Name Secret
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Wednesday, February 02, 2011 7:59 PM
One of the first things that I thought about when I found out we were having twins: baby names.
We’d already decided - having done it both ways, and having liked it better this way - to find out the sex of the baby by ultrasound, but once we learned the babies were twins, we were even more certain that we would. When you’re having one baby of unknown gender, you need a boy name and a girl name. When you’re having twins of unknown gender, you need three sets of names to cover the possibilities.
And it turns out that (for us at least) coming up with names for twins is more complicated than naming two babies individually. There are so many criteria! But fortunately, we found out that the babies are boys quite early, so we have plenty of time to figure this out.
I was interested to discover that the Social Security Administration shared the top 50 sets of names for each type of twins born in 2009, including the number of twins who were given each set of names. As a dedicated baby-name junkie, I enjoyed checking out the trends.
(In case you’re interested, the SSA also tracks the 1000 most popular single baby names each year. Here they are for 2009.)
In the month that we’ve known our babies are boys, I’ve noticed that when I tell people we know the sex of our babies, they’re even more likely than usual to ask the next question: “What are you naming them?” Twin names are even more fascinating than singleton names, apparently.
Unfortunately for all the inquisitive strangers, I have to disappoint them, because my husband and I have a strict policy of keeping our baby names secret until the baby is actually born. There are several reasons we do this, including the fact that we don’t like to commit to a name until the birth (in case it doesn’t feel right for that particular baby) and the fact that I am pretty thin-skinned. It seems like people are much less likely to criticize a name that’s already been given to an actual baby than a name that’s still hypothetical.
But on the other hand, I have plenty of friends who name their babies before they’re born, and it works well for them. It seems to give an extra humanizing touch to an unborn baby if he is already being called by his name. And I have friends who don’t find out the sex of the baby, but still share their potential names, and that seems to work for them too.
How do you handle the naming thing? Do you keep names secret, or share ahead of time? Have you done it more than one way? Have you ever regretted a decision to share or not share?
word cloud courtesy of wordle.net
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