Alice writes:<\/p>\n
I was one of those strange kids who cut pics of people out of catalogs and assembled them into families so that I could name them — I’ve always been obsessed with names! Of course, now that I acutally need to name my daughter, due this summer, I’m having such a hard time narrowing my ever evolving list down to just one.<\/p>\n
Here’s the situation. My husband is Alex and I am Alice — already a bit of a family identity nightmare. This means that every name that falls into the Ellie\/Alexa\/Allegra\/etc camp is out of the question for our daughter. In fact, I’m avoiding A names in general, though I could be convinced for the right one. Our very common last name starts with an F sound and rhymes with “ellipse”.<\/p>\n
Second issue: He is British and I am mostly American. I say mostly because I grew up in the States, but my mother is Australian and my dad is British as well. Like me, my daughter will be a citizen of all three countries, and although we currently live in the UK, I could see us moving back to the US (where my parents still live) or even Australia at some point. For this reason, I’d really like a name that works well in all three places and has similar positive associations. Mostly this means no names that are too “American” (overly trendy, made up, or last name as first name, i.e. Madison or Naveah) or too “British” (stuffy or virtually unheard of in the US, i.e. Elspeth or Nicola). Don’t mean to offend — these are just the perceptions as I understand them.<\/p>\n
Some other considerations:
– We gravitate toward vintage names, particularly those that are a bit quirky.
– We don’t want anything too popular or trendy in any country.
– We prefer names with interesting meanings.<\/p>\nNames we like:<\/p>\n
Maeve
(This is probably our favorite, because it’s a nice blend of classic and slightly quirky and I’ve loved it forever. My only reservation is that it blends with our last name a bit and ends up sounding like Mae F-ellipse instead of Maeve F-ellipse. I’d be interested to hear what people’s thoughts are on this.)<\/p>\nBeatrix
(My husband likes this a lot, but I’m worried about the Trixie nickname — cute or whore-ish? Too British overall?)<\/p>\nCleo<\/p>\n
Ivy<\/p>\n
Vivien<\/p>\n
Georgia\/Georgina<\/p>\n
Lydia (My husband loves this but I can’t get past chlamydia)<\/p>\n
Clementine<\/p>\n
Others we considered but have rejected: Annabel, Briony, Scarlett, Evangeline<\/p>\n
For middle names, we’d like to use one of our family names, which are as follows:
Annabel, Vivien, Elizabeth, Kathryn, Ann, Kelly<\/p>\nI’d really appreciate any insight. Thank you, thank you, thank you!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Name update!<\/span> Alice writes:<\/p>\n
I have been meaning to write this for ages but time gets away from us new moms! Anyway, I want to thank your readers for helping me with my naming dilemma.
Their responses assured me that my original choice was a sound one.
Maeve Kathryn was born in August. Her name suits her PERFECTLY, and she’s just amazing!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alice writes: I was one of those strange kids who cut pics of people out of catalogs and assembled them into families so that I could name them — I’ve always been obsessed with names! Of course, now that I acutally need to name my daughter, due this summer, I’m having such a hard time […]<\/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-6374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1EO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374","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=6374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}