What’s Man without a Name?

Not much, according to the border control officials, hence I stayed behind with the little man, slightly bummed, when my husband and daughter headed to England and Ireland to celebrate our friends’ wedding.

It was clearly about the time to give our little man a name.

If only we had the paperwork.

After a baby is born in Norway, the news go from the hospital to the government central registry, from where a letter is sent to the newborn’s home, name is chosen, papers are filled and sent back to the registry again. Then a birth certificate is crafted and sent to the baby’s home again, and in our case, the next destination for the increasing pile of forms is the Finnish embassy. From there, the register offices in Finland will receive the information about our baby and the name, and a Finnish ID number is given. And only then, it’s time for the passport. For which we probably have to travel down to Oslo.

As we are only in the first step, we have a while to go yet. But to celebrate the arrival of the form number one, I did already book flights to Ireland in October. So here we come, again, me and a toddler and a newborn, just the three of us, returning to my old home. Could be a great idea to fly alone with two under two-year olds, could be a disaster. We will see.

Besides the hassle of moving paper around, it hasn’t been an easy task to choose a name for a man, even for a little one. I hope this one is the one he will be happy with, mixing bit of tradition and rolling easily of the tongue of the non-Finnish speakers as well, including my husband.

Where as miss Mini had to wait for the announcement of her name for a month or two to go with the Finnish tradition of not telling the name of a newborn until christening or name-giving party, for the little man we already organised a name-giving gathering of friends and family over BBQ on a sunny Saturday.

Here in To Destination Unknown however, let’s just call him the Little Man.