She Suggests Names, He Vetoes Them: Can This Couple Negotiate?

Oh, that is SOOOO good! Thank you for that dose of levity and reality all rolled in one……. and your daughter’s names are darling too. I’ll share this one with my husband for sure.

This SO sounds like my husband! We only had to come up with one name, but the process was about the same: I’d suggest a name and he’d shoot it down. Your daughters’ names are great – congrats on 2 beautiful little girls!

I adore Hester!

I cannot wait for my husband to read this post. Thank you for the dose of laughter on this gloomy morning. And what beautiful daughters you have!

This sounds familiar….

Your wife came up with a great method!

Thanks, everyone. And Paul, Hester isn’t so bad, but it’s way too close to “fester” for my liking.

I sent this to my husband this morning. His response: why are those babies holding a light saber?

I don’t think he got the point. LOL.

Lila and Victoria are lovely choices! And what cute little girls you have!

Why is it that most men don’t want to take an active role in baby naming? My husband is willing to semi-interestedly look through lists I make up — but trying to get him to make a list of names he likes on his own? Very difficult.

I really enjoyed reading this post! Your daughters are so adorable. They have gorgeous names, too! Do you pronounce Lila like LEE-luh or LY-luh?

Eva, we pronounce it LY-luh, or as she says it, YAI-yuh. I’m saving my speech therapy dollars as we speak.

They’re holding a light saber because it is the weapon of the Jedi. I hear those two have mad Jedi skills.

Your wife is brilliant, lucky for you. And I’m laughing about the way Lila pronounces her name because I’m a speech therapist who was dumb enough to name her son Lyle and he can’t say that, either. I *knew* better. But at least he can get free speech therapy with one of my employees!

Huh, we had the opposite problem. I was responsible for shooting down every name my husband came up with. I did it well. I was going to be pushing these babies out of my hoo-ha, so I figured I had final say. It all worked out in the end. Neither of us can imagine any other name for each of our girls.

ciao,
rpm

Sounds like when we chose our daughter’s middle name. I suggested seven possiblities, all honoring important women in my life, mostly departed. All were rejected by my husband. We agreed on Eleanor as her first name so when I told him to suggest a middle name himself all he could come up with was, “What was Eleanor Roosevelt’s middle name?” Cool, coming from a guy on a green card, but it turned out her name was Anna Eleanor. His second try was Rose. It stuck.

Naming our son was a whole other kind of nightmare.

I’m a terrible, terrible person for pointing this out…but there’s a gramatical mistake in your essay. It should be “neither of them **is** Hester.” “Neither” is singular, and the “of them” gets ignored. I thought you might want to know so you could fix it.
The essay itself is lovely.
What about your older daughter’s name? How did you pick that one?

What’s wrong with Hester? You could have named the other one Prynne. It’s soooo modern. It has a “y” in it. It even rhymes with twin. What’s not to love?

I am curious as to the other 8 names on the list as you picked three classic beautiful names for your beautiful daughters.

Oh, and that pic is the epitome of cuteness.

Your wife is a genius. Beautiful names and a great way to survive the name game. Tell her she is famous and others may emulate her method.

Why aren’t there TWO light sabers? You mean, they have to share?

I figured the light saber was
to delineate which side of the box is Lila’s and which is Victoria’s.

Also, one of my twins is Eliza and she and her sister also pronounce it YAI-yuh.

On the day that they decided my twins needed to be born, my husband and I sat in a triage room in L&D for 7 hours, waiting our turn in the OR. We used the time to finally pin down the babes’ names. My husband, trying for levity, said that he really wanted to name the boy Chakotay (you know, from Star Trek: Voyager). I agreed that, should he be born with a tatoo in the middle of his forehead, we would name him Chakotay. It is a great tribute to my husband that he did not hold me to that deal when our son was born with a large birthmark smack-dab in the middle of his forehead.

z: I feel very very certain that the original copy of the post was entirely grammatically correct and that any mistakes in the version you see here were added later. It was also funnier and contained the secret to world peace. And our other daughter’s name is Kathryn, which has too many Ys.

Desiree: For the life of me, I cannot remember what any of the other names were, but I do have the distinct feeling one of them was Persephone.

As for the lightsaber, there was only one because there can be only one. Oh crap, wrong movie.

The story of how the list of ten was whittled down to two is even a better story…but it will be told another time.

Before we knew our twins were boys, I was reading names I liked out loud from the baby name book to my husband (starting with the girls’ “A” section): “Alia?” “No” “Anna?” “No” “Anya?” “No” “Aria?” “No, I don’t really like names that…” he froze mid-sentence. “Start with an A and end with an A?” I asked (My name, as you can see, starts with an A and ends with an A).

Masterful as usual. When’s will you have a book coming out?

The flaw in this arrangement, which it seems you two never ran into, comes with the question of who determines whether your suggestions are better than the names on the list.

Because then, you guys would just switch roles and be back where you started, except now you’d have a list conveniently at hand for whoever reached it first to shove down the other’s throat.

Our eldest daughter is called Hester Lillian Frances – a beautiful name. She lives up to it as she is full to the brim with personality. Hester means ‘star’ and that is exactly what she is. I think it is a lovely name that is feminine as well as being strong.

I have 4 kids. 3 girls and 1 boy.

Jasper Alfie and his twin sister Alice Maria are 3.

And my newborn twin girls are called Holly Rebecca and Ivy Alexandra.

Beautiful names and beautiful story. I just gave birth to my daughter, Viktoria, 2 months ago. Does your daughter Victoria go by any nicknames?

This has to be the funniest article I have seen around the Berry Blogs. I read it aloud to my husband and we both laughed our heads off. It’s too bad our kids will have headless parents now, but we sure had a great time. Thanks.

Saracita, I agree! This is still one of our funniest posts ever and one of my favorites….