What's in a name?

Sorry about the lack of pictures. We're still unpacking and I can't find the cord that connects the camera to the computer. Sigh.

So in the meantime, here are some fun facts about Isaac and Tomie.

I had totally meant at one point or another to talk a bit about the origins of Tomie's name, but the clamor was for MORE PICTURES, MORE PICTURES, so the story fell by the wayside. But since we are unable to provide pix, I figure now is a good time to bring in this story.

Tomie Tsuru Asato Ishimatsu
Tomie was named for her maternal great grandmother (Jolynn's mom's mom, Tomie Kumata). But we also took some liberty in the Japanese spelling of her name. More often than not, the kanji that is used to spell Tomie means "child of fortune." And that's fortune in the "material" sense of the word. Since Josh is in non-profit and I'm an aspiring academic without a full time job, this is a pretty cruel and ironic name for our daughter, no? So instead with the help of some Japanese friends, we set out on a course for an alternate spelling... 登美恵. Separately, the characters mean to- to ascend, mi- beautiful, e- blessings. Piece by piece, it's kinda nice, if I do say so myself, but how does that translate, really? Everytime people ask, I have to pause a bit because it doesn't quite flow off the tongue, you know, like oh yes, it means "rainbow", or "flower" or something easy like that. Hmm..so put together, what does it mean? The closest I come to is to say "the struggle towards beautiful blessings". Does that work? How should we "translate" this name? I am beseeching our more poetic readers of the blog for a more graceful translation. Help!

The Tsuru part on the other hand is nice and neat...she's named for her paternal great great grandmother (Josh's mom's grandma's name) and kinda for Josh's mom who's name is Tsuruko. And it means, simply "crane". :)

Asato, Ishimatsu, I hope needs no explanation.

On to #2 Issac Kazuo Asato Ishimatsu
For the story behind this one, we need to take a more Gestalt approach. We wanted to name #2 after Josh's paternal grandfather. Grandpa's name was Kozo Ishimatsu, but he was known by the community as Ishikozo-- IK for short. Although we wanted to have another Japanese name for him, there just wasn't a good Japanese name that started with an I. So, we thought we would name him Ike. But the thing is, it's just not an elegant name, it's much more of a nickname, no? Isaac shortens into Ike, so we went with it.

The Kazuo provides the K in this equation. 和男 The first kanji Kazu=peace, O=man. Much more straight forward. And in these times, I think that it reflects our hopes for his future.


And there it is....pictures coming as soon as I recover enough to start tackling the mountains of boxes in my living room.