Carmon's Name

Yue Mei Hua: Carmon's Chinese name is made up of three English words. The first word/name is her last name. Yue is the old way of calling the county she was abandoned in (Yugan). It is very common for all children in one orphanage to share the same surname. Yue can be translated "to exceed" or "to overcome". Mei Hua (pronounced: May Hwah), though it is comprised of 2 Chinese characters and translated as 2 English names, is actually, as a unit, her first name. Mei means "beautiful" and Hua means "intelligent", "talent", or "splendid". When I received the referral call from Jackie Harrah, I immediately (and totally lacking Tom's input, to be completely honest) decided to name our daughter Carmon Mei. We had actually already chosen to name her Carmon after my sweet sister who is also my best friend. We were thinking we would keep some part of her Chinese name but weren't sure what that would be. While I was exercising several days ago, I was again thinking about her middle name and was contemplating Mae. Our older daughter is named Madeleine after my paternal grandmother and that grandmother's middle name was Mae. In addition, our two biggest kids have referred to Carmon as Mei Mei a little because that means "little sister" in Chinese. So it seemed fitting when we found out her given name included Mei to choose that. However, after talking to a Chinese man at Tom's office, we decided to make her English middle name be her full first name: Mei Hua. He explained it in such a way that the two names comprise the one name; there's no middle name in a Chinese name even though there are multiple names that make up the first name, and he let us know that it just doesn't really make sense to take only one word of the name.