Fighting Over Baby Names – Kveller
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Fighting Over Baby Names

I had to laugh when I read Ariel’s post from yesterday about not finding out the gender of their child. Similarly, we are also very superstitious and waited until over 17 weeks to announce our pregnancy with my firstborn and over 14 weeks with this one. We don’t tell anyone what we’re naming our children before they are born and never refer to the unborn child by said name. Those are pretty much the only secrets I’ve ever kept in my entire life.

But my husband and I are crazy planners. We thrive on hypothesizing plans for next week, next month and five years from now. We always try to be prepared and rarely like surprises. In fact, my husband has correctly guessed every single birthday gift I’ve ever given him (hockey skates? Who guesses HOCKEY SKATES?!) Squeezing a seven pound human out of my lady bits and then wanting to do it again is surprising enough for me, so I’d like to know in advance if we’re hosting a
brit milah
or a simchat bat.

Recently my husband said to me, “So if this baby is a girl we would have one of each, so would you want the next baby to be a surprise?”

My response was, “I’d like to say, yes? But I’m pretty sure the answer is no.”

To which he replied, “Oh good. Because I’d still want to know which baby clothes I needed to dig out of storage in advance.”

My husband and I rarely fight. Sure we disagree and sometimes we just agree to disagree but we aren’t much for shouting or arguing. In the 10 years we’ve been together I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve heatedly disagreed, four of those times were over baby names.

Yep. We don’t agree on baby names AT ALL and we need a good five months to duke it out. With our first we wanted to choose both a girl and a boy name. The boy name was easy as both of us had family names we wanted to use. Slap those together and we were done. The girl name? Enter disagreements one through four. We finally settled on a girl name just about the time we found out that we were having a baby boy. Going into this pregnancy my husband was convinced we were having a girl so, according to him, no name discussions were needed (despite the fact that there hasn’t been a girl in my husband’s family in over three generations).

My pregnancy is high risk this time around so we have lots of doctor appointments and ultrasounds. Due to his job, my husband can only make it for “big” appointments so it’s usually just me and my toddler seeing the “pictures of Mama’s belly” every other week. Last week my husband was able to join us for one of the ultrasounds. The technician took fluid measurements and pictures of my ovaries while our 16-week-old fetus bounced in and out of view. The tech asked if we would like to know the gender if she was able to see anything to which my husband and I simultaneously replied, “YES.” Within moments, her jelly wand was giving us an underside shot of our baby complete with a sack and a little penis.

We are thrilled to add another little boy to our family and at the same time terrified that he will be named “baby boy Reese” for the first year of his life. My husband doesn’t like names that are nouns, verbs, androgynous, spelled weird, or have been used by famous people. I like names that start with vowels, four-letter names, and names with familial meaning. So it looks like we’re in for a few more “conversations” before we find something we can both agree on. (Not to mention that we also have to choose a Hebrew name!)

So yeah, the only surprise around here will be when our second son has both an English and a Hebrew name and two parents that are still happily married.

How did you choose a name?

Be sure to take full advantage of Kveller’s Baby Name Finder while you’re trying to decide!

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