The Great Name Debate

People often ask what we will name this baby...  Unfortunately, like the other kids, it is not an easy answer.  With Hunter we immediately said "Hunter, if it's a boy, and Emmaline if it's a girl".  No question.  We picked out Claire and *R* (we're keeping it secret because it's back on the list for this baby!) very quickly for the 3rd pregnancy.  When we got pregnant for the 4th time we decided to keep *R* as the boy name and went back and forth between Graysen, Vanessa, and Zoe for the girl name.  Lincoln eventually ruled out Zoe and we had Hunter pronounce the remaining two the night before we went in to have the baby.  He pronounced Graysen more clearly, so that's the one we went with!  

This baby is a bit more complicated!  Since he will already have a name we have several things to take into consideration.

• If he is old enough to recognize / know his name, we have to weigh what changing his name would do to him.  Let's face it, he's going to have enough adjustments; is changing his name really that imperative?  

• If he is too young to recognize his name, we have to see if we can find out who named him.  If it was his birth mother or father we will debate very heavily on changing it from his first name.  They will have picked that name for a reason (like all parents do), and I'm not sure that it's my place to change it.  If the stranger who found him, or a worker at the orphanage named him, we will have to weigh the importance of keeping an Ethiopian first name.

• If we decide to change the first name and give him one that we have picked out, we will move his given name to his middle name...

• ...but do we give him an American middle name as well?  (So that he has two?)

• We currently have 5 boy first names and 1 middle name picked out...if we decide to keep his given name as his first name we will choose one of those four for his middle name I suppose.

• I have heard that some parents decide that they will for sure change their child's name, and refer to them as that name during the entire adoption process, and then when they meet their child they just can't change it.  The child just IS their name.  I can totally see this happening to me...