Baby Names

A few weeks ago I was reading the blog of a woman who adopted from Ethiopia. She mentioned that they picked out their kids' names a year prior to ever knowing them. Immediately I decided that was something that I wanted to do. It makes sense. Pregnant women get to name their babies before they ever meet them. I want to be able to pray for them by name. Now you might be wonder, if we adopt older kids who already know their given name, what about that name? Its pretty common for people to pick a name and give that to their adopted child as their middle name or move their given name to middle and give them a new first name. The idea is that they still get to keep their identity but also have a more common name that they can choose to use here in the states.

I picked out two names. One boy name and one name that has a girl and a boy version. I think we will either end up with two boys or a boy and a girl but it seems unlikely that we will adopt two girls. You see there are more requests for girls. I heard once that the theory is that women often are the one in the family driving the desire to adopt and often they want a girl to round out their family. We don't really care boy or girl so it seems unlikely that we would end up with two girls. Back to the naming. So I picked out two names but Josh didn't love them so I asked him to pick out a couple. For days I asked him if he had any names yet. Finally he told me that he needs a book of names to look at. Ask and you shall receive!

I was on the hunt for a baby name book. My coworkers told me that you can often find little mini-magazine versions near the checkout at the grocery store. I looked at a few places and didn't find anything. So I looked at WalMart. Sure enough they had one. They seem to have one of everything. The name of the book.... one hundred THOUSAND baby names!!! Jippers! I bought it because it is the only one I found but just looking at it made me sick to my stomach. It was easily the size of my textbooks. So I decided to try Barnes and Noble to see what they might have. This time only twenty five thousand baby names. Still alot but much better. So I bought that one and will return the other one.

This weekend we have a 4.5 hour drive over the mountains and then back again. That is 9 hours in which I will have a captive audience. I am resolved that we will have names picked out before we return on Sunday!