Sarah writes:<\/p>\n
Hello! My husband and I are expecting our first child, a girl, in late summer. We’ve pretty much decided on a first name, Sydney, but are having difficulty with a middle name. Our last name starts and sounds a bit like Cobalt, though it does not end in a hard t.<\/p>\n
I really like the tradition of using a family name as the middle name. I also like more feminine names, given Sydney’s history as a boy’s name. I know it’s no longer that much of a boy’s name (and it’s certainly not Sidney), and my husband doesn’t seem to think this is a problem at all. He, therefore, likes Ryan (his middle name) as a middle name, or an alternative spelling such as Rian or Ryann. I could handle Rian but am not an alternative spelling person. I like Elizabeth, my middle name and his grandmother’s middle name, but he thinks it’s too much of a mouthful. Is it? Sydney Elizabeth? I need another set of eyes. Our other family name options are the opposite, short and sweet: Mae, Rose, and Laine. If the baby were born right now, our tentative truce option is Rose, after his other grandmother. But I’m just not sold, or maybe I’m afraid to commit. I wonder if I’m somewhat too selfish and really want her named after me\/my side of the family.<\/p>\n
Our other first name option is Cecily. This is actually still a strong contender for me, less so for my husband. Given (what I view as) the name’s femininity, I have no problem with Cecily Ryan. This makes my husband perk up a bit, but I know he likes Sydney more than Cecily. He likes cute nicknames, and he loves the thought of calling her Syd. Is there a cute nickname for Cecily, other than Cece?<\/p>\n
The only other name that I really love love love is Madeline, but we’ve chosen not to consider it as a first name because a very close family member has a daughter named Madison. I would strongly consider Madeline as a middle (now or in the future) if it were in any way a family name. Am I holding onto that self-imposed “rule” too tightly?<\/p>\n
Oh! I just read a post of yours in which the mom finds herself torn between Elizabeth and Elise, and believes that Elise honors her family members named Elizabeth. Is this a commonly held belief\/connection? Is Sydney Elise better? I just can’t grasp someone seeing the name and thinking “oh, it must be Elise after her middle name of Elizabeth”?<\/p>\n
If the baby were a boy, my first choice has always been Cameron, a name my husband also loves. (It would be the subject of an entirely different question, though, because of another family member, less close, who recently used this name. Back-up boy names were hard to come by before we found out the sex.) Finally, we do plan on having more children, 3 total is the current prevailing thought. I haven’t even thought about matching future sibling names, and maybe I should.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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While it’s true that Sydney is used much more for girls now, I’m with you about preferring a more feminine middle name: a name formerly used for boys followed by a name currently used more for boys seems to be making a statement—and also seems like it might make you feel you needed to choose boyish names for all your daughters. If your girl name choice is Sydney, and your boy name choice is the unisex Cameron, I’d suggest you make everyone’s middle names very clearly masculine or feminine.<\/p>\n
If Sydney is your husband’s first choice of first name, it seems like it would be fair for you to get more sway in the middle name. And if you’re planning to have more children, it seems likely that there will be other chances for him to name a child after himself. Sydney Elizabeth doesn’t seem like too much of a mouthful to me at all—and if the surname is your husband’s, I think it would be nice to bring in a name from your side of the family instead of a second name from his. That doesn’t seem selfish, it seems balanced.<\/p>\n
Another balanced option is your idea of Cecily Ryan. Then it’s your husband’s middle name and surname, but you’d have more sway in the first name. I don’t see any reason he couldn’t still call her Syd\/Sid; plenty of people use non-name-related nicknames, and it seems sweet for a dad to have his own nickname for his daughter. We know a family where the dad calls his daughter an assortment of boy names (Hank, Frank, George, Lloyd) as their own running in-joke.<\/p>\n
If before your first child is even born, your rule about family names is already painfully ruling out names you love, I do think it would be a good idea to loosen that a little. One option would be to make your rule that one of the two names should be a name of significance; this takes away the restriction that it has to be in the middle-name position and also the restriction that the significance has to be family-based. Another option would be to set the whole thing up as a preference rather than as a rule: you’d say that you’d prefer each child to have a family middle name, but then you’d allow another preference (such as a preference for a particular name) to trump that. (We did something like that in our family: I looked first for family names, but didn’t sweat it ((much)) if it didn’t work out.)<\/p>\n
Different people have different feelings about how far away from an honor name you can go and still be honoring the family member. Some would use just a first initial; some would use a few letters or a sound (Madelyn honoring a Lynda, for example); some use variations (Elise honoring an Elizabeth, for example); some would translate a name from another alphabet into their own (Orla to honor Irish Grandma \u00d3rlaith, for example); some would vary the spelling but not the name (Marian instead of Marion, for example); and some would be completely strict about it being the exact name. I use the “Would I feel honored?” test: I wouldn’t feel particularly honored by a child named Keegan or Crystal “after me,” but I would be by a child named Cristen or Kristin (though even more so by a child named Kristen, if anyone is currently filling out a birth certificate). To me, Sydney Elise doesn’t seem like it honors an Elizabeth, any more than Riley seems like it honors a Ryan—but what matters is whether it feels that way to the people involved. If when you think about it, you can’t imagine anyone seeing Elise and thinking it’s after your middle name, then it sounds like Elise won’t work for you.<\/p>\n
Here’s a name that seems to me to be right between Syndey and Cecily: Cassidy. Cassidy is used only for girls, like Cecily—but it has more of the sound of Sydney, and Sid could definitely be a nickname for it along with Cassie. Cassidy Elizabeth Cobalt.<\/p>\n
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Name update!<\/strong><\/p>\n
In a shamefully long overdue update, I want to let you and your readers know that we named our baby girl (now a wonderful and willful toddler) Cecily Ryan.\u00a0 I cannot tell you enough how much your perspective and the thoughts and ideas from your readers helped us!\u00a0 We poured over everything.\u00a0 We went into the hospital with two options, and Cecily had really grown on us and won out when we saw her.\u00a0 We call her any one of a million nicknames, too, which is something that was difficult for us, first-time parents, to imagine when all I thought about was naming.\u00a0 Now, it seems totally natural.\u00a0 Thank you again.<\/p>\n
p.s. – Cassidy would definitely have been on the short list–you nailed my style–were it not also the name of one my good friends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sarah writes: Hello! My husband and I are expecting our first child, a girl, in late summer. We’ve pretty much decided on a first name, Sydney, but are having difficulty with a middle name. Our last name starts and sounds a bit like Cobalt, though it does not end in a hard t. I really […]<\/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-7840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-22s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7840","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=7840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11378,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7840\/revisions\/11378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}