Our last name is extremely Spanish, and ends in an "O," so I find any girl name I pick has to end in a vowel. My name does not end in a vowel and isn't Spanish at all and I just don't think it works with my last name at all. If it is a boy I have no choice but to name him Carlos... And we are not finding out the sex... So I find I'm having a very hard time picking (and keeping) a girl's name.
The only rule we have is not to name our baby something and then call them something different. For example, naming the baby William and then planning on calling him Will. Then we'd just name him Will!
1) Both of us have to be pronounce the name the same and families have to be able to correctly say the name OR traditional nickname (Ukrainian in-laws, my dad is Southern). My brother is Carl and my dad's family couldn't say "r-l" together so they call him by his middle name (so despite it being a "nice simple name" it didn't really work for the family so it isn't used by most relatives!).
2) We are raising our children to speak English and Russian/Ukrainian so the spelling has to translate easily to the cyrillic alphabet used in Russian/Ukrainian...so I will be choosing the the often judged "unique" "k" & "y" spellings because that is the transliteration of the Ukrainian spelling (and with current tension between Russia and Ukraine we will NOT be using the Russian transliteration if it is different than the Ukrainian spelling. We are also looking at names that would be German or Swedish to honor my heritage (still has to be capable of translating to cyrillic alphabet).
3) No sharing exact names with living relatives but can honor with a similiar name from one of our heritages (i.e. Michael to Mikhail etc).
4) Our last name is strong so the first name has to be strong enough for balance...I am looking at names that are slavic but the nicknames are widely used in America so they will be familiar to both families. Nicknames are key to finding names both families can say, can be translated and holds its own with a strong last name (i.e. Aleksandr or Aleksandra are both traditionally nicknamed Sasha in Russian but in English the nickname for a boy would be more likely to Alex).
5) Initials only kind of matter...monograms last name is middle anyway so we will check for words in mongram. Most people don't go around thinking about others initials unless they see their monogram.
6) No top 30 names from social security name list in any year of the last decade.
edited to add 7) We will not use any common Russian/Ukrainian nickname as a full first name (can call a child Sasha but wouldn't name them that...because that would be awkward on my husbands side).
Re: Weird name rules.
If it is a boy I have no choice but to name him Carlos... And we are not finding out the sex... So I find I'm having a very hard time picking (and keeping) a girl's name.