Patty writes:<\/p>\n
I’m pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl, and have no idea what to name them! Our 16-month old son is William Ryan, or Will, and we’re having a hard time with the twins’ names. I don’t want anything too cutesy or matching. For the boy, my favorite name is Henry, but my husband doesn’t like it. We tend to like traditional or old-fashioned names (Sam, Ethan, and Owen are a few I like). The top contender right now is Thomas, which means Twin and was my dad’s name, but I’d rather use it as a middle name. For the girl, our top pick right now is Hannah, but if we do end up with Henry, I’m not sure we want to do two H names. Other girl names we like: Lauren, Emma, Emily, Caitlin. I love Grace, but already have a Will, so don’t want to use that! Our last name starts with a B and is 3 syllables. Any suggestions?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My twins were my hardest babies to name! I wanted a LITTLE TIDGE of matchiness, but not TOO MUCH. And none of the boy names we liked seemed to go with the girl names we liked—or else they went too much. What we finally did was separate the two decisions: we thought to ourselves, “If we were having a girl now, what would we name her? And then if we scooted forward in time to the next pregnancy and found we were having a boy, what would we name him?” And then we went with those names.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately this turned out to mean zero matchiness, but we hadn’t been able to find any that had the right tidge anyway. Elizabeth and Edward (the pseudonyms I use for my twins on my blogs) would have been the perfect tidge with their matching initials and matching whiffs of royalty but utterly distinct sounds.<\/p>\n
Oh, hey—would those be good possibilities for your twins? Elizabeth and Edward? Elizabeth Grace and Edward Thomas, perhaps—that would be a good way to use the name Grace without the Will & Grace problem. Gosh, I LOVE that: William Ryan, Elizabeth Grace, and Edward Thomas. Or if you don’t like Edward, maybe Edmund?<\/p>\n
From your lists, here are some pairings I like:<\/p>\n
Emma and Sam
Sam and Hannah
Ethan and Hannah
Lauren and Owen
Ethan and Emily<\/p>\nJust for fun, and because you and I have Lauren, Emily, and Ethan in common, here are some sets we considered for our twins:<\/p>\n
Eric and Lauren
Eric and Genevieve
Eric and Anna
Eric and Jane
John and Emily
John and Eliza
John and Lauren
John and Genevieve
Eric and Claire
Eric and Emily
Charles (Charlie) and Genevieve
Charles (Charlie) and Elizabeth
Charles (Charlie) and Jane
Alec and Genevieve
Ethan and Genevieve
Ethan and Jane
Malcolm and Genevieve
Jonathan and Genevieve<\/p>\nYour husband doesn’t like the name Henry but you both like Hannah, so here are a few more boy names to try with Hannah:<\/p>\n
Hannah and Caleb
Hannah and Daniel
Hannah and Elliot
Hannah and Emmett
Hannah and Evan
Hannah and Gavin
Hannah and Isaac
Hannah and John
Hannah and Nathaniel
Hannah and Oliver<\/p>\nGo nuts, everybody: choose sets of twins from the parents’ list of possibilities, choose boy names to go with Hannah, or choose whole new sets from thin air.<\/p>\n
Name update<\/span> 10-05-2009! Patty writes:<\/p>\n
Well, the babies arrived last week, and as we waited for me to be wheeled into the OR, my husband and I finally came to an agreement on names: Samuel Thomas and Lucy Elizabeth were born on 9\/29\/09 and are doing great! <\/p>\n
Thanks for your help!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Patty writes: I’m pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl, and have no idea what to name them! Our 16-month old son is William Ryan, or Will, and we’re having a hard time with the twins’ names. I don’t want anything too cutesy or matching. For the boy, my favorite name is Henry, but […]<\/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-6942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1NY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6942","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=6942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}