The Name Game

After about two weeks home, we finally settled on names for the children. We were beginning to think we'd just call them Yana and Ruslan forever. Even though we really like those names, we weren't sure how they would feel about them once they're in school. Would they feel different because they have Russian names? Would they feel like they were not part of an American family and in an American school? Yet, we wanted to be able to keep some of their heritage and help them through the transition.

We'd always said we liked Alexander and Anna since they were both strong Russian names as well as American/English names; and we'd always thought we'd have those as their first names and keep their given Russian names as their middle names.

It was pretty easy for the boy: Alexander Ruslan LeFort. For a while we're calling him Alexander Ruslan so he'll associate the two names as his before we eventually drop Ruslan and just start calling him Alexander. We also knew we'd have to be happy with people shortening his name as people tend to do. In this case, Alex is just fine. No Als, please.

For the girl, not so easy, as we didn't want to name her Anna Yana LeFort. We figured that wouldn't be a very nice thing to do to her. After much back and forth and reaching for other names that just didn't feel right, we decided to stick with our original plan of Anna for the first name. Because it sounds so much like Yana, we knew the transition would be easy for her. (And it has been.) We decided on Alexandra as her middle name as her given middle name was already a form of that.

So, welcome to America, Alexander Ruslan LeFort and Anna Alexandra LeFort.