20 Apr 2014

What's in a name?

We're now half way through the pregnancy and have started looking at names for the little baba we've been calling 'Titch' whilst he or she is in my tummy. The scan is next week and we've chosen not to find out the answer to the question everyone seems to want to know - pink or blue?

The approach we've taken isn't everyone's approach it seems. Some people have loved particular names all their lives and some put it to public vote using social media. A dangerous game if you stick to the public choice which is no doubt something crazy!? There was a chap who did exactly that and at last check, he was going to have to name his child Optimus Prime or something from Transformers. I wonder if he followed through with it?

As I've probably said before, we're that couple who didn't have any elements of our wedding pre-chosen and it's the same with baby names. We've never had any favourites that we've always wanted to call a little bundle of joy, so we've been pouring over name books and websites to give us inspiration. We've managed to shortlist a few, but we're keeping those under wraps until we meet the little guy or gal to see what suits them. The biggest struggle choosing names has been associating the name with someone else or even a pet. In most cases it's been realising we know someone with the same name who is irritating or has negative connotations in some respect, whether that's a celebrity or a person we know or have met in our lives. The next hurdle was choosing a name one of our friends or colleagues hasn't already chosen. I know it's not a pre-requisite, but I didn't want our baby to have the same name as all the other kids belonging to people we know. There are plenty of names to choose from in the world and we're not choosing really random names, but since we don't have our hearts set on any it just made sense to us to do it this way. The next check we needed to do is to write what the initials would be, say the names out aloud and check that the most torturous nicknames aren't going to be painfully obvious. A woman at work suggested 'Belle' until another collegue followed it wih the word 'end'. School is hard enough without targeting your kids for abuse! Having done all that we're happy with our traditional choices and have managed to tick everything off our list to do the best we can for Titch.

Only approximately 20 weeks to find out now!