Naming our newborn child.

With the quickly approaching deadline in choosing a name for our newborn daughter and with Shabbos coming right around the corner where the baby-naming ceremony was to happen, my wife and I still didn't have a name. Thinking about it, I decided to give in to the name my wife wanted, and I told her that I would be very happy with naming our daughter the name she suggested. As soon as I did that, she told me that she wanted to name our daughter the Yiddish name I suggested because the person I wanted to name her after was my grandmother who I was very close with, but the person she wanted to name her after were names of people up the family tree she never met.

So I went to the baby naming ceremony this morning over the Sabbath and I named our daughter. I'd tell who what we named her, but it would be a fake name anyway, so why bother. ;) The funny thing is that even though I'm not one to give both an English name and a Hebrew name (I think parents should just give one name not to confuse the children with mixed identities) her Hebrew name and English name are identical. But this evening when I looked up how to properly spell the name (because there were so many possible spellings), I realized the name was not a name of its own, but was a contraction of a name COMPLETELY AND UNEXPECTEDLY DIFFERENT than what we named her.

It's like my name here is Zoe. But pretend, in real life I call myself "Zan." Did you know that is short for the name Alexander? I didn't know that until I looked it up. Still don't know what Zoe is a contraction for. I do know it's a girls name too, but hey, that's life. So now we have a name.