The end of the year came with a fierce charge of wonderful events. On December 30, last year, we were getting married in Bolivia, so we celebrated our first anniversary having a romantic dinner just the two of us for the last time, for Annita decided to come on the last day of the year. What a beautiful gift she is!
Caryn did a great job and courageously went through the whole process. Some mild contractions had started on Saturday morning, but it was not until Monday morning that they became stronger and more frequent. We were admitted in the hospital around 10 AM, when she was 2 cm. dilated, and then she had some arduous hours before she transitioned to the pushing stage, which was relatively short. While she was working hard, the excited soon-to-be father was taking pictures all over the place. Anna Carolina was born at 4:51 PM. She weighed 6 pounds 10 ounces and was 20.5 inches long. Mom and baby are doing great.
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My dad went down to open the door wondering who would deliver packages at 10 pm. The surprise was great when he found out that the packages were alive as he lifted up his arms filled with joy :)
When mom heard the voices she jumped up from bed and run down the stairs together with my sister to welcome us with many hugs and kisses and overflowing ecstasy.
In pure Bolivian style, they organized a celebration for Caryn’s birthday in two days. She blew the candles of a delicious cake reading: “Caryn, may the Lord bless you” while the family sang not one but three birthday songs.
host of heaven worships you, and you know each one of them by name, and by your power they are kept in their place. The sun, the planets, the starts, the meteoroids, the moons, the solar systems, the galaxies, the black holes, and the unfathomable wonders of the universe, are the work of your hands and you designed them in detail; you created them by the word of your power. Not only have you put them in their place, but you also have established the physics and gravitational laws that uphold in equilibrium the immensity of the cosmos with all and each one of its components. Though we are overwhelmed and astonished by the things that we can see and partially understand, there is a myriad of celestial bodies and phenomena that our minds cannot grasp or whose existence is still unknown to us. However, you know the most concealed mysteries of your creation.
I was a kid my dad bought me an aeronautical lab kit. It must have been very expensive, because back then those items were rare in Bolivia, my home country, and they had to be imported from far lands. But my dad liked to express his love by getting these exotic toys to play with me. Although I understood little of the manual, since it was not written in my native language, we spent hour after hour making physics experiments, building airplanes and assembling rockets that we tried in multiple testing bases.
After many years of experimentation and a lot of fun, my potential career as an Aerospace Engineer vanished when our most ambitious project failed miserably. The rocket was supposed to start slowly, gaining speed and altitude gradually. As part of the last stage, when the force of gravity had reduced the rocket’s speed to almost zero, a small detonation had to gently expel its tip, while an unwrapping parachute would finally open, sustaining the rest of the body in a gracious and elegant descent. Well, things do not always go the way we expect. The rocket only ascended up to 6 feet and then a not-so-tiny-explosion roared tearing apart the fragility of our creation as we witnessed with perplexed eyes the debris falling around us as in slow motion.
than Engineering. Being realistic, the opportunities as an Aerospace Engineer in a third world country were practically nonexistent. I can’t imagine the Bolivian government sending into orbit the satellite EVO III (name of the current president). However, my wonder for outer space and manmade artifacts sent beyond the limits of the atmospheric envelope that surrounds our planet kept dormant.
