Names??

I'll never forget when we found out we were pregnant with our first bub and how excited we were!
We then however,  found ourselves in the daunting world of name choosing!

Having worked with so many kids in my career, I found myself associating names with previous children....we were no way in hell having a child called Blayne!!! (no offence if you have a Blayne!)
I rememeber advice from a friend who said the real way to test if you like a name is to go to the supermarket and shout out the name as if calling the child......you'll know how it sounds then!!

It had to be a name we both liked, a name that would travel with them through the years, one that went with our surname, one that people could spell, one that wasn't so common there would be more than 2 in their class and yet one that wasn't too out there.........the list seemed endless and the pressure felt enormous!!

I actually like the more 'left wing' names you could say, however it appeared Pip liked the more traditional names. We had 9 months of finding a middle ground! And because we didn't find out the sex of our bub to be, we had to find that middle ground on both a girls and a boys name!! It was a hard process.

We were so excited on April 21, 2005 to announce the arrival of our beautiful Phoebe Louisa (Louisa being my mothers name). We were thrilled. She was beautiful, alert, big and healthy and her name really suited her.

I'll never forget then, our first Mothers group session when I turned up as proud as punch with my divine little bundle, only to introduce myself and my baby and a mother across from me started laughing. She proceeded to explain that her friend had a dog called Phoebe Louisa and it just made her chuckle out loud..........I was devastated! (who the hell calls their dog Phoebe Louisa anyway!!)

Never in our naming process had we thought to include the 'dog name' category!
The 'said' mother and I are the still greatest of friends and we can now both chuckle about it all these years later........but I have to say, it did change the way we thought about naming our next 2 children!!

How did you come about your children's names? Did you have to meet in the middle like we did??