Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Blog carnival: Names

Grown in My Heart is sponsoring another blog carnival. This time the topic is: Names. I thought I would take some time to explain how we arrived at the names for each of our children. I should preface this with the understanding that we don't use our children's names on our blog, since it is open for the public to view. For the girls we use "Miss O" and "Miss I," and for the boy we use "Ato T," because "Ato" in Amharic is like saying "Mr." in English.
Miss O: Our lovely oldest child came into our family through and open domestic adoption. We were blessed to know her first mother while she was still pregnant with Miss O, and Heather was even able to attend a pre-natal doctor's visit. Miss O's first mom made it clear to us that we were her parents, and she wanted us to name her. Her first name was actually going to be "Shayla," because of the meaning of that name, which escapes me now. But when we saw her, her daddy knew right away that was not her name, so we changed what we thought it would be. We chose to giver Miss O her first mother's middle name. We feel strongly that our children need to be as connected to their birth families as they can be, and we also wanted to be able to honor her first mother.
Miss I: This beautiful "middle" child was 3 months old when she came home to us through another open domestic infant adoption. She had a name that was given to her by her first mother and a completely different name that had been given to her by the adoptive family that was originally going to adopt her. Again, we wanted her to be as connected to her birth family as possible, but we just didn't feel like her given name fit well in our family. So we chose to add a given first name onto the front that we chose, and kept the name her first mother gave her as 2 middle names.
Ato T: The lovely youngest in our family was almost 2 years old by the time he came into our family from the lovely land of Ethiopia. This is a name his first lovingly gave him for a reason. In Ethiopia, the tradition is that the child's last name becomes the first name of his father. We felt strongly that we needed to keep those names in order to keep him connected to his identity. We planned that they would be his first and middle names. But then when we got his new Ethiopian birth certificate in the mail, Mike's name was listed as his middle name, which Mike really loved. So, Ato T also has 2 middle names - the names of both his fathers.
That's how our kids got their names! Thanks for reading!

Home education at it's best!

These next few pictures we'll call Physical education. It's a lot of work to pull that heavy brother!






Math: Learning to count by 2's and 10's can be tricky, so we made a sort-of hopscotch game for both, and the girls are now remembering them well! If they forget, all they have to do is hop, and it comes back to them. :)



Not sure what subject this would be: maybe Social Studies? Here are the girls watching the stumps in our yard get ground down. That was even fun for mommy to watch! Ato T was less than impressed, though.

More photos

In my last post I neglected to mention that these photos I took will replace the yearly photo trip to JCPenny's for photos. We're looking to save some money! :) Since I didn't get any good ones of Ato T or all 3 kids, I tried again another day, and this is what I got. I'm thinking of using this first one of all the kids for framing, with a print of the one following it in the corner. I would love to hear your opinions about which ones you think are best for framing purposes!



Here's the one of Ato T that's in the running for our yearly 8x10 and 5x7's that we send out:






This is the top runner for wallet size, since it turned out just the smallest bit blurry :( - But it's actually my favorite! It shows his personality really well!

Back with pictures!

For the last few weeks I have been unable to access our blog, but have now figured out the problem! So here come some updates!
A few weeks ago we took the kids to a local nature center to take pictures. Some turned out pretty good. We would have had more really good ones if mommy was better at figuring out settings on her camera. - But practice makes perfect! Here are some of the best shots of the day. I didn't get any good ones of all three together that day.