Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Clarissa's CURRENT name :)

After my post about Clarissa's middle name I had questions about her Korean name and if we plan to incorporate that with her American name.

This is something that we've been discussing for a long time. A lot of adoptive families use their childs Korean name as a middle name and we decided that we'd wait to see what her Korean name was and then decide. Sometimes the birth mother gives the baby the name and other times a social worker does it. We decided a long time ago that if her birth mother named her, we would use that name as her middle name. We figured that if she named her it was probably something special to her and we wanted Clarissa to keep it.

When we got the referral we learned two things. First, Clarissa's name was given to her by her social worker and not her mother, and second, it's a little hard to pronounce without a little practice! We talked about giving her two middle names, her Korean name and an American name, but I think that's just too many names.

Part of Clarissa's Korean name means "grace", so we thought about going with Clarissa Grace, which I think is pretty. That was a definite possibility for a while.

We spent a while discussing the options and in the end we finally decided to take it to a family vote and Rose won. We had picked out Rose a long time ago as a possibility and we all agreed that Rose was the name we all loved the most.

Clarissa will always know her Korean name and I plan to have a Korean scroll made for her room with her Korean name on it. Her Korean name is beautiful and will always be special to us and hopefully to her. It's just not going to be part of her legal name.

Now for a little trivia about my family! Giving our daughter a middle name at all is breaking a long standing family tradition. No females in my family have a middle name. My grandma doesn't have one, my mom doesn't have one, I don't have one, my sister doesn't have one, my sisters daughters don't have one...I'm totally the rebel by giving my daughter a middle name, lol.

I don't really know why that's a tradition in our family, it just is. I've never minded not having a middle name, that's just normal in my family. But it's important to me to give middle names to my kids that that honor someone from our family history. We put a lot of thought into our boys middle names. Josh's middle name is my dad's name, who passed away before Josh was born, and Matthew's middle name is my husband's great grandfather's name, who has a neat life story. I didn't want to leave Clarissa out of that tradition. But you can see why the thought of giving her TWO middle names seems like too much to me. Even giving our daughter ONE is breaking tradition!

So there is the rest of the middle name story. It's been a hot topic around here for quite a while. Coming up with a name is a big responsibility as it is and I especially worried about it with Clarissa since we weren't quite sure what to do about her Korean name. We feel good about our decision though and hopefully when Clarissa is older she'll enjoy hearing the story of where her name came from.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

It sounds like you have given it a lot of thought. I hope I didn't come off as snarky or rude I was genuinely curious.
I like Rose over Grace.

Wendy said...

Oh, no, you didn't sound snarky at all! I don't mind answering questions, I've been meaning to post about her name anyway. :)

Herzig Family said...

Is there any way that the foster family can start using Clarissa as part of her name now so she get's used to hearing it?? Probably not, but that would be neat. Best wishes - I've been following your story.