Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Aaron Lovik was able to make it home from Iraq just in time to be there for the birth of his first daughter, who also was the first baby of 2008 for Sweet Home.
Nicole Elise Lovik was born to Aaron and Jennifer Lovik at 3:29 a.m. on Jan. 2 at Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital. She weighed 7 pounds 10.7 ounces and was 20 inches long with dark brown hair.
A Lebanon baby was born by Caesarian section, edging out Nicole for the first baby born in 2008 at SLCH.
Aaron, a cable communications systems installer in the Army, has been in Iraq for three months. He had been stationed in Germany and lived there with his wife. He was able to take leave to come home for Nicole’s birth and will return to Iraq on Jan. 25. He is scheduled to leave Iraq in December and then be discharged from the Army.
Lovik graduated from Sweet Home High School in 2004 and then joined the Army. He flew home and married his high school sweetheart, Jennifer Belveal, on June 17, 2005 after her graduation as a valedictorian from Sweet Home High School, and they later moved to Germany.
“We just met in high school,” she said. “Our groups of friends kind of meshed together. He was a junior. I was a sophomore when we got together.”
Jennifer worked in a child development center on an Army base.
“I was the youngest (in the family), so I never had little siblings to change diapers or prepare,” she said, but she did get some preparation for being a mom working at the child development center.
“It’s just crazy,” she said. “You have nine months to get used to it. “Then she’s there.”
Jennifer returned to Sweet Home to have her baby.
“There was a rush to get home and be here and share the experience with everybody,” she said.
Aaron was worried about not making it home in time, he said. “They asked me what days I wanted. I put in for January.”
The day he returns to Iraq “is ever looming,” Jennifer said, but “we’ll have our ways of keeping together.”
He works in communications, he said, so he’ll have the means available to talk to her pretty much when he likes. He is stationed at Camp Speicher in Tikrit.
The Loviks knew they might have the first baby of the new year, they said.
“I wasn’t really concerned about it,” Jennifer said.
The waiting room was full of family talking about it, grandmother Angie Belveal said. “But that wasn’t what was on the mind.”
Aaron was in the delivery room with his wife, along with Jennifer’s sister Kristin and Aaron’s 11-year-old cousin, Tressa.
Grandparents are Blake and Angie Belveal and Bill Lovik Sr., all of Sweet Home, and Brenda Smith of Lebanon.
Great-grandparents are Bessie and Lloyd Lovik, Sharon and Neal Smith, Gene and Adelle Harris and Ruby Graber.