(My mother-in-law is in town this week, but the babies don’t wait and the questions are coming in faster than I can answer them, so I’ll post some for anyone interested to work on.)<\/p>\n
Mechi writes:<\/p>\n
My name is Mechi Foster and my husband, Joey and I are expecting our second child on October 17th. We have a three and a half year old daughter, Sofia Juliana, and we had a really easy time picking her name. We came up with and agreed upon a first and middle we liked very quickly. Not really the case for baby no. 2 (and we decided we want the gender to be a surprise, so its trickier).
The main problem we have is a culture clash. Joey (Joseph Henry) is of English, Irish, and Scottish origin (but they’ve been here in the US for generations). My family is from Spain and Argentina, and my parents moved to the US after they got married. I speak almost fluent Spanish, and although my family was just an average American family, I feel like if I name our second child a completely English name, I’ll be losing some of my culture (and I already am because we’re obviously raising them in English, not Spanish.) Joey understands that, and he loved Sofia Juliana, two bilingual names. He’s completely open to it.
So what’s the problem? Well, neither of us can find any Spanish names we like! And we don’t want a name like Ignacio or Magdalena, that is impossible to pronounce in English, so nix all of those names. We want to find a name like Sofi’s (or mine – my full name is Mercedes Alicia) that is bilingual – embraces my culture, but also is English (for Joey, and so people won’t be constantly mispronouncing his or her name).
And one last thing. When we picked Sofia in 2006, we didn’t really do that much research on the popularity of the name, and therefore didn’t realize that it’s one of the top fifty names right now (and Sophia, which may be spelled differently, but is essentially the same name, is in the top ten!) and I regret that. I don’t want my kids to be one of many in a crowd. (Sofia just started preschool last week and there are two Sophia’s and one other Sofia in her class!) So we really would like a bilingual name that is less common.
And for middle names, we’re not the kind of people that are huge on honoring family members, so the same criteria as the first name.
Thank you so much!<\/p><\/blockquote>\nName update<\/span> 10-27-2009! Mechi writes:<\/p>\n
Hi, Swistle! Thanks for all the help
Sofia’s little sister was born on October 15th. Our newest addition is Maya Elena Josephine Foster! Maya Elena is her full first name, and Josephine is the middle. Maya Elena sounds sort of like Magdalena when spoken (“Mayalena”) which we liked because we always did like that name. And Sofi has taken to calling her Mali, and now I find myself calling her that too, and I think thats just the greatest twist. I think Mali is just adorable. Thanks to all the readers who gave us suggestions – they were great! And we have tons of ideas for any future child, thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(My mother-in-law is in town this week, but the babies don’t wait and the questions are coming in faster than I can answer them, so I’ll post some for anyone interested to work on.) Mechi writes: My name is Mechi Foster and my husband, Joey and I are expecting our second child on October 17th. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1NC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}