Dear Swistle,
I’ve been following your blog for years and now that my spouse and I are expecting our first and (probably) only child in January, I finally have something to write to you about! We have already chosen a name that we love and my question has more to do with how to clearly and concisely announce our intentions for name/nickname usage and preference in a birth announcement.
The name that we have chosen is Meredith Price Smith. Price is my middle name and my mother’s last name, Smith is my husband’s last name, and Meredith was my husband’s grandmother’s first name.
While I do like the name Meredith in general, it isn’t a name that I would have chosen if I were having this baby alone. My family does not have a tradition of honor names (if anything we avoid them, especially first names) but honor names are a HUGE DEAL in my spouse’s family and I’m happy to participate. What makes the name Meredith even sweeter for me is that so far, my spouse’s father’s side of the family has been honored with names on multiple occasions, both boys and girls, but my lovely mother in law’s family has not been honored once. Her mother (the original Meredith) died when she was quite young and by all accounts was a wonderful woman that I am happy to name our child after.
My question is this: although I enjoy the name Meredith for all of the previously mentioned reasons, we are hoping that our baby will be exclusively called Eddie (pronounced like the nn for Edward) on a day to day basis with Meredith being reserved for things like passport applications and graduation ceremonies. My spouse and I both love this nickname and understand that there may be the occasional raised eyebrow or mix-up. We are fine with this. I don’t mind if someone, especially someone from my spouse’s family, calls the baby by their full name, but I am hoping that in general it will be understood that her name for most intents and purposes is Eddie. We plan to gently remind people that we speak to in person that the baby’s name is Eddie, yes like Edward, but short for Meredith, etc. if they default to Meredith. The prospect of these reminders doesn’t bother us at all.
I feel that the best way of sharing these intentions right from the start is with the birth announcement, both in print via the mail and on Facebook and other social media platforms. I want to avoid being overly direct (ex: “We are going to call the baby Eddie” or “Please call her Eddie”) but I want to be as clear as possible while still sharing their full name.
My first thought is something like this:
Meredith (Eddie) Price Smith was born on XX at XX weighing XX, etc.
or
Meredith “Eddie” Price Smith was born on XX at XX weighing XX, etc.
or
Meredith Price Smith (Eddie) was born on XX at XX weighing XX, etc.
Is this too ambiguous given that Eddie is not a common nickname for Meredith and may even be perceived as a second middle name or additional last name? My spouse and I have different last names and it’s possible that a distant relative or friend would assume that “Eddie” was my last name if they didn’t know me well.
Another thought is to do the announcement something like this:
Meredith Price Smith was born on XX at XX weighing XX. Eddie is doing well and is enjoying a short rest in the hospital before heading home, etc.
Does this make it clear enough that Eddie is even the baby? I can imagine some of my older relatives seeing this and thinking, “Who the heck is Eddie and why is he in the hospital with them?!” The Facebook comments alone would be a headache to say the least.
What are your thoughts on this? What is the clearest way to explain that we would like to use an unusual nickname as their primary day-to-day name without being too direct or throwing off the style of the announcement? We mostly want to avoid confusion and concern on the part of our family and friends and are less concerned about having our objectively unique naming choice strictly honored.
Thanks for your help!
The Smith Family
I don’t think you should avoid being direct. Given how many emails we get from parents struggling to get relatives/friends to use even a mainstream chosen nickname, or to use the full name instead of a nickname, I think the birth announcement is your perfect opportunity to make things very, very clear to everyone right at the start. This may also help reduce the number of times you have to carefully and repeatedly explain the whole thing to people in the early days when you might rather be spending your time enjoying your new baby and/or managing to achieve a shower.
If what you want to end up with is a traditional birth announcement you can frame, I might suggest making the birth announcement simple/standard (I would put the nickname as you do in your first two examples, but in quotes AND parentheses), and including a separate piece of paper with the whole explanation. (Or I wonder if some services would allow you to put text on the BACK of the announcement, so the front would be traditional and the back would lay out the whole story?) But otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about throwing off the style of the announcement, and my inclination would be to instead lean way into the whole thing. This is the kind of thing I am imagining:
HELLO, BABY!
Meredith (“Eddie”) Price Smith
birth date, birth time
birth weight, birth length
We’re calling her Eddie!
Yes, just like the nickname for Edward!
We’re only using Meredith for passport applications and graduation ceremonies and this birth announcement!
We did want you to know her legal given name for the record, but from now on we’re all going to call her Eddie!
One reason I suggest this approach is this: I think a fair amount of stubbornness and the related annoying behaviors (such as exaggerated incredulity and/or pretending not to be able to remember the nickname) come from Not Getting It. People know it’s rude to challenge parents about their name choices, so when they don’t understand what’s going on, they divert confusion into resistance. Having it all laid out for them makes them less likely to even want to resist—but if they DO want to resist, it makes it impossible for them to pretend they’re not doing it on purpose.
On the other hand, you say you don’t at all mind the prospect of lots of corrections/explanations. And what you’ve asked for is something clear but also CONCISE, which my sample above certainly is not. And also, when I was proof-reading later on, and I came to my first example, I wasn’t sure I liked it as much as I did when I was feeling the full impact of my second cup of coffee. And so for all those reasons, I might instead do it like this:
HELLO, BABY!
Meredith (“Eddie”) Price Smith
birth date, birth time
birth weight, birth length
[Mother’s name] and Baby Eddie are doing well!
And then as you speak to each person, you are ready with your prepared cheerful explanation. I do think you’ll have to do many more corrections of people deferring to the name Meredith, but I am charmed by your willingness to do so.
It might further help to include a few more pictures of the baby (which would be delightful ANYWAY, even if we weren’t trying to solve anything here), each one carefully labeled: “Eddie wearing her hat!” “Eddie and her daddy!” etc.
A couple I know have a baby who is a junior but goes by the name Skip (his initials are SKP). When they announced his birth they put the nickname in parentheses after his full name. It seems like it caught on very easily because I see a lot of social media posts and family/friends only using the nickname. I would be very direct with close friends and family from the beginning so it trickles down.
It might also help to say Eddie first? Like: Hello, Eddie or Welcome, Eddie, and the her full name. Maybe even write a brief note explaining why Eddie’s formal name is Meredith (but calling her Eddie throughout)?
Yes I agree. Welcome, Eddie! In big print.
Yes, like “Welcome Baby Eddie!” in big letters with some indication of gender, then the full name in smaller print or on the back of the card. “It’s a girl! Named Eddie! Which is short for Meredith!”
This was my thought too.
It is funny timing because I was just looking at my son’s birth announcement (he’s currently 6yo) a few minutes before I read your post. And the birth announcement we selected is laid out something like this… Maybe you can find an announcement style that will allow you to highlight her nickname and still have the formal name uninterrupted.
With love & joy we introduce;
“CAL” (large, bold print of nickname)
Callahan O’Brien Bxxxx (below the nickname, script writing that was smaller & we wrote out his full name)
Date/ Time, Weight, Height
Oh I like putting the nickname as the big bold primary name first.
Yes, definitely do something like this. Where you announce “Welcome Eddie” or “Introducing Eddie” in big letters and then in smaller letters at the bottom you write her full name Meredith Price Smith or maybe Meredith “Eddie” Price Smith.
We did this! We picked an unrelated nickname for our kiddo and just used an announcement option that said: Meet NICKNAME! And then underneath we did his full formal name. We’ve had no issues, phew!
We’re going to be calling our baby a nickname primarily too. I’ve seen lots of birth announcement designs that feature the baby’s first name in big letters, and then at the bottom of the card there is a place for the baby’s full name and stats. So you could have it say “Welcome Eddie” in big letters and the bottom would say Meredith Price Smith, 7 lbs 12 oz, etc. Minted has a bunch like this. I think that’s direct enough without over explaining to the point that you seem defensive about the name. I think Eddie totally works as a nickname for Meredith and people will catch on just fine!
I’ve always liked the name Meredith, but the nickname Eddie is friggin adorable ! It makes me love the name Meredith even more!
I wrote to Swistle a few weeks about people not using my daughter’s name Nell and instead using her legal name Eleanor. The majority of people are coming around to calling her Nell with one exception (mother in law). For her birth announcement I put a large “Nell” in the corner with her full legal name in much smaller letters with her birth stats. None of the templates I saw gave me this option so I had to design my own. If you’d like to see it I can send the photo to Swistle who could send it on to you (if Swistle is okay with that). Otherwise I’ve made sure that we refer to her as Nell in everything, she even has a Nell hashtag as you may expect of a baby of her generation. One time I’ve found where it’s more of an issue is when my mother in law introduces her to others so maybe if you’re with other family members be forthcoming in introducing the baby first and I’d recommend “Eddie, short for Meredith” rather than “Meredith but we call her Eddie”.
We had photos taken with our newborn wearing a hat embroidered with his nickname on it. Just another way for people to see the name!
I was also going to suggest that you use embroidery to help with your message. Maybe a blanket that you can take and send/post many pictures of the baby lying on so people really get the message.
Beautiful name and a fun nickname!
We did something similar with our youngest. His name is Jeremy but we almost exclusively call him by his nickname Remy. It is not the usual go-to nickname for Jeremy, but it seems like obvious and natural one to me. We simply did the quotation mark version of the baby announcement: Jeremy “Remy” {last name} and any time we talk about him or post anything to do with him on our FBs for family and friends, we always use Remy.
My husband’s grandma tried very unsuccessfully to call him “Jer” (Juh-air) but that lasted all of 10 minutes before my father-in-law firmly said: “No, Mom. His name is Remy.” (I was present the whole time.) If you are nice about it but persistent, people WILL get the message… some sooner than others. When I was first introducing him to friends, I would say: “This is Jeremy but we call him Remy.” And then I would use Remy repeatedly about five times to re-enforce it.
Our baby boy is Nathaniel Fr@nk. We actually love his full first name but he has a double barrelled last name so we always knew we probably wouldn’t want to use it all the time. Buuuut we (ok I) STRONGLY dislike Nate as an abbreviation. It’s great for other people but just not my style. We’ve always planned on using Nat.
So our birth announcement ran:
Nathaniel Fr@nk G-P (Nat) arrived on…
weighing ….
We’re all doing well and M@rgot is thrilled with her baby brother Nat.
It’s worked pretty well. A couple of people from my husband’s side of things (he’s American, I’m not, we live in England) have tried to call him Nate but in general they seem to roll with Nat – or call him Nathaniel which I’m ok with anyway. We sign all cards etc Nat, and our thank you cards when we was born had his full name on one side and the other read ‘thank you so much for helping us welcome Nat to the world’.
Like the others mentioned, there are a quite few birth announcement formats that let you put the primary name (in your case nn) up top in bigger print so it is the first thing people see. Plus I like the family update note Swistle had for the bottom … “Mom and Baby Eddie are doing great!” To me that seals the deal. I’m not a huge fan of the “Eddie” in the middle of the formal announcement part, because that isn’t her legal name. But it is clear. If you wanted you could add a note in the envelope explaining the history and why you choose Eddie to honor Meredith. Or maybe Facebook. Personally I’d leave that off the card. That message is for a subset of the folks who will probably get the announcement. The above should be more than enough.
You may get some folks pronouncing Eddie like Edie. But at least they’d be trying.
Great name and great way to blend your family traditions!
I just adore that nickname! Bravo!
We named our daughter Natalie with the very clear understanding she would go by Tilly from the start. When I was pregnant with her, we only referred to her as Tilly. Our announcement on social media and formal birth announcements were:
Natalie “Tilly” Juliette Tr@usch
I think it all comes down to how you handle the situation. If you or your husband NEVER refer to your daughter as Meredith, people won’t either. In fact, I’m finding that friends and family are starting to forget our daughter’s legal name (14 months in) all together because we NEVER refer to her as Natalie. She is Tilly. We sign christmas cards with Tilly, we refer to her as Tilly, we say Tilly a million times over in a day. Sometimes I even need to remind myself that her name is actually Natalie when the nurse calls out her name at the pediatrician’s office. My own mom, who swore up and down when we told her our naming decision that she would only call her Natalie (big eye roll), gave up after a couple of months because our daughter doesn’t even respond to that name.
All this to say, if you as the parents are consistently and constantly calling her Eddie, people will too.
Noting your pronoun use, I am wondering if you are planning to use this name for either gender. If so, you might want to make sure you also indicate the gender on the birth announcement, even beyond using pink or blue. You might make mention of welcoming our new son or daughter as well.
My first son has a non-traditional, non-intuitive nickname. We put text on the back of the birth announcement with the nickname in parentheses. When asked we simply told people we were using nickname exclusively. When I introduce him to new people I don’t mention his given name at all. It’s basically been a non-issue.
We named our 6th baby Archibald last year, which is a family name a few generations back in my line. On our birth announcement we wrote “Hi! My name is Archibald B Jenkins but my friends call me Archie.”
Happy to report that we have had absolutely ZERO problems. He is Archie through and through, and I am happily satisfied that his honor name stands the way it does. Good luck!!
We used our adoption announcement to announce the nickname, and it worked well. We ended up using quotes: Ariela “Ari”. For the most part people picked up on it. Some refused to “remember” her name for other petty reasons as Swistle mentions, but those who actually wanted to know her name eased quickly into using Ari.
Just here to say that this nickname is adorable and I love every second of this!
Hi Everyone- Thanks for all of the suggestions! I’m taking a look at some announcement design options and I think that we will probably go with Swistle’s fabulous advice to include the phrase, “[Mother’s name] and Baby Eddie are doing well!” in addition to having (“Eddie”) in the full name.
I agree with Swistle, I see nothing wrong or aggressively direct, which is what I think you’re worried about, to say “We are going to call her Eddie!” I’ve received multiple birth announcements via Facebook and in the mail where parents will word it this way and I’ve never once raised an eyebrow.
I wonder if some of your anxiety is surrounding the fact that you feel subconsciously guilty that she won’t go by the full honor name? If this is not the case, then I really don’t see anything wrong with just stating “Meredith was born on XXX and weighs XXX. We will be calling her Eddie! We can wait for our little Eddie to meet all her relatives and friends!”
As a silly aside, when my 6yo was very little, he called my friend Meredith “Merve”