Picking Baby Names

Deciding on your baby’s name can seem like a daunting task, it is a lifelong decision after all. There seem to be more “names” than ever and people are getting creative with them. Luckily, parents have quite a few months before their baby comes to settle on one, but even that can prove to be a tricky assignment.

Naming Our First Born

With our first born, Wyatt, we spent hours discussing his name. We utilized a few different strategies and narrowed our list down to TWO names that we went to the hospital with for a game-time decision.

Using A Baby Name App

As soon as we found out I was pregnant, we downloaded a “Tinder for baby names” app. The one we used back then was called “Baby Name” and me and my husband both downloaded the app and synced it to each other’s. It would just show different boy and girl names and individually we would swipe left or right on the name to indicate if we liked it or not. It was a fun little thing to do in our spare time, whenever we had a minute or so, and it didn’t have to be done together. When we both swiped right on the same name, it would tell us we had a match and add that name that we both liked to a growing name list! Once we found out at about 20 weeks that he was a boy, we set a filter for the app to just show us boy names.

We loved using the app to generate our initial name list, it was a great way to easily (without controversy) find names we both liked, and it also saved a list of each person’s own “like” list that we reviewed as well. This strategy gave us a list of about 15 boy names we both “liked.” Although, we were finding boy names a little tricky, we liked a bunch, but none of them stood out as ones that were “the one.”

Deciding on the Middle Name

We knew we wanted to use a family name for our son’s middle name and we pretty quickly decided on William, after Tim’s grandfather who was our baby-to-be’s only living grandfather and who we were both very close with. Luckily William is a nice classic name that goes with a lot of names, so it didn’t add an extra layer of difficulty to our search.

USING The Names Before We Made A Decision

Once we had our list of about 15 names, we wrote them out and saw immediately that we wanted to get rid of a few. We spent the next few weeks narrowing down our list to 10 names. Then for the last 10 weeks of my pregnancy, we tried calling the baby by a different name each week. This was one of the most helpful things we did, there were some names on our list that I thought we’d love, but we just didn’t end up referring to our baby by them AT ALL throughout that week, which was a very telling sign. The names that we found ourselves actually saying and using a lot throughout that week instead of “the baby,” were the ones we could see naming our son. By the time this exercise was over, I was very close to delivering and we had narrowed it down to two names: Wyatt and Timothy. Timothy is my husband’s name and was always in the running.

Game Time Decision

We went to the hospital with the two possibilities and wanted to see our baby before we decided. When he came out, he was smooshed and wrinkly as many babies are. I was happy naming him either Wyatt or Tim, and because “Tim” was after my husband, I kind of felt like it was his call if he wanted him to be his name or not. He didn’t necessarily look like Tim, (although he’s basically his twin now) and our little guy went about 20 minutes without a name before we decided on Wyatt William Hughes.

I was very afraid of name regret, but I felt confident in our decision after taking almost the whole 40 weeks and a few different methods to be sure about our choice.

Deciding on Our Baby Girl’s Name

Just like for Wyatt, we want to use a name we choose on our own that we love for our daughter’s first name, and a family name for her middle name. So far we’ve used the same strategies we did when naming Wyatt, we first used a “Tinder for baby names” app to develop our initial list. This round we used Kinder, which is awesome because it pairs each name with your last name too so you can see how it looks and sounds. (And there are way less glitches in this app.)

We’ve found girl names to be way easier for some reason, and we have quickly narrowed it down to just a few names already after finding out a few weeks ago that she is a girl. I think we’re pretty close to making a final decision on the name, but I want to give it a few more weeks before we make it official (in our own minds). I’m 25 weeks along now, and still have 15 weeks to go so I can’t commit yet. But because we already feel so confident in being able to figure out a name soon, I’m excited to have it picked out before we go to the hospital this time so I can do important things like monogram her coming home outfit and anything else 😉 Plus after seeing Wyatt when he was just born, I don’t know if I subscribe to the
“waiting to see the baby before you name it” method, because they change so much even in the first few hours & days.

Sharing Baby Girl’s Name

Even when we finally decide, we plan on keeping her name a secret until she is born. I like having one final surprise for when the baby comes…plus once a baby is named people seem to keep their opinions on the name to themselves unless they’re complimentary. Hopefully within the next few weeks we’ll make a final decision on our sweet girl’s name, and share it when she’s born in May!