There's a family name set aside if we have a boy. We went with Classic Rock song names for girls' first names, and selected middle names that sounded good.
I have a friend that is doing this. They picked first names from name songs, and middle name by either family or just what they thought sounded good together.
Girl names are hard! There are very few I like. My very favorite is a no go because SO dated a girl with it's nickname. We've tossed around a few names but not seriously. I think I have a few in mind I like so hopefully he doesn't shoot them down.
We are team green, so we need to come up with both boy and girl names. I've had a boy name in mind for many years, and when I mentioned it to H, he agreed to it right away. But big commitments make me nervous, so even though I love the name, I'm second guessing it lol.
As for girl names, so far we haven't found one that we love. I have a top contender that H thinks is "ok" that he would probably agree to if I pushed for it, but I'm still hoping to find a name that we both love.
We do have some general guidelines though, neither of us wants to name the baby after anyone in our family, and neither of us likes very traditional or super popular names.
My H and I come from different cultural backgrounds and we have a doozy of a last name. Our first priority was picking a short, easy-to-spell/easy-to-pronounce, untrendy name. Bonus points if the name overlapped with either of our backgrounds. Many years ago, before we were even married, we were reading the Sunday paper and saw the byline of a reporter with a short, pretty first name and a super ethnic last name. The first name happens to perfectly fit with both of our cultures. Instant agreement. For boy names, we had a harder time. Last month, we agreed to one, and although it was not my first choice, it's really grown on me. As for middle names, we have no idea at this point.
We didn't really talk seriously about names until we found out the sex, but I would throw out names to my H and he knew my favorite boy/girl name. The night we found out, he told our family we think we have the name, and I was like what?! He said, "well it is your favorite, and as soon as I found out it was a boy it seemed perfect." So we didn't really have to have much of a discussion, at least for the first name.
We decided on a boy name a few years ago after our close friends were the first in our group to have a baby.
Girl names were harder and we had one we liked, but didn't really talk about specifics and a middle name until after our bfp. We still don't have a girl name picked out, though we have about 3 names that we'll pick the first and middle names from. We'll revisit the girl name after our a/s if it's an issue.