on the couch
on the couch with Poppy
in the Moby wrap with mom
So here's the story behind his name:
We decided that he would have an "American" first name, and a Chinese middle name. (When he travels in China or Taiwan, he'll use Jayde's maiden name, Lin.)
The first name was the hardest to decide - we wanted to use a family name, but didn't find any that we both really liked. So we moved on to look at names from some of the multitude of baby name sites on the web, and we came across a site of Welsh names. My family is, at least partly, from Wales, so that seemed like a good list to consider. After rejecting Caddock, Gwalchmai, Rhydderch, and Ynyr, we found Owen, which has at least 2 origins. Owen is the British spelling of the Welsh variant (or is it the other way around?) of Eugene (meaning: "well-born"), my paternal grandfather's name. It also means "born of yew," which didn't mean much to us until we looked at what the yew tree represents - it's an evergreen, and can put down new shoots from branches and thus live a very long time (2000 years). It was a symbol of longevity and rebirth.
Ok...now on to the Chinese middle name. Most of this stuff I don't really understand, so this is my best guess so far.
Geng is a very old character that's one of the fundamental parts of Chinese cosmology, the seventh of ten heavenly branches. In Classical Chinese it is part of the name for Venus when it is in the west (the Evening Star). It's used as a counting word for the seventh part of something – like time. For instance, this lunar year is a Geng Yin year (the 27th year of the 60-year cycle) That's about all I know. We chose it because it creates a good balance with the rest of Owen's Chinese name, and is a character that Jayde and her parents all like. It's written 庚.
The Ming part is a generational name (that Jayde and I kind of made up) that's the second character of Jayde's brother's children, too. It's an old Chinese tradition to have a character that is shared for all the children of a particular generation within a family - Jayde's family doesn't really do this, but we wanted to. That character, 明 (which is made from the characters for sun and moon put together) means, most simply, 'bright'. Owen shares this character with his cousins, Tao and Ora (Jayde's brother Peter's children.)
Jayde's family name in Chinese is Lin 林, which is made up of two trees. It means forest. So altogether, Owen's Chinese name is 林庚明, Lin Geng-Ming.
