G. writes:<\/p>\n
\nMy husband, Austin and I were advised to visit your website for some advice and we hope you can help us out!<\/div>\nIn 2009 we had our first and very beautiful little girl, Clara Evelyn. Since having Clara we have discussed the names of her siblings and we ecstatic to find, that we were expecting our 2nd little girl, due in December.\u00a0<\/div>\nClara’s name wasn’t decided until a week before my due date, so our family didn’t know until birth. This time around we were so prepared and had the name on the day of the gender reveal. We had decided on the name Phoebe Matilda. We just love the sound of Clara & Phoebe and couldn’t wait to tell everyone.\u00a0<\/div>\nWe decided to tell them all at a family BBQ this week. We had found this cute way of revealing it, when my sister bursts out in laughter. She quickly stopped, when she saw our serious faces and eventually told us how weird it was, that our daughter had the initial PMS, Phoebe Matilda Sharpe.<\/div>\nNow, my husband and I have talked about this quite a bit and aren’t sure what to think. How big of a deal is this? Should we really avoid naming our daughter Phoebe Matilda? We aren’t really sure and the entire family seemed to think of this as a big deal.<\/div>\nAn alternative could be to do Matilda Phoebe Sharpe, but since this isn’t our favorite option we wanted some outside opinions on how big of a problem this seems to be.<\/div>\nWould you ever name your daughter or son with something that gave them some odd initials?<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nThere is a nice wide spectrum of opinion on this subject. On one end are people who even prefer for initials to spell things, and then it goes into the area of “Who cares? No one will ever notice or care,” and then into “Well, I’d rather not, but I wouldn’t sacrifice a name I loved just because of that,” and then to the far end of definitely being willing to sacrifice a name to avoid initials.<\/p>\n
To most of us, it depends on the initials: something like JAB or ANT is not in the same league as something like ASS or FUK. I consider the initials PMS to be toward the less acceptable end—in the BRA and PIG and B.O. neighborhood, perhaps. I would not want those initials myself, and would rather sacrifice part of the name than use them.<\/p>\n
To me, it seems like the middle name is the clear area for sacrifice: the first name is presumably your favorite name of all options, and the surname is set, and you haven’t mentioned any pressing reason to use that middle name (for example, a family naming tradition or important honor name). So if I were you, I’d keep your happy combination of Clara and Phoebe, and I would find another wonderful middle name. Phoebe Estelle? Phoebe Cordelia? Phoebe Lydia? Phoebe Eliza? Phoebe Celeste? The quest would not be for a name you liked better than Matilda, but rather for the name you liked best of all the remaining names.<\/p>\n
Let’s have a poll over to the right, to flesh out the rest of the opinion spectrum. [Poll closed; see results below.]<\/p>\n
Poll results for “The initials PMS”<\/b> (604 votes total):<\/p>\n
I wouldn’t mind – 96 votes (16%)
I’d change the name – 466 votes (77%)
I can’t decide – 42 votes (7%)<\/p>\nName update!<\/b> G. writes:<\/p>\n
We got wonderful advice from both you and your posters. We quickly decided that letting go of this name was necessary despite of our love for it. Big sister Clara was still going to have baby sister, Phoebe but we went on a hunt for a new middle name.
Not many names were as loved as Matilda but we dug up our old list of names and found Juliette. Phoebe Juliette Sharpe sounded alright but being so focused on initials, my husband kept saying PJs. Moving on!
Vivienne, an old family name from my French side of the family, came to mind. Phoebe Vivienne Sharpe! That sounded so cute in my ears with that French touch but everyone around us pronounced it like Vivian, which wasn’t really to our liking. Moving on!
Well, someone mentioned that giving Phoebe the middle name initial E would be a cute little thing to share with big sister, Clara Evelyn. Bingo! Phoebe Eleanor Sharpe. And there it was and just 4 days later, our baby girl, Phoebe Eleanor joined us.
We want to thank you all for helping us out, and we now know what to name a potenial third daughter, so Matilda is saved for later.
Thank you, <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"G. writes: My husband, Austin and I were advised to visit your website for some advice and we hope you can help us out! In 2009 we had our first and very beautiful little girl, Clara Evelyn. Since having Clara we have discussed the names of her siblings and we ecstatic to find, that we […]<\/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-6092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1Ag","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6092","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=6092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6092\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}