To name or not to name

I have been reading a lot of posts lately about naming your newly adopted Ethiopian child. We can keep their given name which may have been given to them by their birth parents or the orphanage, we can use their given name as a middle name, we can given them a new name all together or some combination that we determine.

We have thought a lot about this. I even bought 2 baby name books. That was a process in and of itself. I wanted to get books that had African/Ethiopian names with pronunciations and meanings. I found 2. One is pretty good and well organized and the other is pretty terrible and I should really return it. It doesn't have the pronunciations in it for all of the names and the African names section is just a couple of pages.

Anyway, we have an African name picked out if we are to have a girl. (No I am not going to say what it is yet). We really couldn't find a boy's name that we just loved. Family names are important in both of our families. I have my mother's middle name and Dave's middle name is his father's first name and his father's middle name is his Dad's first name. So if we have a girl the middle name will be Eileen and if we have a boy the middle name will be David. That was the easy part.

We are going to wait until we get our referral before we decide what we will do for sure. We may really love their Ethiopian name and decide to keep it as their first name. Even if we don't love the name or maybe it is hard to say it will still be a part of our child's name whether it be their first name or another middle name. Part of that decision will depend on if their name was given to them by their birth family or by someone at the orphanage. Our child's given name will mean a lot more if it was given to them by their birth family.

I have read of circumstances where the child is named "Baby" in English or the equivalent in Amharic. In that case we would most definitely change our child's name but would make sure they had an African name. We want our children to be proud of where they came from and their culture.