What's her name?

Contrary to popular belief, our daughter's name is not "the girl" which is how we have affectionately referred to her for at least the past 18 months. If we had to wait much longer that might have ended up being her given name but her name is now official. We were waiting until we had the translation of the characters of her Chinese name before we made a final decision. How the characters of the name are written in Chinese determines what they mean. Thanks to several connections to Chinese people we had sent the characters of her name pretty much around the world and already had consensus from at least three people. On Thursday, when we received the translation of her growth report we had the final confirmation. Her Chinese name is Ji Wen Zhou. The Ji is her surname (last name). It comes from Ji'an which is her home city. The Zhou which is a middle name means "state", possibly because she is in the Jizhou district social welfare institute. Wen, her first name, means figured clouds or multi-coloured clouds. We have named her Indigo Wen. We first saw the name Indigo in a Parent's magazine in an article on names. As soon as I saw the name I knew that it was perfect - as my friend Tricie says, it has a musical/lyrical sound to it. The fact that the color is in my favorite color hues just meant that I already thought of it very positively. David took a wee bit more convincing so we did look at a multitude of others names and also agreed that we would wait to see what her Chinese name was. Later, David brought to my attention that the word Indigo also had an association to his parents, Skid and Lee. They moved from NY to LA - the east to the west. In NY, their friends and them had been part of a social club they called Club Indigo. When they moved to LA (along with many of their closest friends) they called themselves Indigo West. They had letterhead under this name and had all sorts of fun events such as Academy Awards etc. I really liked this connection of the name to David's parents, especially since his dad died back in 1991. Additionally, I had seen a passage from Isaiah, which essentially says, I'll gather you from the west and bring you children from the east. Our daughter is coming to us in the west from the east so the connection to Indigo West was fitting. Some other little things happened such as learning that the Japanese word ai means love and indigo blue. The last piece of kismet was that the weekend before we received the news of our beloved daughter I was at a B&B with girlfriends in the VA countryside. As an amateur bird watcher I spent a lot of time watching the birds from the porch. I saw a beautiful iridescent blue bird that I had never seen before. On Monday, when we learned that our LID was included in the next batch and that our referral was imminent, I had phoned my mom and while on the phone told her that I had seen this bird on the weekend if she wanted to look it up. It was an Indigo Bunting! I never even knew such a bird existed. She was going to be Indigo Jane but we liked Wen from her Chinese name so much, and liked the meaning of it paired with the Indigo so well, that her name is Indigo Wen. We might incorporate Jane into her Hebrew name, but that will be a tale for another day.