Kicking around in Riga!

Your mom started to physically feel your presence inside her around July already, although it is difficult to say exactly when as it feels like something splashing around in water and therefore making it difficult to say if it is really you or not! She could clearly start to feel your little kicks from outside in August, but for somebody else to feel it, takes a lot of time and patience.

Feeling a baby's kick for the first time is a really emotionally moving experience, so we remember exactly the first time Heino could feel it. It was during a city break to Riga, the capital of Latvia over the August Bank Holiday. We try to visit a different city every year and previous ones include Marrakesh, Oslo and Budapest.

Riga will however, always be a special place for us as it is here that we, for the first time, made your acquaintance in a more physical way!

Second scan, 23 August 2010.

This scan is a very important one as they will now check that all your organs are developing properly and therefore your mom is understandably a bit anxious! After the usual wait we are showed to the little room and everything is prepared for us to see you again.

The midwife doing the scan starts to check out all your organs, which are all declared in place and growing properly. To our big relief we could clearly see the four little chambers of your heart, and that they are functioning well. A quick check from the midwife to make sure that we want to know your sex (to which the answer is yes!) and we are told that you are a... GIRL!

It is all over a bit too quickly for our liking! Some of our questions were answered a bit vaguely by the midwife as well, and overall the verdict is that we are not too pleased with the scan. So it is decided that we will try to arrange for another scan to be done when your mom goes to Italy again. Also, we want to make sure that you are really a girl, as it has happened before that the midwives got the sex of the baby wrong, or that the boy bits just develop a little bit later!

Our next trip to Italy is in two weeks time for Alessandra's grand mom's 90th birthday, but this is too quick to try and arrange a scan with Alessandra's uncle Augusto, who is a doctor as well. For the time being we can only trust and hope that everything is indeed fine and growing as it should be!

Your great grand mother Delia's 90th birthday party, 4 September 2010.

Your name.

Choosing a name for a baby is a very difficult task at the best of times. However, when you have to choose a name that can be pronounced easily in Italian, English and Afrikaans, as well as being spelled correctly, it becomes a nightmare!

So, it was a bit of good luck then that your mom, as a young girl herself, used to love the Italian book "Jolanda, daughter of the Black Corsair" by Emilio Salgari. Even then she liked the name a lot and that made it a relatively easy choice for us. Even better luck is that your dad liked it as well, primarily because it is a nice sounding name in most languages, and more importantly because it is not a very common name, especially with the Italian spelling of I-O instead of J or Y! During the year of your birth, the most commonly used girl names were Olivia, Ruby and Chloe, but somehow we just couldn't picture you as any of these!

We really hope that you will like your name as well, especially as it felt so right for us!