I’ll tell you now that LBG was named long before she was born. Before she was conceived. We were really pleased with the result, bashed out how it would be spelled, carried it around with us for two whole years. Until the night before I was due to go into hospital to be induced and DH changed his mind. Which was a little stressful for me who had- since we found out we were having a girl- started thinking of her by her name.
The challenge we have is our tricky surname: the wrong first initial and you get male genitalia, which is a gift to a teenage boy and a nightmare for a girl of any age. Boys are such idiots. So I threw a “huge pregnant woman” tanty, threw in a concessionary middle name and that was an end to it.
The problems began in the hours after her birth.
Here are the five things I didn’t think about when I named my daughter.
1. How it sounds on the phone, or to anyone who has compromised hearing. A totally different name, perfectly nice in it’s own right but not the name I chose and therefore deeply frustrating. I end up spelling it. A lot.
2. That you will never be able to buy an off-the-shelf personalised gift. It matters much more to my five-year-old than to me that she can’t get socks with her name on like all her friends. But it does mean that any personalised gift is “bespoke” and, consequently, expensive. Though so much more special!
3. That I will spend my life spelling it out (see point 1.). That she will spend her life spelling it out. That we will still regularly get official correspondence of one form or another that fails to spell either first or surname correctly.
4. That no two year old in the world will master it. Or three year old. Unless they have been together almost since birth, the friends will always get it wrong. Even in Reception.
5. That I have no control over the nicknames she is given by others: the one we chose so carefully – to avoid unpleasant shortenings of her name- has yet to be used.
Nathaniel’s isn’t too strange, but we still get people asking if it’s ia at the end (I hadn’t seen that spelling until recently). We specified Nate as a short form, but people still spell it Nat. And more annoyingly people call him Nathan – it’s like that’s the only part they hear when I tell them his name. Grr.
I thought about lots when shortlisting names – I only liked 2 boys names that would go with our surname, and thankfully the OH agreed so it was a short discussion after he was born. The one thing I didn’t think about, was how much harder it would be for him to learn to write his name compared with kids called Zack!
And when you have two languages thrown in… we had to make sure the names sounded good in French and English. If we’d have had a boy I would have liked the name Harrison – in French it sounds like Herrisson (hedgehog in French…)
Our surname is Strange. Literally the word Strange.
‘Nuff said.
Please tell me you are naming a child Bella-Le 🙂
I can imagine how some kids will shorten her name! It’s so tricky to choose the right name, isn’t it? I really love flower names like Poppy and Lily but with my surname ending in a y it would just have sounded daft and twee.
Kids are very unpredictable @Alison. I hope to steer her through that by repeating her “chosen” nickname to her whenever she mentions that someone calls he something else!
It’s so hard to pick the perfect name, hopefully the nickname you chose will be used as she progresses through school
i do hope so @Mummy to boyz. Otherwise she’ll be the butt of more teenage boy jokes!
We have a similar issue – I’ve never found a single personalised item with Sausage’s name on it. Also, giving a child a name (especially in Essex…) which ends with a ‘th’ sound, means shes eternally cursed by the dropped this being replaced with an ‘f’, which really does bugs me.
Tricky isn’t it @mum’stheword?