What's in a Name?

Baby names are one of my favorite things to talk about with my pregnant (and sometimes non-pregnant friends). I especially like talking celebrity baby names. I remember when Suri was born and I was like..wait? What? I think my favorite celeb babies belong to JLO (Max and Emme). 

Anyway...I love hearing about what others have named their kids and how they came up with it. So when one of the blogs I follow, My Very Own Modern Family, announced her link-up, I was really excited to read! And then thought, hey, I am going to invite myself to this party.

By the way, this is my first link-up so…who knows if I am doing this right.

I have been thinking of baby names since I was a kid. I remember when I was younger and my mom was pregnant with my sister, I wanted her to be named Christine. I thought it was the most beautiful name. But..no dice. She turned into a Chelsey. I also went through the stages of Steffanie, Joey (for a girl), Abigail and Ally (until my cousin was named Ally, so I lost that one), Joshua and Elijah.

My babe: Ezekiel Robert

So when I got pregnant, one of my favorite things to do was to go through lists and lists of names. My husband got so frustrated with me because I was texting him a new name every other day. The name we ended us choosing was Ezekiel Robert. Believe me, I checked the baby page at our two hospitals in town every week making sure that Ezekiel wasn’t one of the common names. There were several other Brandi’s out there when I was in school (even, I am noticing, in the blogging world. I think I follow at least 3) and I didn’t want my kids to have to use their last initial for people to know who they are. 

We chose Robert because it is my dad’s first name and my brother’s middle name. We want the middle name for all of our future kids to be a family name.

I already have several names lined up for Baby #2. (Husband may or may not be on board with said names). We are adopting our second so our timeline will be sometime in the next two years hopefully! 

Thanks to everyone for linking up! I love hearing about all these names!

Workshop!

We are at the home study and adoption education point in our adoption journey. We attended the workshop on Thursday and Friday. Information overload! I have done a lot of research on adoption between blogs, articles, books and talking with friends who have adopted but some of the topics really got me thinking.

First of all, we are open to adopting any race of child. From the statistics at one of the agencies we considering, many families choose only Caucasian (girls if you want to be specific) children. We do not have a preference as we know that God will chose the perfect child for our family.

However, say we adopt an African-American child (which we will at some point because we are hoping to adopt from Haiti when we qualify in 7 years). We live in South Dakota. Granted, Sioux Falls is becoming more diverse but we are light-years behind other states. How do we explain profiling and racism to our child? We have never dealt with it on that level. We can not speak from our own experience.

Or, if we adopt from in-state, it is very likely we will be matched with a Native American child. The prejudice against Native Americans in this state in incredible. It is scary to think how our child may be treated. How can we protect and/or prepare them for what they may face?

I know that God wants us (all of us) out of our comfort zone. Serving Him should be uncomfortable. We should feel challenged and we should trust that He will give us the tools that we need to raise our children (biological and adopted). But that doesn't make my heart hurt any less when my child comes home, upset about being bullied (for any reason, whether they are a different color, a different weight, or anything DIFFERENT).

We were told in the workshop that we are not only adopting, we are now educators. We are teaching everyone we come in contact with about adoption. The social worker said, I think everyone should adopt trans-racially. If they did, there would be no more prejudice in the world. So my prayer is that God speaks through us, that we can educate and encourage people who may or may not be considering adoption, and that he protects our children from, well, the world.