I’ve always liked names. Since high school (and probably even before that) I’ve been coming up with baby names for future children. Some people thought this was weird, but I know it’s not that unusual. These names have changed over time (and thankfully, as I’ve gone through some really horrible naming phases) but I’ve always had fun with them. When J and I met we found that we liked talking about names. From fairly early in our relationship (even before we knew we wanted to have kids together) we decided that for girls we liked the name Ava. Later on we added the name Olivia to that list. So when I became pregnant our girls names were obvious, Ava Elizabeth (which is my middle name) and Olivia Clare. We couldn’t agree on any boys names, but our girls names were settled.
Well, then I started doing some research and discovered that Ava and Olivia are each on the 2008 top Ten list of baby names. Hmmmm – guess we’re not so creative. Then we started seriously talking about names and realizing that now we didn’t agree on either boys names or girls names. So we started making lists of names that we liked and discovered some criteria.
1. We both liked classic names. OK, that’s something we can agree on. Nothing to trendy.
2. Neither of us wanted a name that is to popular.
However, we got into trouble with the syllables. J doesn’t like names that have more than two syllables. He thinks that a three syllable last name is long enough. I disagree and seem to especially like three syllable names. After much discussion and concessions from each of us, we ended up with a list of about six names for each gender that we both could agree on. For a while there it seemed like the only names on the list were names neither of us especially liked, but neither of us vetoed. We had to fix that – we didn’t want to someday tell our kid “Sorry we named you XX. Neither of us really like the name either, but it’s the name that we both hated the least. You got named by default.”
We decided not to talk to anyone about our name choices. I broke this rule a little bit, but in the end it worked out well. Honestly, when you talk about names people generally have a negative reaction. A person (myself included) is more likely to come up with what they don’t like about a name then what they do like about it. I don’t mean this to personally offend anyone, since I do it myself. In the end, since we had a hard enough time with each others opinions about names we decided that we didn’t really want to hear anyone else’s opinions either. (We’ve since met several couples who felt the same way we did. My favorite story is from our friends Steve and Leah who had a random woman in a restaurant get mad at them because they wouldn’t tell her the name they were thinking of.)
Finally we just decided to wait until we met the baby to decide on the name. This was a bit of a compromise, since J and I had decided on our favorite names of each gender and they weren’t the same name at all. I joked that yes, we each knew what we were naming the baby but unfortunately we were naming the one baby two different names.
When I saw our baby for the first time one of the first things I said was “Well, she’s not a Sylvia.” That was my top name. J took a few minutes longer and decided that no, she wasn’t a Charlotte either. We went down our list of other mutually agreeable names and weren’t quite sure. That night J went home to take a shower and I thought “what about Clare?” During this time he thought the same thing. It just seemed to fit. We both liked the name, but had always thought of it as a middle name. By the time we sent out our original birth announcement email we were pretty sure she was Clare, but we didn’t know the middle name and were hesitant to put it in print. By the next morning we had decided, she was Clare Elizabeth. As I’ve been writing this blog it occurred to me that we actually kept our original names we agreed on but threw out the to popular first names. Sigh – to think of all the disagreements that could have been avoided if we just figured that out sooner. Oh well.
Since she’s been born we’ve gotten all sorts of compliments about her name. Besides that, it fits. Our girl was always a Clare, we just didn’t know it yet.
Oh, and as for the spelling – it’s after County Clare in Ireland.
Family pic from the Bradley Class Reunion last weekend.
Yes, Clare looks like her Daddy.