Naming Your Baby

Choosing a name for your child can be a long and tedious process many people agonize over.  Do you choose a family name, a simple name, or something unique?  People can really get worked up when it comes to naming their children; some people but not us.  Again, Brian and I took another issue of parenting and laughed our way through it.  We did actually consider some family names, although only briefly.  No offense to any of our family members but we did not like any of their names enough to use them.

We ended up choosing names solely because we liked them.  We wanted short names with only one or two syllables.  We wanted something people could pronounce and was less common but still not too unusual.  We tried not to consider any names on that year's Top 100 list.

We chose Brice's name pretty early on, but for the life of us we could not come up with a middle name.  During the process of trying to come up with a middle name for him, I was taking a real estate class.  One of my classmates was talking about her son Carter, I liked it.  I came home and told Brian, I think I found a middle name.  He said, "it's not Carter is it?" Apparently, Brian had been watching the movie Coach Carter while I was gone.  Well, that's it.  It was fate.  We ended up with Brice Carter.

For our second adoption, we had our list of names we had come up while waiting for Brice.  We still liked a few of them, but could not agree on one.  I was doing some research on the internet about baby names and we sort of liked Logan but it was too common.  I found Rogan as an alternative for those who liked Logan.  I mentioned it to Brian and he really liked it too.  We had always liked the name Blake, but again it was fairly common so we used it as his middle name.

Our boys' names have no special meaning, we just liked them.  According to www.babyhold.com; Brice is English and means "swift".  The meaning seems fitting since the child never stops going and runs everywhere.  Rogan is Irish and means red haired.  We find this hilarious since he is olive skinned, brown haired, brown eyed, and half Hispanic.

In adoption, names can become an issue.  Sometimes, birth parents will choose a name and you will have to decide to keep the name they chose or change it.  In our cases, Rogan's birth mother did not name him and we told her the name we had chosen and she said she liked it.  Brice's birth father did name him and had a name on his original birth certificate.  We did tell the family we had chosen a name and they knew we would be changing it.  The name chosen by his birth father was not significant to the family,  he just liked it.  We did keep a copy of Brice's original birth certificate so he will have it when he gets older and can see the name his birth father chose.  Also, his birth name is on all his court documents.

Many adoptive parents will work together with the birth parents to chose a name or will use a name chosen by the birth parents as their child's middle name.  I did hear of an agency recently whose adoption contract has a clause that adoptive parents will use the name chosen by the birth parents, if the birth family chooses to name their child.  This contractual obligation seems unusual to me and could become an issue if birth parents chose something extremely unusual.

For the record, we never really had any girl names set in stone.  We did have a few ideas but never settled on any one.  I guess we just knew we'd be having boys.