{"id":16157,"date":"2023-01-30T21:10:14","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T01:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=16157"},"modified":"2023-04-25T19:24:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T23:24:41","slug":"baby-girl-or-boy-shultee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2023\/01\/30\/baby-girl-or-boy-shultee\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl or Boy Shultee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,<\/p>\n

My husband and I are excited to be expecting our first baby in April and the sex of the baby will be a surprise! We have a shortlist of good girl names but are stumped on a boy name.<\/p>\n

For girls, we like classic names that are now top 100 but not too popular, including Eliza, Josephine, and Audrey. Josephine and Eliza are also middle names on my side of the family, so I like the subtle honoring there.<\/p>\n

My husband is named after his paternal grandfather and suggested we could name a boy after one or both of his grandfathers. His dad is named John and mine is named Wesley. These are both nice names that would fit with our girls\u2019 name choices, as we do plan to have more children. Both sets of parents live nearby and will be involved in childcare. The baby will have my husband\u2019s surname (sounds like Shultee). My surname will likely be a second middle name.<\/p>\n

My questions\/concerns:<\/p>\n

1) Does giving a child an honor name that is directly used by living close relatives get confusing? I know men have managed this for years by going by Jr. or some nickname, but I still feel hesitant. This is a bigger issue with John (grandfather plus two great-uncles plus my parents having a dog named Jack) than it is with Wesley. It\u2019s also a much greater honor than any of the women in our families would get with this baby if she were a girl (unfortunately, our mothers have names that would sound a little strange on a baby born today).<\/p>\n

2) If we abandon using John or Wesley as first names, what else should we consider?<\/p>\n

Others that have made our shortlist (though none feel 100% right) are:<\/p>\n

Brody (Too 2010s? Would this clash with names for future kids?)<\/p>\n

Ezra<\/p>\n

Micah (Although we are religious, we worry this might sound a little overtly biblical- this applies to Ezra to some extent)<\/p>\n

Thomas (and some other classic boy names that are like it- but I know so many people with this name that it doesn\u2019t feel very fresh to me)<\/p>\n

Stylistically, names like Oliver or Theodore would fit well if they weren\u2019t so terribly trendy, particularly where we live.<\/p>\n

Thank you for your votes and suggestions!<\/p>\n

Allie<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oh! I can give one data point from my own personal experience! One of my children has the same first name as my dad and, when my kids were younger, my parents lived nearby and we saw them often and they babysat the kids and so forth. And what we realized was that only one person was affected by the duplicate name, because only my mom calls both my dad and my son by their first names—and even she only used my dad’s first name when talking with her peers. So for example, if we were in a family gathering, there was no issue: we all called my dad Grandpa or Dad, and we called the child by his first name. In that context, even my mom would refer to her husband as Grandpa or Dad when talking about him or to him, depending on who she was talking about\/to him in front of. And if my parents were babysitting the kids, everyone called my son by his first name and referred to my dad as Grandpa, including my mom. But if my mom were talking with one of her friends, then she would have to say “[Name]…oh, I mean HUSBAND-Name…” or “[Name]…oh, I mean GRANDSON-Name…”—but that wasn’t a big deal either, because it was usually clear already from context: i.e., either they were discussing their husbands\/marriages or they were discussing their grandchildren.<\/p>\n

It can get more confusing in a situation where more people in the family have the name: for example, if the child has a grandfather AND an uncle with the name, which later happened in our family. But we all just refer to the uncle as Uncle [Name] when there’s any doubt—even those of us whose uncle he is not. It’s no big deal. And in your case it sounds like it’s GREAT-uncles, and it seems like their names would come up even less often.<\/p>\n

The dog named Jack seems…less relevant. If the dog is a puppy, and so likely has many more happy years with us, it’s possible I might take it into account—but I doubt it. Especially because I want to encourage you to call the child John, not Jack, and I’m hoping the dog’s name will help me with that. I think you are likely to find that the name John has an unexpected\/overlooked freshness on a baby.<\/p>\n

But if you would like to lean on those issues as reasons not to use John, you have my full support because: I think you should use YOUR dad’s name. The baby will already have the surname of your husband’s family and, if the baby is named for his grandfather because his father was, then he is also following a naming pattern from your husband’s family. Let it at least be a name from your side of the family. The only thing I don’t love is the repeated -ey\/-ee sound of the ending with the surname, but it doesn’t feel like a dealbreaker to me. (This is the kind of thing where I soothe my mind by leafing through a yearbook and seeing HOW VERY MANY people have names with repeated endings: it’s the sort of thing that stands out a lot more during the Naming Phase than it does later in life.)<\/p>\n

If you decide to abandon the grandfather-name idea (and it would bother me too that there is no similar honor that would work for any of the names of the women in the family) (and DID bother me too when I went ahead and did it anyway for one of my own kids), then I would like to start by crossing Brody right off your list. I think it’s an outlier name for you. If you find it’s your favorite and you are pining to use it, I suggest making little imaginary sibling groups to make sure you can find combinations you like with it.<\/p>\n

Ezra and Micah do tip a little more biblical than what you’ve got going on with your girl-name list, but I think they work fine and are not startling. I agree that Oliver and Theodore are better coordinated, but I see your point about the popularity—and it’s pretty common for parents to have a different naming style for boy names than for girl names. More possibilities to consider:<\/p>\n

Calvin
\nCharles
\nEdmund
\nElliot
\nEmmett
\nEverett
\nFranklin
\nFrederick
\nGeorge
\nGrant
\nIan
\nJasper
\nJoseph
\nJulian
\nLeo
\nLouis
\nMiles
\nReid
\nSimon
\nWarren<\/p>\n

You are probably already thinking of this, but my FAILURE to think thoroughly about it when naming my firstborn has caused me to mention it on this blog whenever I feel the smallest impulse: be careful when naming your firstborn that you’re not using a name that rules out names you’d like to use later. For example! Let’s say you would rather not repeat any initials, and your absolute top favorite girl name is Eliza—then it would be good, if this baby is a boy, to remember NOT to use Edmund, Elliot, Emmett, Ezra, etc., unless you like one of those names BETTER for a boy than you like Eliza for a girl; and if your absolute top favorite girl name is Josephine, then you’d want to be careful not to use John or Joseph for a boy. If you use Ezra\/Eliza, does it rule out using Eliza\/Ezra, because of the repeated sounds? Oh, and even things like, if you name a baby Wesley, would it bother you to have the similar -ey ending of Audrey?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Hello Swistle,
\nThank you to you and your readers for weighing in on boy names for us! We appreciated the perspectives of those who used honor names in their families and the additional suggestions that people gave. We did end up having a baby boy! We named him Wesley John after his grandfathers. Our families were delighted and we think the name suits him well! <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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

Dear Swistle, My husband and I are excited to be expecting our first baby in April and the sex of the baby will be a surprise! We have a shortlist of good girl names but are stumped on a boy name. For girls, we like classic names that are now top 100 but not too […]<\/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-16157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-4cB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16157","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=16157"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16287,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16157\/revisions\/16287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}