The Name Game

Many girls start dreaming of their wedding day when they are little. They want to do hope chests and cut out pictures of wedding dresses or wear a pillow case on their head like a veil. I don't remember doing that at all. I'm sure I dreamed of getting married, but it was more about the feelings of loving someone and being a bride, not the details of the actual day. Planning our wedding wasn't difficult. Tim actually had great input and made very little requests. (He really just didn't like certain colors, that was all.) It may have been stressful but I didn't have a grandiose dream that I had to make come true.

No, what I really dreamed about was names for my future children. I recently threw away all my old diaries and there were pages and pages of names that I liked. Taylor, Rose, Madison, Mariah. I can only recall one boy's name, Tyler, and that was to go with Taylor.

Surprisingly, making a list of 5 or 6 names that we both liked wasn't difficult when we found out we were going to have a boy. It was much more difficult to narrow it down to just one. The name Brenden didn't show up on that list until I was about 33 weeks pregnant, and even then Tim was positive he was going to be named Braden. (When he likes a name he likes a name. Poor Brenden gets his stubbornness from both parents.)

However, this time around has not been so easy. There have been names we have both liked but nothing has really struck us as THE NAME. Tim has a name, again, that he is extremely fond of. I don't hate it, I just like other names better. I have a name I love, but the nickname that would obviously come out of it is something that I don't like at all. I tried doing an impromptu poll on Facebook, asking if there was any way I could request for her name to not be shortened. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we could convince anyone that the name we picked was the name we would like for her to be called.

I don't have a problem with nicknames in general. Obviously Tim's name is shortened from Timothy and many people in my family still call me Mandy. (Those family members are the only people allowed to call me that.) If we decide on a name and later on our daughter wants to be called by a nickname then that is totally fine with me. After we've given it to her it's her name. Much like when I was 3 years old and decided my name was Amanda, not Mandy, and my parents respected that, I would respect her right to choose.

So for now, she's nameless, which is obviously okay since we have a little time. It just makes me slightly anxious because there are so many people having babies right now and I would hate for one of my friends to decide to use a name we already like. Yes, we could still name her that, but it would feel weird to me. The fact that I've been dreaming about naming a girl since forever doesn't help either. This is much more stressful than planning a wedding...by a LOT.