Please Let Me Name Your Baby

my favorite girls name are Amanda and Laura while i like japanese sounding names for boys.

Oh! My name is on here, I feel special :)

That's a great idea! (The ethnic name sites for characters' parents, etc.)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

In my case, I write historical fiction and to choose names, I go to ethnic name sites to find good names for various characters in 19th century US America, based on where I think their parents/grandparents came from, what class they are, etc.

It IS fun, isn't it?

"All that you have is your soul." Tracy Chapman

Thank you very much :) I definitely agree with not choosing a name with the 'on' 'en' and 'an' endings, they definitely sounds strange because of the last name.

Yes, they were very helpful-it's definitely given me some more names to consider! I really like Taryn with the middle name Olivia for a girl, and Eliza too. And as for boys I really like Drew and Eli.

So thank you very much!

Ok, so Stretton is a strong last name with the hard 't' and 'n' ending. I'd avoid names with the 'on' 'en' 'an' ending (such as Brandon, Breydon, Jordan, Ethan etc.) It's too much of a mouthful. With Stretton, I'm leaning towards one syllable names for a boy: Max, Drew, Jack, Luke, Gabe, Will.

Some 2-syllable boy names would work too . . . ones with softer endings like: Levi, Eli, Ari, Daniel.

As for girls' names: I tried out every name on my lists in the post and they all work well except Lauren and Allison. (Again, I don't love that repeated 'on' sound.)

As you can see from my original post, I really favor somewhat traditional names so I'm not the best resource for funkier stuff. Hopefully my suggestions help though! I can't wait to hear which ones you like. :)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Thank you very much!
Both genders please as we don't know the sex. And no siblings-first baby :)
Okay, sounds good. Um...just S because I don't like alliterated names.
Thanks again and I look forward to reading your recommendations

Kiri

And all 3 sound perfect together. :)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

All three of my kids' names made your list - I have a Will, Jack and Audrey!

Kiri- I'm so excited to help. First, a few questions, boy for girl? (I can do both, of course!) Are there other siblings with names I should consider for family cohesion? Obviously the names in the post are the ones I love THE MOST, but I can go through those too and pick out ones that sound best with Stretton . . . and add some others. Oh- also, any first letters you want to avoid?

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

that you'll find me in the blogosphere when you have the baby! I have to know what you decide. http://ninabadzin.com. I'll be eagerly waiting!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

My husband is Jordan and we didn't want to do a Jr. However, I love Oliver, Miles, Sean and even Elliott although it starts with E. But, my husband is the picky one haha.

Hi Nina,

I really liked some of the names on your list and I wondered if you could give me some recommendations?

I don't really have any specific origins or anything that I'd prefer but I would like names that are a bit different, but not too weird :) Oh, and the surname is Stretton.

I hope you get the time to give me some suggestions and thank you in advance!

Talk about giving your child a God complex!!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

If only some people had contacted you before naming their children. I have a long long list of names that makes me wonder WTF were these people thinking. My best one is Jehovah. Yes like God. His mother calls him hovah which she yells very loudly at little league games. If she shows a baby bump I will direct her to you!

Michelle

I blog at http://www.mommycan.blogspot.com/

Hi! This is my dream . . . someone asking for my two cents. :)

Okay, let's get down to business. I agree with your friends questioning the sound of Hudson and Sheldon with Wilson. My ear is super-sensitive to sounds/rhythms like that. As you can see from my list, I do like biblical names, but I can think outside the box.

Not- E, J, G
Hebrew but not Biblical: Dov (Bear--pronounced like "dove" into the water, not like the bird "dove"). Ilan (can be spelled Elan or Ilan), Lev (heart), Levi (it is Biblical, but so great with Wilson), Noam (sweetness, friendship), Zev (wolf), Rafi, Jared (if you change your mind about J), Ezra (if you change your mind about E), Kobe (nickname for Jacob but I've seen people just use Kobe)

Other ideas: Zander, Ryder, Oliver, Clark, Drew, Blake, Liam, Logan, Cooper, Miles, Sean, Wes, Leo, Elliott or Jordan (if you change your mind about E or J)

I hope that helps!!!!!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Maybe you CAN help me since I liked several of your names.

My husband and I are very picky, and trying to come up with a boy name in case we are having a boy. After 3 boys, I want a girl really bad but the odds of that after 3 boys aren't good. We have three girl names picked out, two are definite and so we know what we will be naming a girl.

However, we are out of boy names. We don't want to re-use any of our boys initials (E,J or G) as our rebellion against people who name their kids all after one letter (Duggars) and we don't want to use a Bible name (we know too many snotty people that think those are the only acceptable names), we want something slightly unusual but old fashioned that will be a good mans name not just a cutesy little boy name. We have tended to like Hebrew and English names. However, I've been through name lists over and over and over again, and coming up empty.

We'd prefer not to use, but will consider names starting with K,Z or R as those are the first initials of girl names we have chosen. Our last name is Wilson, so anything we like so far people say sounds weird because the first names have the "on" sound at the end. We've decided that we like Sheldon and Hudson ok but people think it's weird with our last name.

If you can help, please do. :) I love hearing ideas. I just don't want to hear them from my mom or my mother in law, especially my mother in law as we aren't particularly impressed with anything she named her kids lol.

If you have any suggestions please, please let me know. I know our criteria is weird, but it fits us HAHA.

They might be on my hoarder's list. I didn't put my own kids' names OR the names I'm holding onto in case we have another. Thanks for visiting me here!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Definitely different! I totally respect that but you can see it's not one of my criteria. ;)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Oh fun! I love that!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Great names on the lists.

And yet...none of my kids' names made the cut. Close...but not there.

These lists sound like the role sheets at our preschool ;)

So great to see you here!!!

We have friends who named their daughter Harper Leigh -- only to discover that she too was born on Harper Lee's birthday.

And my cousin just named her daughter Louisa Mae.

Let's hear it for literary prowess.

For the fiction try the social security's website popular names section. They let you look up a name and see it's use over time. OR, the feature I like best, you can type in a year and see the top 500+ names. It's honestly a goldmine.

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

I'm being 100% objective when I say I think Nina is a great name! (I'm not kidding). Different without being weird, easy to say and spell, feminine but not flowery. My mom did well--as did you!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

I love a kindred spirit! You need to become a writer (fiction) so you can have a good place to use all those names. By the way, I love the tagline to your blog. Stink bugs . . . amazing.

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Hi! Cara almost made the list, but my issue was the CARE-ah vs. CAR-ah pronunciation debate.

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

THAT is a great naming story!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

It's the "popular baby names" website run by the social security office. It's GOLD for a writer. I've wasted MANY a writing hour on there.

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

I'm terrible at names - both for babies and characters in my fiction. Would have loved your list before my son was born, when my husband and I were up late many nights in a row, unable to settle on anything. In the end we went with Evan, which we now love (yay! so glad it's on your excellent list!).

Of course, how could I not love a list with Allison on it?

Love your lists! I have a brand new baby cousin Phoebe... and my daughters are Natalia and Nina.

~Danita Sparks
http://www.findingmyspark.com
Kickin' ass and takin' names, y'all

I'm also freakishly obsessed with baby names. I've literally spent entire days on Nameberry. I'm not pregnant, nor even sure my husband and I will have another baby, yet I often randomly say to him, "What do you think of this name?" when I come up with yet another favorite moniker to add to my ongoing baby name list. He finally told me to go to Build-A-Bear and make as many bears as I had names since you get a little birth certificate to go with each. (I didn't do this... but I thought about it.)

In any case, I for one would love to see your expanded list. And I like a lot of the names on the list above.

Oh, and after an exhaustive search for just the right name, we named our daughter Vivian Faith.

Kristin Alexander (@Kalexa75 ( http://twitter.com/#!/Kalexa75 )) blogs about everything from motherhood to stink bugs at her virtual mind dump, That's What She Said. ( http://www.twss-blog.blogspot.com/ )

I really enjoyed coming up with my sons' names. I wanted them to have names that you don't hear so very often since my name is Somer Monique and not a name I hear all that often.
My oldest is Lukas Drake and my youngest is Ruegen Bradley. Ruegen's name was ALMOST Lauden Oren, but I liked Ruegen better. If either boy had been a girl, I was in love with the names Lorien Scarlett or Skyla Felene.

Somer blogs at Merry Wife of Canon ( http://www.merrywifeofcanon.com ) as well as Smell My Plate ( http://www.smellmyplate.com ).

Hubby and I argued about names for ages when we started the adoption process. Every single name I came up with he hated. Hubby is 1st generation Irish so I wanted something to honor his heritage.

For a boy the first name was easy, Charles, after my dad. We call him Charlie though. His middle name is Jameson, after the Irish whisky. It was my father-in-laws favorite.

For a girl we finally settles on Cara. It means "friend or beloved". It was also the name of Aer Lingus's inflight magazine which is where Hubby found it. For a middle name we were going with Jeanne, which was my mom's name and is my middle name.

I personally love the name Sheridan for a little girl. It's Hubby's middle name and the name of an Irish poet.

Elizabeth

@texasebeth ( http://twitter.com/texasebeth )  and My Life, such as it is.... ( http://texasebeth.blogspot.com )

We have a Meredith Claire and a Harper Rose. We actually let the internet vote on Harper's middle name. My husband was hoping for Harper Eliza. I was hoping for Harper Rose. I won. (Rose was my grandmother's name.)

When we got home from the hospital, we discovered that Harper was born on Harper Lee's birthday. It was meant to be.

This is a favorite subject of mine, too. I have a notepad on my desktop where I collect names of bloggers who have interesting or weird names. I love how a name can give you an image, that could be completely off, like the woman with a very French, upper-class name who works as a trucker!

There is some site online, and I don't remember what it is, but it contains an amazing graph of birthnames and popularity in the United States from something like 1890 to the present. And you can see a name like Sophia was incredibly popular two generations ago, and then disappeared for a long time, because everyone associated it with their grumpy Aunt Sophie. Now it is the top rated girl's name again. So, clearly names go in cycles. We want to disassociate outselves from our parents, but then become nostalgic for our grandparents and our uncle Max.

I would not be suprised at all when some celebrity names their daughter Ethel or Mildred, and before long, the sexiest supermodel is named Ethel.

My self-proclaimed expertise is always available to you!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

I have a 4 month old boy who has a name we settled on. My husband does not like anything except my first son's name Cole. He was named after my Great Uncle. My other son Grant was named after my Great Grandfather. Both boys have Japanese middle names for their Japanese grandmother. We fought about names my entire second pregnancy. I am scared when we have more kids (he wants 4 or 5). This just means 3 more pregnancies of fighting & disagreements. I will definitely be calling you!!!

xo, Shannon@withumami
www.livingwithumami.com ( http://www.livingwithumami.com )
at twitter

Thanks for your support here, Natalie! We have similar taste!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

I read this on your blog and loved it there...because I have a Ethan, Lila, and Mia and they all made your list!

Natalie writes at Mommy of a Monster and Twins ( http://www.mommyofamonster.com ) about her day-to-day life and the chaos that comes with raising a 3 year old and 1 year old twins.

All great names! And Rachel is my daughter's middle name. I'm not sure why I left my own kids' names off the list. I guess it seemed the most even-handed thing to do. ;)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Thank you, Liz!! I don't know what sparkling is!!! But it sounds good! :)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Completely. I don't like it as a girls name either. But one of the ladies who named their daughter Micah is a close friend of a close friend of mine ... so we see each other often ... so it would be awkward. But it's alright, the name we chose is quite masculine and if it gets stolen for a girl name I pity that girl.

http://heymrswilson.net

Oh I LOVED coming up with my kids' names. We were torn between 2 meaningful family girl names, then found out we were having twins. Perfect!

We have a Claire (named after my grandpa, James Clare), a Rachel (named after my husband's late sister), and a Zoe (named after a character in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof...not kidding. Maybe not so much after her as I decided I liked that name after watching that movie).

I love that they are all special, not too common, but not too weirdly original. :)

This is a fabulous post, great rules and great name choices.

You are SO worthy of syndication!

I sparkled you, too. :)

Liz ( http://www.bellebeanchicagodog.com )

http://www.bellebeanchicagodog.com

http://twitter.com/bellebeandog

Interesting . . . some names go both ways, but let me say for the record that Micah is just not a girl's name! I can't get behind that one. I think it's definitely appropriate for a boy if you still want to use it!

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

When I was in labor with my youngest (soon-to-be-middle-child), Micah was on our list of boys names. We couldn't decide between that an another one. But, she was a girl and we named her Liliana. I'm due in 10 weeks and we just moved and I've met three GIRLS with the name Micah. SO, needless to say, it's off our boy list. I hate it when that happens. (I still love the name though.)

Also, one of the middle names we have for our boy (if he's a boy) is on your boy list.

You have great taste.

My dream job is for sure--Baby Name Consultant. ;)

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

Oh! Love those! I really feel like Zoe and Violet should be on my list. They fit all my criteria.

Nina :)

http://ninabadzin.com

THE WRITING LIFE, MARRIAGE, AND MOTHERHOOD.

http://issascrazyworld.com

In a heartbeat, I'd make a career out of naming if I could. I spent hours just the other day on Twitter discussing names.

I love them. I have lists everywhere.

My husband and I had a horrible time agreeing on a name. We settled on Victoria, but *my* other favorites were Zoe, Violet and Abigail.