Next week I will be 33 weeks pregnant with our second child, and my husband and I are still deciding on a name. With our first, we agreed early on that we wanted a Spanish first name that was easy to pronounce in English (more importantly one that my husband felt comfortable with).

It was important to me that he stay connected with his Chilean side and I wanted to start with his name. Oddly enough, it was my American husband who found the name Matías — he liked it because it worked in several languages. What we didn’t realize was just how many languages it would work in. When we lived in the UK (where our son was born) we had people ask if we were Greek, German, Polish or Finnish. Talk about a universal name! We are well aware that we will live in the U.S., but like many bicultural and bilingual families, we feel names are an important part of your identity and help keep you connected to your roots.

Now we are having our second child, a girl, and we just cannot decide on a name. It’s been more difficult than the first time and we’ve also learned to keep our ideas to ourselves, because everyone seems to have an opinion on this topic — mostly from my familia. No surprise there! It’s either too old fashioned, or too edgy or too foreign. Yes, these are the types of comments we get. That’s why I’ve had to keep the names to myself despite being asked every chance they get.

Read: What’s in a Name? So many Choices, Only One Winner

What we do know is that  we would like a name that works well both in English and Spanish, but one that won’t be butchered in English and easy for my husband and his parents to pronounce. I know what it is like to have an unpronounceable name or one that gets cut in half — no one wants a lifetime of that.

I keep repeating names to myself, saying them out loud to see how it would sound when calling my daughter and what feeling they give me. Another factor to consider is the shortening of names; for instance, my husband likes Victoria and Magdalena, but I am not a fan of Vicki or Magda. Of course, we won’t call them that, but others may and we don’t want that. Nope, not having it!

So I ask you readers, how did you decide on your children’s names and what factors did you take into consideration? Was having a name connected to your roots imminent in the decision-making process? As for us, we are still deciding, but with the baby due in February, we should have one soon!

{photo by Gato Azul}

I’ve had baby names on the mind lately, and at this late stage of my pregnancy it’s kind of hard not to. Every sharp kick, jab and foretelling Braxton Hicks contraction is a reminder to stop procrastinating and decide on something, anything, before delivery day.

For my first pregnancy four years ago, it was different, as most first pregnancies tend to be. I was so excited that I basically peed on a stick and ran to a bookstore to purchase a baby name book and started scouring baby name websites immediately in search of a name I would fall in love with. But if you’ve ever looked at one of these books or been on any of these websites, you’ll see that the possibilities are seriously endless. In much the same way I feel when I enter a multi-story department store, I was totally overwhelmed by all the categories, meanings, spelling variations, etc. etc. So many choices, too many choices, and you get to pick just one (well, two, if you use a middle name). One name that will be with your child FOREVER. So I took a breath and a step back and asked myself: Well, what do you want in a name?

Read: In The Name… of Culture?

So I started sorting things out in my head: Do I go with trendy, traditional, classic, cool, strong, sweet or unique? Should it be international, American as apple pie, or a name in Spanish picked off the family tree? Does it have to flow with our last name? How is it going to come off once he or she becomes an adult? Are there any weird nicknames that could come out of it? And importantly, if it’s English-sounding, how will the abuelos and my husband’s family in Central America pronounce or butcher it?

With the first one, once my husband and I found out we were having a girl, it made one part of our baby naming job easier. Her middle name would be the same as mine, Leonor, which is also my mother and grandmother’s name. Now that I’m an adult, I absolutely cherish this name, but truth be told, as a kid, I despised this name. It felt so old-fashioned. But that’s exactly why I love the name now, and the fact that it was passed on to me makes me feel more connected to my family and my roots. I think of my great-grandparents, and what they must have been thinking when they gave this name to my grandmother. Of course, it’s also kind of cool that in recent years, la Infanta Leonor of Spain brought the name back in vogue, and other variations of the name have become a popular choice in naming the newest little princesas of Europe.

After we settled on Leonor for a middle name, picking the all-important first name wasn’t too difficult. We wanted something that flowed nicely into the last name, so we soon settled on Kalila Leonor. Kalila is Arabic in origin. We liked the way it sounded, plus, it has a wonderful meaning: beloved. And yes, the abuelos have no trouble pronouncing it.

In the end, we went down a route that is fairly telling of our hybrid, bicultural and bilingual American-Latino lives. We were definitely very American in giving our daughter an uncommon first name, something that would distinguish her from the herd. But we are also very proud of our culture and heritage and wanted a name that reflected that. And since I already had a family name that had been passed on to me it was easy to pass along the torch.

We’ll probably go down the same route of choosing a not-so-common first name and family middle name for this new baby girl. I do have a short list, and that’s a good thing because we have a short amount of time to decide. As I write, I’m feeling those practice contractions, yikes!

How did you chose your children’s names? Did your heritage play a part in the decision?

{Photo courtesy of Cynthia Leonor Garza}

Santiago, my baby boy’s name, is number one on BabyCenter en Español’s list of 2011′s most popular names… again! In fact, his name has been at the top of the list since BabyCenter en Español started compiling it back in 2007.

To be honest, I didn’t chose my son’s name because of its popularity. In fact, I never really knew about it being the most popular until a couple of years ago. He was born in 2009, but we had already chosen his name back in 2006 when I was pregnant with my daughter and we had thought she’d be a boy!

I feel kind of weird knowing that there are A LOT of children my son’s age, or close to it, bearing his same name, but I’ve loved the name for a very long, long time and from the moment I first met him, I couldn’t imagine another name for him.

In terms of the rest of boys’ names on the list, there are many in the top 20 that belong to children I know. In fact, four of those are the names of boys in my immediate family: Matías (godson), Alejandro (nephew), Gabriel (nephew) and Emmanuel (nephew). How crazy is that?

For girls, the top three names were Sofía, Isabella and Camila. Again, I have three nieces that bear those names. Not to mention that Camila is the name of Ana’s daughter.

As many of you know, choosing a name for a bilingual and bicultural child is no easy task. Before having children, I always knew I wanted their names to be as Latino as possible, but that they wouldn’t be mangled when pronounced in English. I never really cared for names in English and because of their very Latino last name, I didn’t think those would go together either way.

Many Latinos in this country deal with the same issue, as BabyCenter en Español found out, and they end up choosing bilingual names, which they describe as those that sound and are written similarly in both English and Spanish.

Check out the most popular baby names Latinos in the U.S. chose for their children in 2011.

Are the names of your kids in any of the lists? How did you choose your children’s names? 

One of the most difficult tasks you need to accomplish when you find out you’re pregnant is to come up with a name for the baby. We really all have so many personal reasons in deciding which name our child is going to have to honor the rest of her life. I mean, it’s a daunting task to get it right and make one of the first of many huge decisions on behalf of this other person.

The reason I’m up late thinking about this is because I was reading a discussion started by Mamapedia on the Million Moms Challenge community where she’s asking how and why we all picked our baby’s name. It was fun reading everyone’s responses and realizing that a lot of people still go the conventional route of naming their child after a family member, or even coming up with acronyms using the first couple of letters from the mom’s and grandmother’s names and combining them. Phew! So much into a name!

That all got me thinking that I’ve never shared with you how my husband and I came up with our daughter’s name: Camila. Well, I’ll take credit for “coming up” with it, of course!

The story is that my husband and I knew for a fact that we did not want to borrow any names from family members. Not because we wanted to be unconventional, but because we didn’t want the responsibility of choosing one abuela over the other, etc. Plus, I’m already named after my mother, Ana Lilian, and two is enough! Well, almost three…my mother, in an act of sheer genius (Ahem…) named my little sister Liliana, as in Ana Lilian reversed..get it?

Anyway…

We wanted a different name and the three rules we had  {aside from no familia names} were:

1.  We both must agree on it

2.  It needs to be easy to pronounce in both English and Spanish

3.  It can’t be any name that some wisecrack can figure out how to tangle around to make it funny or whatever

So, it wasn’t that easy.

During my sixth month of pregnancy we went to Mexico City for our last trip as a family of two. One of the first things I do when there is run to the bookstores. I found a novel by Marcela Serrano (I have to thank Roxana for my Marcela Serrano addiction!) titled Antigua Vida Mía. I immediately devoured all the pages in that book and fell in love with the main character, Camila. She was strong, she was passionate, she was adventurous.

There it was. My daughter’s name. I just knew it. It just had to pass the Dad test, and it did. He loved it immediately and since it had been the first name we had both immediately and without hesitation said yes to, we grabbed it.

And, that’s it, our baby name story.

What’s yours? Would really love to know!