Choosing a NAME or NAMES

It's a very weird place to be... thinking of a name for a child who you have no idea when he/she will enter your life. At least with pregnancy, things progress in ways that you can begin to imagine this little thing and what you might want to call him/her. With adoption, we have no idea when that time will be or how many we will get or what gender. So we took my mother-in-law's advice in June and began the discussion about names. Just to have some ideas so when our child/children arrive we don't have to be battling that one out! Thus began an almost 4 month old discussion and long lists and tiny tantrums and a lot of talking around making any type of decision.

The problems we are facing are that my dear wonderful husband has one name (well two including his last name). That's it. His first name is the same in English and Hebrew (because he's Israeli and it's a Hebrew name) and Israelis do not give their children middle names. I, on the other hand, have 6 names. An English first and middle name; two last names since I hyphenated when I got married, and Hebrew first and middle names.

We are working on the compromise of how to blend the simpicity of one name and the tradition of multiple names in order to remember those gone and honor my family name while still creating a unique but not extraordinary name/hardship for our child.

We have learned a lot on this journey. Living with the names is a good thing. Some that we loved are not so great anymore. Others that were so-so, have really grown on us. As we figure out who we want to remember, we also realize that we could end up with more than one child so we need boy and girl names for more than one person who has passed on. We have discovered that there are a lot of extremely unusual names and some very interesting ways to write "basic" names.

We always said that we probably won't get the phone call until we decide on names. That we have to have our thoughts together in order to take on this next challenge.

We had a wonderful weekend celebrating Shabbat in Orange County with friends for their auf ruf. Our entire car ride up, throughout the day, and on the way home was focused on names and I think we've actually agreed on some wonderful choices. Dare I say that? Dare I believe that we actually have a list with names we both really really like? For both genders? Remembering those gone and honoring my family name?

I do say that we have meaningful names that meet all our criteria and make us both smile. Now if the phone would just ring....