I’m a dad!

Yesterday at 4:41pm little Isabella was born weighing 7.3 lbs. She was 52cm long (sorry you’ll have to use google to figure out what that is inches) and perfect. She scored a 9 and then a 10 on the apgar scale and doesn’t look like ET (which was my secret fear). I can’t believe how beautiful she is. She has thick dark hair and beautiful inquisitive blue eyes. All her thousand and one parts are perfect. Today they’ll give her a bath/clean up of some sort – she just got toweled off yesterday and so has these very punky dreadlock things happening, which still look very cute.

From Isabella's De...

Jessie was a champ and endured her labor with aplomb, especially considering that it was in a foreign country where most of the staff spoke only Spanish, and that most of the what happened was different than what she had wanted. She is doing fine today, tired and in pain but delighted with our new daughter and taking comfort that for the first time in 9 months, every day will be a bit better than the last. Please continue to pray for her, especially for a quick and full recovery with no long-term issues.

Sitting here typing on my laptop in the darkened hospital room with my sleeping wife and baby to my left, it’s still hard to believe that I’m really a father. Maybe when we get home from the hospital and I realize that little Isabella is here to stay, and that I can’t leave her in the car or the backyard like Ransom when I’m running errands then it will feel more real.

It’s funny as I’m writing this, Isabella keeps stretching or softly twitching in her sleep and I get these glimpses of her little hands (which are in little pink socks since we forgot her mits at home) waving above the top of her little sleeping basin/bucket thing. It makes it look like a four-legged critter swaddled in pink is in there.

Please check out our picture link to the right of the page for some of Isabella’s glamor shots (don’t worry, our selections have been edited for public viewing). And stay tuned for more updates on the most recent Colombian addition to the Chynoweth family.

(in case you were wondering, I wrote this earlier but couldn't upload it till we got home)