In pre-internet days, snail mail was the way to get information. If that information came from abroad, it was bound to be a month or so delayed as it came via the ocean 🚢🚢🚢..
So, consider this your postcard from across the pond 📮📨📬
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Hello World! |
Caydia A'merari was born as the sun came up on April 20th on the DOOR Campus where we are living. She's the first child born on campus and our second child to be born at a Deaf ministry location (Kaspien was born on Deaf Missions campus where we were living at that time - this is turning into a pattern🙊).
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| And since she's the fourth child, she gets more pictures since her birth announcement has been so delayed 🙈 |
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| Mariah coloring with the kids |
Due to Kenyan cultural norms, mom and baby don't do much socialization for the first 2 months - until the child gets their first immunization, I'm told. The concept of meal trains aren't something that happens here either. We've been wonderfully blessed to have our friend, previous housemate and kids "Aunt" Mariah come to Kenya and help out as we adjust to being a family of 6! She arrived at the end of March and heads back to the states the first of June. We are grateful for her help!
As always, our kids names are from our pregnancy journey and what Azael and I are learning in this season.
Caydia is a name I had on the "girl list" when I was pregnant with Kaspien. At that time I wasn't sure if we would spell it Kaydia or Caydia.. but it came from Kay meaning joy or rejoice, dia is spanish for day.
Loosely, Caydia meant to me, the phrase from Psalms 30:5 - joy comes in the morning.
I mentioned in my recent update that Azael and I took some parenting classes for foster and adoption preparation in the winter/spring of 2021. While we did not move forward with our plans of adoption at that time, the classes were beneficial to see some unhealthy patterns in our parenting. Blending cultural values and norms is not an easy task. Resources in ASL are tremendously lacking, and as a cross-cultural family it has been an arduous journey to figuring out a peace-filled way forward. As we are entering our 8th year of marriage and being parents, I feel as though we are coming out of the "dark night" of the parenting trenches and into the "day of rejoicing".
Paralleling our parenting journey, Abba has been leading me to numerous familiar passages to look deeper at them in the Hebrew and Greek contexts. As a result of this, one of the passages I was pondering/investigating/leaning into was
Ephesians 4:31. Getting "rid of bitterness" stuck out to me as that's something that continues to find its way into my thoughts and plans. The greek work used for bitterness is pikria, which I found unappealing as a name, but I knew from earlier study that the name Merari came from the Hebrew word marar meaning 'to be bitter'. Merari in the old testament is a boys name, but I read a book back in 2020 that had a female character named Merari. I liked the thought of it, but didn't want to name a child 'bitter'.
At that time, I came to find out that in Greek adding "A" to the beginning of a word transforms it into it's opposite. When we were living in missionary housing back in the fall of 2021, a neighbor girl was named Lolyla. When I asked the origins of her name, the mom explained that she liked the name Lyla, but that it meant darkness or night in hebrew and that her husband didn't want to name her that.. However "lo" meant the opposite, or "no darkness", so they came up with Lolyla.. Then it clicked!
adding "A" to "Merari" brings us to A'merari to mean getting rid of bitterness..
Welcome to the world, Caydia! We look forward to seeing who you become.
Soli Deo Gloria
:D
