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!