Baby’s Name

For a lot of parents-to-be like us, being parents for the first time made us very excited to choose what name should we give for our first baby. It is wonderful to read a lot of beautiful names from different resources and like many others we’ve had a difficult time choosing the right one amongst all that’s on the list.

At the beginning, we started to look for a lot of different names from short to the longest can be, but then we decided to think about the length, we had to answer the question, should her name be short or long? Once we had the answer to this question our list drastically narrowed. But still we had hard time choosing the one we love and our daughter would love to have.

A lot of name suggestions came up from friends and relatives but none of them really sounded well to our ears. What my husband and I did was to pretend that our baby was already walking on her own and call her using all the possible names that we had picked because eventually the name that we will choose will identify her for the rest of her life. We had a lot of debates about the sound and every time I picked a name my husband would be like “That does not sound right” or “It doesn’t go with our last name” and many more expressions from him.

We wanted a more unique name for our baby, so we started constructing names in different ways. Many of those names turned out to be hard to pronounce or easy to be mispronounced and that had to stop us choose some of these unique ones because we don’t want our daughter to be correcting people throughout her whole life when people start to call her name and be recognized.

At this point, coming up with a name was very difficult and that really overwhelmed us a bit but we had to keep looking and looking for that special name that our daughter would use when she finally gets here, then in the middle of nowhere we came across the name Mia, which means “mine”. The meaning of the name somehow touched our hearts and that’s when we officially decided that’s how we were going to call our most wished child.

After choosing the name Mia for our baby, we knew that there was something that we still needed to do, and that was to make sure that our baby’s initials would stand out when it comes to the time for her to just use her initials. We would never want it to turn out like M.A.D or M.A.N. you know what I mean. So once we made sure that her initials were okay, we were at long last ready to have the name of our daughter that will age well with her.

Here are some of the tips we considered throughout our special experience:

1. Be unique as possible?.
You don’t have to be unique, you just need to love the name. The name Mia that we picked is not unique but the meaning and the simplicity of the name made us fall in love with it. However, we still believe that it is a good idea to go with a unique name as long as it is not long or hard to pronounce because ultimately the one that will get stuck with the name is our baby. Each of us have our own identity and of course babies will have theirs therefore it can be a good idea to go with a unique name so that he/she can stand out among all other kids or people in the community just by having a name that is only owned by a few and not that popular like the other names.

2. Be short and simply spelled.
This is the other reason we chose the name Mia, we thought it would be an advantage for our baby to learn her name as soon as she learns to babble words and write the letters of her name at her very young age. Baby would be able to say and and even write her name without any difficulties or confusion as she learns all the basics. We can now tell that in the future most people won’t get confused on spelling her name.

3. Search names with special meaning.
Most people believe that every single name should have a meaning or at least have a reason behind that name of their child especially unique ones. I believe they are right, Why? My husband has kinda a unique name, and every time he tells his name to new people he meets, he always gets asked about where his name comes from, does it have a meaning and so many more. So having the answer to those questions is great and that is why we encouraged ourselves to go with a very special name that represents the meaning of having this beautiful gift that God has blessed us with.

4. Agreed and loved by both parents.
My husband and I had a baby name battle, both of us had the veto power but no matter what, we knew one thing; we were on the same side. So to keep things in a calming way we had to carefully listen to each other by naming names by turns and that helped us agree on names we both like. I’m so glad that both of us got the final say because that made it more meaningful for the both of us.