Callie Elia Kilpatrick

I moved all my family's stuff to Illinois. As soon as it was somewhat settled I hopped on a plane to get back to my very pregnant wife. In fact, I was suppose to fly out on a Tuesday, but I left the Saturday before, just in case. When I arrived back in San Jose, I was very happy to see my beautiful wife and my son Owen! It had been about 2 weeks and it was a very happy reunion. The joy that Owen expressed when he saw me gave me that same amount of joy that only The Father can provide and the type of Joy that cannot be explained. To put it simply, it was fantastic! A couple days later I experienced the same type of joy again. I guess it was one of those joyful weekends. We were at Taco Bell one evening eating Taco's (not the inspiration of Joy) and Amy begins going into labor. Wheewwww, I am so glad that I am here with her and not in Illinois. I was kind of bummed though, it wasn't the type of labor where we threw Amy is the car and I had permission to break land speed records and break traffic laws to get to the hospital. It was the type of labor where we went back to the Cooner's house in Gilroy and hung out for a while before casually getting in the car, and casually driving to Santa Clara for the birth of our second child. Once we get to Santa Clara, instead of going inside and waiting for a few hours, we decided to walk around the hospital.... the whole hospital. We killed about 45 minutes of "labor waiting" and most likely sped up the delivery by at least an hour by walking the circumference of the whole hospital. Once we were in, the nurses confirmed that Amy was in fact in labor and gave us our room. Things were going well. Amy's anesthesiologist was really good, the doctor/midwife was good, our nurse the one who does a lot of the work... not so good. It seemed as if she was focused on all the wrong things, when all I thought the focus should be on my wife and new daughter. Anyway, without getting to detailed the delivery, it went really smooth. I'm not gonna say it was easy, or else I would be black-listed for life, but I thought it went a whole lot better then the first delivery Amy had with Owen. After the birth, Amy and I really got to take our time and bond with our new little girl. It wasn't the "floppy baby" experience we had with Owen. Again, this is where that type joy comes into play. We named her Callie Elia Kilpatrick. We decided on Callie as a reminder of our time that we shared in California. We saw Callie as being God's final gift for us during that chapter of our life. She was the icing on the cake, and even though we tried really hard to have Callie in Illinois, it was clear she was meant to be a "Callie"-fornia girl! We gave Callie the middle name Elia, (pronounced A-lee- ah). It is the girl form of the Hebrew name Eli from the story in 1 Samuel in the Bible. The name Eli means "God has answered." Over the past few years (3-4) Amy and I had been in constant prayer and in conversation about the life that God had in store for our family. It was becoming clear, that God was preparing us for something different, even though we had no idea what that was. It was finally in these last 6 months before Callie was born that God was revealing to us what he had been orchestrating all this time. We prayed for clarity, and God's answer was so very clear. So, we gave her the middle name Elia as a constant reminder in our life of how God answered prayer! We gave her the last name Kilpatrick, because it has a nice ring to it. Now six weeks later, she is an amazing little girl. She is beautiful, she is social, and her big brother loves her just as much as momma and I.