My Thoughts On.... Names

This week, Wayne and Colleen Rooney welcomed their third son into the world.  Whilst the birth of a child is a wonderful thing, it's a serious undertaking. So is naming your child.  Their three sons are Kai, Klay and Kit.  From here on in known as KKK..  as one twitter user succinctly put it:

In the summer of 2013, Katie Hopkins caused absolute uproar because she candidly said she judged parents and children alike because of their names.  She went too far saying she wouldn't let her children play with others whose names she disliked.  But, whether we all like it or not, we judge on looks and names. As adults, if we went to school with someone who wasn't always so nice, we are pre-dispositioned not to necessarily warm to another person of that name immediately.

Choosing a name for your bundle of joy can be a tough experience. If you don't know what gender to expect you have two lots to get it down to.  MrM and I spent hours on names.  With the 10 year old we didn't know gender. We had a book of baby names. Night after night I called out names and we both wrote separate lists of what we liked. then we compared lists and only kept it to names we had on both lists.  That whittled it down to about four. Then it was haggling with our favourites.  I'm pleased to say 10 years on and I'm still happy with it and he seems to quite like it too.

The 6 year old was a lot easier. We started with the list we'd made four years previously. Did we still like those names? Was there any we wanted to add? Did it fit with the rest of the family?  You see; I think that's fairly important. You can't have two children called Bert & Ernie and then another called Hendrix.

Some countries have baby naming laws.  Germany, Sweden & Denmark to name just a few.  Often it's to ensure you can recognise a child's gender by it's name,  that traditional names are kept and that your child is not going to grow up embarrassed having been named after a piece of pottery or fruit.

There's also the question of being able to spell your name.. or can anyone else spell your child's name?

It's Marc with a "c"

I have a coffee shop name.  It makes life easy. I don't have a particularly difficult name but people struggle to say it or spell it right.  I blame it on three vowels in a five letter name.

The top 5 baby names of 2015 in the UK were these:

Are there any surprises in there?  How did you choose your children's names?