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Home Study Pt 2 & Ethiopian Names

We got a call from our home study agency that all our paperwork made it safely…the last 2 documents needed to be sent by other people, and those ones took the longest.

So, next week we have our first appointment and phase 2 begins!! We have an office visit, just Paul & I. I’m a little nervous, but it’s more a nervous-exictement. I don’t think we have anything to worry about (hopefully!) so there’s no fear in the situation. Just ready to go!!

I don’t think we’re going to make the 2-week-mark (see previous post) but that’s ok.

Today I was thinking about names. It’s a bit of a debate in the adoption world about changing a foreign adopted child’s name…and in our case, Ethiopian names can be complex! So the thing is, do we change her name to be “American” or let her keep her name and her “heritage”?

We’ll probably do both. Heritage and background are very important to us. Even before adopting, we’re both interested in our genealogy and traditions. And we want this child to have hers. We don’t want her to grow up missing a piece of herself, we want her to feel as though both halves are fulfilled.

It depends on her age and name. If she has a more complex or hard-to-pronounce name and is very, very young (like under a year) we’ll probably change it to her middle name and give her a new first name. But if she’s older (2 yrs old) obviously we won’t want to disrupt her life more than what we’ll be doing already. We’ll probably give her an easier name for a middle name and use her first name or find a nickname.

And if she has an easy name (Amara or Desta are common) then we’ll stick with it!

So many “IF” scenarios.