She's Here!

 

Our precious daughter was born at Medi Flower Women's Natural Birthing Center after a natural (drug free) labor and delivery, born in water in a birthing tub.  The birth story will be my next blog post!

Elliana Christine is such a blessing to us.  I wanted to share the meaning of her name.  The name 'Eliana' is Hebrew, meaning "my God has answered me."  We liked it spelled better with 2 l's though (I was afraid some people might accidentally call her Elaina if we spelled it the other way).  I feel like so many of my prayers have been answered by God throughout this pregnancy,  from the perfect timing of the pregnancy (we were able to tell our parents in person that we were pregnant last summer, and just able to still travel home for Christmas, and I am not having to go back to work after my maternity leave until the next school year--August 1!  So I get to basically have 4.5 months with Elliana before we have to leave her in the ELC/daycare at work) to finding a diet that works to keep my colon disease in control which was really important to the health of the pregnancy and baby, to finding an amazing birthing center to give birth at the way we wanted to do it with a fantastic doula to support us, to actually going into labor and giving birth at a perfect time so that Michael could have two weeks at home with us instead of just one (he got 5 days paternity leave the first week and then this week was Spring Break), and numerous other prayers that I haven't mentioned...so the name really resonated with me.  I also came across this song by a Christian group called Watermark called Elliana's Song, and once I listened to it I of course cried and I pretty much knew that would be her name...though I still wanted to wait until she was born to see her and make sure it fit!  Her middle name, Christine, means "follower of Christ" or "Christian," which is definitely our prayer for our daughter to become one day.  Christine is also my middle name, as well as my Grandma Kukta's (she is Estelle Christine), so it is a family name and I was happy for her to carry it on, as I have always loved my middle name.

As we were trying to decide upon names (we decided on the middle name pretty early on, but then it was the task of choosing a first name), I came to discover that the meaning of a name really had an influence on how much I liked it and wanted to use it (as well as popularity--I looked up the popularity of all names we liked and pretty much ruled out anything in the top 100 ;).  I felt like choosing a name with a strong meaning was important, as our daughter would hopefully grow into her name, and would probably at some time want to know it's meaning.  I am always amazed at how people in the Bible were either named for a situation they were born into or they seemed to "become" their names.  When I came across it in a baby name book, I put it on our shortlist and later it became one of our top 6, and then when we scrapped our first top 2 because we didn't like each others' favorite, it became part of our second top 2.  ;) The more I considered it for baby Raindrop, the more I really loved it, and Michael really liked it too.  Becoming parents has been an amazing journey for us so far, and we are thankful to God for answered prayers.

Thanks for sharing in our joy!!  Feel free to listen to Elliana's Song which I have embedded here. :)



More to come soon!!

Getting Closer!

I am not actually 38 weeks until tomorrow, but seriously, who's counting that closely? :)

This was a pretty good week!  Michael and I went to Costco one afternoon to stock up on some stuff and made it out in a record 30 minutes!  We divided and conquered.  For those of you who've ever been to the Costco in Yangjae, Seoul, you know what a feat that is.  It is the most busy, crowded, and most profitable Costco in the world (from what we've been told).  It's insane sometimes just to get into the parking structure.  So anyway, we got a ton of cereal, juice, nuts, laundry detergent, and other things to last us a while.

Wednesday we had a doctor's appt and our doula Lisa met us there this time.  The non-stress test went fine,  I am having irregular uterine contractions (Braxton-Hicks)--though they certainly seem to be pretty regular!  The baby's movement is good, and as Dr. Park says, "this will guarantee your baby's health for one week." haha kind of a weird statement.  We go back again on Tuesday this week and will have another one, and then I am guessing we'll go back for another a week later, etc.  Everything else was looking good.  I took a personal day off of work on Thursday to run some errands in Seoul to pick up stuff to wear in the birthing center, some nursing tank tops, etc. for after the baby is born and my co-worker Natalie, whose baby girl was born 3 weeks ago in a homebirth, decided to join me and she drove her nice SUV.  We actually first went to a meetup of nearly and new moms at a coffee shop that is organized by the company my doula runs, Birthing in Korea (BIK).  It was nice because I got to meet some other ladies and saw the two from our hypnobirthing class and their little babies that were both born in January!  So precious, and good to know that things went well for them--they both delivered at Mediflower, the birthing center we are going to.

Speaking of BIK, if you haven't checked out their website, you need to.  You might notice that I have a couple of short appearances in the video on the main page! :) http://birthinginkorea.com/

And in other news, we had maternity photos taken today!  It was kind of odd for us because we really haven't had any professional photos taken of us since our engagement and wedding photos almost 7 yrs ago!  We met up with the photographer, Heather, in Bundang this afternoon and spent a couple of hours walking around and taking photos.  It was slightly cold but nice nonetheless and we had a really good time with her--she's extremely easy to talk to and she made us feel very comfortable.  She knew a lot of areas with good architecture to have in the background, so we walked around to several places and took lots of photos!  Here is a link to her blog with some of the photos that she edited quickly this evening and has already posted!  We'll hopefully get to see the rest in the next couple of weeks.  We are thinking of also having her come over after little Raindrop is born to take some newborn photos for us as well.


http://heathermeinen.com/raindropmaternity/

And here are two photos just to give a sneak-peek of the sneak-peek! :)

This week at work should be pretty busy for me.  My substitute for my maternity leave is supposed to be starting on Monday so I will be training him and showing him as much as I can to prepare him to take over for me soon.  I've got to get my huge book order done soon so that can be processed in time to make it to the shipping container in May.  I've also got a session to lead at a teachers' conference on Friday, and hopefully that will go smoothly!  Then on Saturday Michael's got a middle school athletics tournament to go to.  Hoping to get everything done before the little babe decides to join us on the outside!

Please keep us in your prayers as we prepare to become parents soon!  We are trusting in God for a safe, smooth, and gentle birth.  Getting excited as each day brings us a little bit closer. :)