Changing names?

It's no secret that having a kid of your own is beyond exciting with all the things you get to decide. Names are probably my favorite things in the world. Literally. I have helped name almost all of my nieces and nephews and had names picked out for kids of my own. When you foster to adopt however, nine times out of 10 you don't get to pick the name. Our four came with names, they knew them, they answered to them-we got no say in them! However, they didn't have middle names-yayy!!! I got my chance to pick names for them! Even if it's a name they don't necessarily go by it's the name that I often use on social media due to not being allowed to use their real names. With that being said, their middle names put a lot of pressure on me, they needed to be perfect. In our family typically, with a few exceptions, the middle name is a family name. That means middle names are normally shared, if you know our family you've probably noticed "Lucas" is the most common middle name for our boys and "Joy" is the most common for the girls. No this isn't a coincidence, it's just a family tradition. A tradition so strong it shocked people when I told them my son's middle name was "Glenn" not "Lucas". Despite the fact "Lucas" is the family name and my "uncle" Luke was one of my favorite people I wanted to pay tribute to my dad whose name is Glenn. That was a no brainer and we felt so accomplished with naming one kid. Then we realized we needed to name three girls. Yea. Three. I couldn't even think of three girl names let alone really good middle names! Our oldest was kind of easy though, once we got going through the family tree, we decided on Colleen after my mom. The younger two were harder, you'd have to know their names to understand the struggle, but trust me it was hard! In all honesty we actually haven't decided on middle names for them. It's tough picking a name that your child is stuck with for the rest of their lives and I now understand why my sisters stress out so much when they're picking out names. I don't want to take away their identity, but at the same time I want them to know they're part of this family and giving them a family middle name will  do just that. I feel like picking a new name for an adopted child is just as hard if not harder than if we were pregnant and had nine months to do this, I mean really we were told the papers would be signed about two months before signing them! It's tough! If you ever decided to foster to adopt, if they're older kids, don't be afraid to ask their opinion, I mean after all it is their name. Wish us luck as we pick out two really adorable girl names for our youngest two!