What's in a name?

Yi, Er, San, Si...
This is 1, 2, 3, 4 in Chinese. Of course we didn't know this when we named Ian and Eric. "Yi" is pronounced "EE", the "Y" is silent (like Ian) (I thought you were sick of medical lessons, so I have moved on to Chinese. :) ) Then we have Eric. So, when we found out I was prego with number 3 the day before we left for China, I had this great idea to have a San... name. This was harder than is sounded, so, to mix metaphors or at least languages, we went with Sam... which is 3 in Korean, where the baby was conceived, and thus Samuel was the name we chose. However, we also have this thing for vowels (even our cat we left in Michigan is Abi) and Shane doesn't like names that can be shortened (like Samuel to Sam), we decided Samuel will be the middle name. Samuel also happens to be the name of my dad's maternal grandfather who came to the U.S. from Norway. We looked up the name Samuel and one of the meanings is "hears from God", now this may be why he has such giant ears, or it may be that he got those from his Jichan (my grandpa) - genetics are a funny thing. So, then we had to find a vowel name and we started looking in the A's since we had an I and an E. Aaron means "messenger of God" - like Moses' brother, which, I guess it is good to be someone who also listens, and so Aaron Samuel was named.
Now we have Samuel (we didn't name him remember), and before you feel bad for him not being part of the order, in Korean, Sa is 4. (who turned 4 months old yesterday when he came home from the hospital, but we will get to that on another post).

So, onto other little tidbits about names...
Eric kept coming home and telling us his Chinese name was "Eric Drum" (that is what we all heard). I finally asked his teacher why he says that. She said he is so strong (which he IS unnaturally strong for a 4 year old) that they call him "Eric the Strong" in Chinese, which is "Eric Zhuang".
Ok, stay with me for a bit...
When we were in Korea, we had a Chinese girl stay with us. She is now like family (and the closest thing to a daughter we may ever have). She decided long before she knew us, to change her name to ZiJie (her first name). In Korea, everyone just called her "Jie" (pronounced like G.A.) - this will all tie together, just give me a minute...
So the boys absolutely adore her. She is such a lovely person inside and out. She is from one of the minority groups from southern China called Zhuang. Also, the word for big sister in Chinese is Jiejie.
So, in Eric's Chinglish (combination of Chinese and English) he would say, "Jie is my jiejie!" (or "Jie si wo de jiejie" as his Chinese got better). So he was not surprised when I told him that Jie's people are called Zhuang. He only responeded, "Jie si wo de jiejie. Women si zhuang" (Jie is my big sister, so we are both Zhuang people - or we are both strong). And then walked away, as if to say, "duh, mom, how long did it take you to figure that one out?"