Name is official

We finally decided, Friday morning, not a moment too soon, what our daughter's name will be.

Iris Lingyue Stenkamp Swift

A lovely name, isn't it? And full of character.

Thanks to our party guests for helping us with this one. Although we still like the idea of including 'Moon' in her name (Ling Yue means Exquisite Moon), Lingyue is more respectful of her current home and heritage. And she can always be 'the little Moon Unit' to us!!

Here's some additional information about Chinese names in general, and Iris' Chinese name in particular. Wang is her surname, and is the same surname as that of the orphanage director. Ling is the next name, and we learned (on Wikipedia), that this is the generation name. All of the girls being adopted from this orphanage by our travel group have 'Ling' in their names, making them all the rough equivalent of sisters. The next name is Yue, the most unique part of her name. Chinese people are known familiarly by the combination of the generation name and the unique given name. Correspondingly, most Chinese people who emigrate to English-speaking countries collapse two of their names into one, or hyphenate the name. We decided to combine Ling Yue into Lingyue.

My apologies to my mom for not including 'Margaret' as we originally intended. Two middle names seemed sufficient.