Isabel Wherry of Illinois is no stranger to naming babies. After all, she had named three children before her fourth arrived in January 2024.
But a few weeks after bringing her newest baby home from the hospital, she wondered if she and husband Alex Wherry had picked the wrong name.
Her viral video describing the process of changing her baby’s name has racked up almost 3 million views to date.
TODAY.com talked to Isabel Wherry just after she put her now 11-month-old down for a nap.
The Wherrys had a baby naming routine for each pregnancy. They didn’t find out the gender of any of their children — 6-year-old twins Harlow and Myles, and 3-year-old Aspen — in advance. In each instance, they went to the hospital with their favorite names, plus a few backups, and spent a couple of days with their newborns before officially selecting a name.
“But clearly that did not work out for us this time,” Wherry says with a laugh.
There was a bit of extra pressure with their fourth child, because the couple suspected it would be their last baby.
“We spent most of the pregnancy planning, whether it was a boy or a girl, to call the baby Calihan,” explains Wherry. But in the last month of pregnancy, Wherry felt certain that the baby was a girl and moved Oakley Mae to the top girl spot.
Soon after the baby came home, Wherry regretted the choice: “I wish we would have just stuck with Calihan and chose the name that we liked from the beginning.”
Wherry called the hospital to find out how to change her baby’s name from Oakley to Calihan, but she hesitated to start the legal process for about six months.
“I kept going back and forth, and I couldn’t do it,” she says.
Meanwhile, she “started hearing Oakley everywhere,” which she says was a “turn off,” and compounded her second thoughts about the name.
“I want something more unique,” she says. “And I’m hearing Oakley everywhere now, so I think this is really a sign that I want to change her name to what we originally had.”
When the baby was 7 months old, Wherry contacted the courthouse to start the name change process. After a petition, a small fee and a court visit, Oakley Mae Wherry officially became Calihan (Cali) Mae Wherry on Dec. 30, 2024.
“Now that she’s Cali, I’m never like, ‘Oh, she should have stayed Oakley,'” says Wherry. “I know I made the right choice. Cali is definitely supposed to be her name.”
Baby naming consultant Colleen Slagen says she received about 20 inquiries from parents considering changing their baby’s names in 2024. Parents may have had difficulty agreeing on a name in the first place, she says, or received negative reactions after announcing the name.
“Baby name regret is a lot more common than you think,” Slagen says. “Going through with a name change isn’t the right choice for everyone, but it also shouldn’t be this pearl-clutching phenomenon. It’s absolutely OK to change it, own it and move forward.”
Wherry says that though some friends and family were “shocked” (or assumed they were joking), she felt validated by hearing how many other people have also changed their baby’s name.
