Yes, we have no blogs.

It was in fact a long, difficult night last night. There you are — there I was — feeling quite relaxed and warm in a full-body sort of way, at the border crossing into the Land of Nod. My conscious self was just a happy shadow of its normal self when — wa. wa. waaaah. WAAAAH!

So it goes.

Less than a week old, this blog, and I’m already getting e-mail from Been There, Seen That readers. Of course, since my “readership” is only, theoretically (yet not too likely) the 30 or so people I e-mailed and told about this blog — all known to me personally — so it isn’t quite the same as the adulation of a real fan base. If I dangled one of my daughters from a hotel balcony, I would not get a pass from the DCFS because of my fame. But I’ll take what I can get.

Dr. Kirk F, known to those of you who attended Alamo Heights High School as I did, said: “I must say that I have always felt that new babies are something other than cute... more like a bloody mess... until they are cleaned up and asleep. Six is plenty enough for me on the ‘dads end’ though I have delivered over 300 myself. It just is never the same from the ‘docs end’ and I’m sure from the ‘moms end.’ I always tell the delivering physician, ‘That’s what I’m paying you for’ when asked to cut the cord.”

To add a little context, Kirk has six children of his own these days (attaboy, Kirk) and practices medicine in Nacogdoches, Texas, recently in the news as the sad recipient of pieces of the Space Shuttle.

Speaking of birthin’ babies, in a previous blog I forgot to mention something I noticed at the Hinsdale Hospital Birthing Center, the sort of detail that perhaps seems more important when running on empty at 3 a.m. the morning your wife is expecting to give birth. But, I don’t want to impugn the dedicated, even-tempered staff at the Hinsdale Hospital Birthing Center (except for one cranky nurse).

If you go the Birthing Center, you have to take an elevator from the hospital lobby to the fourth floor. The elevators open up to a mural on the wall: a collage of large photos, actually. Jesus is the focal point, and around him are a multiethnic array of happy infants. Well and good; the hospital is affiliated with the Seven-Day Adventist Church, after all, and in any case I want Jesus to look out for all the babies there, too.

It was a Jesus Triumphant. His arms open and welcoming, a broad smile on his bearded face, and a biblical robe as clean as if it had just come back from Galilee Dry Cleaning and One-Hour Martinizing. I spent some time looking at this Jesus. Something odd about that face. He looked just like… no, it couldn’t be… but it was.

The Birthing Center Jesus looked absurdly like Michael Palin. A young Michael Palin, too, back when he was with Monty Python. A little joke by the artist? A little joke by God? Go figure.