River Marion Nichols

These last few weeks have been a flurry of excitement, emotion and adjustment! On Wednesday, October, 29, 2014 we welcomed our daughter to the world! Her entrance was not at all like I imagined (the birth story is a whole story in itself!) but she arrived eventually and she was beautiful and healthy and we are thrilled! We loved the journey over these last months of discussing names and meanings and in the end we named her River Marion Nichols. We chose the name River because of our roots and our passion for the beautiful people that live along the banks of the Amazon river. This common thread between Pete and I was one of the first things that drew us together. His grandparents worked with a small group of people in Bolivia and so Pete grew up hearing the stories of these wise, amazing people. I, at the same, knew a couple that also had worked with that exact same group and so we discovered early on the miracle of how we had both grown up hearing the stories of the same tiny group of about 100 people who speak their own language and have their own culture and who live in the Amazon Basin. We both separately went on in our late teens and twenties to visit various parts of that region of the world. My love for the Chayahuita people in Peru and Pete’s passion for the people that he has met along the way are what drives us on in our work here at New Tribes. All that to say the meaning of the name River was loaded as soon as we thought of it and we could think of nothing more perfect. We chose the middle name Marion because of the amazing woman my mother is, and also because it’s a derivative of the name Mary which means “wished for child”. After this journey we’ve been on the past few years, the meaning of that was just so appropriate. River was born weighing 7 lbs and was 21 inches long. She was perfection if I’ve ever seen it.

She is a month old now and today her Grandma and Aunts and Uncles from Michigan are on their way to see her! Most of them have not met her so we are really excited to spend these next days together as we celebrate American Thanksgiving! We will post more about our beautiful River in the days ahead…