For those of you who were caught unaware, Joel has finally arrived.  Christy labored through a little less than five hours of contractions without any pain medication to deliver a healthy baby boy.  Joel was born nine pounds and six ounces and 20 inches long.  His full name (now that we have finally have it figured out) is Joel Riley Kolder.

I’ve uploaded some photos of the last couple of days on Flickr and created a short slideshow here.  Check it out.

So today was proud moment for a young dad. Today was the first time my daughter ate a jalapeno. Let me explain. My love for jalapenos began with Subways’ Southwest Chipotle Cheesesteak Sub. Ever since then, I’ve been eating jalapenos like they were candy. I eat them in my cheese, on my burgers, on my subs…you name it…I’ve probably had a jalapeno with it at least once.

But we’ve always kept Ariel away from jalapenos because we didn’t want her to burn herself. Pretty reasonable, right? I want to be able to enjoy jalapenos with my daughter when she gets older, and I’ve known enough kids that have tried them at a young age and hated them so much that they’ve never eaten them again. No jalapenos for little girls.

But tonight, we had hamburgers. I (as usual) wanted a it covered in pepper jack cheese and topped with jalapenos. Ariel points at the jar of jalapenos and says “Nyummy, Nummy!” We tried every trick in the mommy and daddy book to persuade her against it. “Nooooo Ariel…awky” or “Noooo….hot!” The response? “Nyummy, Nyummy!” At this point, what could we loose? We kept telling her that it was hot and might hurt, but she kept insisting that she wanted a piece. Christy was fearful. I was a little proud of her on the inside. Finally I cut off a little piece and handed it to her. I think because we made such a big deal about how much she didn’t like it, she decided that she would like it no matter what. Regardless, she ate, gave us kind of a puzzled look, say “ottt” (hot for those of you who don’t speak toddler) and then almost immediately after “Nyummy, Nyummy!” She wanted more! This repeated itself several times until she had eaten a whole jalapeno and was asking for another one!

Anyways, this may seem like a random story but it is such a funny story that even though we didn’t capture it on film, I wanted to have a record of it somewhere.

My daughter’s first jalapeno-8/06/08