{"id":10713,"date":"2014-12-08T11:02:23","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T15:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10713"},"modified":"2014-12-08T15:44:07","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T19:44:07","slug":"baby-naming-issue-should-i-choose-a-traditional-name-to-avoid-my-child-spelling-both-his-first-and-last-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/12\/08\/baby-naming-issue-should-i-choose-a-traditional-name-to-avoid-my-child-spelling-both-his-first-and-last-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Should I Choose a Traditional Name to Avoid My Child Spelling Both His First and Last Names?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle!<\/p>\n

I am so excited to write to you, I can barely type. Ha! Your blog feeds my inner naming desires. :)<\/p>\n

My name is Christy. Hubby is Andrew. After four years of marriage, I still have extreme difficulty accepting my husband’s last name, which is Stewart, minus the T at the end. I have unofficially hyphenated my last name, but go by my maiden name 99.9999999% of the time.<\/p>\n

I dislike the last name for several reasons such as: it needs to be spelled out every time it is spoken, often mispronounced (My kindergarteners called me Mrs. Sewer for a week), and I do not like the sound of it in general.<\/p>\n

Anyway, we are pregnant for our fist child- a baby boy in March! YAY!<\/p>\n

My dilema is the following: Should I choose a traditional name to avoid my child spelling both his FIRST and LAST name for a lifetime?<\/p>\n

We would like 3-4 children. We take a liking to slightly askew names such as Julian, Beckett, Elliott, Corbin, or Sebastian. However, I am not against traditional names such as Benjamin, Will, or Thomas.<\/p>\n

Is spelling your first and last name something you just get use to? I am no stranger to spelling “Christy” as there are many variations.<\/p>\n

Second, do you think I’ll learn to love my husband’s last name once my baby is here?
\nThank you for your input. I appreciate your on-going creativity and attention to details with names.
\n-Christy<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am getting stuck on a couple of details. If we were talking in person, I would be saying “One: Is your LEGAL NAME your maiden name or your married name? Two: In what situations do you use your married name? Three: In what situations do you use your maiden name? Four: In what situations do you use the hyphenated form?” And so on.<\/p>\n

But that would just be to satisfy my own curiosity: none of that really matters for what you’re asking. WHATEVER the surname situation, if it has been four years and you’re still having a very hard time with your husband’s surname, and you almost never use it yourself—is NOT using your husband’s surname for the children a possibility? Could you and the kids (and your husband too, if you’d like a unified family name) have YOUR surname? It doesn’t seem likely that you’d start loving his surname after the baby was born, though you may feel slightly less negative about it with time. I dislike Paul’s surname (hard to spell and pronounce, and I think it has an unpleasant sound), but as the years go by I do get more accustomed to it—and perhaps that has in part been from hearing it on my children.<\/p>\n

To move on to your next question, I don’t see any reason to choose a first name you don’t have to spell, just because you DO have to spell the surname. I think it’s very common to have to spell both names (for not-sure-I-heard-it reasons as often as for not-sure-I-know-how-to-spell-it reasons), and that yes, we get used to it. Awhile back I worked at a pharmacy, and all day long we had people spelling their first and last names for us. Unless your maiden name is something really easy, my guess is that you’ve had a lifetime of experience with this yourself. Certainly I’d avoid making it deliberately HARDER (Bennjamin, Bekkitt), but that’s not the sort of spelling you’re considering. In short, I don’t find spelling my name to be a huge burden, and I don’t think you have to choose the name Thomas if you prefer the name Sebastian.<\/p>\n

And if you DO use your husband’s surname for the baby even though you hate the name, that seems to me even MORE reason to choose a first name you love, rather than choosing something to accommodate the surname.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle! I am so excited to write to you, I can barely type. Ha! Your blog feeds my inner naming desires. :) My name is Christy. Hubby is Andrew. After four years of marriage, I still have extreme difficulty accepting my husband’s last name, which is Stewart, minus the T at the end. I […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2MN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10713","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=10713"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10719,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10713\/revisions\/10719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}