{"id":10649,"date":"2014-11-17T10:37:28","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T14:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10649"},"modified":"2015-12-29T08:35:18","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T12:35:18","slug":"baby-boy-or-girl-cldwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/11\/17\/baby-boy-or-girl-cldwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Boy or Girl C@ldwell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n

I have been a long time blog reader and am thrilled that I am finally pregnant (after two years of infertility!) and can pick your brain. Our last name is C@ldwell and I am due next spring. My husband and I have decided not the find out the gender of our little one. It is so easy for me to pick out girl names, I love unisex names with short feminine middle names. My husband and I have completely agreed on two girl names: Elliott Maeve and Sawyer Brynn. We have loved these two names for a long time and could realistically use Elliott for our first daughter and Sawyer for our second.<\/p>\n

We are in desperate need of help when it comes to boy names. My issue is I have this tendency to want to use masculine names for girls, and as a result most “boy” names are ones I would want to use for daughters. A great example of this is Jasper. My husband first mentioned the name and he absolutely loves it. I immediately thought it would be amazing for a little girl, which my husband is NOT on board with. After letting it sink in for a few months, I really have come around to the name Jasper for a boy, but for some reason, I can’t see it being the name of our little boy (does that make sense?).<\/p>\n

The other top contender right now is Graham. I like the name quite a bit, but worry it is not strong enough of a name next to his future sisters’ names? Another big concern is the worry that a child who is Graham C. will always be called graham cracker. My husband doesn’t like Grant or other similar sounding names.<\/p>\n

A few other names that made our lists are: Lincoln, Hudson, Desmond, Finn, Oliver. Again, all of these are great names but I have a hard time thinking of them as the name of my child. Our girl names feel so natural and I just wish we could find a boy name that felt just as right. I should also mention my husband is named Miles, which I love absolutely love, but we don’t want to name the baby after him. My two brother-in-laws are named Kaleb and Dylan which I like quite a bit as well. We would love any input of suggestions you have for our little one!! Thanks Swistle!<\/p>\n

Meghan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have been mulling this over, and I’m not sure what to advise. Awhile back we answered a similar question about siblings for a girl named Micah: What to Name the Siblings of a Child with a Gender-Neutral Name or with a Name Traditionally Given to the Opposite Sex<\/a>. In that post, I had to draw a bunch of pictures to explain what I meant, but the gist of it is what you seem to be getting at as well: if you have girls named Sawyer and Elliot, should the boys have names that are more boyish than their sisters’ names?<\/p>\n

In 2013, the name Sawyer was used for 683 new baby girls and 3,142 new baby boys. That same year, the name Elliott…well, that’s harder to figure out. Counting spellings used for more than 25 babies:<\/p>\n

Eliot: 27 F, 194 M
\nEliott: – F, 69 M
\nElliette: 115 F, – M
\nElliot: 308 F, 1486 M
\nElliott: 280 F, 1465 M
\nElliotte: 47 F, – M<\/p>\n

That’s 777 girls and 3,214 boys—very similar to the numbers for the name Sawyer. Both names are currently unisex but used more often for boys.<\/p>\n

I think that no matter what names you use for boys, there is going to be some occasional paperwork confusion as to whether children named Sawyer and Elliott are boys or girls. At first I thought my advice would be to reduce this effect by choosing very decisively boyish names for any boys—but I found I couldn’t muster or sustain enthusiasm for that plan. I think it’s that I can’t think of ANY names you could give to boys that would cause the names Sawyer and Elliot to read Obviously Girl on paper. Even if you named the children Sawyer, Elliott, Benjamin, and David, there will still be the occasional confusion about the names Sawyer and Elliott, and it seems like you’re aware of that and it’s not going to bother you. And the feminine middle names will help with paperwork confusion too.<\/p>\n

I guess I would suggest staying away from names that were unisex but used mostly for girls. For example, I wouldn’t recommend naming boys Emerson and Harper in this sibling group, because it doubles the confusion factor. But Graham seems good—great, even. It’s a name used almost exclusively for boys, and I don’t think it seems insufficiently strong with sisters Sawyer and Elliott. My guess is that a child named Graham will occasionally hear the graham cracker joke regardless of the surname; I would probably avoid using it with a Cr_____ or C______er surname, but just C doesn’t make me think of cracker.<\/p>\n

Jasper seems like another great choice. I do know what you mean, though, about really liking a name but feeling like it’s not Your Baby. I used that as a test, in fact, to narrow down my own lists: I’d imagine a baby in my arms, and then I’d try to picture the baby having each name in turn. Some of them clicked into place: YES, that’s MY baby. Others failed: great name, but not My Baby. Sometimes the test results change with time: it might happen that by spring, the name Jasper WILL seem like Your Baby. Or it may be that it’s the right name but for a second boy. Or it may continue to be “Great name, but not My Baby,” and so it’ll be the kind of name you try to talk your friends into using.<\/p>\n

This is a shot in the dark, but I wonder if it might apply. With my first pregnancy, Paul and I were both certain the baby was a girl: it isn’t that we thought it over and made our guess, it’s that we were assuming it without even realizing we were assuming it. Finding out at an ultrasound that we were in fact expecting a boy was a significant shock. We went home and spent the rest of the day in near-silence, just getting used to the intense surprise of it: the surprise of the baby being a boy, but also the surprise of realizing we’d been assuming the baby was a girl. I’ve wondered since then if that’s why we had strong girl-name candidates but a harder time coming up with boy names: when I pictured the baby in my arms, I think I was always picturing a girl. Subsequent boys were easier to name, I think because it was easier to picture the baby as a boy. Anyway, this might not apply to you at all, but if it DOES feel like it might be the case, it could be reassuring: it might not be that you haven’t found the right name yet, it might just be that it’s hard to use the same Rightness Detectors that you’re using for girl names.<\/p>\n

Even without a situation of that sort, many parents have an easier time with names of one sex than with names of the other sex. It could be that boy names will never click into place for you as naturally as girl names do: again, not because you haven’t found the right one yet, but because for whatever reason they just won’t click in like that for you during the naming process, and\/or because you never will feel as enthusiastic about boy names.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it IS that you haven’t found the right name yet! If so, there is still lots of time. I suggest the game I play with The Baby Name Wizard<\/a> book: look up a name you like (Miles, Graham, Jasper, Sawyer, Elliot, etc.), and then pick your favorite name of the suggested brother names. You don’t have to love the name: just pick the one you like BEST of those options, and look up THAT name. And so on: keep traveling until you think, “No, these are not my style at all; I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere,” or until you loop back around to your original name; then go back and try a different choice. I found that this helped me narrow things down a little: I found I kept cycling among the same dozen or so names, and all of them fell into the same few categories, so I felt like I started getting a better grasp on what my style was. I also added a few names to the list, because I kept seeing them again and again and they grew on me.<\/p>\n

With names such as Miles and Graham and Jasper, I think of names such as:<\/p>\n

Edmund
\nEverett (not with a sister Elliott)
\nFelix
\nFranklin
\nFrederick
\nGeorge
\nGideon
\nHarrison
\nIan
\nLouis
\nMalcolm
\nSebastian
\nSimon
\nTheodore
\nWesley<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Soon after I contacted you, we learned the exciting news that we were having twins! We didn’t find out their genders so we went into the hospital with names for every possible combination. We ended up having two beautiful boys and named them Jasper Aaron and Lincoln Michael.<\/p>\n

Thank you SO much for your help :)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle, I have been a long time blog reader and am thrilled that I am finally pregnant (after two years of infertility!) and can pick your brain. Our last name is C@ldwell and I am due next spring. My husband and I have decided not the find out the gender of our little one. […]<\/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-10649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2LL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10649","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=10649"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11813,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10649\/revisions\/11813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}