Welcome Adele Marie Hille

Sarah: Well it's time to announce the birth of our new daughter, Adele Marie. Two and a half weeks ago on Friday, David and I went into San Jose with our bags packed. We knew it was 2 weeks early, but we wanted to be prepared in case the doctor said we needed to stay close to the hospital....which ended up being the case. After a minor freak out by both of us, David and I walked around in a daze the rest of the day, as the reality of the situation was hitting us hard. We stayed with our friends Trevor and Laura over the weekend, and had another routine doctor's appointment the following Monday.

As we were waiting for the doctor, I began going into labor. As one of our fears was the fact that we live 2 hours away from the hospital, we were extremely thankful that we happened to actually be IN the hospital when labor happened! The doctor checked me out, and then sent us down to admissions to check into the hospital. After that everything went (relatively) quickly. My contractions got closer together and much harder, and it was only a matter of hours by the time we settled into the maternity ward to the time little Adele made her appearance.

Now granted...I'm NOT going to say it was easy. :) But, everything went so smoothly that we couldn't have asked for a better delivery (I guess I could have asked that it wouldn't have hurt so badly!). David did an excellent job keeping me calm and sane, and the other doctors and nurses in the room did a great job of yelling encouraging words and directions in Spanish. It was a pretty surreal experience. Adele Marie was born at 7:27 on November 16th, and weighed in at 7 lbs., 18.5 inches long.

The following day my mom (who just couldn't wait) jumped on a plane and came to visit for a week. It was her first time visiting Costa Rica and we were happy to show her our lives and our home, and were extremely thankful for an extra set of hands and her knowledge as a mother as we were trying to figure things out during our first week as parents. It was great to have her here and introduce her to our friends and support system in San Jose and in our community.

We also had a number of visitors in and out of the hospital to welcome Adele to the world. It was great to feel the support of friends during such a special time. We were especially grateful to Trevor and Laura, who let us invade their house as we were waiting for Adele to join us, and also let us crash at their place right after she was born. When we brought her back to our community of San Gerardo de Dota, we were also welcomed by our neighbors around us. It now is quite common for someone to stop by and see Adele, and fight over holding her. Last weekend lots of the women threw us a surprise "tea" as well - which is what they call a baby shower in Spanish. It was really sweet - lots of balloons and streamers, and really good food. We also got more presents - mostly blankets, since Costa Ricans seem to think babies are ALWAYS cold and need to be bundled up in warm blankets all the time.

Now David and I are settling back into some sort of a routine as we're still figuring out what our lives are going to look like with a newborn here at QERC. It's been a fun change though (besides the fact that Adele is sort of confused when it's night and when it's day), and we both really enjoy spending lots of time just simply staring at her. She's super cute trying out all her new facial expressions and her vocal chords with her grunts and squeals.