The Name Game

I almost forgot about this fun bit...when you adopt, your child already comes with a name. If he is younger (< 1 year or so), you can probably change this name without too much trouble. However, in our case, we are adopting a two-year-old. He's going to know what his name is.

In Alex's case, he came with a pretty easy name - Alexander. It "works" over here in the states. Before we went to meet Alex and found out his name (they don't tell you in advance), we jokingly called him "Boris". When folks would ask about naming, we would say, "Well, if his name is something like Vladamir, we will probably consider changing it. However, if it's something like Alexander, we will keep it."

You can imagine our shock when his name was actually Alexander!

In hindsight, we spent a LOT of time worrying about naming, when we didn't need too.

But...we have to consider this again for New Kid. At two, we will probably know and identify with his name. If we change it, we will need to change it to something similar. This makes it darn near impossible to prepare ahead of time!

Do we look up most common Russian boy names and find alternatives that 'work' in America? (ouch...too much work)

Do we just keep his existing name, even if it's Vlad or Dmitry? (easiest solution, but he might get beat up in the future)

Do we just come up with a new name and figure he will learn the new one? (not very nice, IMHO)

ARG.

I dug out our old 'name list' hoping for some help there. Yuk. Names that we liked four years ago do NOT sound good now.

Oh yeah, and there's one more situation that could occur. He could be named "Alexander". What do we do then? We will have two kids with the same name. Hmmm...