Just currious...
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Just currious...
| Tue, 11-01-2005 - 7:48am |
...what do you look for when you're "name hunting"?
DH is *very* conservative whereas I'm a little more "independent" so I look for classic names for fn possibilities and something a little more non-traditional for mn.

My DH tends to like common, simple names. Some of his favorites for girls when we were deciding were Beth, Julie, Katherine, and Erin. For a boy, he wanted a strong, common name -- John/Jack, Alexander, or Max.
I didn't want anything too trendy, too common, or too unusual. I also like a name that lends itself to at least one nn. My favorite girl names were Amelia/Mia, Eliza, Elena, Ava, Eleanor/Nora, and Margaret/Greta. For a boy, I liked his name choices, but I also liked Isaac, Noah, Jonah, Hayden, Aaron, and Erik.
We ended up taking three compromise names to the hospital with DD#1 -- Madeline, Carolyn/Cara, and Megan. Upon seeing her, we decided on Megan Joy -- the mn was a family name and already decided.
We really struggled with DD#2, and I made lists and lists of names to discuss with DH, only for him to veto most of them. Finally, we settled on Julianna May, nn Annie, and we were pretty confident in that decision before she was born. Both the fn and mn are actually family names.
Choosing a name was very difficult for us, and I wish you luck in finding something you both like.
Stephanie
Birth announcements in the paper are a good source- so are the obituaries! (and a number of international newspapers have them online- www.theglobeandmail.com from canada, www.timesonline.co.uk from london uk, www.smh.com.au from sydney australia). A really good US source is www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames, which has the top 1000 baby names since 1880, which is really useful to gauge how many other kids' will share your baby's name.
If you like unique names and he prefers traditional, maybe you could compromise on a name that was used a lot 75 years ago, but sounds unique now? I teach preschool, and names like Helen, Jane, Louise, June, Alice, Margaret, Rose, Anne and Dorothy/Dorothea are pretty rare, while there are tons of Isabelle/Isabella/Isabels, Emmas/Emilys, Olivias, Maddys, Katies, Abbys, Julias...just to give you an example from the girls :)
-Sisi.
I wish I knew what we were looking for!!! :)
I want a name with a lot of history, but that still sounds fresh and spunky. I tend to like girly 3+ - syllable names for girls with cute, uncommon nn's. I'm still trying to pin down my taste in boys' names. Fortunately, dh is pretty agreeable or at least usually comes around to names I like, although his standard response to a new name is always, "it's okay...". If he gets excited about a name, it usually means I get excited about it too, since it doesn't happen real often :)
We also have some 'rules' we try to stick to: we want each kid to have a unique first initial (and different from our initials, too) and a family mn, plus we have a ln that doesn't work with -ia names for girls (like Cecilia, Amelia etc.) and can potentiallly spell lots of unfortunate things if we're not careful with initials.
I think all that leaves us a choice of about two names for each sex :)