{"id":11414,"date":"2015-06-17T08:51:28","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T12:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=11414"},"modified":"2015-06-17T17:39:28","modified_gmt":"2015-06-17T21:39:28","slug":"baby-boy-or-girl-hll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2015\/06\/17\/baby-boy-or-girl-hll\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Boy or Girl H!ll"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good Morning! My husband and I are in the process of starting our family soon and love talking baby names, but are struggling to set on a name! (Plus, we are the TWO most indecisive people I know…) To start, our last name is H!ll. A few things…
\n1. We don’t want a first name that can be nicknamed, and 2. we want the middle name (or first!) to be an honor name.
\nAt this point, we think we will keep our family small with only one or two little babes :)<\/p>\n

We have some boy names we LOVE but can’t decide. The following are our favorite combos:
\n-Jack Anderson (Anderson is an honor name)
\n-Judd Anderson OR Judd August (Our wedding month)
\n-Beau Anderson
\n-Hank Anderson<\/p>\n

And as far as girl names… ugh. So many to choose! We love classic, older names. We were both raised in the midwest, but now live in the south and have fallen in love with older, southern sounding names.
\nSome names we love:
\n-Hattie or Haddie
\n-Grace
\n-Annie
\n-Caroline
\n-Vivienne
\n-Ramsey<\/p>\n

Some girl names I love, but he isn’t crazy about:
\n-Daphne
\n-Seraphina ( I know, I know… this one could be nicknamed ;)
\n-Phoebe<\/p>\n

Honor names we like but don’t know what to do with:
\n-Toni
\n-Ann
\n-Rose
\n-Olivia
\n-August
\n-Anderson
\n-Edward<\/p>\n

Thanks so much! I love your blog :)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am going to stay fairly general, since it’s early days. It can be so much easier to make a decision when there is a baby growing and a due date impending, and it helps considerably that you both love to discuss names. (I’m so envious of that last part. Paul was more the “Ug, do we HAVE to talk about baby names?? You’re only 8 months pregnant!” type.)<\/p>\n

My first note is to make sure you’re trying your name candidates without the middle name, since that’s the way they’ll mostly be said and used. If you are saying aloud, “Beau Anderson H!ll,” that’s a very different sound than “Beau H!ll.”<\/p>\n

My second note is that your surname is little tricky. First names ending in a hard C\/K sound tend to make H!ll into Kill, and I noticed that a lot of combinations brought associations to mind. Jack H!ll, for example, makes me think of Jack and Jill going up the hill. Annie H!ll makes me think of Annie Hall. Hank H!ll makes me think of Hank H!ll from King of the Hill<\/a>, even though I haven’t watched that show since the late ’90s. Are any of these Giant Serious Concerns? No, and a couple of those references get more dated by the day—but they’re the sorts of things I like to take into account when making a decision, rather than getting surprised by them as I start announcing the baby’s name.<\/p>\n

My third note is to watch for style outliers. For example, looking over your list of girl names, Ramsey is a stand-out. If you have one child, or if you prefer sibling names not to coordinate, this isn’t an issue; if, however, sisters named Ramsey and Vivienne strike you as startling, it’s good to have thought of that ahead of time.<\/p>\n

You’ve got some great honor names to work with. My suggestion there is to work first on the first name: add any honor names you might want to use as first names to the list, and narrow that list down. Once you’re down to your finalist first names, start bringing in the middle names. If, for example, you have your girl-name list down to Caroline or Hattie, then start pairing them up with honor middle names: Caroline Olivia H!ll, Hattie Anderson H!ll, Caroline August H!ll, Hattie Rose H!ll, etc. If, on the other hand, you decided on Annie or Rose or Anderson as a first name, you could then look for non-honor names for the middle names: perhaps names that weren’t quite right as first names but you still want to use them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good Morning! My husband and I are in the process of starting our family soon and love talking baby names, but are struggling to set on a name! (Plus, we are the TWO most indecisive people I know…) To start, our last name is H!ll. A few things… 1. We don’t want a first name […]<\/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-11414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2Y6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414","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=11414"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11422,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions\/11422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}