{"id":14267,"date":"2019-07-17T08:40:03","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T12:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=14267"},"modified":"2019-09-13T19:17:48","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T23:17:48","slug":"baby-boy-roan-brother-to-casen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2019\/07\/17\/baby-boy-roan-brother-to-casen\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Boy Roan, Brother to Casen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello Swistle!<\/p>\n

I just recently discovered your site and am amazed by what you do! I’d love to hear your thoughts on our current situation. We are expecting our second son at the very end of August and are having a terrible time agreeing on names this time around. Our first boy is Casen (Kay-sin) Parker and was such an easy name for us to agree on. Our surname is Roan (rhymes with bone). For the longest time, I had the name Grady picked out for another son, with no middle name in particular. My husband eventually agreed, but I think that’s because we hadn’t really found anything better. We also considered Callen and Nolan in the process, but they just weren’t “it.” Now that it’s getting closer to his arrival, my heart just isn’t into the name and I’m having trouble committing.<\/p>\n

Someone recently suggested the name Barrett to us, which I melted – instantly fell in love. I love the potential nicknames (Bear, or Rett) and I was excited to use the middle name Henry (a family name) with it. BUT… after the high of the discovery, I remember my brother’s dog’s name is also Barrett. After discussing this with my mom whom I’m very close to, she is trying to talk me out of it and thinks it’s a bad idea. She knows I have a preference for uncommon names, and rattled off someone else who has used the name in the past 5 years. I’m also extremely worried that this will make my brother or his wife upset (I am more worried about the wife as she has a very… unique personality) and I am not the type of person to make waves. My husband also really likes the name, more so than any other we’ve discussed so far, which makes it really hard to turn away from.<\/p>\n

So, my question is this: do I move forward with the new name we love, stick with the one we had already picked, or start from scratch? I appreciate any advice you have!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

These are my thoughts:<\/p>\n

1. I am very in favor of taking into account other people’s feelings about baby names, especially if someone else has already used the name you want to use. And, simultaneously, I am a “names are not one-time-use items and the other people weren’t the first ones to use it either” person.<\/p>\n

2. I care very much less about using someone else’s PET’S name. That is, I don’t think pet names fall into the same sort of “be careful, be kind, take feelings into account” category I’d use for someone else’s child’s name. I had a cat named Oliver and so I chose not to use that name for Henry even though I wanted to (Paul said his mother would never have let it go, and did a credible imitation of her “joking” about “the boy who was named for a cat!” and it killed it for me), but if a friend had a cat\/dog\/rabbit\/hamster named Oliver, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the name for a baby if I wanted to. Well, okay, I would hesitate, but I tend to be over-anxious about things; I think in the end the hesitation\/anxiety would not kill the name for me.<\/p>\n

3. You know better than we do how much of an issue this is likely to be for your sister-in-law. It’s easy for us to say ignore her or that she shouldn’t care, when we’re not the ones who have to deal with the possible fall-out. My hope is that even if your brother\/sister-in-law didn’t like that you used the name, that it would not be a big deal and in time it would be no deal at all. But if you suspect they’re the sort of people who would never let it go, that may be a factor as it was for me when I thought about my mother-in-law never letting go of the cat’s name.<\/p>\n

4. I think your mom didn’t immediately love the name Barrett and that’s why she’s mentioning the one other person she’s heard of with the name. According to the Social Security Administration<\/a>, the name Barrett was the #213th most popular boy name in the U.S. in 2018, which is not very common at all. I wanted to reassure you here by comparing its popularity to the popularity of the name Casen, but that turned out to be challenging because of all the possible spellings: there were only 380 new baby boys named Casen in 2018, but another 500 named Cason, another 785 named Kason, another 693 named Kasen, another 420 named Kaysen, another 961 named Kayson, another 424 named Cayson, another 153 named Caysen, and so on. But with only those first eight spellings I thought of (and I don’t even know if those are the most common), we’re up to 4,316 Casen variants born in 2018; for comparison, there were only 1,802 new baby boys named Barrett that same year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In summary, I’m in favor of you going ahead and planning to use this name that made your heart melt. I’d leave yourself open to finding other names you like better still, just in case such a name exists, but I wouldn’t let either your brother’s dog’s name or your mom’s tepid initial reaction put you off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Thank you so much for your thoughtful advice! I ended up chatting with my brother and his wife, and they were totally supportive of our name choice. But in the end, we found another family middle name that gave us a total change of heart.<\/p>\n

We welcomed Grady Haze into our family on September 4th and had absolutely no reservations about our decision! Funny how things work out.<\/p>\n

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

Hello Swistle! I just recently discovered your site and am amazed by what you do! I’d love to hear your thoughts on our current situation. We are expecting our second son at the very end of August and are having a terrible time agreeing on names this time around. Our first boy is Casen (Kay-sin) […]<\/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-14267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3I7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267","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=14267"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14348,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14267\/revisions\/14348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}