We had a baby! Adileen Kate Daggett was born at 18:46 on 21 January 2016. She weighed 3,030grams, or about 6lbs and 11 ounces. She was 50cm long (19.7") and that noggin was 35cm around. Adileen is amazing, Katie is my hero, and we were well taken care of by the team at Clinica Arequipa. I wrote a bit more about the delivery and our first day at home on our Tiny Letter.
Ten days in we're ever more amazed that this little human being living with us is our daughter.
A first step for learning how to survive in another country is grocery shopping: learning food vocabulary, finding what’s available that’s familiar, learning how to use and love what’s unfamiliar. At first, it’s fun to bring home a whole chicken but after a while it’s nice to know that there are other options. Grocery shopping in Arequipa has really evolved in the last decade. For a long time, the open air market was the only option.
One positive aspect of living in a city is the ready availability of public transportation. Katie and I don’t own a car, but that doesn’t stop us from getting where we need to go. Arequipa is full of taxis, and we occasionally ride those if we’re in a rush or if it’s late. Our main means of transportation, however, is the combi.
We had a baby! Adileen Kate Daggett was born at 18:46 on 21 January 2016. She weighed 3,030grams, or about 6lbs and 11 ounces. She was 50cm long (19.7") and that noggin was 35cm around. Adileen is amazing, Katie is my hero, and we were well taken care of by the team at Clinica Arequipa. I wrote a bit more about the delivery and our first day at home on our Tiny Letter.
Ten days in we're ever more amazed that this little human being living with us is our daughter.
I am in a period of waiting. In fact, I feel like I have been for about 9 months…or really 8 months, when we found out we were pregnant with Adileen. But the past week it has become harder to wait. We can’t wait to meet her! And it’s so soon! We are ready (or so we think). We are nervous. We’re excited. But we must wait. The hardest part about this waiting time is that we don’t know exactly when it will end. Yes, we know that it won’t be any longer than two weeks from now, but she could come anytime in the next two weeks. So we continue to make plans with an asterisk beside them warning friends, yes, count us in*
*but if our baby girl comes we might not make it.
For the past 8 months it has been hard for me to plan or to think about our work here past January because I don’t know what life will look like as a family of three. The not knowing it has made me feel frozen—like all I can do right now is wait.
But I want to enjoy the waiting. I want to be thankful for the waiting. I’ve been trying to find joy in the waiting because I don't want to rush it…of course we have to wait so that physically Adileen will grow and be healthy and be ready to join us in the world. But this waiting has been necessary to prepare me to be ready for this next chapter in our lives. And I don’t need to rush that. I don’t want to rush that. Because it is in this waiting time that God has made me slow down and be thankful for today.
Thankful for the peacefulness and quietness and rest.
Thankful for Jeremy and the uninterrupted time we have together.
Thankful for the sleep.
Thankful that today is enough.
Life’s about to change. Our days will look different. Our nights will look different. Our family will look different. But we’re excited. And nervous. And ready. And thankful. But until then I will wait. I will allow God to use these last few days to mold my heart into what it needs to be to be momma to this baby girl He has given us.
A first step for learning how to survive in another country is grocery shopping: learning food vocabulary, finding what’s available that’s familiar, learning how to use and love what’s unfamiliar. At first, it’s fun to bring home a whole chicken but after a while it’s nice to know that there are other options. Grocery shopping in Arequipa has really evolved in the last decade. For a long time, the open air market was the only option.
One positive aspect of living in a city is the ready availability of public transportation. Katie and I don’t own a car, but that doesn’t stop us from getting where we need to go. Arequipa is full of taxis, and we occasionally ride those if we’re in a rush or if it’s late. Our main means of transportation, however, is the combi.
Apart from the typical street sounds blending into our secret garden-style peaceful soundscape, we've discovered some sounds that at first we thought might be unique to our street, and have since learned make up the traditional street life of Arequipa. I was able to record a few of them for your cultural learning and viewing pleasure.
The slow death of the visa is naturally for the best in our ever globalising world. But one minor casualty is that the visa -- as a physical object -- has become something of a dying art. Visas were traditionally meant to serve several purposes. They had to easily communicate necessary information to authorities, such as validity and the terms of stay. They were often designed to prevent easy forgery. And they were occasionally used to convey aspects of a country's national character through visual symbolism and imagery. For all these reasons, the visa, in its brief heyday, was (like the modern airline baggage tag) a little-appreciated masterpiece of modern design.
Katie and I spent May and June of 2014 in Tullahoma, TN, working and worshiping with the Cedar Lane church. We were in extroverted overdrive for two months, trying to get to know as many people as possible in this narrow window of time, before we would move to Little Rock and then to Peru. One of the many things we loved about Cedar Lane was Steven Hovater's preaching. We're diving into some more of it.
Robbie Shackelford, known on Instagram as @RobertEarlShack, has been the director for Harding University in Florence for the last 26 years. He’s also my uncle. For the last year, he’s been using Instagram as he “aggressively seeks beauty in every day.” It’s been fascinatingly fun to follow.
What I am getting to do, studying someone else’s heart language, is a privilege. No, it does not always feel like a privilege as I am struggling through using the past tense correctly, but regardless of how I am feeling on a particular day I am trying to remember that the fact remains that it is a privilege and for this I should be grateful.
