How did you choose your children's second names?

[MMfanalltheway]

Mine are named after saints I prayed to during pregnancy.
I guess a lot have second names after grandparents (I'm named after my paternal grandmother).
If you don't have those reasons, do you just pick a pretty name that you like?

We just picked names that we liked and that sounded good when said along with the first and last name

We picked names of significant family members - either grandparents or deceased - with very little regard to whether the names sounded good together. For us, the meaning was more important.

My mums name, she died when i was 12
By chance it fit with dd first name

My Dad's first name is my son's middle name and my mum's middle name is my daughter's middle name so we all have the same middle name. My mum's first name is completely dreadful though! No way would I have used that.

My first dd was given my original first name choice as second name as I didn't think it suited her enough for a first name once she was born.
Dd2's second name was picked by Dd1 as I hoped it would help with bonding,didn't work!

Family names, all my family do that, and a lot of my friends. I find it slightly odd when people pick random middle names - it isn’t odd of course, but to me the purpose is family links.

DD is Marie after the Virgin Mary. I had a medal of Virgin Mary dangling over my bump throughout pregnancy.

It's funny, but nobody but myself ever uses her second name. My aunt gave me a medal of the Virgin Mary which I wore throughout the pregnancy (tied onto my bra so that it dangled over my bump).I had only one bra that was comfortable in pregnancy as it had no underwire and that's where the medal dangled from lol. So her second name would have been Mary, but Marie went better with her first name and The Virgin Mary is Maria or Marie in different languages. So that's who she's called after.

Aunt (midwife and birthing partner) nearly had to wrestle the medal off me when I was going in for the c-section - emergency - placental abruption. I was like 'no, I have to have the medal with me'. Aunt calmly told me not to worry that Holy Mary would know but that I couldn't have anything metal with me going into surgery - I wasn't fully convinced lol - I honestly thought that if I let go of that medal, baby would die. But ye, so many things went wrong and I absolutely then had to call dd after Holy Mary - hence Marie.

It would've been nice to have used grandparents' names as middle names, but all four names were unusable to me. I couldn't give a child a name I don't like, even as a middle name.

DS1 has an underused classic as his middle name, it has been used in my family previously. DS2 shares his dad's classic middle name. DS3 has another classic name, chosen specifically for its meaning.

I've noticed as a child, that the grandmother I was named after, really had a soft spot for me.

A favourite character in a book & a family name (2 middle names)

For us it was easy. We agreed that middle names would be after our closest friends.
We didn't want to know the sex until the birth so we chose both a boys and a girls name.
So our first sons middle name would be my husbands closest friends first name. And our first daughters middle name would be my best friends first name. We obviously asked them both beforehand if they were happy for us to do that. And said we would ask again when the baby was born to make sure they were still happy.
We had a son so my husbands friends name was used. We hope to have another one day, and if we have a girl my best friend is still happy for us to use her name (we would check again at the time of course, if it happens).
We thought it would be a nice way to honour them as they would have been godparents. My husband is an only child, and both my siblings are much younger than me (10 and 20 years respectively), so we have no siblings who would have done it, hence why we would have asked them to. However our child or children will never be christened or baptised because of our different religions. I'm Catholic and my husband is Church of England. We both wanted our child to be our own religion and couldn't compromise. So we did neither. Hence our friends will never be godparents. So the name was the next best thing (though we would have still named our children after our friends anyway)

DS1 has 2 middle names. My paternal Grandfather and his Dads maternal Grandfather, who were both deceased before he was born. (I wanted to name him after both my Grandads, but we decided, rightly, that this wouldn't be fair).

DS2 has DS1s Godfathers name as his middle name. He died on the day my pregnancy with DS2 was dated from so felt it was fate.

We tried to do family meanings for example Rosina which is a grandparents middle name. But for baby number 2 we just are just going to go with what we like. We are considering Joy though after a Nan x

Both are family names on both sides of the family

One of my nieces has a beautiful second name Amélie. She's not called after anyone, my dbro and dsil just loved the name. It is actually a first name that I would have considered for my own dd.

I wanted to name after my great Nan but DP really didn't like it so we compromised on a name we both liked, that sounded good with her first name, and have her a sensible alternative name (plus lots of NN options) if she decides she doesn't like her fairly unusual first name. I'm still slightly sad we didn't use the name I wanted but her actual name is also very nice.

First child has partner's surname as a middle name (and my surname as a surname). Second child has my mother's maiden name as a middle name (and my partners surname as a surname).

They're all names from the family tree - one of which is traditional in DH's family, the others are just ones we liked

My mum died just before I fell pregnant with dd. I actually gave birth to her EXACTLY one year after my mum died, which was quite strange.

Dd has my mum's name as a middle name.

DS has my DH's name as a middle name. DH has his dad's name as a middle name. We considered using the grandads' names as middle names for DS, but it got complicated. If we'd used them both, then mil would have been left out (not that she'd have minded, but we would have). If we'd only used one of the grandads names, the other grandad would have been left out. We could have used our siblings' names etc or our grandparents, but we didn't like any of those names enough. I don't like any of my aunts, uncles or cousins enough to give my babies their names. I think DH feels the same about his. So, all in all, it made sense to use DH's name.

We didn't want to pick a name which wasn't a family name, as we had already started that tradition with dd, so it would have felt weird to pick a random one.

Family names, as middle names should be IMO.
DS has my grandad's name and DD has DH's grandma's name.

DD1 middle name after an amazing student midwife who helped so much during an awful labour and post labour experience. DD2 middle name after the Queen lol!

DS1 - named after his Grandads - although the combination of his names cover both Grandads and uncles.

DS2 - named by DS2 ( actually the name of a child I looked after as I was a nursery worker!)

My oldest is named after the town where DH and I met which is also the middle name of my grandma. My middle dd is named after my sister who died a month before she was born and my youngest has my middle name.
I like that all their names have meanings and reasons and my dd’s seem to like to hear the story of why we chose their names

Three are taken from family names.
One is a name associated with a place.

My oldest daughter has a family name, my middle daughter has my grandmothers name, and my youngest , my son , has my grandfathers name. My grandparents brought me up from the age of 14.