When did you start referring to baby by their name?

Sometime around her first birthday, I think She was baba most of the time before that and still is at times.

I genuinely can't decide whether Ava's post was a pisstake or not
Both mine were 'the baby' dd2, now 5 is still 'the baby'

Fenella, yes we gave our bump a joke name too and it did become normal. After almost 5 months of having an actual baby with a real name I still get mixed up sometimes. I miss my bump!

By the time we had our first child several people we know had had still births. I didn't want to tempt fate by naming an unborn child (just my opinion, don't care what anyone else does).

We referred to our twins as Big Twin and Littlest Twin (there was a size difference in utero)

We'd picked names out, but didn't tell anyone beforehand and didn't decide which twin was which name until they were born

When they were born.

I have been trying to think of a polite way of responding to avabird s post, but struggling........ who exactly are you distributing this treasure chests too ??

We've made the mistake of consistently referring to the baby by a joke name, which was the worst one we could think of with our surname. (Along the lines of Collin Collins) The trouble is after nearly 9 months of this, it's going to be very hard to switch to calling him a real name!

Avabird - you're joking, right?!

We didn't know what ds1 would be but it was definite with ds2 and we used his name from the time of the scan as we only had one favourite. As a top 20 name it was hardly not going to suit him.

We didn't know if we were having a girl or boy so there was no definite name decision. We had a shortlist for a while and then did narrow it down to our top choices for a girl or boy. Immediate family kind of knew - told them 1 or 2 options. But we never used the names before she was born.

We picked a name, but didn't use it till after birth. I wouldn't want to tell everyone, make it Facebook official, have personalised stuff made, only to decide the baby didn't look like an X or a Y or just have a change of heart and then have to do the rounds telling everyone the new name.

People just cant wait these days to tell the world stuff about their lives that nobody needs to know.

On another point mentioned in this thread. Gender reveal parties are so self indulgent and silly. Apart from the parents and maybe some immediate family, nobody really gives that much of a crap, it's one or the other, no need for such a fuss. Avabird, if you are serious, I have no words!

Earlier this year I was pregnant with boy girl twins when my boy died at 29 weeks. I remained pregnant as had another baby to keep cooking. For a few days after it happened when I talked about my pregnancy I called my boy "the baby that died" and got sick of that pretty fucking quickly, so about 30 weeks we decided on names, told our family and friends and they were known by their names from then on.

If the above had not happened then I believe we would have kept any name ideas a secret until after babies were born.

I was thinking the same about Avabird.

Not until the baby is born. Feels wierd to me otherwise.

AvaBird are you serious?

Around nine months I swore I would lay off her ridiculous nicknames are try to call her by her actual name...Manage it about 50/50.

When they arrive. I don't find out whether it's a boy/girl. We've gone in to labour with 2 or 3 names for both boy & girl each time then decided what fits them during first cuddles.

Both after DD was born even though we known she was a girl and had settled on her name.

Is the gender reveal and name reveal thing American? Because really who apart from immediate family really give two hoots? All seems very self-centred to me.

Alexandra - glad to hear that your DS has done so much better than expected. That must have been terrifying.

We didn't find out the gender with either of ours and won't be finding out this time either. I've always found it a little odd to use a name before birth but I think that's just because it's just so different to how I do things, rather than me actually thinking there's anything wrong with it.

I'm loving all the different bump names. Mine is currently 'peanuts' as it used to be the size of a peanut but has since grown. So I started calling it 'bag of peanuts' shortened to 'peanuts'. That's not crazy, right?

It took us 3 days to name dc1 after birth. 37 weeks pg with dc2 and we can't decide.

DS2 is nearly 10 years old, and I still accidentally call him The Baby sometimes.

The gender reveal party sounds bloody awful.

We used it after the 20 week scan. We were told he might not survive long after the birth, so we wanted him to have his name, exist as a person from then on in case that was the most time we'd get with him. (He did survive and still does)

When he was born - I didn't find out the sex during pregnancy. The bump was called Horace.

At the 20 week scan for DC1. I have Xmas cards prior to birth with name in. DC2 was only decided in last month before birth.

After they were born and even then I found it really weird for the first few days.
I think this was because we were quite torn between a couple of names both times so when we chose one it felt strange calling our dd her name, me and dh would look at each other the first few times as if to test it sounded ok.