Picking out the perfect baby name

By Allison Berman
July 14, 2009

Picking out a name is a big deal. For kids you need to worry about potentially treacherous nicknames as children and if you are naming a business, is it a name you can grow with? Would it lend itself to a logo? Will people remember it? There is a lot of pressure to get it right.

You can name a business by describing what you do, like John's Housekeeping Service. People will know exactly why to call you when they see your name on the side of a truck. The risk is what if John wants to go after commercial jobs?

I was responsible for naming our kids. My husband's sole request was to maintain the right to "veto" some of my more "colorful" ideas, like using the middle name "Blue." As challenging a process as that was, I believe naming my business was harder. I thought of several descriptive titles, but I ultimately chose to keep my options open using "With Love, Ali B." - sweet and catchy.

If you are pulling your hair out trying to name a child or your business, here are some lessons I have learned along the way...

1. Don't read "names books" or dictionaries like menus. It's overwhelming. When my husband and I narrowed our search to names that started with R in memory of my mom, we thought of a boy name immediately.

2. Compromise... We couldn't agree on a girl name with an R, so we used my mom's middle name for my daughter's middle name and agreed second child boy or girl we would use the R. Problem solved until I got pregnant again.

3. Laughter... We had to agree on an R name for a girl once and for all. Fortunately my husband was always good about making me laugh just as I got ready to kill him for vetoing another perfectly good name.

Try as we might, what do we do when we don't get it right the first time? A friend was so upset with her choice; she legally changed her daughter's name when her daughter was about 6 months old.

Fortunately, I love both daughter's names and the name of my business. However, as I big push to get syndicated, I have been seriously evaluating is "Career and Family" the best name for my column?

I need a name that doesn't alienate "dad" or "singleton" readers. The family I write about happens to be my kids and my husband. But before I was married, I still could have related to a lot of my columns. It didn't matter that my family was my friends and family-of-origin; it still was a balancing act.

And I don't want to go too cutesy... which is how I managed to whittle a list of 50+ potential new names down to 2 finalists.

And one finalist is Career and Family, the title I chose over a year ago. It was a good choice. It manages to say what the column's about and still leave a great breadth of potential topics.

A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet, but would anyone remember the name?

Allison Berman, an artist and mother of two, handpaints custom home accessories for interior designers and private customers. She works out of her home studio in Warwick, NY. See her collection at www.withlovealib.com. She can be reached at ali@withlovealib.com. Her column appears Tuesdays.