My wife and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what to name our prospective baby. This process started quite sometime before we even started trying for one.

In the beginning, we thought that we needed to include references to our family backgrounds. I’m part Irish and she’s part Spanish. We mulled over family names and even religious beliefs. Naming a kid is a lot harder than it looks.

Things like “will he be teased at school because of his name” came up. Or, “every generation has included such and such middle name”, so do we stick with tradition or break from it.

And the closer we came to the birth the more we revised our original picks for names. It was almost like we had to go through a process of figuring out what was important from our past, what would the name mean as a legacy, and who in our lives mattered most to us.

In the end, we realized that a name is not just a link to the past but also a link to the present. What mattered to us more turned out to be the present, especially those relationships with people we admire and trust. So, in the end, we wanted to immortalize those people as part of our child’s name.

Our son’s name includes the names of two of our closest friends because we believe that they are good role models for our son and we wish him to look up to them whenever he ponders how he got his name.

I would love to hear stories from readers about how they chose the names for their children. Please use the comments section below to share your story.