Natalie Carolyn and Sophia Marlena

Did you know that Natalie and Sophia remained nameless for nine whole days? I mentioned in an email to family and friends that we were waiting until we were a little less tired. Some cousins wrote back to say that, in that case, they would remain nameless until they were 18! :-)

For nine days, Natalie was “the bigger one” and Sophia was “the little one”. Those names are still appropriate today, although we don’t use them anymore.

Scott and I had the toughest time coming up with names. For Scott, there were three criteria: it needed to sound good, it needed to have a good meaning (very important for Turks as well), and of course, there had to be no negative people associated with the name.

The first criterion was the toughest for us to agree on. I really like girly-sounding names; Scott doesn’t. For example, I loved the name Elise, but he nixed that one right away. Probably good, since I usually go by Alis, since it is easier for Turks to say.

We narrowed it down to a list of six names (two that Scott had chosen, three that I had chosen, and one that we both liked) and then one night, Scott called an expat friend who was in the US for a few weeks. He has lived in Turkey much longer than we have, and we wanted to know if there was anything to watch out for. For example, we were suspicious of Eva. It sounds a lot like "Eyvah!" which means something like "Oh crap!". He confirmed that Eva was a bad choice. After hearing the list, his daughters were overwhelmingly in favor of Natalie and Sophia, which were high on our list as well.

For a day, we “tried out” the names on “the bigger one” and “the little one” to see how we liked them, and to determine who should be named what.

Natalie is related to the word Nativity / Jesus’ coming to the world. Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom. Carolyn and Marlena are forms of our mothers’ first names, Carol and Marlene. It isn’t very often when you can use both mothers’ names at the same time.

So there you go. Aren’t you glad you asked?