{"id":10167,"date":"2014-07-21T06:46:58","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T10:46:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10167"},"modified":"2016-11-21T08:09:22","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T12:09:22","slug":"baby-boy-lamberton-brother-to-annie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/07\/21\/baby-boy-lamberton-brother-to-annie\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Boy Lamberton, Brother to Annie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,<\/p>\n

I’m hoping you can help us out with a few suggestions for a boy’s name. We just found out that our child due in mid-November is a boy, which is great, except for the fact that we only can find girl names that we like!<\/p>\n

Our last name is Lamberton, and we have a daughter (who will be 2 when her little brother arrives) whose name is Annie (not Anne, Anna, Ann… Annie – we knew that’s what we would end up calling her for a long time, though we are not nickname-averse).<\/p>\n

Girl names we’ve liked:
\nMargaret (Maggie)
\nClara
\nTalulah, Louisa (Lulu as a nickname for either of those, although we weren’t entirely sold on the alliteration with our last name)<\/p>\n

Boy names we’ve liked but nixed:<\/p>\n

Elliot (our friends have a son named Elliot and it would feel weird to us)
\nHenry (I love it still, but my husband is less sure about it… it doesn’t feel right to him.)
\nCharles (I like it, husband doesn’t)
\nJames (we’re kind of on the fence – it’s my one brother’s first name, but he goes by his middle name)
\nBeckett, nickname “Beck”. – I really liked it until I saw a sign for Beck beer….
\nOliver – love it, especially with Annie, except for the fact that my far-more-astute-than-I friend pointed out that both our children would then be named after orphans.<\/p>\n

We’ve also nixed a lot of the really popular names right now: Mason, Liam, Noah, Owen (he’ll have a big cousin named Owen)… Names ending in “-aden” don’t even enter the discussion.<\/p>\n

Using “Richard” as a middle name is a possibility, as it is a strong family name on both sides, but my brother has already used it as the middle name for his son, so we don’t need to use it… but it would be nice to find something that could go with it.<\/p>\n

My husband is Benjamin (goes by Ben), so that is probably out, although I do love it as a name. Basically, we like interesting names that are more timeless than trendy. Oh, also, we’d probably like to steer clear of names beginning with a “B”. We’re already having our first two children (I’d like more, at least I think I would, but my husband isn’t sold on that yet) at pretty much the exact same interval as my husband and his older sister, and since his sister’s name also begins with an “A”, I’d like to try to stop the similarities before they get too out of hand. Hmm… any other conflicts? Ben thinks it would be hilarious if the baby’s initials were “LOL”, but I beg to differ :)<\/p>\n

I hope that made sense… we obviously have some time, but I would just love an impartial third party’s opinion!<\/p>\n

Thank you so much,<\/p>\n

Kate Lamberton<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

The sibling pairing Annie and Oliver does immediately bring both musicals to my mind, even though I don’t think of the musicals with either name alone. Whether this is a problem or not depends on your own reaction to it: it would bother me, but if it doesn’t bother you I think there’s plenty of room to spin this as a musical theme rather than an orphan theme. I also think “named after” is too strong a condemnation: if you’re not deliberately naming the children with the fictional characters in mind, then it’s just a shared name rather than a namesake.<\/p>\n

I do love James from your nix list, though I would have liked it better with Anne or Anna: pairing it with Annie suddenly makes me feel as if the girls get cute names and the boys get serious names. To avoid this feeling, I think I would lean toward using a boy name with a similar nickname feel: Charlie\/Charley, for example, rather than Charles. Or Jack would be exactly the kind of thing I mean. I think Henry also works for this, perhaps because of the -y ending.<\/p>\n

Gus, perhaps? Gus Lamberton; Annie and Gus.<\/p>\n

Or Grady. Grady Lamberton; Annie and Grady.<\/p>\n

Or Eli. Eli Lamberton; Annie and Eli. My tongue gets just a little tangled, but not enough that I’d rule it out; I find I even like it, so perhaps tangled is the wrong word. I find I start saying it with a little sass.<\/p>\n

Or Theo. Theo Lamberton; Annie and Theo.<\/p>\n

Or I wonder if you’d like Milo: Oliver and Charles and Elliot and Henry and Milo were all finalists on my own name list. Milo Lamberton; Annie and Milo.<\/p>\n

Or Hugo. Hugo Lamberton; Annie and Hugo.<\/p>\n

Or George. George Lamberton; Annie and Georgie.<\/p>\n

Or Louis, if you find you’re pro-alliteration. Louis Lamberton; Annie and Louie.<\/p>\n

Elliot makes me think of Emmett and Everett. Emmett Lamberton; Annie and Emmett. Everett Lamberton; Annie and Everett.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Name update:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thank you all so much for all your helpful input!\u00a0 While I could have sworn that I updated you all after he was born, a quick Google search of our names (fueled by being overly awake from prepping lunches for the week and too much caffeine, as it’s 11:17pm here) revealed this query and the fact that I never did update you all!\u00a0 Thanks to R for checking back in in February (and I will now update my selections so that I receive updates should anyone else post)!<\/p>\n

We ended up naming our son Jacob Richard, and we call him Jake.\u00a0 Annie and Jake.\u00a0 They have just turned 4 and 2 years old respectively, and we think we really nailed it on the names for them.\u00a0 They are classic but with some flexibility, and while Jacob seems to always be on the top 10 lists for popularity, I know of only 2 others.<\/p>\n

In the end, I couldn’t go with Jack, knowing it was the name of my brother’s dog.\u00a0 That hasn’t stopped people in our family for accidentally saying “Jack” instead of “Jake”, but since my mother once went through all my brothers’ names and the dog’s (Choco) before finally landing on “Kate” one time, I figure that’s not so bad. ;-)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle, I’m hoping you can help us out with a few suggestions for a boy’s name. We just found out that our child due in mid-November is a boy, which is great, except for the fact that we only can find girl names that we like! Our last name is Lamberton, and we have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2DZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10167"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12419,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10167\/revisions\/12419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}