Our daughter's name

Our baby's name is Dessi Alemitu Young.

We wanted her to have an Ethiopian name, but also to have a name that would be easy for Americans to pronounce and spell. We started reading lists of names, we saw 'Dessi' and loved it immediatelyt. It's an unusual but legitimate Ethiopian female name. I don't know that it means anything per se (although "Desta" means joy), but it is the name of a town in northern Ethiopia that Eric has traveled to. (It is sometimes also spelled Dese'.) He said it is a sweet little place, although I think he got a flat tire there.

Her birth mother's name is listed as Alemitu, and so in her honor and because we always want to hold that sacred link for our daughter, she is Dessi Alemitu. I'm sure I will always be a little bit sad about the obvious but somehow mindblowing facts of Dessi coming to us -- that we have her because someone else does not. Eric and I look at Dessi's photographs and are fully in awe. She is this sacred, perfect little thing, and we know that her birth mother saw and loved her as we do. I cannot imagine her heartbreak, and it makes me sad. But more overwhelming is this deep reverence I have for her birth mother, that she has allowed the lot of us to plug into to this break-your-heart-wide-open connection and love that I can see now most obviously must have been in the world since the beginning of time -- this motherhood and fatherhood and the almost awful power, responsibility and truth of it.

And then her last name, of course. Our name. Dessi Alemitu Young.