Are you sharing your name ideas with people?

[emiliaj]

I am not remotely interested in sharing. It is hard enough to battle out a name I like, then agree on a name DH likes too.
No way am I adding anyone else into that equation.
In the end (miracles willing) our baby will be named with great care and love, and if other people don't like our choice then they can go have their own child and name that. LOL

emiliaj

[oddcreature]

Not pregnant yet (but trying! OMG it's frustrating...) but I'e narrowed my list to two boys names and two girls names.

I've shared them with some friends, but not others. It helps that we already have one daughter, and I know from last time what sort of things people said about our name choices. So this time around I know who to tell what!

BTW, choice are...

Annabel Claire
Bethany Ann
Liam Richard
Hamish Michael

[kibby]

When we have children, we'll likely be keeping our mouths shut. I know I have a unique taste that my mother doesn't share so I don't want to open that nutshell, and if I don't tell my mother, it's really not fair if we tell anyone else. So nobody is going to know! Except us of course, and as someone else said, it's hard enough to finalize a choice that we both like! Much less adding in everyone else! Once we find something, we are keeping it under wraps!

That being said, our top names right now are...
Odessa Jane
Corisande (Middlename pending!)
Althea Caro

(Jane and Caro being the first 4 letters of each grandmothers name, both names on their own so it's perfect!)

[snacktress]

It only took me sharing one name with my mom back in 2006 when I was pregnant with my first (the name was Adele, the reaction was "Like the farmer in the dell" - eyeroll, eyeroll) to decide I would never again share names with people in my circle before the baby was born. Names are like art - what is beautiful to me is not necessarily beautiful to you, and we don't have to agree. Naming a child is hard enough between two people, without adding the unhelpful opinions of a whole league of folks whose thoughts, frankly, don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

I named my second child (daughter) Virginia. I knew my mother would hate it, and I decided I didn't care. It made for a much less stressful process to just decide we were going to choose names for us, not to please others.

[annasage]

I'm not pregnant, but I am a name nerd. Sometimes I share names with my family or close friends and the reactions vary. My Dad is probably one of the only people I like sharing names with because he likes a lot of the same names I do and even if he doesn't like it he finds the positives about it. My mom is a little less positive (I told her about the name Genesis and she flipped out). I also tell my best friend but she doesn't have the same style and openly told me that she didn't like most of the names I like. (I told her my favorite name in the whole world was Cyril and she told me she'd always call my kid Cereal. Oh well, I still love that name and am going to use it anyways.) If and when I ever do get pregnant I'm not telling anyone until after the kid is born.

[shutterbuglove]

I can't tell. I wish I didn't care but I do. My husband told someone tonight and they had a negative reaction... and the name slowly fell in my mind. Never knew how much of a people pleasure I was until this baby naming adventure came along!!

[clover]

We don't anymore. We did with our first, and not that many people disparaged our choice, but we weren't 100% certain about it and we got lots of monogrammed gifts. After that were like, "OK, I guess that is what he's going to be called!"

[mariab]

I have learned my lesson with my 4 previous children that people can ruin names for me. So when we get pregnant next time i will definitely not be sharing our name(s). Hopefully People will keep their opinions to themselves when the name is attatched to a child.

[zaelia]

We shared our individual long lists (we kept separate lists in the beginning) with our friends and family pretty early in the process and asked for their thoughts, but told them up front that we didn't plan take their opinions too seriously. As it got closer to the due date, we did reveal our short list to our families, but told them that they wouldn't get more than that until after the boys were born. It wasn't hard to stick to that because we didn't decide on their names until they were 2 days old anyway.

I really liked getting feedback from people around me, but I think doing it early in the process with huge lists was beneficial. That way we weren't too attached to any single name yet and there were LOTS of names for people to comment on so they got the picture that it was very preliminary and they were all just names we liked but maybe weren't going to use (there were definitely some "dreaming" names on there). Presenting it in that light got us productive feedback, and no one was too negative. But we could also have just been really lucky.

[goodhope]

I discuss my names with others, so I guess I'm in the minority. I enjoy getting feedback from people, even when it's not positive. It's easy enough for me to brush off negative comments if I can write them off as a matter of different tastes, and sometimes people have actually pointed out unfortunate associations or potential pitfalls I failed to consider. Plus, I just enjoy talking about names with people.