Choosing a name for your baby is probably one of the most important, and most confusing, decisions regarding your unborn child. For many of us, we won't know if our baby is a boy or a girl, so we need to choose 2 names!

When my husband and

I were choosing Nathaniel's name, we set a few ground rules. These are our rules, I hope they will help you choose a name for your new arrival.

Fit with our chosen middle names

My parents gave my siblings and me our grandparents' names as our middle names. As my husband doesn't have a middle name, and we both liked this way of choosing middle names, we wanted to continue the tradition. As my Father-In-Law died while I was pregnant, if we had a son, we wanted to give him my Father-In-Law's name as his middle name.

So, for a girl we had the choice of Glenys, Faye and Anna, and for a boy it was Efim.

Not the name of a family member or close friend

Growing up in a large family, this was a hard one! A lot of names we liked were the names of my first cousins, or a close friend! Although, it did help us to cut down our list!!

A Biblical name

As my husband is Jewish, this point was particularly important to h im. It also gave us some, shall we say, interesting names to look at! Names such as Obadiah and Jezebel!! We had a lot of fun with some of these!

If your family is of a particular tradition, this may help you narrow down your list.

A shortened version that we liked

When we chose Nathaniel, we looked at the shortened versions and chose one that we would call him. We chose "Nat", and he's been Nat since he was born. The only shortened version I really object to is "Nathan"!

Not too hard to spell

We didn't want our kids to spend their whole lives spelling their names, especially if they sounded "normal" and were spelt a funny/different way. Especially with the surname "Khalinsky", they will h ave enough trouble with that as they grow up!!!

No strange/rude words in their initials

Another one was the strange words their initials could spell out. Someone once suggested Jonathan Efim Richard K----- - J-E-R-K!

Meaning

The most important to us was we wanted a meaning that was "Gift from God", or similar. Nathaniel was not planned, but we are very glad he came when he did.

We were also wary of some of the meanings. We didn't want our child growing up and finding out his/ her name meant "Toad in Mud" or something similar!

Final word

We also had to BOTH like the names.

Even with these self-imposed rules, the task of choosing a name for our baby was a big one - and EVERYONE had their opinions too! Like my brother Steve who said we should name the baby Steve Phil, and my brother Phil who said we should name the baby Phil Steve!

But when he was born, we knew he was our little Nathaniel Efim.