My husband and I have 2 kids, when we had our son we could only agree on 2 names so used both of those for him. When we had our daughter we couldn't find a boys name we both loved so were lucky she came out a girl. We'd only planned on having two kids so we gave her our 3 favourite names. No doubt you can see where this is going...
We don't know the sex of our new baby and are completely stuck on names. The biggest issue we have is that I'm English but live in Sweden with my Swedish husband. Large parts of my family wouldn't call themselves racist but they're very insular and can't see why anyone would move out of their local area yet alone to another country. They also cannot seem to comprehend why we'd give our children "foreign names" - I know this is an issue and we limit our contact with most of them but obviously things get talked about in the family. When choosing names we've tried to find something that can be pronounced by my English speaking family but are also Swedish. Our son is Heinrich which we thought would be OK but a lot of my family call him either Henry or pronounce it Hen-rick both of which he hates. When we had our daughter we thought we'd got around that by calling her Astrid and on the whole they spell and pronounce it correctly.
So now we are trying to find names for our new baby and I'm looking for any help or suggestions.
For boys we like
- Björn but that has the triple threat of being pronounced B-jorn, compared to Björk and the accent over the o.
- Leif but they'd either pronounce it as leaf or spell it wrong.
For girls we love:
Freja - same issue with pronunciation as Björn and my husband wants to spell it the Swedish way not with a y.
Elisabet - similar issue to Heinrich.
Please mumsnetters help me out with suggestions or tell me what you did in the same situation. I know it sounds like we're choosing names purely to please my xenophobic family but some of them aren't xenophobic and want to do it right but need a little help and we're also conscious of the fact that they'll likely travel to other countries and we don't want them to spend their lives telling people how to spell or pronounce their names constantly.