Guest Post: Ana on Baby Naming

Ana and I went to college together and have reconnected thanks to my favorite...the internet. I was thrilled that she chose to write about baby naming because I love to obsess over (especially girl) names while Simon loves to not obsess and rapidfireshootdown my always brilliant suggestions.  Ana stays at home with her two cute little ladies and keeps a lovely little (very enjoyable!) blog that you should most certainly visit, follow and frequent. 

anddd without further ado...

Baby naming:

Hyacinth Michiana Palin

This is the name that my husband, Mike, would tell people we were going to give our first little girl.
It was a joke, one that he thought was especially funny, but always made me really uncomfortable when he would actually tell people that we were naming her that. I sat through many a blank stare before they realized we were not serious.

Baby naming is a funny thing and after I saw Grace's post about name strength, I started to think more about it. Plus a few days later my sister had her fifth little girl and that really got me thinking about it.

I did not over think baby naming when I was pregnant with Naomi, our first girl. I was just so stinking excited to be having a baby, I figured whatever we named her, it would be fine, good, great, whatever. But I do remember looking at all of the papers in the hospital after she was born and seeing her name written on everything, and realizing what a permanent, life long, no-going-back thing it was (unless she decided to change it, but let's be honest, I think that is what we're trying to avoid at least a little bit).

So then with our second, I had my ideal name picked out. I felt GREAT about it. I had no doubts in my mind at all and I even had Mike on board. Elinore, and we would call her Nora. So cute, right? Classy and beautiful, nothing could go wrong. Until one day my wanna-be theologian husband came home and told me that the Pope had written some beautiful letter on the importance of Catholics using names of great saints in the Church when naming their children. I tried really hard to ignore him, but I could not stop thinking about it. My Catholic guilt was crushing me since I did not pick the name Elinore in honor of any saint and could not actually find a saint Elinore. So we went to the drawing board again and ended up with Bernadette Martha if it was a girl (still beautiful, still classy) and Josemaria Benedict if it was a boy. I still had so many doubts even after we decided on both of the names. I was so freaked out about screwing them up, I mean her initials would be BM, his name would be JOSEMARIA. Great. I could not get people's weird reactions out of my mind and the permanent nature of the decision made me a bit nauseous, or maybe that was just from being pregnant. Either way, I would say that the last 4 months of the pregnancy were spent with me freaking out all too frequently about the choice of our second kid's name. Then the baby came, it was another girl, we named her Lucy. Then we changed it 30 minutes later to Bernadette (partially due to how doped up I was after a c-section, and partially because I was still freaking out about it).

The decision is so tough, and the fact that you AND your husband have to AGREE on the name makes it even harder! Maybe you don't have these problems, but this is how things go here for us. My sister who I mentioned above has it even hard since she and her family are Byzantine Catholic and her husband is very adamant about using very specific Eastern saint names. Here are a few examples of the choices he gave her when she was pregnant with one of their 5 daughters (this is derived from an extensive list that he made for her):

Rohama     Meaning: “Having Obtained Mercy” Ge’ez/Biblical

Saida ~ Saidah          Meaning: “Helper” Amharic   or “Happy” Muslim
Safia ~ Safiya             Meaning: “Pure & Wise” or “Lions Share” Arabic/Abyssinian
Samrawit    Meaning: “She Is Unity” or “She Who Unifies” Amharic/Ge’ez
Selam        Meaning: “Peace” Amharic/Tigrigna
Semira       Meaning: “Fulfilled” Muslim
Tinsae ~ Tensae       Meaning: “Resurrection” Amharic
Twebesta   Meaning: “Mother Of St George” Amharic/Biblical
Tsehay      Meaning: “Sun” Amharic

This is only about 1/4 of the list- we pull it out every once and while to show people and have a good laugh, and my sister thinks it's pretty funny too.They've been able to settle on names for 5 little girls so far, and the names are all beautiful and very unique, but my sister pretty much always dreads the comments made by family members and perfect strangers.

No matter how confident you are about it, if you have chosen a more unique name, people will have something to say about it.

With both of our girls we got/get a lot of "oh, wow. you don't hear that a lot!" or "wow, I have never heard that before!" (Naomi and Bernadette are not that crazy, it is just that they're not named Madison or Abigale - beautiful names, just more common). What they're really saying is they don't like it. Occasionally I will get someone who genuinely loves their names and have nothing but compliments and then I actually feel good about my decisions and I want to give them a big hug. 
The fact is, I have NO idea what the child would want their name to be, or whether they will like it at all once they are older. Obviously, in the end, what people think about your child's name should be the last thing you're considering since it is your child, not theirs.

And in the end, we are inevitably going to screw up our children in some way, so it's most fitting to start with their name and just get it out of the way, right? This is why I will most likely always freak out about it.