What’s In A Name? A Parents’ Struggle To Find The Perfect Baby Name

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The best piece of advice my mother gave me was to pick a name for my child that I didn’t mind saying over and over again for the next eighteen years. Boy did she hit the nail on the head!

Growing up, I always thought that my mother named me after the city in Australia, so that was the story I always told when people asked. Finally in high school I asked her. She then proceeded to shatter my dreams by telling me she knew a girl in kindergarten named Sydney and always knew that when she had a girl, she would be named Sydney. Cute story, but now my life no longer felt so glamorous.

The not-so-easy task of picking our baby’s name

So when it came my (our) turn to pick out a baby name, I knew it would be easy. I had been picking out baby names since I was like ten! But seriously, following my mom’s advice, how hard could this really be?

To say it was a nightmare is a slight exaggeration, but not much. My husband and I decided that we didn’t want to know the gender of our baby, so this made the job of name picking twice as hard. The boy’s name came nice and easy and I was convinced that we were having a boy. But then part of me thought “There’s no way it is going to be THAT easy.”  And of course, it wasn’t.

The girl’s name… The girl’s name proved to be the hardest thing I had done to date. Why? Because it had to be perfect. We were responsible for picking out a name that would forever be my child’s name. This name needed to have power, and love. It needed to be a name that didn’t sound old when she was a baby, or young when she was a grown-up. This name couldn’t be a family name, or a common name, or one that no one could spell or pronounce (including her parents).

Baby name

I was constantly going back and forth on names. I’d pick out a name, present it to my husband, we’d let it marinate, and when my husband was finally coming around to liking it, I’d change my mind and say “NOPE!” I’d go back to the drawing board and start again. In the beginning, I would jot names down that I heard on the radio or a TV show and say them out loud over and over. After a few months of striking out, I finally decided to buy a baby name book. Talk about baby name overload! I just wanted to finally be done with the whole thing.

And then it hit me

And then one day out of the blue, the name Audrey hit me, and I felt like I was finally onto something genius. I took the name to my best friend to get her opinion and help with the middle name. We spent the night pouring over baby name books, both in paperback and online, each time saying the name Audrey with another name for the middle. I finally settled on the name Audrey Greyson and felt ready to send it up to the husband. He wanted to make one small change-he wanted to change Greyson to Grey. DING DING DING!!! We finally had our winner, the girl’s name had been officially picked.  Now all we had left to do was wait.

It turns out that we had a girl and to this day, I never ever get tired of saying her name, even if it’s a million times a day!

How did you pick your child’s name?