her name before was Cynthia Rose, which is actually a very cute name, something i'm sure any other girl would thank their parents for some day when they're older. certainly not something she'd be teased about for any particular reason.
when we adopted the other two kids, we didn't change their first names. they're at the age where they're too old to change their names and assume they wouldn't notice, but they're also not old enough to understand the concept of being able to change it. so the notion to them just seemed silly, like we'd be playing a game if we started calling them something else. so their first names stayed the same, and we only changed the middle, and last of course.
we'd decided long ago when we were still trying to get pregnant that the kids middle names would all come from family, so naturally, we gave the kids those middle names, joe's is now Todd, and claudia's is now Jean. initially in our fantasy plan, we were going to have 2 boys and a girl. so although we have another boys name, we didn't have another girl name, so even though from the beginning we knew we'd change her name, for the longest time we didn't know to what.
as much as we both think that cynthia is a cute name, and i'm actually partial to names that have 'y's in them, darren and i are both very much against the name 'cindy' which all too often becomes the nick name for cynthias. (and the birth mother does call her cindy, which proves my point) so we knew from the beginning we wouldn't keep it cynthia. even though yes, we could call her "thia" for short, we knew that inevitably she'd be asked "is that short for something?" and when she said "well, cynthia actually" she'd end up being called cynthia at times (and i know this from my own experience, no matter how many times i tell people to call me ash, they end up calling me ashley anyway once they find out that's what it 'actually' is, gah).
i've had some people be kind of hard on me, saying that i shouldn't take that choice from her, "what if she wants to go by cynthia when she grows up?" well what if i wanted to go by celeste? it's not my name because that's not what my mom named me, and ultimately it was HER choice, that's just how it works!
changing the spelling to Theia was mostly my decision, darren would have preferred just thia. i explained to him that i wanted to differentiate it from cynthia and thia as much as possible so it would remove as much of the "is that short for something..." as possible. now she can just tell people it's greek for 'divine one/goddess'. the same greek root word that we get theology from.
anyway. in our quest to figure out a way to give her a family related middle name, we decided on my mom's middle name which is lynn. of course there's a drama story about that and how my mom reacted, first when we weren't going to do it, and then how she acted like she couldn't care less when we did, but whatever, you'd have to know my mom. *sigh*
but much to our relief and joy, as of monday december 15th, she's forever Theia Lynn Croteau, and yes, her initials are TLC ;)
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