naming the next child

Baby naming can be tricky. As parents, we labor over THE perfect name for our first child and probably even more so for the next kid. For us, we had our firstborn's name picked out ahead of time (as in before I was pregnant) so it was super easy. But when the second child or third or fourth comes around we feel pressure to picking another perfect name--especially if the next one is of the same sex. 

Do you need names that sound well together? How about picking names that great good together on the family Christmas card? If you give one kid a super creative funky name what do you do about the next? Do you get them relatively the same number of letters or start with the same letter?

My kids’ names both begin with the letter ‘A.’ That was NOT planned! People always comment about how cute, and my grandmother refers to them as “the A team.” It doesn’t help since my husband’s name also begins with an ‘A.’ But I swear we didn’t mean to do this. And should we have a third child, I’m not sure what we’ll do since people might expect for another A name. Quite honestly, we’ve run out of names we like so I guess we’re done having kids.

The Social Security Administration put out their list of top baby names for last year and Emma and Jacob are the top winners for 2008. And while we can debate over and over about unique names (check out my recent article in Washington Parent to this topic), the question relating to Baby Bunching is what do you consider when naming subsequent children?

Comments

[MommyNamedApril]

our kids both have family names, as will all subsequent children :-)

[Joelle]

my children all have family names as middle names. i wanted their first names to be their own (not family) but did want classic names. turns out all three ended up being Hebrew names from the Bible. my first two are "R" names followed by "M" middle names (Rachel Marie and Rebecca Mae), but weren't planned that way. those just happened to be the first ones hubby and i agreed on that we liked. we debated a long time over whether to name our son an "R" name too, but didn't do it since we plan to have more children and didn't want to be stuck with R's. he ended up being Jacob Ambrose (with such a popular first name, we chose a more unique middle name from the family tree).

[Ninja Mom]

mine are all E names, and the middle initial is a single syllable with a long "a" sound. This wasn't planned, it just worked out that way with the first two, and then we felt obligated to continue the trend.

[geekymummy]

We have a girl and a boy, and we didn;t know the sex of either before they were born. WE picked out both a girl and a boy name the first time around, and used the boy name for the second one. My kids are Rosa (Rosalind), and Bjorn (A Danish name). They have two middle names, which is a bit of a mouthful, but I wanted them to have my last name in there somewhere (since I still have my original last name).

[jenni]

It was important to me that none of my children's names lend themselves to nicknames. That is number one for me. We wanted a similar to my husbands in style - not overly popular, but not "unique" or unheard of. Oscar, our first son, is a kind of a cool-cat sort of name (I think), so we wanted a similar style for our second son. So, no nickname, cool, not terribly common, but not terribly uncommon. We didn't decide until I was 38 weeks pregnant, but we finally settled on Miles. I think we hit the mark.

[Laurie]

Here's an idea: You can use the first letter of a grandparent's name as the first letter of the baby's name. This gives the name a deeper meaning and gives you enormous choice. Check out my blog entry for more naming advice:
http://expectingwords.com/its-all-in-the-name
Good luck!

["Gidget"]

We wanted Biblical names for our kids, so that gave us some limitation. We have a son named Peter, so now that I'm pregnant with a boy, we decided on the name Andrew 1) because we like it (although it's a tad too common for me, but DH LOVE LOVE LOVES it!) and 2) because Peter and Andrew are brothers in the Bible. We thought about the Peter/Andrew connection as soon as Peter was born (Peter is a family name, Andrew is not)

[Cara Fox]

HA! Laugh at PP comment because we are also lovers of Biblical names and have a Peter and an Andrew as well (both family names), only we didn't even make the brother connection until AFTER we had decided on Andrew. We really struggled with our third son - I was campaigning heavily for Seth (Adam and Eve's lesser known third son), but hubby nixed it. We ended up (after MUCH debate) with a Joshua.

I've talked to lots of people about this and it seems that intentionally or not, once you have two kids, you have a pattern that the third has to fit in with. Really makes it hard, especially if you have all the same gender. Which is why our third remained unnamed until 5 minutes before we were discharged from the hospital - LOL.

[Rachel O.]

I'm at 38 weeks with baby #2 and we're still deciding on a name! I don't like too popular, my husband doesn't like too weird. He speaks to our kids in Spanish, and I speak to them in English, and we're moving to an Arabic speaking country in a year, so it has to work in all three languages. Not easy.

Right now it's a toss-up between Elijah and Jonas, with the second name Charles. Baby #1 (daughter) is Nolene Joyce. At least we've both agreed to use our parents' names as our kids' second names!