In the weeks and months after naming baby, it’s not unheard of for mums or dads to become unhappy with the name they’ve chosen for their child.
Like in the case of mum Carri Kessler.
Because she had a friend living in the UK with the name and had always loved it, Carri decided on the name Ottilie for her daughter.
However, it wasn’t long before the mum and her husband Will began to get cold feet.
“No one could remember it and no one could pronounce it,” Carri told TODAY. “I was like, ‘If you say it with a British accent, it sounds really good!’ And people said, ‘But you're from Maryland’.”
However, things went from bad to worse when her grandmother told her she couldn’t remember the name.
“She said, ‘I don't know how to say her name. I have Post-Its all over the house so I can remind myself’,” she says. “Anytime anyone said her name, I kind of cringed. Introducing her made me sweat. And I thought, we're going to keep having to introduce her! This is going to be a problem forever.”
So after three months, when Carrie tentatively suggested to Will they change Ottilie’s name, he was completely on board.
“Then we were like, ‘This is so exciting, we can rename her!’” she says. “All we did was talk about names. Is she this? Is she that? I felt like she was anything simple that wouldn't give me anxiety.”
So three months after she was born, Ottilie was renamed to Margot, and it wasn’t the big deal they had imagined at all.
“We sent out a mass email,” she says. “It was like, 'Hey! Remember Ottilie? Her name's Margot now!”
While it might not seem like a huge thing, mums can feel a lot of pressure when it comes to picking the ‘perfect’ name. It’s comforting to know that if you do decide you picked wrong, it’s not a massive deal to change it.
