named Justin Case and a girl named Candy Kane. You couldn't have paid me to pick either one of those.
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I chose my son;s name specifically so he would NOT have anyone in his class with the same name, as my brother was one of 6 Davids in his Kindergarten class.
I went on Hebrew and Gaelic name sites and made a list of manes I liked and my husband marked the ones he liked too and we narrowed it down from there.
i also once knew a kid named Candy Sweet. cruel parents
We chose our son's name in a panic because we were told he was a girl when we had the ultrasound. So "Brooke" became "Jakob". The name Jacob has been in the top three, I think for at least 15 years, but what could we do.
I adore the name Connor, but if you put it with my last name, it sounds like "gonorrhea". What a shame.
My husband and I picked the girls names based on names we liked, but definitely not celebrities. He was named after Dustin Hoffman, though. The movie The Graduate was popular when he was born, I think.
We named Middle Connor for a day or so and then realized he wasn't a Connor.
I knew a Linda Zipper and a Sharon Baron.
I knew a Georgia Belle and a Krystal Ball, and my seventh grade teacher's son was Casey Jones.
We had the same problem you did with my husband's last name, which rhymes with yours. Except his name is a fruit, so Harry sounded dirty.
The Stooges are named for apostles and an arch-angel.
My son is Andrew and I have always loved the name, but he did happen to be born just a few months after Hurricane Andrew...so maybe the name was fresh in my head from that?
He actually didn't have a name for three weeoks. His dad was in the military and I refused to write a name on his birth certificate until he came home. Which was stupid really, cause his dad got home and was like-what's his name??? (we divorced 3 yrs later-no shocker)
I went to school with a Ginger Snapp.
Our girls' names (first and middle) are family names from both sides (we kept things even). We're pretty old school, so there's no way we would have gone with celebrity names, out-there names, or creative spellings. We also thought long term about how their names would age and how they would sound at their high school.
As a Jennifer, I'm keenly aware of how popular some names can be, so we also avoided anything in the 25.
People need a license to cut hair but you can slap any old name on a human being. I've never figured that out. We had strict rules about our boys' names--no rhyming with anything naughty, gender-specific, easy to spell, traditional and solid so they'd never ask for a change.
How-about Ron A. Round?
:)
Both of our boys ended up with "J" names that are fairly popular, but that is because our last name limited a lot of choices. For one thing, if your last name starts with "O" all names that start with "B" are automatically out because of the initials.
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