Amanda writes:<\/p>\n
My husband and I are due with our first little one April 15th… and we are not close to having a name picked out at all! I tend to lean towards the names that are not in the top 100 (some have slipped through though) and he tends to not care if they are popular. I was Amanda S. for my entire education, so I don’t want to do that to a little girl by naming her Addison or something else extremely popular. His name is Paul. Our last name, Cada, is pronounced like Cadillac so we would like to stay away from C and K names, they sound a little too comic-bookish to me.<\/p>\n
The names I like…<\/p>\n
Mira
Alexis
Mara
Nora
Alannah
Eliza
Leah
Adeline<\/p>\nMy husband’s fav’s…<\/p>\n
Jane\/Jayne
Addison
Mia
Kirsten
Alexis
Lauren
Victoria<\/p>\nWe both have Alexis on our lists, but it’s still not winning us over as the finalist! (and it has been very popular in the past).<\/p>\n
We both love Mira but fear that people will pronounce it Myra, and then everyone pronounces Cada as ‘Cayduh’ instead of the short a sound. So she would have to correct everyone on her first and last name forever! We could spell it Meera though… we just prefer the Mira spelling.<\/p>\n
Our middle name options (just depends on which first name we go with)… Ann, Marie or Elizabeth.<\/p>\n
Thanks for your help!! :)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I think you’re right about the Mira thing. I think the name Mia gets the same sort of thing, with some people saying it MY-ah and some people saying MEE-ah. And Mara is another one: MARE-ah or MAR-ah.<\/p>\n
When you said Cada as in Cadillac, that’s when it occurred to me that Alexis as in A Lexus might be too much car for one name.<\/p>\n
Both Addison Cada and Alannah Cada seem rhymey—but this is one of those areas where in some situations I’d be saying that was what made the names click so well, so this could go either way. In fact, I wonder if it might help people remember how to pronounce the surname, by getting their mouths in the right shape with the first name. The flip side of this is that a name like Jane Cada might have the opposite problem: getting people’s mouths in the shape of AY, so that they go naturally into CAY-da by mistake.<\/p>\n
Well, enough chipping away at the lists you already don’t agree with each other on; let’s see if we can find some other possible candidates.<\/p>\n
Since you DO both like Alexis, and your husband likes Addison, I wonder if you would like Ellison. Ellison Marie Cada. Ellison is unusual but not too unfamiliar because of its similarity to Allison, and it has the cute nickname Ellie.<\/p>\n
Emerson is similar to Ellison, but with the cute nickname Emmie. Emerson Marie Cada.<\/p>\n
Elaine. Elaine Marie Cada. Elaine is underused but completely familiar, and it has the cute nickname Laney. It sounds something like your choice Eliza and something like his choice Jane.<\/p>\n
Elena would be a little more up to date: Elena Marie Cada.<\/p>\n
Eleanor. Eleanor Marie Cada. Eleanor is like the sounds of Lauren rearranged (nor instead of laur, and len instead of ren), and you could use Nora as a nickname.<\/p>\n
Emeline. Emeline Marie Cada. Emeline has the sweetness of Adeline, but without the repeating “addah” of Adeline Cada—which, as I said before, might be a plus or might be a minus. Also, it has the cute nickname Emmie.<\/p>\n
I didn’t mean for those all to start with E and get paired with Marie, but there it is. Apparently I was on a roll with E\/Marie.<\/p>\n
[Edited to add<\/span>: I thought of this too late to put it in the poll, but how about Aliza? It’s so similar to Alexis, and also to your choice of Eliza.]<\/p>\n
Let’s have a poll over to the right. [Poll closed; see results below.]<\/p>\n
Poll results<\/span> (263 votes total):
Ellison: 51 votes, roughly 19%
Emerson: 52 votes, roughly 20%
Elaine: 18 votes, roughly 7%
Elena: 27 votes, roughly 10%
Eleanor: 55 votes, roughly 21%
Emeline: 60 votes, roughly 23%<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amanda writes: My husband and I are due with our first little one April 15th… and we are not close to having a name picked out at all! I tend to lean towards the names that are not in the top 100 (some have slipped through though) and he tends to not care if they […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1PE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046","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=7046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}