A letter to myself about the absolute farce of finding rare baby gi...

Dear Tom of exactly six months ago,

You're currently sitting on the floor of the hallway, a chewed-up blue biro in your mouth, staring at a stack of nursery registration forms while Twin B attempts to post half a soggy rusk through the letterbox. You're feeling incredibly smug. You're filling out the "First Name" boxes with a flourish, utterly convinced that you've managed to give your daughters names that no one else in your London postcode has used since the Victorian era. You think you've won parenting before they’ve even learned to walk.

I'm writing to you from the bleak, sleep-deprived future to tell you to wipe that smirk off your face.

Do you remember the sheer panic of trying to find a baby girl name that felt special? You spent an entire trimester acting like an amateur linguist, crossing out anything that sounded too popular, too weird, or too much like a brand of expensive Scandinavian hand soap. You wanted something rare, but you didn't want to explain how to spell it every single time you rang the GP for a Calpol prescription. I'm here to tell you that your meticulous planning was largely a waste of time, but the journey was incredibly funny in hindsight.

The spreadsheet incident and the hundred-year cycle

I know you still have that Excel document saved on your laptop. The one where you color-coded potential names for a baby g based on their historical origins. You spent weeks scouring the very bottom of the global statistics charts, looking for names that were barely recorded. You were obsessed with the "5-baby rule" you read about online, convinced that if a name didn't show up on official registries, it was the perfect untouched gem.

What you failed to realize is that the hundred-year cycle of naming is an absolutely ruthless machine. You thought you were being incredibly original by digging up names from the 1920s. You thought dusting off Agatha, Sybil, and Maude made you a visionary. I hate to break it to you, mate, but every other millennial parent in a fifty-mile radius was looking at the exact same sepia-toned ancestry records. You thought you were being a trailblazer, but you were actually just part of a massive, predictable demographic shift toward dressing babies like Edwardian ghosts.

Let's take a quick break from your past hubris to talk about something you actually got right. Those Baby Pants in Organic Cotton with the ribbed drawstring bottoms that you bought in a haze of 3am online shopping? I'm telling you right now from the future: buy six more pairs. They're essentially the only bit of clothing that actually makes sense in our current existence. When Twin A does her terrifying alligator death-roll during a nappy change, that drawstring waist is the only thing keeping her from streaking bare-bottomed across the carpet. They stretch beautifully around the absurd, bulky cloth nappies we insisted on buying, they don't dig into their little milk-bellies, and honestly, the ribbed material is brilliant for wiping off rogue bits of porridge when you've run out of muslin cloths. They're brilliant. Don't bother with those stiff denim jeans you thought would look cute; babies in jeans just look like tiny, uncomfortable middle-aged mechanics.

The resume test and other middle-class anxieties

You spent an ungodly amount of time worrying about the so-called resume test. The idea that you've to stand in the kitchen and shout a potential moniker loudly to see if it sounds like a respectable chartered accountant or someone who sells woven hemp bracelets out of a campervan in Cornwall. I remember you standing by the kettle, whispering "CEO Elowen Smith" and "Head of Marketing Calliope Smith" until your wife asked if you were having some sort of neurological event. You worried that giving a baby girl a highly unusual name would somehow ruin her chances of taking over a mid-sized logistics firm in 2055. You agonized over whether a quirky title would carry enough gravitas for a future boardroom, completely ignoring the fact that by the time she's forty, the boardroom will probably be run by people named Jaxxon and Khaleesi anyway.

Meanwhile, you completely forgot to check if their initials spelled anything offensive, but whatever, they'll survive the mild embarrassment in secondary school.

We really do overthink the psychology of baby girl names. When the health visitor came for the six-week check, I distinctly remember her vaguely mumbling something about child development and identity, though my memory is so shot I’m pretty sure she was just trying to distract me while weighing Twin A. She said something about how a unique name might give a child a stronger sense of individuality, or maybe it was that too weird of a name causes administrative friction later in life. Honestly, the science on this is incredibly murky and mostly seems to consist of sociologists making wild guesses based on how many people named after fruit end up in therapy. My personal understanding is that no matter what you name them, they're still going to throw a wooden block at your head when they decide they hate bananas.

Eco-friendly names that make you sound like a minor woodland deity

Let's discuss the nature trend you fell into so deeply. You thought you were being incredibly poetic pulling botanical and atmospheric words out of the dictionary. Suddenly, every weed in the garden was a potential option. You genuinely suggested 'Bramble' to your wife with a straight face. You wanted something that sounded like it belonged in a damp, mystical forest rather than a semi-detached house in Zone 4.

You fully leaned into the whole Mother Earth aesthetic, which is highly ironic for a man who gets stressed out by the responsibility of watering a single indoor fern. At least your attempt at an earthy aesthetic led you to buy that Blue Floral Pattern Bamboo Baby Blanket. I'll admit, that was a highly strategic purchase. It's incredibly soft, yes, and the bamboo material is supposed to be naturally hypoallergenic and temperature-regulating, which is great for their sensitive skin. But let's be honest with each other: I mostly value it because the specific blue cornflower pattern is strangely good at camouflaging the precise shade of neon yellow sick that Twin B produces after eating sweet potato. Plus, I can throw it over the hideous, brightly colored plastic jumperoo when visitors come over to make it look like we're calm, minimalist parents who only own wooden toys.

(If you're also currently attempting to mask the plastic chaos of your living room with nice fabrics, you should probably browse the Kianao baby blankets collection before you lose your mind entirely and accept the brightly-colored plastic invasion).

Stop trying to outsmart the alphabet

There was a dark period in week 34 of the pregnancy where you considered just taking a normal name and aggressively misspelling it to make it rare. Instead of trying to replace every single vowel with a 'y' and throwing silent consonants into the middle of perfectly normal words just to feel special, you should probably just accept that spelling 'Jessica' as 'Jhessyqa' is nothing short of a hate crime against future nursery teachers. The friction balance is a real thing. You want them to stand out, but you don't want them to spend eighty percent of their adult life on hold with the bank spelling out their first name phonetically.

You know what else you overthought during this period? Teething accessories. You will inevitably buy that Silicone Panda Teether next week because some blog told you it was a developmental necessity for jaw strength. Look, it's fine. It does exactly what it says on the tin—it's made of food-grade silicone, it's shaped like a panda, it's easy to wash in the sink, and it's perfectly safe. But let’s be brutally honest here: you can hand that perfectly engineered, non-toxic panda to Twin A, and she will immediately drop it on the floor, crawl over to the hallway, and attempt to soothe her inflamed gums by chewing vigorously on the heel of my muddy running shoe. Buy the teether if you want, it's a perfectly acceptable piece of rubber to keep in the changing bag, but don't expect it to magically stop the 3am screaming jags when those molars start pushing through.

The great nursery reckoning

So, let's bring it back to that moment six months ago on the hallway floor. You finish filling out the forms. You post them off. You wait.

When you finally turn up to the toddler room for their settling-in session, you're going to experience a deep ego death. You know those baby girl names you thought were so unbelievably rare? The ones you were so sure would make your baby g stand out from the crowd of Olivias and Amelias?

Yeah. You're going to walk into that room, covered in dried milk and exhaustion, and you'll hear a nursery worker call out to three other girls with the exact same "rare" vintage nature names you chose. It turns out every other sleep-deprived parent was reading the exact same obscure baby name blogs at 4am.

And you know what? It genuinely doesn't matter. Because the moment you see your kid waddling across the room, answering to that name, you realize it belongs to her now. It doesn't matter if it's shared by three other kids in her class or if it hasn't been used since 1842. It's hers. And she's going to make it entirely her own, mostly by screaming it at the top of her lungs when you try to feed her broccoli.

Before you completely spiral about the fact that your child's identity is entirely unoriginal, maybe do something you can really control, like upgrading their wardrobe to something that doesn't involve wrestling with fifty plastic snaps at midnight. Shop the Kianao organic baby clothing collection right now and save your sanity.

Questions I frantically Googled at 3am about baby girl names

Does a rare name seriously affect a child's personality?

Honestly, my doctor just laughed when I asked if a unique name would make Twin B more creative. From what I can gather watching them destroy my living room, their personalities are baked in from day one. Your kid might be named something incredibly poetic and ethereal like 'Moonbeam,' and she will still spend her afternoons trying to eat fistfuls of dirt from the garden planters. The name doesn't make the kid; the kid makes the name.

How do I know if a name is seriously rare or just temporarily unpopular?

You don't. That's the cruel joke of parenting. You can check the bottom of the government statistics, you can scroll through archives, and you can cross-reference everything. But you can't predict pop culture. You might pick something wildly obscure, only for a massive Netflix series to drop three months later featuring a wildly popular character with that exact name. Just pick something you don't mind shouting across a crowded park.

What if my family absolutely hates the rare name I chose?

My mother openly winced when I told her our top choices and asked if we were raising children or naming thoroughbred horses. Let them complain. They will physically be unable to hold onto their linguistic outrage once they're handed a tiny, squishy human. After about three weeks, they'll be cooing that weird name into a pram like they invented it themselves.

Should I worry about how a rare name sounds with our surname?

Yeah, but mostly just to avoid accidental comedy. I highly think doing what I call the "angry dad shout test." Go to the bottom of the stairs and yell the full first, middle, and last name as if they've just drawn on the walls with a permanent marker. If you stumble over the syllables while doing your angry voice, it's too complicated.

Is it a bad idea to use a completely made-up name?

I mean, all words were made up at some point, weren't they? But practically speaking, if you invent a name from scratch, you're signing a lifelong contract to spell it out for receptionists, pharmacists, and teachers. If you've the patience of a saint, go for it. If you get annoyed when the barista spells your very normal name wrong on a coffee cup, maybe stick to something that already exists in the dictionary.