What's in a name

The Marsh family has officially begun month 2! They keep telling us that once you've gotten through the first two months, things really start to click. The boys continue to adjust well to their new lives. We are still dealing with a few minor health issues and one major one: we think they may have cracked their mother's rib cage!! Since we returned, it has hurt pretty bad, and the boys seem to have some kind of radar in their little elbows that finds her sternum every time they get picked up. Ouch! We hope the doctors provide a miracle cure since Daddy has returned to work full time this week.


Thought it would be fun to share with everyone the story of the boys' names. You see, Daddy is actually the fourth Curtis Marsh. So, how do we incorporate four generations of family history and not make one of the boys feel left out? The plan began to materialize when we looked over all of the wonderful family heirlooms that have been passed to us with the initials, C-N-M. How about giving both boys the initials so they can equally feel a part of the family history?

Once the decision was made to create two CNM boys, we also wanted to give them some kind of lasting connection to their Russian roots. Lots of adoptive families keep their children's Russian first name as their new middle names. We weren't lucky enough to get two boys with Russian names that began with "N," so we decided to search for new Russian "N" names. Well, Nikolai was easy. It is a well-known Russian name, and one we liked very much. But even the Russians we asked couldn't come up with another! We did hear about Nikita, which is used for both men and women in Russian (like Nikita Khrushchev), but really seems to be only for women here in the U.S. We turned to the internet for common Russian names. http://www.doukhobor.org/Russian-Masculine-Names.htm



Imagine our amazement when the original CNM middle name appeared on the list!! The name “Naum” has been in the Marsh family for five generations, and somehow it was lost on us that it had Russian roots. How cool is that? So we had found our two Russian middle names, and even got to use an existing family name for one of them.

Now, it was easier to find two American names that we liked beginning with "C." Carson and Conner were at the top of both our lists. One day, we thought it would be nice to learn what each name meant. Amazement once again! We discovered that the origin of the name Carson is son of carr, and carr in old english is "marsh!" http://www.babynamenetwork.com/

So things really started fitting in to place. We could give one boy the first name that turns out to mean son of Marsh, and the other boy would get the middle name that is a family name with Russian roots. So, that's how we got Carson Nikolai and Conner Naum.