Long time reader here hoping to get some last minute advice. I am having a c-section on Friday and having cold feet about our daughter’s middle name. Our first daughter’s name was much easier because my husband and I had only one name in common on our favorites lists – Georgia. We call her Georgia, Georgia Kate, and GK. Deciding our second’s name was not as easy because we did not have any overlapping choices this time, so in the end I picked my top choice from his list. The name chosen around 24 weeks was Scarlett Claire.

Fast forward and long story short, we have had a very trying third trimester — broken a/c, dryer died, multiple house leaks that will mean we cannot return home after the hospital and will have to stay with family instead. At church this past Sunday, it hit me that I think her name should be Scarlett Joy, because despite the circumstances and stress, her arrival will still be a source of Joy and should be celebrated. Claire has no significance other than I liked the sound. I still like it, but think Joy might bring more “butterflies” because of the situation. I also like how SJ sounds more than SC, if we ever call her by initials like we do with GK. My husband says he is not entirely swayed either way, so I think since I picked Scarlett from his list, I can have more swing with the middle.

So do I pull a last minute switch up based on emotion or do I stick with the choice we made ahead of time? I’d love your outside input.

Thanks!
Kelsey

I don’t see any reason you have to stick with a name just because you chose earlier in the pregnancy: the name isn’t REALLY decided until it’s on the birth certificate (and of course, sometimes not even then). It sounds like you like the new choice better AND it has significance for you. I say go ahead, and that it makes a fun naming story.

What does everyone else think?

Name update:

Our little girl was born this morning and in the operating room I asked my husband one more time if we could call her Scarlett Joy, and he said yes. She is certainly a joy during a rough season, so I think it is perfect.

Hi Swistle!

My husband and I are expecting our second baby in August and are having a terrible time coming up with a name. We have a little girl, Rae, who is 1. We knew he/she was going to either be Rae/Ray as that is my grandfather and we both love that name. We don’t know boy or girl this time so are needing to have both ready.

For a little boy, my husband loves the name Fred. My maiden name is Fredrick, so of course my family is in love with it. I am yet to be convinced.. I’m just not sure I can imagine snuggling a sweet little Fred. I don’t really know what I like, but am drawn to the more classic names such as Michael and Phillip.

Girl names we don’t have much. We are tossing around Helen or Vivian but haven’t found one yet that sounds like the “one”. I, again, like the more classic names.

Any advice for this baby that is going to be here before we know it?!?

Thanks,

A struggling Momma

Here are some things I love:

1. Family names.
2. Maiden names used as first names.
3. The name Fredrick/Frederick/Fred/Freddie.

So I am 100% on board with naming a boy Fredrick. I think there are a lot of names that seem like they’d be odd on a baby, but that’s why so many babies get silly nicknames such as Peanut and Sunshine and Lovebug: babies are ridiculous, and too cute and small for anything serious. But babies grow, and soon the baby that seemed too tiny and squooshy to be named Margaret seems absolutely right as a woman named Margaret. If you gave the baby a name that seemed just right for a baby, you’d likely find the baby outgrew it alarmingly early.

I don’t think you must continue to use family names just because you used a family name for your first, but it does make it more appealing to search out more family names. Do you have any other relatives you’d like to honor in this way?

I further think that because Rae is an honor name, it’s less important to coordinate the style of the sibling names—but I still do like the idea of coordinating where possible. Rae is an interesting challenge because the particular style doesn’t immediately spring to mind. It seems to me it goes well with a fairly wide swath of names. I don’t know if these would work with the surname, but these are the sorts of names I’d be looking at:

Alice
Anne
Bonnie
Claire
Delia
Eve
Flora
Georgia
Gwen
Iris
Ivy
Jane
Jean
Jill
Joan
Joy
Lucy
Lydia
Lynn
Marlo
Molly
Opal
Polly
Sally
Sylvie
Tess

Or would you want to do another “We use this name either way, boy or girl” name? Casey, Avery, Teagan, Lee/Leigh, Bailey, Charlie?

Name update:

Thanks Swistle and everyone for your help! My sweet Fred was born last week and is happy and healthy :)

Hi Swistle,

I have a question for you and your readers regarding hyphenated middle names.

A little background – we have four kids and are expecting our fifth, and likely last, baby in the fall. Our four kids are named Eli Michael (mn after my dad), Ezra Matthew (mn after my husband), Emmeline Kaye (mn after my mother-in-law) and Eben Jacob (mn after my grandfather). We pronounce our daughter’s full name as Em-eh-LEEN, but mostly call her Emme (pronounced like Emmie). The first names are all names that we loved and middle names all honor various family members. Now we are expecting another girl and will likely follow the pattern of choosing an E name that we like for the first name and a family name for the middle name. Our top choice right now is Eulalie, with Elisabeth and Edwina as distant alternatives. In terms of middle names, we’d like to honor my grandmother Ada. I like the sound of Eulalie Ada, but not nearly as much as that of Eulalie Ada-Rose. (Rose is not a family name, just a name we like.) Other family names we’ve considered are Bella (my other grandmother’s name) and Anna (my name), but I like Ada-Rose the most, I think.

And that brings me to my question. I know plenty of people have hyphenated last names, but what about a hyphenated middle name? My husband thinks I’m created unnecessary difficulties, but I like Eulalie Ada-Rose considerably more than Eulalie Ada Rose, and I like that a hyphen makes it clear that Ada-Rose are both part of the middle name and not part of the first name. But is it worth the trouble? What is the trouble, exactly? This is unchartered territory for us so I was curious if you or your readers had any insights.

Thank you! We really appreciate it.

I haven’t had to manage a hyphen before, so I will be very interested to hear what complications people with hyphens have had: do some forms not accept them? do some forms eliminate them? do people sometimes omit them accidentally, creating hyphenless mash-ups? etc.

But I HAVE dealt with a double middle name, so I can tell you two things that appeal to me right away about your hyphen idea:

1. It makes it clear that the two names are both middle names. We occasionally (at least, before I learned to head it off at the pass) had people thinking that the second middle name was part of a two-name surname.

2. It gives you ONE middle initial even though you get both names. We fairly regularly encounter forms that allow for only one middle initial, and it bothers me to have to pick one. Eulalie Ada-Rose would have the middle initial “A.”

And in your particular case, there is one more reason to favor the hyphen:

3. All the other kids have one middle name, not two; using Ada-Rose makes it feel like one middle name. It’s no big deal to suddenly break the pattern—but I say that with a deep forehead wrinkle. It would bother me a little, though I do feel that with The Last Baby you can pretty easily use the explanation “We ran out of babies but not out of names!” or “It was our one last chance to use Rose!” or whatever.

But also one reason to be against it:

1. All of the other kids have family middle names, and now this last child’s middle would be a family name combined with a non-family name. It dilutes the honor and changes the pattern. Especially if your Grandma Ada is still alive, I wouldn’t want to make her wonder why everyone else got their name honored as-is, but hers was modified. Again: it’s no big deal to break a pattern if you want to. But: deep forehead wrinkle.

Name update:

Hi Swistle,

Thank you so much to you and to your readers for posting our question regarding a hyphenated middle name for our fifth child whom we planned to call Eulalie. For nearly all of this pregnancy that was our top choice for our daughter’s name, but towards the last couple weeks my husband wanted to find something “less frilly and more solid”. We went back to the drawing board and both agreed that we liked the nickname Edie. Our baby girl was born on November 1 (just barely missing a Halloween birthday) and we were still going back and forth between Elodie and Edolie. We picked Elodie initially, but it just didn’t seem to match her spunky little personality. After spending a little more time with her, I new Edith was the right name for our little girl. For her middle name, I wanted to honor one of the women on my side of the family since our older daughter’s middle name is after my wonderful mother-in-law. Finally, we landed on Annabel as a middle name with Anna after yours truly and “Bel” after my late maternal grandmother, Bella. I am a bit sad that we didn’t incorporate my other grandmother’s name (Ada) into Edith’s name somehow, but I do love Annabel as a m.n. for our little Edith (I was also considering Adabel, but didn’t like it as much) and I know my late grandma Ada would have absolutely approved. Thank you again for all your advice. We can’t wait to take baby Edith home today and introduce her to all her big brothers and sister.

Best,
Anna

Hello Swistle,

My husband and I would greatly appreciate some help in naming our first child, a baby girl due in November. Prior to finding out the sex, we thought we had narrowed down our names: Maren Luna for a girl and Ezra Adair for a boy.
Maren: Latin for sea – my husband and I are both obsessed with the ocean and find it very therapeutic, so we loved it
Luna: After Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter. I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan and so is my husband, and Luna embodies many traits we would love to see in our daughter (quirky, true to herself and ignores the judgements of others, intelligent, very loyal)

Ezra: A beautiful Hebrew name (we are Jewish) that we love the sound of
Adair: Unique and we like the meaning. My husband has connections to Scotland and it’s has a Scottish origin which we liked

So, we found out we were having a girl and there we were: Maren Luna! However, that very same day (somehow it took over a month to notice this…) I realized that there is no way I want to name my daughter Maren because it is literally a perfect combination of my husband’s and my name: Mark and Lauren. Mark, Lauren, and Maren… I just can’t do it!

So, we are back at square one. Names we like but are way too popular for us are:
Amelia
Hazel
Olivia
Charlotte

Names I like that my husband isn’t sold on:
Reese
Micah
Navi (nah-vee)
Arielle
Juliette

Names my husband likes that I’m not sold on:
Amaya
Flora
Talia
Aviva

While we would love to keep Luna as the middle name, we are more concerned with finding the perfect first name and going from there. And while I realize that none of the names I listed above fit this theme, I loved the sound of Maren Luna with the -en ending on the first name and a more feminine sounding middle name. So clearly we are all over the board. At this point we want at least two children (three tops) and still intend to use Ezra Adair if we have a boy in the future.

Thank you so much for your insight!

I think we should start by making sure you really don’t want to use Maren. On one hand you have told us clearly that there is no way and you just can’t do it, so there’s no reason for me to be sitting here discussing something you’ve been so clear on. On the other hand, if we were in actual fact sitting in my office and having some doughnuts and coffee while talking it over, I would want to pick at it just a little more to be absolutely sure.

For one thing, I’m not sure what percentage of other people will notice, especially once more children are added to the family (“Mark, Lauren, and Maren” is more obvious than “Mark and Lauren / Maren and Ezra”) (although I admit I Really Notice It in either example)—and those who DO notice may think of it as cool/deliberate: name-combining is the sort of thing some parents go for on purpose. For another thing, sometimes a sudden realization about a name can have more force than it needs to: the surge of adrenaline from “I can’t believe we almost didn’t notice this!” can feel like a disaster averted, when really it’s just nice to have thought of it ahead of time. I’d hate to see you throwing away a name you love and agree on, if it’s the adrenaline talking.

But if there is no way and you can’t do it, then let’s see what else we can find. From the list of names you like and your husband isn’t sold on, I want to talk for a minute about Micah. Micah has somewhat unisex usage in the U.S. (3,718 new baby boys and 268 new baby girls in 2018), but is still mostly used for boys. If a future possible son is likely to be named Ezra, I wouldn’t use the name Micah for a girl: two male biblical names used together make it seem like the name Micah must be a boy in this case. (And in fact I recommend it for a future boy, if you have two: it would make a perfect little brother for an Ezra.)

I would have some similar concern with the name Reese, but at a much lower level: that spelling is used mostly for girls in the U.S., and it’s not a biblical name so it doesn’t make that fast connection with Ezra that Micah does. But I am not sure Reese works well as a sister name with the more feminine names on your lists: Talia and Reese, Juliette and Reese, Arielle and Reese, Flora and Reese.

I would personally cross out Navi: at my house where the Legend of Zelda video games have been played for years, Navi is an object of mockery. “Hey!,” we say in her piping fairy voice when we want to draw someone’s attention to something they already know about. “Hey! Listen! Hey!” But I am not sure how widespread that association would be.

From your list, my favorite is Juliette. I like that it’s familiar but underused, and I like its similarity to Amelia and Charlotte from your joint list.

From your husband’s list that you’re not sold on, I am particularly drawn to Flora. That seems to me to be a name that goes very well with the names that are too popular for you, such as Hazel, Charlotte, and Amelia: Flora is appealingly old-timey, and contains the same sounds as more popular names, but seems to have missed the Cora/Nora/Theodore/Eleanor popularity. Her name would mesh well with her peers’ names, while still standing out as a fresh surprise. And I find it charming with a possible future brother named Ezra. Flora is my top favorite for you and I am feeling the impulse to try to force you to love it, so let’s take a break and think of some more possibilities:

Athena
Bianca
Cecily
Claudia
Constance
Cordelia
Corinne
Dalia
Delphine
Fern
Fiona
Freya
Georgia
Isadora
Linnea
Liviana
Lyra
Margot
Mariel/Meriel/Miriel
Mariella
Maris/Meris
Meredith
Minerva
Mirren
Philomena
Polly
Rosemary
Sabrina
Simone
Sylvia
Willa
Winifred

From this list, my favorite is Meredith. Underused; keeps the sea meaning, loses the similarity to your own names. Meredith Luna Gilbert. Maybe one day Meredith and Ezra.

Name update:

Our daughter’s name is Maren Luna.