we thought of a girl's name about 5yrs before even thinking about ttc.
come week 37 of 1st pg, we're still desperately struggling for a boy's name. Cue dh standing in front of bookshelf yelling out random authors' names, and convos like, "Shackleton?" "Rifle?" "Jupiter?" "Chair?"
Then dh finds a name online and we both go, BINGO! (That wasn't the name, btw.) That's it, we thought. The next day dh found out it was a foreign version of his own name so then we really knew.
It was a boy, much to our astonishment, and he totally belongs to that name.
2nd pg, well, we still have our girl's name in hand, but damn, finding a boy's name this time round is hard. From about 35 weeks we are putting ds to bed then hitting the web, searching for another boy's name from the same foreign language (Finnish, since you ask), failing, searching, drawing up lists, crossing every name off each other's lists, searching some more, etc. As I'm doing this one night a girl's name leaps out at me and I scrawl it down with my middle name, ring it, there in between all the boys. Mention it to dh. It's alright, he says. Then we go back to arguing about boy's names. It is desperate because 100% of the babies we've ever had were boys, so clearly this one is going to be a boy as well, right? [pregnancy 'logic' face]
In the end we never did find another boy's name. Astonishingly, dd was, well, a dd. In the birth suite, dh said I could tell them her name, and that found-in-passing name just tripped off my tongue. A week later, I was in doubt. Bad doubt. I thought - well, a lot of loopy supernatural mumbo-jumbo that I'd prefer to gloss over, actually - enough that when dd was 7 weeks old we tried calling her by our original choice for a while. But it's wrong. She just is the name that leapt out at me. A year later, the other name, much as we still like it, is unthinkable.
So yes, bizarrely, we knew.
(sorry to hog your thread, btw.)