What's in a name?

I love thinking up names. I have written lists of names since I was a kid - girls on the left, boys on the right. I went through fanciful stages; Anastasia and Preston, and through weird stages; Fabian and Toby (short for October) - guess which is the girl and which is the boy?!? Many of my names started with "J" - Joanna, Jacob, Jessie, Jonah, Josephine, James... Strangely, though I can remember some of my lists, I don't remember if Jack or Elliot were on any. I know Paxten wasn't, and I know Anna was. I could talk about names all the time and for no reason, even if no baby was pending - which drives Steve crazy because he hates talking about names, even when we have a reason to do so.

Anna was named when we started the process to adopt. Anna was not a name we discussed at all for any of the pregnancies, but when we decided to adopt, it fell quickly and easily into place. Steve wants a girl named Annie, and said it didn't matter much to him what her full name was as he would call her Annie. I liked Anna best of all the long forms of Annie and he agreed. We also want to honour my grandmother by using her name in Anna's full name.

Now that we know her given name, I'm not convinced Anna fits as well as I had thought it would and I'm struggling to decide what the best option for her will be. Through discussion with other AP's we have come to realize that her given name, ChunWen, is the only piece of her history that she will be able to take from China with her. We'll have pictures and stories, but everything about the first two and a half years of her life will stay in China. She was anonymously abandoned, without information about her birth name, so she was given a name by the orphanage, and that was her first information that followed her to us, her first known identity. We can't take that from her. Many in the adoption community use the Chinese name as a middle name, which would be an easy option. That gives us two of our options:

Anna Mary ChunWen

Anna ChunWen Mary

Both are nice, both keep her given name intact should she choose to use it later in life. In the orphanages, it appears the pattern is to call the children by their second given character, and often duplicate it, much the same as we add "ie" or "y" to make a name a diminutive. So, chances are ChunWen has been called "WenWen". I actually like Wen - a lot - and wouldn't mind using that as her name. The name ChunWen doesn't sound as pretty to me as Wen or Anna, but it's hers. That gives us the options of:

ChunWen Anna Mary
ChunWen Mary

I'm not quite ready to give up on Anna though. Anna is the child we've dreamed of and hoped for. The kids know her as Annie and call her by name on a daily basis. Also, Steve really wants to call her Annie. That brought me to a new idea - taking part of her Chinese name and combining it with our Canadian name, giving us the options of:

Annawen Mary (Chun)
Anwen Mary (Chun)

Both are growing on me FAST. Steve is less convinced, though I'm reminding him that he said he didn't care what the full name is as long as he calls her Annie. With these names she could be Annie/Anna, or Wen or Annawen. She could easily use any of those three into adulthood as she wishes, or even switch between them without legal confusion. My only drawback (besides Steve's stubbornnes) is splitting up ChunWen. In Chinese, it is written as two characters, and most children go by one just as here they go by a first name and have a middle name, but it's still her name as it is.

So, we're left discussing the options...

On a side note, we had a discussion about "names" at dinner tonight - not people names but body parts. Elliot announced "Do you know what Jack said? He said a penis is a weiner" I recovered from choking on my cob of corn and agreed that that is a name, but that we prefer he use the word 'penis' as it is more polite. At that point, Paxten Julia contributed her two cents by cackling out "Beans and WEEEEners! Beans and WEEEEEEEEners!" before succombing to hysterics. I wish our discussions about ChunWen's name could be so entertaining.

N