First Bath

I. Love. This. Picture.

Other than a little fiddling with the contrast and putting in in black and white, I wish I could take credit for how cool it looks. But I can't--the sun was coming through the window of the hospital room at just the right angle with just the right brightness and the rays landed in just the right place to really give it the effect of studio lighting. I love too that Kiddo provides his own caption: "I'm the big brother." I love the look of care and concentration on Kiddo's face, and the obvious gentleness with which he's handling the cloth.

Seeing one of my children helping to take care of the other gets me a little verklempt, too.

I'd say I'm proud of this picture, but that would imply that I did the work to intentionally compose it like this. Nope, I just got lucky. Right place, right time. But as they say, better lucky than good, right?

(By the way, to see the picture full-size, click on it to enlarge.)

First Bath

(c) 2008 by Matt Schur

LH

More baby pics

How lucky am I? =)

LH

P.O. Pears We Hardly Knew Ye

We take a brief respite from baby news for this important bulletin:

March 23, Easter Sunday will (ironically enough) be the first day Lincoln is without one of its dining landmarks.

Yes, the venerable P.O. Pears will be closing its doors.

P.O. Pears is quite possibly the coolest restaurant ever. There are some out there with better food (though Pears IS the home of my fave hamburger...more on that in a minute), there are some out there with a better bar, better bands, better decor...but there's nobody that put it all together in the unique way and with the devil-may-care sensibility that P.O. Pears did.

Where to start...well, there's the front door. I have to admit to falling prey to the "PUSH other side" wording on the door handle more than once.

Then you get to where you order your food, which in P.O. Pears' case is a giant set of lips which, according to their website, was originally used as a promotional device by the Rolling Stones on one of their tours. Apparently the rumor is that Keith Richards got *ahem* "acquainted" with one of his wives on that very set of lips.


The decor of the place is peppered with old movie artifacts, including a sleigh from Dr. Zhivago, a scale model ship from Tora Tora Tora and this wheelchair, which played a notable part in Psycho.


In fact, there's all kinds of crap hanging from the ceiling throughout the whole place, which is notable because P.O. Pears did this and made it look cool well before corporate places like Applebees started using that style of decorating in each of their 10,000,000,000 restaurants.

Then there's the food itself. This is probably my favorite hamburger ever:

It's called the Jiffy Burger. A big ol' juicy hamburger patty with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, bacon, jack cheese, and...peanut butter. Look at the picture again. What may appear at first glance to be yellow cheese, is in fact the gooey goodness of peanut butter.

That's right. Peanut butter is what puts the "Jif" in "Jiffy Burger."

And my GOODNESS is that burger good. Probably takes a year or two off your life expectancy each time you order one, but well worth the potential health risk.

So Monday, Sweetie and I went to P.O. Pears for lunch one last time, and I ordered what was probably my last Jiffy Burger.

I may be in mourning for quite some time.

LH

More baby pictures...

...because right now, uploading photos is just plain easier than trying to string together coherent thoughts. =) Suffice it to say that all is well...baby's doing great, Kiddo's been an amazing big brother, and mom and dad are happily sleepy. Or is it sleepily happy?

Those first few weeks with a newborn, you stop thinking about time in terms of daytime and nighttime, and instead switch to a mindset of sleep-time and awake time. And in our case, baby came home with some jaundice, which is caused by high levels of bilirubin, which apparently is something the body gets rid of by pooping it out. And in order to poop a lot, one needs to eat a lot. And when one is a baby, that means mom and dad need to feed you a lot. Which for Sweetie and I has meant feeding about every 2 hours since baby came home from the hospital a little over a week ago. 2 hours from the beginning of each feeding...not the end. So if you figure each feeding takes about 45 minutes, we're talking maybe a little over an hour between the end of one feeding and the beginning of another. Round the clock.

I'm not complaining, mind you...but I just realized that with all of this, we've kind of retreated into a little "baby cocoon." Our own little world of 2 hour feeding and sleeping cycles.

An interesting sidenote...Saturday night/Sunday morning, I got to watch the clock on our cable box switch to daylight savings time. It said 1:59 AM, then all of a sudden it said 3:00. I always wondered how that happened.

Well, I said I wasn't going to write much and here I am rambling along. So here's the promised pictures. I'd better get going.

After all, it's almost time for baby to eat again.

Ain't she a cutie?!?!

Does a dad's heart good to see scenes like this...

LH

Commence Heart Melting...

Okay, I thought having one child led to heart-melting moments. Well, we're finding that having a second child around only multiplies those moments exponentially...

Click on the video:

LH

Welcome to the world...

On February 28 at 7:43 AM, we welcomed our new little girl (not sure yet what her blog nickname will be) into the world. She was 6 pounds and 7 ounces, and measured 19 inches long. She's a beautiful little girl (obviously taking after her mother!) with a pretty full head of hair and an easygoing temperment. She's just a little sweetheart, and we all just feel so incredibly blessed to have her as part of our family. Kiddo has been a very proud big brother! He loves to hold her and talk to her, and even sternly told his mom and dad once to stop talking because his sister was trying to sleep! We are sleep-deprived but otherwise doing well...keep us in your prayers!

LH