{"id":14051,"date":"2019-03-06T12:27:42","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T16:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=14051"},"modified":"2019-03-20T20:03:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T00:03:00","slug":"baby-girl-m-sister-to-jane-janie-and-maxwell-max-audrey-or-nellie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2019\/03\/06\/baby-girl-m-sister-to-jane-janie-and-maxwell-max-audrey-or-nellie\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl M., Sister to Jane (Janie) and Maxwell (Max): Audrey or Nellie?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m due in 2 weeks with baby #3, a girl, and our last baby. I have a girl named Jane (always goes by Janie) and a Maxwell (nearly always Max). I swore if I ever had another girl, I\u2019d name her Audrey. I\u2019ve loved the name forever.<\/p>\n

Somewhere in this pregnancy, though, I also fell in love with the name Nellie. We\u2019d use it as a stand alone, mostly because we don\u2019t love any of the more formal names for which it has been derived. I feel like it works alone as it was in the top 20 in the early 1900s for years. My kids love the name, my husband loves it and really I love it too. But I\u2019m so worried that I\u2019ll regret never using Audrey. I\u2019d bump Audrey to the middle spot, but we\u2019ve already selected a family name for the middle from my husband\u2019s side (which has been largely neglected during the naming of all of our children). Do you or readers have thoughts or clever solutions?<\/p>\n

Other considerations: I\u2019m worried about my Janie feeling like her name is \u201cboring\u201d, so I\u2019m resistant to using more flamboyant names (Penelope comes to mind). Our last name starts with M and we already have a Max so I\u2019d like to avoid using other M names.<\/p>\n

Thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

One possibility is that you love the name Audrey, you have always loved the name Audrey, you WILL always love the name Audrey, and you are just having a little fling with the name Nellie—but will come back to Audrey in the end (though we are running out of time for that to happen). Another possibility is that you love and have always loved and will always love the name Audrey, but now you have discovered the name Nellie and so all names have been re-ranked, and the challenger has defeated the champion.<\/p>\n

I’m interested to know what the situation was with your first daughter’s name. Had you always loved the names Jane and Audrey, and it was a huge struggle to decide which name to use first, and you finally decided on Jane but with the comforting thought that you could use the name Audrey next time? Or was the name Jane the clear favorite over the name Audrey? Or was the name Audrey the favorite, but there was another motivating reason (honor name, etc.) to use the name Jane?<\/p>\n

All of these things factor into the current decision, and I can’t tell from the letter which things are most likely to be the case. This is the kind of thing that would work best over coffee and doughnuts, while sitting in comfy chairs. We would pick through it piece by piece, and doughnut by doughnut.<\/p>\n

It is not uncommon to decide on a name, and then get nearly to the point of using the name and decide against using it. Sometimes it’s that a name seems like a great idea until an actual baby is on the way \/ almost born, at which point things click into a new kind of reality and the name doesn’t seem right at all. Sometimes it’s that a name is the chosen name for so long, it gets a little…stale, or something. Sometimes a name that would have been EXACTLY RIGHT at one point in time is, for whatever reason, no longer exactly right at a different point in time. Sometimes a better name comes along. It can then feel weird to change one’s mind—and, for some of us, it can feel worryingly RIPE FOR REGRET. What if we wish we’d stuck to our original decision??<\/p>\n

And our fears are not totally baseless, because it’s also not uncommon to decide on a name, and then get a crush on another name and go spinning out on that idea for a bit, but then come back with relief to the original decision. I am susceptible to that myself: Paul and I agree on a list of names, we decide on one name from that list—and then I hear a name on TV and OH MY GOSH I LOVE THAT NAME, WHAT IF THAT IS THE NAME?? But soon the name-crush fades and I’m back to our previous choice and glad the baby wasn’t born during that brief interlude when I was entertaining another name.<\/p>\n

But sometimes a name turns out to be not a crush but a dark horse. When Paul and I were naming Henry, we were down to two finalists, one of which was the near-certain front-runner but I didn’t want to give up discussing the other option yet, when abruptly a new name came out of nowhere: we had never considered it for any of our babies before. I thought it might just be a name crush, but after awhile it seemed more as if the reason we couldn’t commit to either of the two finalists was that neither of them was Right, and this new name was Right, and we did use it, and I’m glad. (I do think our previous finalist would have been a really good choice too, though, and I don’t think I’d have been sorry if we’d used it.)<\/p>\n

I think it can help to differentiate between a DECISION and an INTENTION. You can decide at age 12 to name a future daughter Emily because it is the most beautiful and perfect name in the world—but a couple of decades and an acquired co-parent and several actual pregnancies and a decade of Top-Ten Emilys later, that decision turns out to have been an INTENTION: the elements of the decision were not yet in place at age 12, so no decision was actually made. You weren’t 12 in your situation, but I would still say you intended<\/em> to name your second daughter Audrey, but now that all the elements of the decision are actually in place, this is when you get to make the actual decision. I don’t think you should feel bound by your earlier intention (if you ARE feeling at all bound by it).<\/p>\n

It has helped me, with time, to find that I maintain tender feelings for names we almost used, but in not a single case so far do I wish we’d used the Almost name instead. I think you can pick Nellie\/Audrey (whichever you end up preferring) as the given name, and end up just feeling ever-tender toward the name Audrey\/Nellie. I have several Almosts on my naming list, and I mention them pretty often on this blog in the hopes that others will use them, and I use a couple of them as pseudonyms for the kids, and I have secret hopes of seeing any of them used for grandchildren—but I don’t have any serious regrets about not using them. More like a fun “That was the name we Almost Used for you!”—but the name we Actually Used seems better.<\/p>\n

I think one option is to name her Audrey and nickname her Nellie. I can be on the conservative end of the spectrum about nicknames, and so you might expect me to be opposed to such an idea—but in this particular case it seems like it has the potential to solve the whole thing nicely. Anyone wondering about the connection can be told a cheery “She just SEEMED like a Nellie!”: even I, so conservative about nicknames, would think “Oh! Okay! That makes sense! Sometimes things happen that way!” And the name Audrey doesn’t have other any natural nicknames to fight for the role. And I like the parallel set-up of Jane\/Maxwell\/Audrey and Janie\/Max\/Nellie (instead of Nellie being the only one who has just one version of her name), and I like the idea of her ending up with a more formal name if she wants one later on, without you feeling forced to choose a traditional long-form you don’t like much. And the combination Audrey\/Nellie sounds right to me in a way that makes me wonder if I once read a book with an Audrey called Nellie. And also I just for whatever reason want you to have BOTH. I am perhaps getting soft in my later years.<\/p>\n

Oh wait! I have had another idea, and it is my top favorite: name her Nell. (Unless you already considered that option among other more-formal names for Nellie, but I am imagining you were thinking more along the lines of Eleanor and Penelope, because of the reference to not wanting to get fancier than Jane.) It’s less diminutive than Nellie as a given name, while still letting you use the diminutive as you do with the name Jane\/Janie, and it gives her a name\/nickname just like her siblings. Jane, Maxwell, and Nell; Janie, Max, and Nellie. My one concern is that this option highlights the similarity between the -ell of Maxwell and the -ell- in Nellie.<\/p>\n

And I think it’s worth reconsidering the middle name situation to decide which option the two of you like better \/ feel better about: using the honor name, or having a way to salvage\/save the name Audrey. Sometimes honor names just don’t come out even, and that’s okay, especially if this is a situation where your husband’s family has been honored in everyone’s surname.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n

I wrote you a few weeks ago on my naming dilemma (a sister for Janie and Max). My husband and I poured over the comments for the last few weeks, rereading them in the hospital in the hours following the birth of our little girl. We even briefly considered naming her Anneliese (nn Nell\/Nellie).<\/p>\n

We finally settled on Nell Audrey Mae Mxxxx. So far, we mostly call her Nellie Mae or Nellie girl. We love the simplicity\/dignity of Nell and the sweetness of Nellie. We weren\u2019t sure about having two middle names, but Audrey and Mae are family names from opposite sides, and the longer length of the double middle seems to balance the shortness of Nell. Thank you so much to you and your readers for all the help and input!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle, I\u2019m due in 2 weeks with baby #3, a girl, and our last baby. I have a girl named Jane (always goes by Janie) and a Maxwell (nearly always Max). I swore if I ever had another girl, I\u2019d name her Audrey. I\u2019ve loved the name forever. Somewhere in this pregnancy, though, 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":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3ED","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051","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=14051"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14082,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051\/revisions\/14082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}