In our quest to find the meaning of Chia-Wen…

From Heartsent (our adoption agency)

I heard back from the translator that Chia-Wen translates to “beautiful disposition”.

From a friend who is travelling to Taiwan soon

“Chia-Wen” is pronounced “jia wen” – two syllables, not three. I noticed that St Lucy spells their babies’ names using the Wade-Giles method of romanization, but the modern way is to use the Hanyu Pinyin method. In Pinyin, “Chia-Wen” would be “Jia-Wen” which is closer to the actual pronunciation.

At St. Lucy, they probably call Ava “Wen-Wen” or “Xiao-Wen” or “A-Wen”. “Xiao” means “little”. “A” doesn’t mean anything but it’s a term of endearment. Chinese/Taiwanese people, when talking to their children, usually double the second character of the name or replace the first character with “xiao” or “ah”. I guess it just depends on what sounds better with the name.

We are allowed to send a few items to our baby. The only requirement is that the contents fit in a 1 gallon ziplock bag. This is the list of items we mailed to our agency which Heartsent will mail to the nursery in Taiwan

• 2 tubes of Desitin – Diaper rash cream
• 3 pairs of Socks
• 1 Bib
• 3 Caps
• 3 Onezee’s
• 1 Teether

Our baby is 3 months old now. We received a few more photographs of her from our agency.

• Height: 55.5 cm (21.8 in)
• Weight: 4.7 kg (10.4 lbs)
• Head circumference: 38 cm (15 in)

Our little girl was born in Taiwan on September 2006. As per the medical report, she is healthy in every sense. She weighed in at 2600 grams (5.73 lbs) at birth. On Nov 30th, at a little over 2 months, she weighed in at 9 lbs. Her birth name is Chia-Wen but we are thinking of calling her Ava. The name Ava is derived from Eva which is short for Evangeline which means ‘bearer of good news’.

We are probably getting carried away by calling her our little baby since anything can go wrong until the adoption is finalized. We have 2 choices: wait until we get custody of her and celebrate then or celebrate right now. We are going to celebrate right now! Wish us the best of luck. We still have about 6 more nervous months to deal with before the adoption is finalized.

Here is the first photograph of our little cutie: