Giving a name to your child is one of the first big responsibilities that a parent takes on towards his or her baby. The risk that one day they may not like them is very high! The choice of the name of our daughter was therefore very ... very ... considered. We only started selecting names after knowing their gender. When I was 'young' I fantasized about the names I would give my daughter ... and in the end she always ended up calling herself after one of the characters in Beverly Hills or some other favorite movie of mine.
Faced with the reality of the facts ... the fantasies of the past did not even seem appropriate to propose them. The only thing that remained of my fantasies was the hope that she was a child, also because I didn't have the faintest idea of how to call a child ...
It all starts on a Sunday in September, a few days after having been certain that I was expecting a beautiful princess (who has now turned out to be a tomboy)!
We were having lunch with my in-laws, and at one point my father-in-law, very extravagant type, very seriously asked us if we had any idea what to call her. We hadn't thought about it yet ... after all there were another 5 months left. He then, with great conviction of himself, said that we should have called her after him because most likely she would not have had more grandchildren who carried her name down through the generations. The bite went the wrong way ... should my daughter be called Pina or Armandina? Never be! The first rule that I had imposed on myself, already when I met my husband and his name, was that I would never call my children with the names of their grandparents, especially because the names of all 4 of them are terrifying and impractical. That same evening, spurred on by this terrible idea of the grandfather, we spent hours going through the books on baby names and the various websites, the same thing we did the following evening and for another two weeks in a row. Foreign, unpronounceable names and the usual discounted classics were forbidden ...
I always thought that the name expressed some personality traits of the wearer, therefore, I concentrated above all on the symbolic value of the various names I selected. Of each name we checked the meaning, the history, the incidence with some important historical person, the etymology, the phonetics ... I also wanted my baby to have a sweet name, I even took care of the composition of the letters of each name.
His name should have been a fair compromise between soft, hard and elusive sounds. Finally, each name selected was paired with the surname to hear how it `` sounded ''. It was a lot of work ...
I would have to find a perfect name exactly like the little creature it was assigned to.
So during the last few days of research both my husband and I had come to each have their own preference list. Mine was made up of these names in order of preference: Sara, Martina, Gaia, Sofìa. My husband, on the other hand, had chosen Francesca, Elisa, Martina.
Not to have any names, we had several and indecision was great. Choosing the only common name we had chosen seemed too obvious to us, so we decided to move on to the draw. We wrote each name on a small piece of paper and sealed it well ... we mixed everything up and started drawing lots and excluding one name at a time, one each. Sara left, then Gaia and so on ...
The last one left in the urn would have been our little girl's name... the word I would have said most often from then until the end of my days, the name of the little person who would have been present in my mind every moment of my life. The name I would have given my life for ...
Simply Martina ...
Who knows if when he grows up he will consider the choice of mum and dad satisfactory ...
(History of alessandra85 taken from the mymodernparents.com forum)
The choice of name
"I understood that our silence on the name had been guided by an Angel! Also in this case we had understood each other without saying anything or someone had always guided our choices. Francesco fully respects the spirit of what has guided me : he is sunny, generous, smiles, loves butterflies, flies, dogs, horses. He is also very lively, irrepressible, stubborn, but above all he is the greatest gift that life has given us! "
