What's in a name?

"I'm Soren Navarro, and I'm going to be a ROCK STAR!"

That is the most common greeting coming from my little Soren these days.  He is excited to be getting a new name, and he is especially excited that he has a rock star name.

I was actually worried about giving Soren a new name.  He is the oldest child we have re-named, at  3 months shy of 5 years old.  I did not know how he would take the news or like the name.  Some suggest letting the child choose his own new name if you must rename him, but I was not interested in a son named after a superhero, and I have no doubt that is where his suggestions would go.

When we started fostering to adopt, I truly had no thoughts of ever changing the names of my kids.  I went almost a full year thinking that we may tweak a spelling here and there but largely keep the names we all knew and loved before it was suggested to us that there were very real safety reasons for changing the names of some of our kids.  We decided that we would treat all the kids the same and change every name at adoption.  We have had to choose 5 new names in the last 15 months.  That's a lot of naming.

We gave middle names with family significance to Cassia and Edison, but we decided to give Hispanic middle names to all of our Hispanic boys to make up for taking away their Hispanic last names.  "Navarro" is the middle name we chose for Soren.  When we told him that there is a rock star who has that name, he was in love.  When we showed him pictures of that rock star, he assured us that he will be the sort of rock star who wears a shirt.  We let him know that would be fine.

His name will be Soren Navarro.  He will be a rock star.  He will wear a shirt.

Got it!