What's In A Name?

To me, one of the most exciting things about being pregnant is picking out a name.  Well it turns out, that excitement is no different when you are adopting.  An added bonus now is that our older children are of age to partake in the fun!

Once we knew that then-Davidson was going to be our son/brother, the family began serious talk about his name - do we keep it or fancy him a new one?  Stephen and Isabel (our oldest at 10 years of age) were Switzerland in the debate.  They were fine either way.  Cole (our second born, who's almost 8) and I were on polar ends of this thought.  He liked the current name and I, however, never really warmed up to it.  Not that I dislike the name David or Davison -granted its not my first choice when naming my child- but it just didn't fit him.  You know?

So the process began on thinking of new names.  My first thought was Matthew.  This is a name I love.  Actually, I was going to be named Matthew if I was born of the male persuasion.  A couple of years ago,  Stephen and I were having dinner with some of our close friends.  We were discussing adoption then and I said that I would love to name an adopted son Matthew.  Don't know where that came from but its what I liked.  Apparently, I was the only one in our household that liked that name.  So on went the search.

We tried all of the biblical names and came up with a few front-runners - Noah and Matthew (I was still holding on and even referred to him as Matthew Davidson on a regular basis).  After endless discussions, Stephen finally said, "these names just doesn't fit my syllable requirement."  What?  It turns out that my engineer husband likes names that do NOT have the same amount of syllables as our last name.  Being that our last name has 2 syllables, this nixes A LOT of names.  OK.  Back to the drawing board we go.  But at least we may be on the right path now.

Over Christmas week, our family of 5 stayed at a lovely cabin in the Virginia mountains.  We never left the cabin.  Ever!  We enjoyed the snow, board games, crafts, and name discussions.  Christmas afternoon, while Cole was knee-deep in his Lord of the Rings Lego gifts, he declared that he had a suggestion... Frodo.  Seriously?!  I quickly declared his name voting privileges gone. He giggled and followed it up with, "how about Samwise."  Yeah, he wasn't helping his cause!

We continued throwing out names here and there throughout our quiet vacation but I found myself thinking about the name Sam.  It was really growing on me.  While we were on our way home, I suggested to Stephen that maybe the name Sam would be a good fit for our boy.  It is biblical AND it fits his syllable requirement perfectly... Samuel is 3 and Sam is 1.  A match made in heaven.  We all quite liked it.

I sent this suggestion out to the facebook word because, well, that's what I do.  I work well when I have thrown ideas at every available mind.  There was some concern that a name change would be hard for our little guy once he comes home.  I gave this some thought and came up with a solution...

The kiddos and I spent this last week making these shirts for our Sam.  We are hoping that the nannies and missionaries will start calling him Sam now and that will hopefully make the transition easier.  What do you think?  One of Stephen's cousins brought by the mom shirt at the top.  I told her that I'll forgive the color choice!