On Friday, March 24th, we got up early (very early...) to go to the hospital. Cheryl's mom, who had arrived on Tuesday evening, stayed home with sleeping Lura. Comparing our experience this time with Lura's birth (scheduled C-section vs. unscheduled after hours of labor), Cheryl said that it almost felt like just getting up early to go to the airport for an airline flight! Comparing this photo with the one at the top of the page from Lura's birth, you can see that this was much easier on Mommy!
David Yoshio Looper was born at 8:01 a.m., weighing 7 lb 10.2 oz and 19 inches long. Here he is about five minutes old as the nurses attach the "baby LoJack" security band to his ankle. Like his big sister, he had a full head of hair! "David" is the name of Mark's older brother, and it also has the same meaning as "Cheryl," namely "beloved" (from the Hebrew and French respectively). "Yoshio" is a variant of the middle names of both Cheryl and her dad ("Yoshie" and "Yoshito," meaning "good girl" and "good boy" in Japanese respectively).
David is a feisty little fellow; as you can see in the previous photo, he isn't content to keep his hands folded. When she measured him, the nurse had to tug pretty hard on his leg to get him to straighten out; subsequently, we have found that you have to be careful holding him because he flings himself from side to side (leading with his head), and if he gets a solid footing on, say, a couch back, he can launch himself! By contrast, for the first several months of her life, we could look in on Lura before she woke up and find that she had not moved an inch from where we laid her down. Here, about five minutes after the previous picture, the nurses have managed to subdue him long enough to swaddle him.
Those of our friends who told us the second child would be easier than the first may yet prove right about the care we give to each (getting them to eat, sleep, and so on). However, they didn't mention that it is much harder to organize your life when you already have a toddler to attend to! We couldn't have done it without Mom; she took care of Lura at home while Mark was at the hospital with Cheryl and David, and Mark brought Mom and Lura to the hospital between Lura's nap and dinnertime each day, then drove back to spend the night at the hospital after getting Lura to bed. So after seeing David off to the nursery at the hospital, Mark drove home; before he returned with Lura and Mom, the hospital staff had moved Cheryl out of the recovery area and into a private room, and brought David to her.
Lura has been looking forward to meeting her baby brother; we had told her she'd have to be careful with him because he's so little, but there's nothing wrong with a kiss on the head (or a tickle on the toes).
Here's Grandma with her two grandchildren, the Little Brother and, as her shirt makes clear, the Big Sister.
The kids exchanged gifts when they met; David gave Lura two Hello Kitty sticker books, instantly rising in her esteem, and Lura gave David this teething toy. The shirt Mark is wearing, by the way, was made by his mother over a decade ago, using a "cosmic" patterned fabric she found. It's threadbare in places, so he only wears it on special occasions, to keep it from wearing out; he figured this was such an occasion. (We didn't get to choose what we wore when Lura was born, because she surprised us late at night!)
The next couple of days we repeated the pattern of shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital. Here Lura looks at David in his hospital bassinet the day after he was born.
Here's David up close, two days old. His eyes are closed in nearly all of these photos; he actually opened them up occasionally on his first day, but it took a few more days for him to get comfortable with the idea. And, of course, he sleeps a lot!
The hospital room was pretty tight; that's the fold-up bed Mark slept on, jammed up against the sink. Thus there were plenty of "don't touch that!" things within Lura's reach; one day she startled herself pretty badly by eliciting a loud whir of motors from Cheryl's bed when she touched one of the adjustment buttons. Thus her visits could have been quite stressful (for her and us), but here again Mom (and Dad) came to the rescue. One of their Christmas gifts to us had been a portable DVD player, and so Lura could occupy herself in a very small space by watching "Lady and the Tramp" or "Bambi II" when she tired of watching David sleep.
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to Photo Albumnew 30 March 2006