Adiella's 1st Christmas

We're still celebrating! Adie's aunt and uncle, Tamra and Luke flew in from Germany last night so we will celebrate this weekend with them. The day before Christmas eve we celebrated with just the three of us and then on Christmas eve we headed to Grandma and Grandpa Radatz's. Christmas day was spent at Great-Grandpa Radatz's and the Saturday after we spent with Grandma Holland's side of the family. Adiella got to meet her twin cousins and they all enjoyed playing under the floor gym together :). We're so thankful for all our family and the love they give to Adiella. She is one very loved baby!
Jacob's sister spent Christmas in Canada with her bf so we will celebrate with them in a couple of weeks down in Tulsa. Adiella hasn't made the trip to Tulsa yet so she is looking foward to meeting all of the Tulsa friends that she has heard so much about.

Life with Adiella

We're slowly settling into life with Adiella...and wishing and hoping for the night she will sleep! She loves to sleep, during the day anyway :). In fact, during the day she can sleep through anything, including all the strategies we've tried to keep her awake. At 3 am however, she's ready to party, wide awake and as happy as could be...as long as you don't try to convince her to go back to sleep.

We are settling into life with a baby. Today has been our first day without any help...it's been just the three of us. Adiella has been a very easy going baby and likes to sleep so so far the transition has gone very smoothly. We still look at her and say to each other, "we have a baby", it still seems very surreal...except for at 3 a.m. :)
We took Adie to the Dr. on Thursday and she was already back up to her birth weight, which means she has been gaining over and ounce a day! The Dr. said that if she chooses to sleep through the night we can let her since she has made such good gains with her weight. She's been waking up about every three hours but last night she slept from 9:30pm to 3:30 am!! What a blessing! I just hope she keeps that up.
Yesterday her daddy got to dress her....see the picture for the result of this... :)

Adiella has finally arrived!!!

We headed to the hospital in the morning of October 7 to be induced. I was already having some contractions on my own and the pitocin went right to work. The nurse said all the other nurses were jealous at how well the contractions were tracking...Thanks for all your prayers!!!
At 7pm the nurses reported it was time to push. We were thrilled after waiting all this time and were excited to be only moments away from having Adiella in our arms and out of my belly! :) We were thrilled that moments turned out to be only 20 minutes. Thanks again for all your prayers. Everything went smoothly and we now have our daughter in our arms. She weighed in at 9lbs. 4 oz. and measured 21 inches long. She passed all the tests and is as healthy as can be! PRAISE THE LORD!
We came home from the hospital last night and are settling into life at home. Adiella loves to sleep, even more than she likes to eat so this is our biggest battle right now...waking her up enough to eat. She's catching on and hasn't lost her chubby cheeks so we're confident she will continue to do well.

Yes, we are still waiting...

Our little gal is just taking her sweet time. We're scheduled to go in tomorrow (Tuesday) morning to be induced. We are still hopeful that she will come on her own sometime today...

8 more days...

Eight more days and counting!! We're hoping for sooner rather than later. All the wedding travels and parties are past so were ready to go anytime. I'm not sure who is more anxious between Jacob and I. We've both done our fair share of 'nesting' although Jacob refuses that I call his preparation behavior 'nesting', so whatever you may call it we're both cleaning, fixing, etc. Hopefully the next post will include pictures of baby! :)

We are just 4 weeks away from the due date of our baby girl. The last 8 months have gone really fast, although I must say it's beginning to slow down some as my belly grows bigger! The bags are packed, as of yesterday, the car seat is bought and the nursery is ready...so now we just wait on baby. I resigned from my teaching job at the end of last year so that I could stay at home with our new little bundle of joy. Jacob continues to work at his job at Children International and has been able to grow in his ability to speak Spanish. I just finished my first trimester of Spanish class and hope to continue to add to my ability as well. We hope to someday, sooner rather than later, to spend enough time in a Spanish speaking country to both advance our language abilities.

Jacob and I have now been living in the house we bought for a little over a year. We moved here with the desire to build relationships with the people in the english classes that we were helping to teach. The area we live has many Spanish speakers and the culture of our surroundings is very Hispanic. The first 6 months or so we felt like we were in a spiritual dessert. We had been unable to find a church to call home and were pretty discouraged. However, in the last couple of months we've been connected with three families who have a similar vision for reaching out to the Hispanic immigrants in our area and sharing the love of Jesus. In just the last month we have been very encouraged by these relationships and are so excited about the plans that God has for us here. We continue to love the people, our neighborhood more and more each day we are here. It truly has become a place we can call home!