How to choose?!

[Carabu1]

Hello ladies! So I’m expecting my 1st, just into 2nd trimester and getting excited enough now to start thinking about names. My DH is being a bit hopeless - he thinks it’s too early to start, and also hates basically all names - even before we were expecting he could never even pick names for pets....! So I’m not sure how to go about getting him involved, in a positive way - any tips?!

Related to that - I have 2 stand out top choices for boy and girl, both of which are long term favs. The girls name is, in last year or so, becoming more popular (moved into top 100, albeit still not top 50). I’m not sure how much this should put me off, or if you just ignored popularity lists?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how you went about deciding? Especially with a dh who’s not being that helpful! My fear is we’ll end up with a total compromise name that neither of us hate, but don’t love either.

What are your standout top 2 choices for boy and girl? Maybe we can help you with related suggestions to add to list

With DD I was the only parent which obviously made it easier.
My dad just said to my mum when me and my sister we're born. Oh, names are your department. Again this made it easier as she'd had my name picked out when she was a,little girl.
It could be the other way around your partner could have point blank refused the name you've always loved.

We both wrote really long lists of literally any name we vaguely liked for both boy or girls, in the hope we might find some common ground. We then edited each others lists so we had a long short list of probably 10 to 15 names we both liked. Closer to the birth I think we got it down to 2 options for a girl and 3 for a boy. On the day we used my choice from the final 2 for girls. 2nd time around, another girl and we went with the other name.we didn't use first time around.

My dh and I wrote a list of the top ten names we liked. We then looked at each others list and vetoed any we hated and worked with what we had left.

Sounds like the lists are the way to go then...just hope dh manages to put at least one name on his....!

Rather than staring with separate lists, we sat down together in front of a long list and drew up a shortlist together of names we both agreed were ok.

That made it feel like much more of a joint decision from the start.

Also it's good to remember that once they're here they'll really become their name, no matter what it is. So it doesn't really matter if it doesn't feel "perfect" at the beginning because it will become perfect for them eventually.

*starting