So, after sitting on our girl’s name choice and reflecting on it for the last couple months, we’re now pretty much completely certain on what name we’re going with (if she’s a girl-- we won’t know until the birth).
Mayna [name]Hazel[/name] [name]Rose[/name] [name]Luckie[/name] (that’s the last name)
We decided to go with the double middle name for several reasons. [name]Rose[/name] is a family name we wanted to honor, but find it a bit boring by itself. [name]Hazel[/name] is another family name on the other side of the family (we’ve already honored this branch of family with our first son’s MN, but double honoring is never bad) that we like a lot. [name]Hazel[/name] [name]Rose[/name] feels like a really great match, and after sitting on it for a couple months, we like it even more. The only thing that would keep us from using the double middle name, at this point, would be if the name doesn’t fit on the birth certificate (we live in [name]China[/name], and the birth certificate form is made to hold Chinese characters, which take up a lot less space).
Mayna we’ve been certain about since… forever. It has all sorts of significance for us, on several levels. And it has great meanings in several languages.
Great Name!
I usually don’t like two nature names together like that but [name]Hazel[/name] [name]Rose[/name] sounds great with Mayna & [name]Luckie[/name].
Have you considered hyphenating them? It would make it more like one name instead of two. It might make you feel better about not always having space for two middle names on forms.
Is there a way to write “[name]Hazel[/name] [name]Rose[/name]” in Cantonese or Mandarin? (It could be a great way to connect her to the country she was born in - and if you move to a western country or have her birth certificate translated it could easily be spelled out).
Other thought. My birth certificate has my middle names but because I refused to use the first without the second, it doesn’t show up anywhere except on offical ID’s. School records, doctor records, etc everything is just FN LN.
The pronunciation of Mayna is may-nuh. The major meaning (for us) is the Chinese meaning, in which the name has a unique connection (based on it’s Chinese characters- 美纳) to both my culture and my wife’s culture. It highlights the multicultural-ness of our child. It’s also a Sanskrit name that means ‘message of God’ and a variation of a Greek name (Maena- there’s still a chance we might choose to use this spelling. For the Chinese meaning it doesn’t matter what spelling we use.) meaning ‘moon’. It’s also the name of a flowering plant native to [name]Columbia[/name]. It’s not a very common name anywhere, but strangely, from the research I’ve been doing, it seems that more people in [name]Brazil[/name] have this name than anywhere else.
@[name]Blade[/name]- Yeah, you can write out the babies name in any language (including pinyin) on the birth certificate, it’s just a matter of whether or not there’s enough space for a long name. In fact, since our kid will be getting a US passport, we have to write out her ‘English’ name rather than her Chinese name on the birth certificate, or else the process of getting an official US passport requires several extra (rather annoying) steps. She’ll still have a Chinese name (美纳), it just won’t be on her official documentation. @Lexiem- We won’t use [name]Hazel[/name] [name]Rose[/name] as part of the Chinese name, the MN will be just for her ‘English’ name, but that’s just fine since her first name is a Chinese name.
I have thought a bit about hyphenating the middle names. But those thoughts have really come to anything. I think I like the names standing opening on their own a little better, just in how it looks. But the hyphen would help the names connect together. We’ll have to reflect on it a bit more.