To save good names in case of a second child?

[Mol5]

Hey,
We're expecting DC1 in January - we don't know the Gender of the baby and have left it to be a surprise.

We have a shortlist of girl and boy names and some we really love more than others which we just like. We're waiting to have the baby to decide on any final names.

Is it a bad idea to use two names you love as their first and middle name -vs- saving one name you love for any potential future DC/instead giving one name you love and one OK middle name...?

I don't want to use up the two best names on DC1 and risk not liking any as much for DC2... just in case there ever is a DC2 of whichever gender!

X

Depends. If family name then I think it should be used as it will be sad not to use it if the future is different. If it's just a mane you love I'd save it although names I loved for DC1 I had totally gone off by DC2.

Anyway what are the names?

We always had a name that we said we call our child before we had kids. We didn’t use it for our first or second. We are early stages of expecting DC3 and we will 100% use it unless it is the opposite gender. I love this name as much as our other children’s names.

So, we didn’t use it as a middle name as per your question. They have family names for their middle names, as will our next baby.

Best of luck to you next month!

I know a family of four daughters. DD2 middle name is DD3 first name.

I’ve recently had my first DS and now sometimes think I wish I’d saved his middle name for a first name in case we have any more as I just really love it!

We used our favourite boys name for our son but didn’t use our second favourite name for his middle name as I wanted to keep it in case we had another boy. Our second child was a girl. I like my sons middle name but do now think I should have used our second favourite name as his middle name. By the time we had our second, I also had a few other boys names I liked just as much so I’d say use both the names you like on your first.

I would use the names you love. Names that were on our shortlist for DS1 but weren't used didnt even make the shortlist for DS2.

Use the names you love now. You don't know what will happen in the future - your tastes may change, you may not have more children, you may only have daughters or only sons. There will always be more great names if you need them.

Middle names in our family are usually family names and not necessarily anything we'd use as a first name. To be honest they are a bit of an irrelevancy unless they hate their first name and want to use the middle instead.

I know a family that used DS1's middle name as DS2's first, but it was a family name so maybe a bit different.

Haha, OP, that's exactly what I did. I had a name & middle name for DC1, but decided to save the middle name to use for a potential second boy because I loved the name so much. It was actually my favourite name, but it didn't seem to suit DC1. As it happened, I had another boy so he got the name & it's perfect for him

I would save them personally, but DH and I had a really hard time agreeing on names, so if there are multiple names that you both really like then save them!
When I was pregnant with DC2 we could not for the life of us agree on a boys name, having used our only agreeable name for DS1. We agreed on one boy name in the end, and then DH went off it (he only told me this after the birth!). We had a DD so it wasn't an issue thankfully.

We used family names for middle names both times, which were much more about the family connections than how much we loved the names (although obviously we did like them, but none of them were really names we'd have given as a first name IYSWIM).