Once again today I had to engrave a name on a gift for a baby who is not yet born. This bothers me, on many levels. (The customer also toyed with the idea of putting the expected birthdate on the item, but that I refused to do.) Usually I try to talk people out of engraving the baby’ name on an item prior to the official birth because of several factors, the primary one being that friends of mine were told, during an ultrasound 24 hours before their baby was born, that their daughter was doing fine. Imagine their surprise when she delivered a boy instead of the girl they’d been told they were having. This happened just about 5 years ago.
And then there are those other issues, like what if they change their mind about the baby’s name at the last minute, or what if the baby doesn’t survive to term, or what if they have the spelling wrong? Plus, even though I am not usually superstitious, it makes me feel like it’s bad luck to permanently engrave an item before the child actually arrives…and not just because it’ll have to be redone and that will mess up my misengraved numbers!
But the issue that I’m more concerned about is the gender thing, and I’d like to know how many Dopers (and their family and friends) who have had babies in the last few years, with all the technology that is used these days, have been told to expect one sex, and got the other?
And as a corollary question, who here has changed their mind on a baby’s name, or the spelling of it, after telling people about your choice, or at the last minute?
My cousin’s wife just had a baby boy who was taken home to a pink room and exclusively pink clothing. I’m sending a car package with some blue stuff in it.
Yeah, I think it’s not real smart to rely on the gender prediction. I thought that before the kid was born, though.
And some good friends of ours waited a couple of days after the birth to reveal the name, because they weren’t sure, and didn’t want the wrong name floating around. So they changed their minds afterward. It happens.
Ugh. I couldn’t engrave anything pre-baby. Probably because of my own parents: up until shortly after I was born, my mother was ready to name me Crystal. My father had vetoed the name Anastasia, thinking it was just a name my mother thought was nice and would soon get bored with it, and it would be better to pick a name she wouldn’t tire of. However, when the time came to fill out the papers, my father suddenly asked her if she still liked the name Anastasia, and she said she still loved it. So, oh, what the heck, he says. And here I be.
A very similar situation happened with my brother. He was supposed to be Matthew. His name is Shorn.
No gender mixups involved, but for that reason alone, I just wouldn’t engrave anything.
FWIW, my parents changed their minds about what to call me a few days after I was born. This was in the days before it was possible to detect a baby’s sex before the birth - apparently if I’d been a boy they would have named me Maynard. I’m glad I’m a girl!
Sorry to anyone whose name really is Maynard, by the way - I just don’t feel like a Maynard …
It could have been worse. My sister would have been “Randy” if she’d been a boy. Dunno whether that means the same outside the UK as it does here (i.e. “horny”).
I posted and forgot about this thread. Had some pizza, watched some TV, browsed other threads… saw this one come back up, read my own post, and saw a whopping mistake. My brother’s name is not Shorn. It’s Shaun. :smack:
No gender mishaps in recent years here, although there’s a rumor (pprobably a urban legend) in Spain about ObGyns saying one thing and writing another because that way if the prediction was wrong they can point to the paper and say “noooo, you just heard me wrong!” Nobody checks the paper unless there’s a complaint, eh?
I worked for several years with a Juan Carlos who was supposed to the be girl, after 5 boys; he was one of the first “ultrasound babies”. “Her” room and clothes were all pink. Oops. He’s got two little brothers; for these, Mom went back to the tradition of getting white clothes with ribbons (easy to change).
Several of my cousins haven’t had the names decided (or announced) until the last minute, mostly to avoid family politics. My father’s family has a tradition of not naming babies after someone alive (you can give tha baby a name that happens to be the same as that of someone alive, but it’s got to be for another reason), partly for superstition and partly to avoid confusion. Get one of us married to someone from another family that’s on “Joebob Smith VII” and the business of naming babies becomes something akin to war. Several of Dad’s cousins declared they’d name the baby “after grandfather”… but didn’t say which or whose grandfather. “Why, we have named him after grandfather! After my mother’s paternal grandfather!” did produce a different name than the inlaws were expecting
Yeah, definitely don’t agree with the pre-baby engraving because it can go wrong so quickly. I was going to be Samantha; ended up being named after my grandma at the last minute. She’s still alive and I’m over at her and my step-grandad’s place all the time. I’ve become ‘Mala’ - “little girl” (rough translation).
One of my mum’s co-workers was expecting a baby boy and brought a little girl home to a blue room full of pictures of trucks and trains. She’s a bit of a tomboy now (five years old).
No engraving! Too many things can change. Kid Kalhoun wasn’t named until about a half hour before we left the hospital. And I had no idea if I was having a boy or a girl. The parents can do that after they settle in.
OK, this story didn’t happen recently, but it is a story of a baby not being named what was expected.
My dad was supposed to be Peter. He isn’t . His little brother is Peter. Why isn’t Dad named Peter? Because his mother took one look at him and said “He doesn’t look like a Peter”. No one in the immediate family is quite sure how one newborn baby boy looks like a Peter and another one doesn’t.
My doctor saw no reason to do ultrasound just to figure out the baby’s sex, and I didn’t want to know anyway, so it worked out there. But it seemed everyone who studied my baby-filled belly declared I was carrying a boy for any number of reasons. A coworker went so far as to talk to “Peter” in utero.
Yes, I had a daughter. And we did have the names picked out ahead of time. And no, we didn’t personalize anything, nor would I. Too many things could change.
My daughter was unsexable the whole time I was pregnant. Each ultrasound (I had to have several, due to being high-risk), she would cross her little legs so tight that no amount of maneuvering would allow the tech to determine her sex.
Funny enough, I did have an ultrasound about 3 days before she was born, and her little foot was right up against the wall of my uterus and her little toes were splyed. I figured that she was a girl when we saw all five little individual toes – her father’s family carry a male-dominant webbed foot gene
As for her name, we didn’t agree on it until the day I went into labor. I really wanted to name her Crimson Jayde. Still love the name. Her father threw a fit (his last name is also a colour), so we finally agreed that the name we had picked for a boy would work for a girl too with a bit of creativity (she would have been Devin Lee August if she had been a boy, we went with Devyn Lee Sterling – she goes by Sterling), so yeh, engraving pre-delivery woulda been dumb.
With my son, we agreed on his name from the get-go. We also knew he was a he from the first ultrasound. The tech said “would you like to know the sex of the baby?” Of course, we both told her yes. She said “well, if he ever lets go of it, you can see his penis” Yup, my son was playing with his winky in utero. :smack:
I wouldn’t have wanted people engraving stuff for him pre-delivery, either, as we were quite creative in the spelling of his names (Aedin Caughner Niquolos). People in the family still misspell his name regularly. To boot, we had been calling him by Caughner, but he decided that he wanted to go by Niq when he started Kindergarten, and many of my husband’s psychotic family refuse to call him Niq because they met him as Caughner. Sheesh.
Yep, right there is an engraving nightmare waiting to happen! I can’t count the number of grandparents and aunts and uncles we get in who pull out a copy of an email, apologize, sigh, and say, “We can’t remember how to spell it, and we’re not real clear on how to pronounce it, but here’s the baby’s name. Sigh.” Heck, I’ve even had fathers come in and have to dig through their wallets for a scrap of paper to remind them of the spelling the mother gave to the child’s name.
And I don’t want to think about the things we’ve re-engraved because they got it wrong. We had one woman call relatives to find out the spelling…the grandmother told her it was spelled the same way as a famous sports star’s name…the mother had made a point of that. We checked the newspapers, called the library to have them check the star’s website…we thought we had it nailed. Turns out the mother hadn’t spelled it that way at all, just **thought ** that was how he spelled his name. But she’d made a big point that it was the same!
I can figure out the first name, and pretty much the third, but the second one…(is that the first middlename?) is that pronounced Koff-ner?
I also think having anything engraved before the baby is born is a bad idea. Although we never asked the ultrasound tech what the sex of our baby was (we didn’t want to know), for some reason, I was absolutely convinced it was a girl. Of course, we wound up having a little boy. I was delighted and would have been either way - as long as whatever it was was human and healthy, what did I care?
We had girl names picked out because we found them far easier to settle on than boys’ names. We chose our son’s name on the fly after he was born on the second day in the hospital.
However, while I do think it’s reasonable that you try to make sure people make informed decisions (i.e., pointing out that things could definitely change) since many people never consider that, how determinedly do you try to talk them out of it? Just asking out of curiosity.
I use my middle name. I have always used my middle name, and my parents always intended my middle name to be my name. However, some sort of mixed up conversation lead my godmother to believe that I would be named after her. So when she found out my parents had a girl “Godmothername Juliefoolie Lastname” was engraved on a little silver bracelet for me.
Ulp. My parents swallowed hard and named me after the bracelet. I never had a problem until the 90’s… suddenly every bank, credit card, health card, etc has to list me as firstname initial lastname. My mortgage has to have me as firstname initial last name. Signing my first name and middle inital didnt feel like signing my own name.
My advice to parents is never give a child a first name you don’t intend to use. In age of preset computer feilds, go with what works best.
Wow. That’s the first time I’ve heard about someone changing the name to fit the engraving!
As to the question of how hard to we try to talk someone out of pre-engraving the name: I try fairly hard. I suggest getting an engraving certificate instead. I remind them that anything can change before the baby comes (“Name the baby after me and you’ll get $1 million!”) and that it is better to wait. I can’t believe the number of people who want to pre-engrave the birthdate, just because that’s when the child is being induced! It’s been less than a generation now that we’ve been trying to force babies to come on our timetables. Have people so quickly forgotten that babies sometimes come early, on their own, or that doctors sometimes have emergencies and might have to postpone a scheduled induction, or that even if they induce you at dawn, you still might not deliver until the next day? And I’ve had friends who have lost their babies in the last few months of pregnancy, and chose to name them something other than the name that was picked out.
But if they insist on going ahead with engraving the name, I can’t refuse.
Yup. I don’t care for the name Connor/Conner but my husband insisted, so I intentionally made it hard to figure out.
hawksgirl, I am glad you take issue with the names I have chosen, I am sure you are much better at picking out names for my kids (and spelling them for that matter). I never said I was offended at people misspelling my childrens’ names, but thanks for playing! Butchered? If you insist, you are obviously superior to me :dubious:
No need to get so touchy. The names are spelled in a way that is essentially unphonetic. That’s okay when the names are from another language (Jacques or Sean, for example). But to mention that people misspell them as though it’s surprising is bound to draw some comments. I’d try hard not to get so offended by such little things.
