To Think Choosing A Baby Name Is Actually Quite Daunting?

[chorltonandthewheelies]

Ok so its baby no4, daughter no3 but I cant help but worry about what to call her, after all she's then stuck with it for the rest of her life :-@

I am hoping when I see her a name will just fit, because we cant really agree on any at the moment. (4 wks today and she'll be here)

YANBU. I only have the one, but me and DH had a pretty difficult time deciding on her name.
I had only two criteria, it would not be a family name, nor would it be religious.
I was rather taken with Zam Zam which would have been fine while we were in Oman, but would have stuck out slightly in England.
As it was, we only agreed on one name and when I went to register her at the hospital they kept asking me for more.
MiL was not impressed that her name didn't contain Mary and advised me to write it on the BC 'it's not as if it's a real document, it was issued abroad'.

Oh I know we gave first daughter one grans name as her middle name and then when second daughter was born we used other grans name as her middle one but spelt it slightly differently. She never forgave us and said we might as well not have bothered it wasnt her name spelt like that?! Grrrrrr

In 'olden times' (pre-20th century) most people chose from a fairly small pool of names, mostly derived from the Christian tradition and often running in families. Now that society is much more diverse and fragmented into subcultures there are a zillion more names to choose from and names often come loaded with connotations ('posh', 'chav', ethnicity, fashion) blah blah. The whole thing is bloody confusing . When we went about naming the forthcoming DS we started off with the following 'rules':

Nothing too 'out there' (I know 'out there' is a relative term!).
Nothing that had strong class connotations or would date them really obviously in later life (you know the way every Doris or Ethel you've ever met is an OAP)
We're Christian, so it was pretty inevitable that one of DS's names would have some meaning in that context (in the end we had Christopher as a middle name).
No cutesy names that work for babies but are bloody embarassing when you're a forty year old with a career.
I really, really hate the whole "Call the DC anything provided YOU like it". It isn't about you, its about them. They will still be living with their name long after you've croaked. So if you're going to call them Moonbeam or whatever at least give them a boring safe second name to fall back on.

YADNBU. I must have read through thousands of names on the internet before DS was born. The only one I liked DH vetoed so we ended up with a compromise - a family name we were going to use as a second name. A year on and I'm still not sure I picked the right one.
It doesn't help that you know that whatever name you choose, someone will judge you for it (just have a look at the baby naming threads )

yanbu, my ds1 is 10 and ive grown to dislike the name i chose for him when i was 18 :( especially now its a chavvy name and ive got 2 dc's with old fashioned ish names