This post started out as a sort of vent that required a little history. The history turned out pretty long...so in this post you get the history. In the next post (or sometime soon), you will get the vent portion of the post. Just bear with me, if you can. If you can't, I'll try to post a couple pictures soon that will make coming here a more aesthetic experience :)

Here goes...

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When Iliya was born, he was given the name Илья (which is pronounced Ill-YAH by Russians).

As far as history is concerned, we do not have much of Iliya's and -- I know this may sound cliched -- most of the specifics that we do have are his for him to decide what to do with, when the time comes.

But since his name is his & has been from the beginning (which is pretty obvious, considering the fact that we did not have this particular name in our brain-namebank), I feel like I'm not really giving away sacred information when I say that Iliya's birthmother gave him his name the day he was born.

When we received his referral 15 months later, we read his name and thought it was a beautiful name... though in all our expectations of our future child's name, this particular one hadn't really come up. So we asked ourselves the natural questions: Would we keep it? Change it? Alter it? We didn't know just yet.

We looked at the little database picture and read through his medical report, and we worried a little about some of the things we saw (things that are in almost every Russian medical report, but still have the tendency to give pause to adoptive parents). We had to make a decision about traveling fairly quickly, and, as I imagine is normal, we were cautious.

But then I went back to this name, Илья, and looked it up. When I read the meaning, I felt a peace that helped me know that we should “go for it!” Because the name Илья means “The Lord is my God.”

And that truly spoke to us…because if you’ve followed us and others in the process of adoption, you know that there is huge amount of faith and reliance on God required throughout the whole process.

Now, before we went on our first trip, we knew that – if we were to make plans to adopt this particular child – we needed to know what changes we planned on making to his name, when it came down to signing the petition to adopt. After discussing names at length, we knew that we would want to keep the basic premise of his name, and in further researching the name “Илья”…we learned that there were 2 solid options.

First, we could go with the English version of the name, Elijah. Which I liked. Or, we could keep “Илья” and give the name an English spelling: Ilya, Illya, Iliya, Ilja, or Ilia. We ultimately rejected the idea of changing his name to Elijah, because we did not want to take his name away from him – and even making that technical change was too big for us. So we made the decision to – unless some drastic information came about on trip one – stick to the name “Илья.”

Throughout the years of trying to become pregnant, we never really did come up with “the perfect name” – but we had thought it would be nice to name a boy “William” or something like that. Very common & popular names, but we erred toward family names. I hadn’t been really wild about the fact that our future son would probably be one of 10 Williams in his classroom, but it was what it was.

As it turns out, we were presented with a child’s whose name would give him almost zero chance of being in the same classroom (let alone an entire school, especially here in the South, where the Russian population is not so large) with another child who bears the same name. So really, it was a good deal.

We then had many conversations about his middle name. We knew we wanted to change it to something that gave him some of our family history…but were just not sure what to do. We had toyed with the idea of keeping his given name as his middle name, but for various reasons, it never rolled off the tongue quite right. Then one day, I had an idea that Nathan loved.

See, Nathan’s grandfather – Pawpaw – had passed away in November 2004, a year before Iliya was born. Nathan was close to this special man and up until the time he passed away, Pawpaw kidded us about needing to give him another great-grandson. He didn’t know about our infertility problems, and of all the people in the world, I never felt defensive when it came to him giving us a hard time about “hurrying up” to have children. Once, when Nathan & I had been married for almost 2 years, Pawpaw came over to help Nathan build a dog run for our dog, with chainlink fence he had saved from tearing a fence down at work. When they were finished, I asked him what we could do to repay him, and he said (and if you knew him, I’m sure you can hear him saying this), “awwww…don’t you worry about it. I tell you what, just name your firstborn son after me.”

And remembering that conversation, I mentioned to Nathan that I thought the middle name “Franklin” would be neat. Pawpaw’s middle name was Frank…and my middle name is Lin (my mom is Linda). From that point on, we tried out different names, but never got past knowing that Franklin would be “it.”

So we knew what our son’s name would be, when we brought him home, but the next task was to figure out how, exactly, we would spell “Илья.”

There’s no real right or wrong in spelling/transcribing Russian names… but there are common spellings when names are translated. For instance, the name “Александp” is not commonly spelled “Alexander” by Russians (at least, as far as I have seen). Instead, the name is often spelled Aleksander (there are reasons for this, but I won’t get into them right now, because I don’t want to bog this post down more than I already have).

I say all that to make the point that we had options, when it came to transcribing the name “Илья.” The common spelling is “Ilya” – but for whatever reason (I suspect the reason has to do with our Southern accent/tendencies), that didn’t feel right to either of us. So we added the “i” in his name, and chose to spell his name, “Iliya.”

The Russian pronunciation of his name is “ill-YAH” – but try as we might, it never came out that way. Instead, we kept saying “ILL-yah” – and it actually (if I listen to myself on a tape – I can never hear this, when I actually say it) ends up coming out as “ILL-i-yah.” On trip 2, when we ran into Russians that could speak enough English to ask our child’s name, our reply was usually met with an amused & knowing smile as they said, “Ohhh, you mean ill-YAH.” Even now, I try to say it that way & I can’t. It’s no disrespect for the pronunciation…it’s just the way I talk.

So now you know the story of how we settled on Iliya’s name.

Up next: How other people perceive & (mis)pronounce my son’s name.