I’ve been reading your blog daily since I found out I was pregnant and I’ve found it to be great inspiration for names. I really did not think that my husband and I would be in the situation of having the hardest time with names but here we are less than a month away from my due date (May 10th). So, now I’m turning to you for help!
My name is Jayme, my husband’s name is Shane and our last name starts with an S and rhymes with Brand (like a _trand of hair). This is our first child and we have not found out the gender. We feel pretty good about the girls names we have narrowed down which would be either Makena Leighton or Ashton Makena.
Our issues are with picking Boy’s names. We just can’t seem to find something that we both LOVE. We like names that aren’t too popular or too plain. Below is a list of names that have been on the list at some point or another.
Holden (top contender at this point but still not sure about it)
Parker (just not sure about it as a first name)
Ryker
Leyton (like the name but not the spelling and the Leighton spelling seems feminine to me)
Mason (too popular)
Cooper (hubby does not like and I really don’t like the nickname Cooooooop which I think he would be called all the time!)
Hudson (hubby does not like)
If we chose Holden as the first name we like Parker with it as the middle name. As for all the other names we just have no idea.
I’m sure I’m way over thinking this now and making it way more complicated than needed.....please help us!
Looking at your name list, I suggest making your future naming decisions easier by deciding now (if you can---it may be hard to think this far ahead and this theoretically) how you'd like the sibling set to go. If this baby is a girl named Ashton, it might seem like future girl names need to be equally boyish, and/or that future boy names needed to be unequivocally boyish to avoid making Ashton seem like a brother, or that you can't use Leyton because now it's even harder to tell who's a boy and who's a girl. I talked about this issue at more length in this post: Baby Naming Issue: What to Name the Siblings of a Child With a Gender-Neutral Name or With a Name Traditionally Given to the Opposite Sex (that title just SINGS, doesn't it?).
So, if I were you, and this is only if _I_ were you, because this sort of thing is sooooo regional (in some areas, for example, Parker is perfectly androgynous; in others, it's almost exclusively boy), I'd eliminate Parker and Leyton except as middle names---and if you use Ashton, either use it for a boy (220 girls were named Ashton in 2009, but 3519 boys were named Ashton the same year, so it's still 1:16 in boy-name territory), or else spell it Ashtyn to lean it toward girl territory.
Are you pronouncing Makena mah-KAY-nah or mah-KEN-nah? If the latter, I suggest putting the second N back in to aid pronunciation and spelling. (If the former: never mind.)
And you're not asking for girl name suggestions, but I'll mention Padgett anyway. I heard that recently and thought it was just about the cutest name ever.
But you asked about boy names. So, as I said, I'd take Parker and Leyton off the list of first-name candidates to start with. And your husband doesn't like Cooper or Hudson, so that leaves Holden and Ryker. Of those two, Holden is my favorite.
More possibilities (I'm avoiding B names, to avoid initials B.S.; I wasn't sure about M.S. and P.S. and S.S., but left them in):
Archer
Coleman
Coulter
Donnelly
Grady
Hatcher
Keaton
Keegan
Kiefer
Lawson
Miller
Porter
Sullivan
Turner
Wilson
