Seems pretty cut-and-dried – you're having a baby, so you need to give him a name. Once it was a given that children would get their father's last name, but these days last names might be hyphenated, combined or otherwise shared between family members. Then there's adoption. Maybe your adopted child already has a name when she joins your family. Do you keep it or give her a new name? Suddenly it doesn't seem so easy.

When Alyson LaBarge and her husband adopted their third daughter from China, she had already been named by the Chinese Social Welfare Institutes (SWI). "In my daughter's SWI, the girls who were born at about the same time were all given the same first and last names, with their middle name being unique to them, so they were all named Feng as their last name and Jiang as their first name," says the mom from Anna, Texas. "My daughter was found near a river so her name, when written out, was Feng Jiang Hui meaning beautiful river."

In choosing her name, they wanted her to be proud of her heritage, yet feel part of her new family. "Since she brought nothing else with her from China, we wanted to keep at least a part of her name," LaBarge says. "We also knew that at times, the family names the children are given in the SWIs are somehow very obvious to other Chinese that the child was named in an SWI, and therefore abandoned, something that would be degrading or looked down upon. We wanted to avoid that for our daughter as well."

In the end, they chose the name Paige, since their other daughters had five-letter "P" names. In combining two of her Chinese names into JiangHui for a middle name, she ended up with a name honoring her culture, as well as identifying her as part of the LaBarge family.

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