How Did/Will You Name Your Kids?

[drothgery]

one thing i've never understood about western naming conventions is the middle name. in my culture, your middle name is your father's name, or your husband's name. and it's pretty much never ever referred to. Is there some significance to western middle names?

Not really.
My middle name is the same as my father's, and my grandfather's (and the only stipulations I've got on names in the extremely unlikely event I'm a father at some point is to continue this with the first boy, and that either the first or middle name should be fairly short and reasonably common and/or easy to spell).
One of my brothers has my grandfather's first name as his middle name; the other has my uncle's first name as his middle name (because they've got the same birthday).
My older sister's middle name was just something my parents liked.
My little sister's middle name was just an artifact of the holiday she was born on.

 

[Aries_Omega]

I have two kids. My oldest is my son. We both looked in a baby book and made lists of like 100 names. We whittled it down to two and I think we did best out of three rock/paper/scissors and I lost. My wife was a very gracious winner and allowed my idea for middle names. This worked with both kids.

Now the middle names are interesting. I don't have one. My dad is of Latino origins thusly has a very long legal name and hated that. With my son he has two middle names. One for each grandfather with mine being the first one.

We were going to do the same thing for my daughter but when we informed the mother-in-laws of our intentions they both did not like the idea. We were going to go with middle names but that wasn't going to work. One mother's middle name was May and the other was June Eris. My mother had two middle names. So we went one generation back. One grandmother's was Olga the other was named India. Olga is a variation on Olivia. Olivia India didn't flow well, but my grandmother's middle name Eris did. I recall explaining to my wife who Eris was but she swore I never told her years later. So my son was named Marcus Roberto Redmond and my daughter is named Jaelin Olivia Eris. The meaning of the names fit I feel.

Bottom line...it will come to you. Just relax your mind and let it happen.

 

[DaveStebbins]

We didn't have any real choices pre-picked, except my wife wanted a daughter to have the same middle name as her and her mom (Lee). So, we looked through name books until we found ones we liked. Our girl name was Emma Lee (which wasn't popular at all when we chose it in 1991; Emma's one of the most popular these days - we like to think we started that ). I think our boy name was Dillon Thomas. Dillon was the closest to a name we could agree on and Thomas is my father-in-law's name. We were much happier with our girl name, so I'm glad I have a daughter.

-Dave
(who isn't going to mention a last name, because that might not be safe on the internet )

 

[Dimwhit]

We didn't have any real choices pre-picked, except my wife wanted a daughter to have the same middle name as her and her mom (Lee). So, we looked through name books until we found ones we liked. Our girl name was Emma Lee (which wasn't popular at all when we chose it in 1991; Emma's one of the most popular these days - we like to think we started that ). I think our boy name was Dillon Thomas. Dillon was the closest to a name we could agree on and Thomas is my father-in-law's name. We were much happier with our girl name, so I'm glad I have a daughter.

-Dave
(who isn't going to mention a last name, because that might not be safe on the internet )

I felt duty-bound to give my children names that wouldn't cause them to hate me when I grew up.

We wanted mainstream names with short nicknames. We went with Samantha and Maxwell. I wanted Maximillian...

 

[CronoDekar]

Hmm, there's a lot of names I'm rather fond of that I'd use. Phoenix, Diane, Vincent, Chance, and Hunter would all be nice. A guy I game with had PCs named Tirem and Alys, and I've always liked those names too. Though, this is just hypothetical as I don't currently have any aspirations of having any children. Maybe I could make some suggestions though if I were to become an uncle

 

[DaveMage]

My first born, Benjamin Jacob, was named after both of his maternal great-grandfathers.

My second, Samuel Ethan, was just a name we both liked.

(Neither my wife nor I have fond memories of our paternal grandfathers.)

 

[ElvishBard]

I felt duty-bound to give my children names that wouldn't cause them to hate me when I grew up.

We wanted mainstream names with short nicknames. We went with Samantha and Maxwell. I wanted Maximillian...

Do you mean when they grow up? Or do you want them to have funny names you can make fun of and not care about until you grow up?

 

[Uzumaki]

Argh! Don't have babies! Adopt! Adopt!

If I acquire kids, I probably won't get the chance to name them, because they'll be older kids whom no one ever wants to adopt. If I could rename them, though, I would name the boys Napoleon, Lafayette, Luche (Loo-shay), Mikael (meeka-el), Hero, Allouitious, and Cyanide. Girls would be Sarin (sticking with the toxic compounds), Silverblue, Elijah (after Heydricus' cohort ), and Tae.

 

[Rel]

Unlike most folks these days, we opted not to find out the gender of our child in advance of her birth (I make no value judgement here. It's just what we did.). As such we had picked out both boy and girl names.

The boy name we struggled with at length. We both liked Jacob as a first name but we battled over the middle name for some time. I don't recall what stupid name my lovely wife wanted but I recall that I liked it a lot less than the cool name that I'd picked out: Beowulf. Jacob Beowulf. What a totally badass name that would have been. But my wife absolutely insisted that Beowulf not be his name. She was named by hippies and while I think her name (Morgana Talltree) is completely wicked, she had to endure a lot of teasing growing up.

So we were still undecided on the middle name when I went off on a scuba diving trip about 3 months before the due date. There I was one night, sitting on a boat off the Florida Keys after a night dive and looking up at the stars and it came to me: Orion. Jacob Orion. Home I went with my awesome new name.

My wife met me at the door with a hug and a kiss and the announcement that she had thought of a boy name and I told her that I had too. Then I said, "You go first." And she says to me, "Jacob Orion." Stunned I was. Stunned and certain that this was a sign from almighty GAWD that he was sending me the son that I'd always wanted...

...and then we had a girl and named her Samantha Rose like we'd always planned and I fell instantly and completely in love with her for the rest of my life and forgot all about ever wanting anything but this perfect, wonderful little girl.

The one interesting thing about my daughters name is that we always envisioned that we would call her "Sam" for short but since day one she has been a "Samantha" and we've never taken to shortening it.

 

[Dimwhit]

Some day I'll check my posts before I click 'reply.'