I promised an update on Tuesday, and I did not deliver.  Sorry! In fact, Tuesday ended up being a completely uneventful day.  We stayed home, we did school, we went to small group Bible study.  But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

Last Monday morning, I woke up to an email from our agency, simply stating: It looks like we may be okay for Trevor to travel without you (?!) Below that was a forwarded chain of correspondence between our agency and the US Consulate in Guangzhou.  While parts of it were unclear, it does seem that there is an exception for Trevor’s type of residency visa, and we have it in writing now that he can complete the adoption without me.  This was an answer to prayer, a gift from God beyond what I had even hoped for (though Trevor was praying for exactly this)!

And now, I want to tell you a story about a little boy with no name.

We found out about our newest little man from my dear friend Kelly, whose son came from the same orphanage.  She came home with her boys two years ago desperate to find a family for little “DiDi”, back when we were just at the start of our process to adopt Lewis.  Adopting a second little boy with Down syndrome wasn’t even on our radar yet.

We found other adoptive moms and agency advocates who knew him, always by the name of DiDi, the word in his language for “little brother”.

One mom shared with me that her husband had asked an orphanage worker what his name was, and she had answered, “He doesn’t have one.  He has Downs.”

Let that sink in for a minute.  The people looking after our boy did not even think he was worthy of having a name.  Words cannot express how this broke my heart.

When we received his file, we discovered that his name is, indeed, just Di – also the character for little brother.  It seems that when his file was prepared, they just wrote down the name he had always gone by.

Well, we aim to give this boy a name.

We are calling him…

Thaddeus Merit Young

We will call him Teddy for short, to echo DiDi, the name he has so long been called.

His “Di” is still in there (he WILL be a little brother, after all!) but his new name, Thaddeus, means “gift of God”, and that is exactly what he is.

His middle name was my grandfather’s.  An English word denoting worth or value.

This boy, once deemed unworthy even of a name, is a gift from God.  He has immeasurable worth.  He is worthy not only of a name, but of a family, of a home, of love, and we cannot wait give him all of those things.

We have been completely blown away by the generous response to our Lifesong grant.  In just over a month, we have soared past the halfway mark and are closing in on three-quarters!  So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.  And I owe you a name.  And a story.

If you’ve been around for a while, you have watched our approach to naming our adopted children (who, of course, already have names when they come into our lives) develop over the years.  As I shared in my stories of naming Niko and naming Delia, we really demand a lot out of our adopted kids’ names, and they always manage to deliver.  We want a name that connects strongly to the birth name in some way, if possible making reference to both given name and surname.  We also need to work a family name into it somewhere, and we’re not really two-middle-name people, so this is often a tight squeeze!  Also, all the other rules! Finally, and this is the real sticking point, we have to both love it.

So, shall I tell you the end from the beginning and then take you along on the journey that brought us there?

Our new son’s name will be:

Lewis Christian Young

When we first received his file, I scoured every inch of it to find his birth name (I confess I looked for it before I read any of the medical information!)  After all, the quest for the perfect name couldn’t even begin without the raw material.  Unfortunately, everywhere that his birth name appeared, it appeared in Chinese characters (which, um, I can’t read), and everywhere that it appeared in English, they had substituted his pseudonym Caden.

Thankfully, not long after we received his file, my friend Rachel and her lovely little tribe were over for a playdate.  I was lamenting my birth name conundrum to her, and having adopted from China herself, she asked if she could take a look at his file.

She scoured, too.  We scoured together.  Still just the Chinese characters and the English pseudonym, everywhere we looked.  We were about to give up, when she had an inspired idea, “Wait a second, show me those pictures again!”

Lo and behold, in every single photo, he was wearing a name tag with his name both in Chinese characters (we cross referenced his name on the file to make sure they were indeed the characters of his name) and written out in English letters:

Loo Chew Yee

(not actual spelling)

Now we were in business.  Rachel helped me to decode the Chinese-ness of his name.  Loo is the surname, Chew Yee would be his official name, but more than likely he’s used to being called Yee Yee.  We pretty quickly ruled out trying to find an English name that would actually sound like what he was used to being called, especially since we were only guessing on that anyway.

I set about searching the meanings of his birth names.  Chew yielded the best meaning, “at the beginning”, and I was so hopeful we’d find him a name that meant the same as his birth name, like Delia’s  But the closest we could find on that front was names containing “Arch”, the Greek word for beginning, and nothing was popping.

I was just beginning to consider abandoning the birth name angle altogether when my long-time name-nerd friend Lindsay astutely observed that his last initial is already Y, like ours!  If we gave him the first two initials LC, he could keep his initials and maybe even have a name with the overall same flow and sound as his birth name.  This was something we could work with (and, glory be!, we hadn’t used an L name yet!).

I made list upon list of L names, but it was always Lewis.  It had such a strong and obvious connection to his birth surname, and it was a name that had been on our boys’ list for years anyway.  CS Lewis is a very positive association for us (I just finished rereading Mere Christianity, which everyone should go do!); in fact, Junie’s middle name is Lucy after the Narnia series.  It just felt like his name from the moment we first considered it.  Doesn’t he just look like a Lewis?

The middle name took a bit more wrestling.  A C family name seemed like it should come pretty easily.  Only it didn’t.  The only male relative either of us had with a C name was Charles, a great uncle on Trevor’s side whom he had never met.  While I love the name Charles, it just didn’t pack the sort of meaningful-family-name punch we were looking for.

C surnames in our collective family tree?  Not a one. We then considered everything from meaningful place names to abstract word names to just keeping Chew as his middle name (and not giving him a family name!?), but in the end, it was right under our noses all along.

My mother’s middle name is Christine (and her initials are LC, too).  She was named after her grandmother, who was also Christine. Christian was the nearest masculine version, and I was delighted to discover while looking through some old documents that my great-grandmother’s given name was actually Christiane (so pretty, right?!), though she went by Christine her whole life for simplicity.  I even loved the (very, very) subtle nod to the meaning of Chew (beginning) in the concept of a Christian’s new beginning in Christ.

One final thought nagged at me, though.  Christian was also the middle name of a dear friend’s son, who tragically passed away about a year ago.  I loved the idea of honoring him as well, but only if it would be meaningful rather than a sad reminder to my friend.  When she told me she would be honored if our sons shared a middle name, our boy’s name became officially set in stone.  Loo Chew Yee would become Lewis Christian Young.

In writing all this down, I realize what a collaborative effort naming Lewis has been, and that is fitting. His life so far has been a collaborative effort. Many have poured themselves into our boy: a birth mother brought him into the world, gave him a name, and made the unfathomably hard decision to let him go.   Who knows how many nannies have cared for him, hopefully with tenderness and affection, and our friends and family have risen up to support us in bringing him home.  In the end he will be our boy, but we realize he couldn’t have become our boy without so many others helping along the way, and for that we are extremely thankful.

(Image from www.swallowtailgardenseeds.com)

Back when we were naming Niko (click the link to read his name story), I discovered that naming an adopted child was a completely different animal than naming a child born into your family.  You know us: we have a few rules about naming anyway, but naming a child who already has a name?  Whole different ball game.

Having been through the process once before, I felt even more strongly that I wanted Delia’s name to be connected to who she was before joining our family.  I wanted it to reflect her birth name in some way.  I wanted it to be all her, and yet all us.  It’s a tall order.

But if we learned anything from the process of naming Niko and watching him become that name, it was this: we could have called him anything we wanted to, and it would have been fine.

A little back story: about halfway through our process to bring him home, while watching a video of little Niko swinging in a swing with one of his caregivers, I heard something that rocked me to the core: she called him “Kolya”!  I should have known.  It’s a common nickname for Nikolai in Slavic countries, and Niko certainly isn’t.

So here we were, calling our boy Niko at home and to everyone we knew, feeling like we were doing the right thing by keeping his name intact, and he was used to hearing a completely different-sounding name. I agonized over it for days.  Maybe weeks.  But in the end, we just stuck with the plan and called him Niko.  And do you know what?  when we picked him up, he understood that Niko was his name from day one.  It didn’t traumatize him; it didn’t even require any explanation.  It was just the new name for him, just like everything else had a new name in this strange new language he was suddenly surrounded by.

Fast forward a year or two to our earliest discussions of adopting Delia – and you must understand here that we named her well before we ever actually committed to adopting her – I knew before we even started discussing it that naming her was going to be much harder than naming Niko.  The name she went by, a nickname for an absolutely stunning name when spoken in her native language, sounded like “Raleigh”.

In those earliest conversations, when Trevor was ready to plunge straight back into the adoption process and the boy was about fifteen minutes off the boat, I was feeling a little bit… less ready.  I am ashamed to admit that, among other completely absurd reasons I gave for not wanting to adopt “Raleigh” at the time, I actually spoke the words, “We can’t adopt a Raleigh.  We already have a Romilly!”  I was only partly serious, but that part of me was deadly serious.  I am so eternally thankful that the Lord changed my heart on the matter, and almost equally thankful that we managed to find a name for her that makes my heart sing.

Without further ado, that name, which came to me while walking the dog (that’s when most of my best baby name epiphanies happen) and was almost instantly approved by Trevor on my return home is:

Delphinia Mary

We first considered the obvious option of sliding her birth name to the middle spot and giving her a family name as her new first name, but nothing was popping.  Then we began to research her given name and discovered it was, of all things: a flower name!  Her name was the actual word, in her language, for the larkspur or delphinium flower.  Bestill my heart, she had a botanical name – this girl was meant to be my daughter after all!

From there, it took a bit of dog-walking to wrestle her name into just the right translated form and nickname combo, but once it clicked, it was love.

Her middle name is in honor of both my great aunt Mary and my oldest and dearest best friend Mary.  Like Niko’s middle name (Dickson), in addition to being a family name, it also echoes her birth surname, which began with Mari****.  Click, click, click.  Perfect.

*  *  *  *  *

PS  It was a pretty ordinary day today.  Nothing much happened here.  Oh yeah.  Except that we bought three-and-a-half round trip tickets to a certain little girl’s country!  Bea is delighted that the tickets are bought and she is actually – for sure – coming with us.  And I cannot even wrap my head around the fact that in less than three weeks Delia will be in our arms and ours forever!

Trevor has had exactly half of his visits with Little Lady already, and the reports have been even better than I could have hoped.  She smiles and laughs (her medical report states that she “rarely smiles”).  She sings and dances and loves picking and eating apricots from the tree at the orphanage.  She likes to run, and Trevor says it will be a long time before we can trust her in our fenced in yard without careful supervision, but she sounds like she has so much life in her.  She has some very limited speech, but any speech at all is so encouraging.  And most importantly, her Daddy is still so, so crazy about her.  And that makes me even more crazy about him.  The pictures have made my heart smile.  Big.

Meanwhile, on the homefront, things have been hot and sticky and very busy.  But while this Mommy has had a few moments of crankiness here and there, the kids have been absolutely delightful and such a help to me.  It is in situations like this, when my hands are at their very fullest and my own weakness is glaring at me, that God’s grace is at its most tangible in my life.  He has answered our prayers mightily on both sides of the ocean this week.

Oh, yes!  And, as promised: the grand unveiling of Little Lady’s name.  I’ll save her full name and the story behind it for another post, but for now, let me shout from the rooftops the name we have been calling this little girl in our hearts for over a year (but for the odd week of typical Trevor and Jodi name drama here and there).  Allow me to introduce our lovely…

{{{    Delia   }}}

Nikolai Dickson Young

Confession time.  When we first began considering adoption, one of my earliest and most persistent concerns was the name.

You know me and names.  Naming is huge for me.  It’s how I prepare for a new little one, how I bond with them after they arrive.  I have to love the name, and I adore the process of choosing it.  But I began to understand pretty quickly as we got into our adoption process that there is more to naming an adopted child than the usual poring over name books in search of the. perfect. name.

Many adoptive parents feel strongly that if the child is of a certain age (younger than you’d think), it is very important to let him keep his name.  It is one of the few parts of his identity that he can hang onto through the huge transtition of moving to a new country, learning a new language, and joining a new family.  Letting him keep his name is the family’s way of saying, “We love you exactly as your are, no need to change a thing in order to join our family.”

At the other end of the spectrum are those who feel that bestowing and receiving names are important rites of passage when joining a family.  They believe giving an adopted child a completely new name symbolizes the beginning of his new life.   I could see it both ways, and it was a lot to think about.

As it became clear that we would likely not be adopting an infant or even a young toddler, we found ourselves pulled strongly toward the that’s-his-name-and-we-can’t-take-it-away-from-him camp.  I began praying about it, and I very quickly felt certain that whatever our child’s name was, it would be perfect.

In place of my usual mental name games (using the letters on license plates as initials to inspire perfect name combos and the like… what, you don’t do that?), I began imagining different Slavic-sounding names and what we would do with them.  If we adopted a Dimitri – perfect!   This is the nickname Trevor’s brother always gives to our babies while they are in utero.  It would make a perfect middle name, but was a bit lacking in nickname options.  We came across a little Teodora… if she had been our daughter she could have become Theodora called Thea for short – love!  If we had adopted a Vladimir or a Sergey… well, I’m sure we’d have figured something out.

But instead, he was Nikolai.  From one of the first times I saw his sweet face and name, I began calling him Niko in my head.  Nico is a European nickname for all sorts of Nic- names (A nickname for a Nic- name – ha!) from Nicholas to Nicodemas.  I had come across it in my earlier years of baby name fascination and it had been steadily growing on me ever since.  Perfect.

With the first name and nickname locked in, we began the arduous quest for the perfect middle name. We first considered using our long-time favorite boy name, which of course I’m not going to tell you here.  We let that idea simmer for a while, but then Trevor’s mum pointed out (quite rightly) that that would make him our only child with no family name, so we went back to the drawing board, and the family tree, for something better.

We decided the name should come from my side of the family, since we were taking turns and we already knew that Coraline’s middle name would be coming from Trevor’s side.

One contender immediately rose to the top of the list.  It would have been Pippa’s middle name had she been a boy, and Ro’s if she had been.  One of my favorite family names based on sound alone, but in this case, it brought a little something extra to the table as well.

Niko’s middle name is Dickson.  It is my grandmother’s middle name, but was a family surname before that.  She has probably always hated it (her sister’s middle name is Jane!), but I have always loved it and hoped to use it for a son someday.

Niko’s surname before we adopted him was D***ev.  You can quickly spot (if you see and hear the name) a visual and sound resemblance to Dickson, but we also loved the fact that almost all middle names and surnames in Niko’s county are patronymic, that is, they mean “son of” someone.  So, Dickson is a (very) approximate translation of his former surname, yet it is plucked right out of his new family tree.

Isn’ that just like adoption?  He’s still who he was, but he’s every bit a part of our family now, too.  And I couldn’t love his name any more if we had come up with it from scratch.