{"id":14729,"date":"2020-05-08T08:04:40","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T12:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=14729"},"modified":"2020-07-30T10:13:31","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T14:13:31","slug":"baby-girl-boy-twins-sounds-like-schooled-josephine-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2020\/05\/08\/baby-girl-boy-twins-sounds-like-schooled-josephine-and\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl-Boy Twins Sounds-Like-Schooled: Josephine and ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello!<\/p>\n

My husband and I tried to have a baby for many years, and to our delight ended up pregnant with twins due in July (a boy and a girl) thanks to fertility treatments. Yay! We’ve had girl names picked out for ages, but are struggling with what to name the boy. Having twins threw a wonderful wrench into our parenting plans.<\/p>\n

The babies will take on their father’s last name, which is a single syllable Irish name that sounds like “schooled.” However, their second middle name will be my last name, a British name which has two syllables and sounds like “caper.” We would prefer first names with at least two syllables that don’t have long vowel sounds since my husband’s name is so vowel heavy.<\/p>\n

We are partial to gender neutral names with a sense of family history. We’re naming our daughter Josephine. It’s significant to us because: a) There are many Josephs on both sides of the family (it’s my husband’s middle name, my father’s middle name, and the name of my husband’s grandfather), b) There are significant women with names that start with “Jo” in our families (Joyce and Joan – grandmothers), and c) I love that its short form can be gender neutral (Jo, Joey).<\/p>\n

We would love our son’s name to have the same kind of significance as his sister’s, but there aren’t a lot of male names related to our families that we like, or that we would saddle our kid with (Chester, Ernest, and Mervin for example), or that are particularly striking in the way that Josephine is (David, Frank, Steve, Chris).<\/p>\n

My husband loves the name Basil (his great-grandfather’s name), but I don’t because people will pronounce it differently and it reminds me of a muppet. I know we could do what seems obvious and give the name Joseph to our son, and find another girl name, but we’ve been dreaming about Josephine for years.<\/p>\n

Other boy names we’ve considered and like but aren’t set on:
\nArthur (Art)
\nJasper – I’m not a fan of alliterative twin names, so it’s halfway off the table for me
\nFinnigan (Finn)<\/p>\n

We’ve also thought about bird names, which I know sounds weird, but my husband has been calling the babies his little birds all throughout my pregnancy (so we’ve thought about Finch for example).<\/p>\n

Looking over this message makes us seem bananas! Syllable counts? Irish bird names? If you can help us out we will be eternally grateful.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\nCatherine<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

My family tree is similar with the male names: plenty of Mertons and Jameses, but not many equivalents of Josephine.<\/p>\n

Well. I do see one striking name I would like to pluck from the list of not-particularly-striking names: Frank. I think Franklin would be striking on a little boy, and fabulous with Josephine.<\/p>\n

Franklin always makes me think of Frederick, which I think would be similarly fabulous: Josephine and Frederick.<\/p>\n

Or, depending on how similar the surname is to Schooled, maybe Louis? I love that the nickname could be Lou, which is gender-neutral. But if the surname really does start with S, I probably would avoid names ending in S.<\/p>\n

Davis would make a good freshened-up honor for a David. Josephine and Davis. But again, probably not if the surname starts with S.<\/p>\n

Do you have any Edwards or Edwins or Edgars in the family tree? Edmund would be a nice with Josephine, and then both twins would have the first two letters of their names referencing family names.<\/p>\n

Oh! Oh! EVERETT! Josephine and Everett! With Ev as a pet name, if not a nickname-nickname.<\/p>\n

Or Elliot! Josephine and Elliot.<\/p>\n

And I love Arthur from your list.<\/p>\n

I am fond of a little twinniness to twin names: like, clearly not the Karen & Sharon \/ Timmy & Tommy type of thing that has thankfully gone mostly out of style, but subtler things such as reversed initials (i.e., J.E. and E.J.), or a matching number of letters\/syllables, or really just any little thing that would give me that feeling of a happy little link. We ended up not being able to make any of those things work, but we DID give our twins coordinated middle names totally by accident, and that has been pleasing to me. Along those lines, and combined with the bird situation, I wonder if it would be fun to give each twin a bird-related middle name. Josephine Lark and Elliot Finch. Josephine Starling and Everett Finch. Josephine Sparrow and Frederick Jay.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Thank you so much for your name suggestions, and for the thoughtful responses from readers of your blog! It gave my husband and I a lot to think about. In the end, Josephine Anne and Arthur Frank (Jo & Art) arrived safely on July 6th. We were stuck on Finnegan for a very long time, but decided against it because it just didn’t work for us any more. I quite liked it, but my husband felt it was too trendy. We kept circling back to Arthur and fell in love with the name all over again. Frank was my grandfather’s name. He passed earlier this year. We considered using Frank as a first name, as many people suggested, but I also have an uncle Frank who would have maybe misinterpreted the significance. Also, I’m a teacher, and I taught a Franklin earlier this year who was a complete pain which soured that version of the name for me (or at least took it off the table as a first name). <\/p>\n

The bird names as middle names idea was solid for quite a while, but ultimately we wanted to pay homage to more family members (Anne is after my late aunt, and is also my middle name). Of course, after the haze of the labour and delivery wore off we belatedly realized we’d given our children Anne Frank as middle names. Oops! <\/p>\n

Thanks again for your input! We had a lot to think about. <\/p>\n

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

Hello! My husband and I tried to have a baby for many years, and to our delight ended up pregnant with twins due in July (a boy and a girl) thanks to fertility treatments. Yay! We’ve had girl names picked out for ages, but are struggling with what to name the boy. Having twins threw […]<\/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-14729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3Pz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729","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=14729"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14867,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14729\/revisions\/14867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}