A Pregnant Pause

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Now, what is the cute Chad Michael Murray’s photo doing on my pregnancy blog? Hahaha, can you believe that he was the inspiration for our first child’s name? Seriously.

When we knew we were getting a boy, I consulted the baby name books and found some really useful tips:

1. Hubby and I made our list of names separately and then got together to compare. We did that and had a lot of fun laughing, joking or yucking! at each other’s choices

This time around, I find out A LOT about what guys / men think of some girls’ names (rolls eyes). Among the reactions:

1. sounds boring, bimbo-ish, common, weird,
2. difficult to spell or pronounce,
3. NO, I’m not going to name my daughter after this awful person!!!
4. what’s that???

2. Practise saying (or in my case now, YELLING) the name you’ve chosen at least 10 times. If you still like the sound of the name, then it’s OK. I remember a couple choosing a 3-syllable name for their boy and I told them, they’re gonna end up using only 1- or 2-syllables. They disagreed but guess what, I was right LOL

3. Check the acronym or initials of your child’s full name. For example, “Harry Owen Tan” = HOT, “Shirley Heng Ing Ting” = SHIT, “Ben Ung Thean Theng” = BUTT.

Ok, these may sound extreme but I tell you, I’ve been checking students’ namelists for half a decade, the jokes and laughs some poor kids get from their college mates or potential girlfriends / boyfriends are enough to make that kid wanna stay at home FOREVER!!! Or worse, hate their parents for making such stupid choices…

4. Do wait until the baby arrives before you decide on your final choice. I really believe in this because the name just has to suit the baby’s personality.

We had a few boys’ names in mind and Lucas was one of them because it’s a German variation of “Luke”, which is the name of seven apostles.

Since we already had the boyish, rugged and cool image of Chad Michael Murray’s “Lucas” in our minds from the TV drama series “One Tree Hill”, we were thankful that he confirmed this personality when he came yelling his stubborn little head out in the labour room

If he had come out a calm, docile and quiet little fella, we might have named him “Charles” or “James” or “Edward”.

5. Choose a name that would suit the baby’s looks. Now that we’re choosing a baby girl’s names, I’m definitely going to wait till she appears before making the final decision although we’re pretty set already

Again, from my teaching and other working experiences, I remember instances (some of them really cruel) where people are incredibly surprised to see plain-looking, simple and mousey-type people with glamourous names like “Dexter”, “Dionne”, “Alexandra”, “Monique” etc.

People would either snicker, laugh out loud, comment or just smile politely when the person does NOT look like their name at all. In one case, an African-American was actually quite offended when she met a Caucasian couple who’d given African-American names to their children:

“Are you making fun of us or are you trying to play the black card? They look NOTHING like blacks. Why don’t you just stick to all the Anglo-Saxon names that you have? Let us blacks have our black names…”

There’s a new trend now among the Chinese who have taken on Japanese names e.g. “Hiroko Tan”. For me, my personal identity (my family, culture and heritage) is very, very precious to me – unless I have a Japanese background, I certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And I also don’t think the Japanese are taking on Chinese names. They are very proud of their culture and heritage and I think we should be too. What do you think?

Do you agree with Shakespeare that

“A rose by any other name smells as sweet?”

All in all, choosing a baby’s name isn’t as easy as choosing the best eye cream