Update (and photo) on Baby Girl Schemmel

I found your website a few months ago and have devoured your archives – obsessed with this site and fabulous community! Really hoping y’ll can help us – I find boy names incredibly hard & we need TWO for the twin boys we are expecting this August.

My boyfriend J and I have a two year old daughter @ri@nn@ who we call Ari. We are using his last name for all of the kids – last name Blew but spelled and pronounced like the color. In naming our daughter I had a list of a gazillion and some names that he would 1 by 1 veto until we got to her name and he said – I like that, let’s do that. He now refers to that as “our process” & we certainly have burned through a ton of vetoing this round.

I absolutely adore the name Beau and we have agreed on that for one of the boys. I am hoping you and your readers might be able to give us some suggestions for the other nugget.

Right now our leading contender is Miles – although neither of us is certain that Miles is “the” name. I have some concerns about it (will kids associate it with the Disney show “Miles from Tomorrowland” & it’s the boy equivalent of naming my kid Dora the Explorer? 2. Will he be called Miley? Which I don’t love yet totally see myself nicknaming him unintentionally). To me Beau sounds very light, fun, precocious and I seem to lean towards other names that “feel” that way and Miles sounds a bit “heavier” to me (if that makes sense at all!)

Lately I am REALLY loving the name Shane and also Ames is starting to grow on me. Both vetoed.

I also LOVE Levi but Levi w/ our last name the blue jean connotation is a bit much – & J just generally doesn’t like (he doesn’t like name w biblical/church associations – Deacon was another one that was vetoed).

I really love the name Rhys (pronounced Reese) but feel hesitant to using it because Reese seems much more “girl” to me. But, I wonder if it is still an option because when it is spelled this way it identified it as boy? I feel the same way about some of these names: Blake (love for a girl name – would use for a boy but we don’t want two B names), Avery (also seems too close to Ari), Finn (plus J pointed out w/ our last name this kid would likely be called Tuna), Peyton/Payton (I feel like a hypocrite because I would totally give a boy’s name to a girl which seems hypocritical/not very cool of me but I digress…)

We both sort of liked the name Fenton for a hot second but J was concerned was that this would also result in a nick-name of Tuna. And we also seemed to have an issue pronouncing it.

I also would have gone with Dillon but J hates. Other random names I liked that were vetoed for a wide variety of reasons: Austin, Graham, Dex/Dexter, Damon, Reed, Russell, Bentley, Weston, Nolan, Jake, Hudson, Nash and many others

The one name J offered and felt strongly about was Hunter. I think it’s unlikely we’ll go with Hunter as it turned out to be more common than he expected (he is a huge reader and associated it with the author Hunter S. Thompson). Also he feels like Beau & Hunter don’t work – it’s too much like “hey here are the boys they are going to head out and kill some deer”. We considered Ryder/Rider – another name I like a lot in theory but don’t envision as our baby’s name. With both Ryder and Hunter they sound more like words to me than actual names.

We don’t like matchy matchy so assuming one baby is Beau we’d prefer a non B name (altho apparently I seem to love B names for boys). Before we solidified Beau J suggested the name Bodhi (I think the meaning of the name is very cool but don’t love the spelling of it – and also prefer Beau to Bo), Bowen, Bowden, Bowie (a bit crazy w our last name), Beckett, Becham (J struck down due to hunky soccer player). I love Brechin (J thinks a bit preppy). Also J has an incredibly unique name (I’ve never known anyone with it) and while we are not looking for something as unique as his name he’d not a fan of too traditional or overly common names.

If one of the babies had been a girl her name would have likely been Quincy with the option of Quinn – like @ri@nn@ I like the flexibility of Ari’s longer name and nickname (but contradict myself in James, Blake, Quinn, Sloane were all top contenders on my list – and I know very inconsistent with the longer lacey sounding Ari@nn@). Also really liked Noa and Collins.

And this is not a priority – but I’d be curious to hear peoples thoughts in naming twins – do you determine before they come out “who’s who’s?” I.e. when they are in the womb Docs assign them Baby A and Baby B so I was thinking, oh Baby A could be Baby Ames and Baby B be Baby Beau to keep that going on. Or, do you have your two names and then look at them to figure out who’s who? I’m nervous about giving my boys the wrong names!

I am all over the place J Love your thoughts!

I cringe at the idea of sending you all the way back to the drawing board, especially when the two of you are having so much trouble finding names, but Beau Blew is a tough one. It’s hard for me to say, it runs together into Boblew or re-divides into Bobe Lew, and I get it scrambled up with other combinations such as Little Boy Blue and Bob Loblaw and Code Blue.

Speaking of shooting down names, I think that J shooting down all your suggestions until you come up with one he likes/chooses was a process that happened to work out well for your first child, but that it is not working this time around. A person who thinks a child named Fenton would be called Tuna is a person whose turn it is to come up with a list, and let you take a turn shooting them down.

I have several short-answer opinions, and I’m just going to stick them in a list:

1. If you love B names for boys, and want to use two of them, I don’t think that seems too matchy-matchy. Many siblings have a shared first initial, because it’s common for parents to be drawn to particular sounds.

2. I definitely think “boy” when I see the spelling Rhys. People hearing the name may still be uncertain if the child is a boy or a girl, but that’s the sort of thing that’s easy to clarify. It comes down to how bothered you think you’d be by occasional mistakes.

3. I wouldn’t think to call a Miles “Miley,” but if it’s something you can easily see yourself doing, and if you would not like that to happen, and if you don’t think you could stop yourself from doing it, then probably the name Miles should be ruled out.

Let’s talk a bit about how to pick which name goes with which twin, because that is seizing my interest. Mine were easy because they were boy-girl twins, but I was still a little distressed to think that Baby B might be born first. It seemed wrong—and yet of course it happens all the time, and at this point (nearly 11 years later) I think it would just be a slightly interesting detail of their birth story.

With twins of the same sex, I think what I’d do is decide which twin (either by A/B status, or by actual birth order) would have which name ahead of time, but then leave it a little flexible in my mind just in case meeting the babies made me feel the names should be switched. To relieve name-choosing anxiety, I would think of it as if the boys were both singleton births: I would imagine Baby A being born now, and Baby B being born two years from now, and think about how little I would worry in that case that the names might have gotten swapped.

I would try a few different exercises to help me figure out which name belonged to which baby. One would be to pretend they were being born one at a time in separate pregnancies, and see if I could figure out which name I’d use first in that case. A similar idea would be to say that the first name we decided on belonged to the first baby to be born, whether that was Baby A or Baby B. Another method would be to just pick which order sounded better to me: Dean and Reed, or Reed and Dean? Another would be to see which name “felt” older/younger/first/second. Another would be to go with alphabetical order. Another would be to flip a coin. Another would be to see which order I was hoping would win the coin toss.

Now let’s go back to the names themselves. I see a lot of one-syllable names on your list, so I’m going to pull heavily (but not exclusively) from the Brisk & Breezy section of The Baby Name Wizard. I’m going to include names that have been vetoed, in part because I think one of the pitfalls of having a suggester and a vetoer is that the vetoer can get into the habit of snap-vetoing without thinking about it carefully. Pairings with Beau:

Beau and Beck
Beau and Casey
Beau and Chance
Beau and Clark
Beau and Colby
Beau and Dash
Beau and Dex
Beau and Eli
Beau and Flynn
Beau and Gage
Beau and Grady
Beau and Jace
Beau and Joss
Beau and Kai
Beau and Keane
Beau and Kip
Beau and Lee
Beau and Mack
Beau and Nash
Beau and Nolan
Beau and Rhett
Beau and Shea
Beau and Tate
Beau and Teague
Beau and Trey

I like how any of the C names gives you A, B, C with all three kids—unless you plan on having more children and so this would put pressure on you to choose a D name next.

For A/B pairings:

Abe and Beau
Ace and Beau
Ames and Beau
Andre and Beau
Archie and Beau (one of my favorites, except feels like an archery reference—archer/bow)
Asher and Beau

Update (and photo) on Discussion: Baby Name Choosing Strategies

Update (and photo) on Baby Girl H0lmes, Sister to Fiona

Hello!
I have a baby girl named Ava and just found out I’m having another girl in August! The 2 girl names I didn’t end up going with the first time around are Evelyn and Olivia and I really wish I would have chosen either of those over Ava for my first daughter’s name. If I chose one of these runner ups for daughter #2, do you think it pairs well with Ava?
Ava and Evelyn
Ava and Olivia
The 2 main reasons I like Evelyn and Olivia better than Ava are 1) they’re longer names and I like how they LOOK written better than the 3-letter “Ava”. 2) I love the nicknames they offer “Ev/Evie” or “Liv/Livi”. It’s difficult to shorten “Ava.”
We ended up going w Ava bc it was the only name we both could agree on at the time, now husband has warmed up to these 2 names.
What are your thoughts if I choose one and which do you prefer paired w Ava?
Last name rhymes with Hide.

Thanks!!!

I think both names work equally well with Ava. Both names repeat some of the sounds of Ava, which may or may not bother you. The name Evelyn gives me just a little bit of a feeling of adding a -lyn to Ava. The name Olivia gives me just a little bit of a feeling of adding an Oli- to Ava.

The feeling is even stronger with the proposed nicknames. Ava and Evie, Ava and Livi. You would need to be on board with this similarity, I think, and not be upset if other people got the names tangled or confused. But plenty of parents really love pairings with similar sounds: Emmy and Abby, Braden and Grady, Lucy and Lottie, Braden and Brinley.

I have a slight preference for Evelyn, I think because it has a different ending than Ava. But I like the way Olivia has a different emphasis, and a more-different first syllable. Well, it’s hard to decide.

You might also like the names Vivian and Genevieve.

Let’s have a poll:

[yop_poll id=”66″]

Update on Baby Boy or Girl Steward, Sibling to Zaiden

The Social Security Administration’s top baby names for 2015 is up!

Update (and photo) on Baby Boy or Girl P0ll@rd, Sibling to D@ne and Nol@!

Hi Swistle,

This is all purely hypothetical, but I have a question that I thought might be interesting to discuss.

Your post about whether the name Dash is too similar to DAESH has me thinking about a little girl in my son’s class named Isis. They are 9/10 year olds, in 4th grade, and surely 10 years ago ISIS wasn’t on our national radar.

Do you think that the name Isis is enough of a burden that it would be worth changing a child’s name? Obviously not without their buy in, but what do you think? I might make a serious lobby with my kid to start calling them by their middle, or to legally rearrange the name order so that Isis was the middle name/nickname that they could easily drop. And if my child was young enough, heck, maybe her name is Iris now, no buy in required.

But then, it’s your baby’s name, and you were probably thinking about the Egyptian goddess of the sky when you named her. I dunno. It’s the sort of thing that would distress me TREMENDOUSLY, so I’ve been puzzling over it. What would you do if your child’s name became very, very negatively associated with something, after you had already named them?

Miss Grace

I am very interested in this, too. My feelings and thoughts on the whole thing are so similar to yours, I’m finding it hard to write anything that isn’t a complete duplicate of what you just said. If my 10-year-old daughter were named Isis, I believe by now we would have taken some sort of action: I like the Iris idea, I like the middle name idea, etc. It would comfort me to know that people would KNOW we hadn’t named her after ISIS, but I think I would still want to do something about it.

Also, I am at least in theory okay with changing names. When William was in preschool with two other Williams, we talked with him about whether he’d like to instead go by a variant of his name, or by a nickname, or by his middle name. And when people grow up with a name they don’t feel comfortable with and they want to change it, I think that’s a fine idea. I don’t have a “NEVERRRRRRRR!!” feeling about it.

I think this is a great place for a poll. Everyone keep in mind that we are not talking only about the name Isis, but about any name that acquires a terrible and specific association after it has already been given to the child. Maybe you’re not really hearing anything about ISIS and so it’s hard to see what the problem is; in that case, think of a situation where the association WOULD be a huge problem—an association that would cause tremendous distress.

Let’s see if we can simplify things by NOT considering names in heavy usage, such as Charles or David or Matthew: perhaps someone with that name is in the news for doing something terrible, but the name is so diluted, it’s hard for the new association to stick. The comments section is going to dissolve into zero helpfulness/interest if we introduce “Well, ANY name can be association with SOMETHING bad.” No, let’s stick to cases such as Isis, where the name is unusual enough for the association to be strong and distressing, and something that is likely to endure beyond two weeks in the news. Adolf would be another good example of the sort of thing we are thinking of here.

Now let’s discuss the poll options. We’re talking about something that could happen when the child was an infant (in which case you would probably feel free to make name choices without consulting them) OR when the child was an older child (in which case you would need to include them in the decision), so the poll choices will ASSUME that range of consulting or not consulting, depending on circumstances. That is, the poll option “Oh, I’d change that sucker” includes the idea that you might be working with an older child who did NOT want to change; we’re only talking about what YOU would WANT to do. The child might not want to, and you’d do your thing about that, but your DESIRE would be to change it.

So! Are we all clear? This is about a name that would cause you to feel tremendous distress. And then it’s about what YOU would want to do about it. (If it’s easier, you can think of it as asking about whether you’d change your own name.) The poll options attempt to achieve a matter of degree of feeling: some people feel names can be changed, and others feel more as if once a name is given It Is GIVEN, no matter what.

As always with polls, there is no way to have an answer that matches exactly what each voter would choose: we are only trying to sort answers into broad categories, so that we don’t have a 1000-option poll with one vote for each option. More detail can be given in the comments section.

[When I voted it asked me if I wanted to vote as a WordPress user or an Anonymous user. I have no idea what that is about. I tried to change it so it wouldn’t ask that anymore (it shouldn’t be asking voters for ANY info except vote)—but if I was not successful, just choose “Anonymous.”]

[yop_poll id=”64″]

Update (and photo) on Baby Boy Mulligan-with-an-I, Brother to Teresa, Nora, and Finn