Since a couple of you have asked, I’d like to take this opportunity to explain our middle name choice for Ty and clear up any debate on pronuncation. (It’s a hard ‘G,’ btw.)
Let’s start at the beginning (a very good place to start). When we first received Ty’s file, we found his Korean name (Tae Yang) cumbersome to keep saying. Patrick suggested we nickname him TY (for his Korean initials). I really liked the way it sounded and asked if we could use that as his name should we go through with the adoption. Patrick agreed. I should pause here and mention three things:
1. At this point, we were just trying to “get a little more information” and ended up with his complete referral and 2 weeks to decide if he was our future son or not.
2. Patrick and I have a history of not agreeing on names. I mean, we let our almost-2-year-old name our daughter. This is why landing on a name early on was such a big deal.
3. Parents of international children often choose to preserve their child’s birth name by using it as a middle name. Like I could have been Melissa Jin Sook Dunn…maybe even Melissa Jin-Sook Dunn.
Unfortunately agreeing on a first name is only half the battle. We ignored the middle-name-discussion for a long time. I was having trouble just picking an arbitrary name since PJ and Mia both had middle names with significance and meaning, but Patrick and I didn’t agree on any of the male names available from our family trees…and we went back quite a few generations since Patrick was on a geneology kick at the time. Using Tae Yang seemed too redundant and sounded awkward but I liked the idea of preserving Ty’s culture in his name. That left his family name, Gim (pronounced with a hard ‘G’). Really it’s the new “correct” translation of the Korean name often seen as “Kim.” You can read more about it here.
Ty Gim. Doesn’t really roll of the tongue and certainly is not enough syllables for a child in trouble. “Ty Gim” just doesn’t have the same punch when yelled as “Patrick Michael” or “Mia Anne”…it seems to fall short at least a syllable. I know it might sound shallow, but I had ruled it out pretty much based on it’s yelling potential until I was flipping through a baby name book and found out that ‘Gim’ meant ‘precious as a gem’ in old English. Granted the pronounciation may have sounded more like ‘jim’ back then but let’s pretend. Besides the obvious reasons, ‘precious’ caught my eye because that was is my father’s special name for me. Patrick, not having any better options (and being an intelligent husband), went along. So there you have it.
How’s the yelling power of ‘Ty Gim’ you may ask? We’ve resorted to the staccato power of a simple ‘TY, NO!’ It’s kind of become the sound backdrop of our house.