Middle Name

Good morning!!

I'm so excited because FINALLY I can tell you the baby's middle name YAYYY!

But first I have to tell you the story behind how we decided on the name......I can't just blurt it out and be done with it. That just wouldn't be any fun. But if I know a few of you as well as I do I know you're not even reading this sentence right now because you're already scrolling down the page to see her name. Yeah that's right. You just came back up didn't you. And you're gonna act like you didn't peek. Uh huh. Busted! 

Oh well. I'm being a bit dramatic about all of this anyway so I'll just get on with it.........

So first of all, Eleni almost didn't even have a middle name. Antonis was totally against it because Greeks don't really do the whole middle name thing. Sometimes they will but that's only in circumstances where someone's had a dream about a saint and then they give the baby that saints name as well as their parent's name. Sometimes they'll do it because the baby was born on a saint day. Or maybe they've prayed to a certain saint for help during the pregnancy and then they want to honor that saint by naming the baby after them. There are a few other reasons but other than that, most people just have their first name and their last name. Usually if you have a first and a middle name, people will tend to call you by both names. Personally, I would be totally annoyed if I had to be called Tara Anne all the time. We're human, we're lazy by nature....saying 2 names at once just takes up to much time man!! And I have short names, Greek names can be super long. Imagine having to say Anastasia Clytaemnestra every time you wanted to get her attention! Forget it! So I couldn't really blame Antonis for being against our baby having a middle name when that's how it's done around here. 

I explained to him that where I come from, pretty much everyone has a middle name. In fact, some people have a couple middle names. But we don't use them. Other than on official documents, and when you're REALLY in trouble....no one ever says your middle name. So Antonis of course says, "Well than, what's the point of having a middle name?" and I said "because if I heard either of my parents say TARA ANNE I knew to start running because I've done something really bad and I'm about to get into massive trouble for it"....he didn't get it. I guess it's one of those things that just doesn't make sense unless you've lived it. 

He did have a point though. Why do we even have middle names? I guess it's helpful if someone has the same first and last name as you, then you can use your middle names so you don't get your mail mixed up? I don't know. But how often do we know people who have the same first and last names as us? Not very often. I have 13 friends on facebook named Tara McClure but that's because I wanted to know how many Tara McClure's were on facebook and then some of us became facebook friends. But I don't actually know any of them. They're not my real friends. In real life, in a world where facebook doesn't exist, I would probably go my whole life without ever meeting another Tara McClure. In Greece people have the same names all the time because of the tradition of naming your baby after your parents. For example if you're a man and you have a baby, and then your brother has a baby, those 2 babies will be cousins and they'll both have the same first and last name. So it's very common for people to have the same names in Greece and you're probably going to know them because they're part of your family. And mail definitely gets mixed up here because of that. So why isn't it more important for Greeks to choose middle names for their children, than it is for Canadians or other countries that don't use this naming tradition? I don't know. But they should.

Anyway, after weeks of explaining to him that this is important to me, that he can pretend as if she doesn't even have a middle name because it's not like we'd use it often blah blah blah, he finally agreed. It wasn't easy because I had already made a big deal about breaking the name tradition to name the baby after my mom instead of his. So by throwing in the extra name I wasn't just rocking the boat anymore. I was getting pretty damn close to sinking it. 

Once Antonis agreed to giving her a middle name, I waited a few more days to talk to him about what name we should give her. I already had a list but I knew I should probably take my time with this. Too much too fast and he might change his mind. So after 3 or 4 days I asked him if he'd like to see my ideas for a middle name. He said ok....not very enthusiastically but that's to be expected. So I gave him my list:

Piper

Caprice

Olivia

Keira

Kevlyn

Noel

Paige

Peyton

Phoebe

Raina

Reese

Sophia

Taylor

Caprice and Reese had to be taken off right away because they rhyme with Mallis. She's a girl so her name will be Malli, but still...the family name is Mallis so I can't give her a name that rhymes with that. That's just mean. So then we were down to 11 names.

I told him if he had any ideas to write those down as well. Or if there were any he really absolutely didn't like to take them off. Or if there were any that he really absolutely liked than tell me.

Originally I had decided on Piper. But earlier that day I was kind of bored of it. Plus it's really hard for the Greek accent to make the 'r' sound the way we do so everyone here would have a hard time saying Piper...it would be more like Pipa (and not Pippa like Kate Middleton's sister, which I actually think is a very cute name but not for an adult). I was watching tv that afternoon when the word 'wisdom' was said. A lot of Greek TV is in English with Greek subtitles so I'm constantly listening to the English and reading along with the Greek so I can learn more words. So 'wisdom' was said in English and I read 'sofia' in Greek. I didn't know Sophia was a Greek name and I didn't know that it meant wisdom. I instantly fell in love with it.

I didn't tell Antonis what names on my list were my favourite because I didn't want to influence him in any way. I wanted his honest opinion. 

He said his favourites were Olivia and Sophia.

YAY!!! He likes Sophia!!! But calm down Tara. What if he likes Olivia better. That's ok, Olivia's nice too. Ok, be cool. Ask him which one he likes better.

So asked him which of the two he likes the most.

Sophia.

YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!! ME TOO!!!! Can we name her that??????

Now he was smiling. This was the first time I'd seen him smile throughout the entire process of talking about baby names. The topic had only ever created stress but in that moment we were both happy so, it was decided.

Eleni Sophia Malli

That's her name!

It's still a Greek name, which I didn't want to do originally, but it's such a common name in English as well that I decided it didn't matter. And besides, when I put it on my list I didn't even know it was Greek. 

I'm still trying to decide on how to spell it though, with an 'f' or with a 'ph'. The Greeks will all spell it with an 'f' because that's how it is in Greek and because most don't know that 'ph' makes an 'f' sound in English. But in English it's more commonly spelled with a 'ph'. I'm not a big fan of messing with the spelling of a name because then for your whole life you're telling people how to spell it right, which would be totally annoying. But no matter which spelling I pick she'll still be telling people from one of the countries she's from that they're spelling her name wrong!

I'm leaning toward 'ph' though because then I'm still sort of keeping with my English name rule. Also I told Antonis that when she's baptized we can just baptize her Eleni, and when we sign her up for school here it can just be Eleni and we'll leave out her middle name so that she isn't constantly being called Eleni Sofia by everyone. But her birth certificates and passports will say both names. That way it's like the Canadian way of having a middle name; it's there but most of the time you don't even notice it. Except for official documents.....or when she's to be grounded with no TV for a week.