What is in a name?

Obviously, we have decided to name our new daughter Nicole. I have a friend who is very dear to me named Nicole and so I have a positive association with this name. My girlfriend Nicole or "Nicky" will be our little Nikki's godmother. We also like the name Anna and have some inspirational, loving and dear women named Anna in our lives.

However, the combination of Anna and Nicole yields Anna-Nicole. I will forever associate Anna-Nicole with the voluptous blonde whose tragic life was televised for public consumption. Hey, I am not here to judge, I just do not feel it.

So, with Anna-Nicole already spoken for, we brainstormed a variety of options. When praying about the adoption, I kept coming across the name "Priya". It is a Hindi name which means "beloved". Thinking this just beautiful and loving the way it flowed with Nicole, we initially had decided on Priya Nicole.

My husband then attended a seminar on international adoption. Some adult adoptees spoke of their experiences and how they felt giving a child an ethnic first name was not the best idea. Yet, we did not want to give her a name which conjured up images of a fair haired, freckled child. That did not seem right either.

So, we pondered. We do a lot of that. It is a good thing my husband and I are married to one another for a variety of reasons. Our love of pondering being one of them.

We decided against Priya because we thought she might not like it. It seemed a little risky. The next step was to find other Indian names which could be Americanized. We thought Kiran was nice, but thought it would end up being mistaken for Kieran. Kieran paired with our very Scotch- Irish last name does not fit an Indian daughter.

Instead, we committed to an Anglo first name and keeping her orphanage name as a middle one. The names we liked were Josephine (Josie), Samantha (Sammy) and Nicole (Nikki). We solicited input from our families. Since we did not include them in naming our first child, we thought this would be a fun way for everyone to be involved. Anyway, they favored Nicole. This seemed right given our affinity for my dear friend Nicky. Strangely enough, it also was the name that my parents had chosen for me before I was born. They decided after I was born that I did not look like a Nicole. Anyway, it also has a spectacular ring to it with our last name which has a hard "C".

So, there we have it. Nicole it is... It is nice giving her a name. It starts to shape her as a real little person.