The meaning of Leland

It took us a long time to decide on the name "Leland".  I will explain briefly the long thinking process here.

During the early preganacy, Mavis had the hunch the baby was definitely a girl and started calling him 貝貝 or 陳貝貝。For the longest time, 貝貝was his name.  We had some early name discussions, and we decided not to give the baby a common name. Later on we saw the movie "Fireproof".  As a movie geek, i always looked at the cast list and found out that the leading actress' name was Erin Bethea.  I thought Bethea was a pretty good girl name and suggested it to Mavis. She liked it a lot too, so we decide that Bethea would be the baby's name. 

Surprisingly, during  the20 week ultrasound, we saw the little thing and realized that we had to start over with this naming process. We were a little disappointed in the way that we thought we were done with the process.   Somehow finding a good boy name was a lot harder.  We still refered to him as 貝貝 most of time even though we knew it was a boy.  We spent a lot of time researching but couldn't find a name that worked.  One day Mavis found the name "Benaiah".  It's not a common name and is also hard to pronouce correctly. However, it became our number choice because the name has a good meaning: "The one who God builds". It also started with the letter B, which connects with  貝貝 and Bethea.  We didn't like most of the other "B" names, and we just couldn't feel any connection with any other names in general. However, we weren't completley sure, so we continued to brainstorm.  Another thing that we decided early on was to give Daniel's dad the honor to name the baby's Chinese name. . We shared our thoughts with him over the phone, and the process dragged on.

During Thanksgiving, Daniel's dad came to visit. We had the chance to talk to him and found out that he had chosenthe name 力仁。 We liked the name right away.  He got the inspiration from the name Benaiah because Benaiah was a mighty warrior and a great general for King David in the bible.  Mavis had the idea that maybe we just used that as his English name as well. Daniel also agreed but he got creative and thought of the name "Leland", which sounds excactly like 力仁.  Mavis also likes the name, so the first name was quickly settled within a couple days.  We were pretty happy and also decided that Benaiah had to be the middle name since that's how the first name came from.

As you can see, naming baby can be challening, but we were glad that we were able to find a name that is not too hard to pronouce but also not too common.  I guess if the baby is a girl, this would have been too easy :)