Sunday, April 08, 2012

Baby Names We Won't Be Using

One of the more pleasant things about pregnancy is daydreaming about what to name the offspring.  I recently discovered Swistle's Baby Names blog, and though many of the names are not my style, I still love reading through it.  However, my always-practical husband refuses to engage in any serious name discussions until we find out the sex, which is still a good 6 weeks away.  So I'm on my own here.

But I can safely share with you a handful of names I love, but we sadly won't be using.

1. Xavier - I've loved this one for a long time. As an added bonus, there's a university called Xavier which means instant personalized clothes!  But TJ strongly dislikes it.  I'll never get him to come around. 

2. Felix -  Yeah, I've got a thing for names with an 'x'.  TJ is meh about this one too, and since our last name starts with a hard 'C' sound, this one doesn't work too well anyway.  Sad.

3. Evangeline - I'm pretty sure I heard this one even before Lost, but it's got way too much of a Christian religious vibe for us to ever use it.  Which is sad, because it just sounds so lovely to me.

4. Brinjal - OK, this one really isn't a name, and anyone Indian is probably giggling at me.  It's the Hindi word for "eggplant" so it's probably not a good choice for a name.  But it sounds to me like a thousand tiny bells.  (I know, I'm nuts.  But I love the way some words sound!)

5.  Maya.  See also Asha and Anjali.  When I was pregnant with BabyT I had high hopes of finding a really cool "crossover name" - one that was both Indian and American, that was easily pronounced and spelled.  All of these fit the bill.  And nearly every Indian family in the US has figured that out too.  Besides knowing people my age with these names, I can also come up with about 7 little kids (and a dog!) with the same ones.  So they're out.

I'm hoping for similar inspiration this time as we got last time with BabyT.  I'd prefer something NOT in the Social Security Top 1000 list (ever), but also don't want something totally made up or spelled uniquely for its own sake.  A tall order, I know.  But we have 6 months, so I'm not worried.

What about you?  Got any discard names to share?  :)

14 comments:

  1. Hopefully the u/s was right because we completely gave up on a boy's name. We had some we liked... but the initials... oh, the initials.

    It reminds me of when Anastasia in the Anastasia Ask Your Analyst series was discussing names for her forthcoming little brother with her parents. (IIRC, they decided on Max in the end.)

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    1. Luckily last time I had to have several u/s from 16 weeks on, so we asked them to reconfirm the gender several times and tried to make sure the tech was confident about the info.

      Heh, we can't use Lillian either due to ridiculous rhyminess, but thanks :) I do love it.

      We don't have too many last name rhyming issues or initial spelling things, fortunately. But waiting for "the one" perfect name is driving me a little crazy :)

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  2. Oh, and we won't be using Lillian. That was going to be #1's name if a girl and everybody under the planed made that same decision, including my very jealous SIL who gets extremely upset when someone "steals" a name from her! (Interestingly, her son has the same name as the boy's family name on my side we'd been planning to use for a second son, so that's out too. So yes, really hoping that the u/s is correct.)

    And we won't be using any names that rhyme with DH's last name, of which, sadly, there are many.

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  3. My office mate at work said Naia might be another Indian/American crossover-type name. Another coworker was also commenting the other day about how they had to be careful selecting boy names with their last name 'Wang'.

    Hope you're feeling better and enjoying your dream trip a bit more!

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    1. Thanks LL! Today we ventured out to the local pub and I had an AMAZING Beef & Guinness stew, so life is looking up. I'm still ridiculously tired, though and have a cough that sounds like I've got some kind of horrible plague. We'll give it a couple more days.

      I love the name Naia/Naya but it's likely too "vowelly" for TJ :)

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  4. I spent a long time lobbying for "George Foreman". Wikipedia is contradicting my memory that he named all his kids "George Foreman", including the daughters. My thought was that, regardless of gender, we'd be set.

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    1. I thought I remembered this too, that they were all named some sort of version of George or Georgina? Maybe urban legend? :)

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  5. Wait. I'm seriously missing something here.

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    1. Jenn - you might have missed a post? :)
      http://houseofpeanut.blogspot.com/2012/03/revisiting-list-and-awesomness-of.html

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    2. Oddly enough I did read that post, but missed that big news. Congrats!

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  6. I could never get YY to go for:

    Grace
    Adelaide

    I loved Evelyn, but it never felt right for Rachel (which is probably why we ended up with Rachel)

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    1. Thanks! It's really hard to get good agreement from 2 people on something so important! I guess we should be amazed we can do it at all :)

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  7. Congrats on number two! That's so cool, and you're really brave to do international travel while still in the throes of morning sickness!

    We tend to name our children for different forms of popular media, so here are some of the ones we evaluated, but didn't actually pick:

    Connor (as in John Connor from Terminator, savior of humanity. Instead, we chose to name our boy "Dyson", as in Miles Dyson, he who created Skynet)

    Sebastien (from the Neverending Story)

    Ophelia (from Hamlet, but Henry didn't want to name our girls after a crazy lady who drowned herself)

    Harper (mostly from the Pern series, not really a specific character. However, I had a high school enemy named Harper, so that ended that.)

    Hunter (for either a girl or boy. But it's almost as bad as Ava or Olivia for number of kids named that at this point, either boy or girl)

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    1. @Heidi - I think I might need to consult with you offline because I love your choices :) I also love, love, love Ophelia, but not the character herself.

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