Give Me an 'I', Give Me an "A", Give Me a "N"!!

While Shawn and I have had girls names picked out for years, we never once discussed boys names. We added and subtracted from a master list for several months until we came up with our top 4 in no particular order of favoritism (I had several other favs that Shawn nixed immediately):

Cameron

Ethan

Ian

Bryce

We decided on Ian over the others for no real particular reason other than it just had a nice sound with Mrzena...both with the n's and long e sounds....and this poor kid needs some vowels in his name. We also liked a short name. I hated spelling Stephanie out all the way growing up and eventually shortened it to Stephani... yes, it's only one letter shorter, but it also set me apart from the million other Stephanie's that I was in school with. It was a trendy name for the early 70's...It was the Brittany of 1973.

Granted, Ian will be spelling out and pronouncing all three names for his entire life. This must be our parental revenge on our child that seems to happen to everyone in some way, shape or form.

What we didn't plan and only noticed after deciding on Ian as his official name was that the middle three letters of the first part of his name: Xiang is...yep, IAN. That was an eerie coincidence.

We decided to keep part of his first name as his middle name: Xuan. We feel that it is important to have something to tie him to his birth country and although these names are often given at random by the caretaker or finding person, it is still a connection none the less. It's pronunciation is also close to Shawn, which was another amazing coincidence that we could have never planned for, so it gives him some closeness to his dad... and a way to bail out of "Shwan" if he decides to defy his heritage at an older age.

So there it is... Ian Xuan Mrzena. He goes to sleep tonight (or waking up right now, I think) without a clue of how much effort is going into the upcoming changes in his life. Maybe some day he'll read this and thank us... but he'll most likely just roll his eyes and ask for 20 bucks.