Barnabas Monkeypants

I have no entrepreneurial talent. My lone venture into doing something for myself business-wise was my failed comic book convention here in Chicago (which gave me no ends of gray hairs and sucked all of my savings down the drain).

But if I ever do start up a business again, I know exactly what I’d do. I’d start up a company that would work with sign companies to correct spelling and grammar before these things are manufactured. So, that flower shop down the road would not be Geneses Flower and Gift, but instead Genesis Flower and Gift. I mean, really, people. Spell check!

I’d also work with companies that not only manufacture products overseas but also print up the inserts and instructions. I mean, how many times have you bought something, pulled out the directions, and thought to yourself, “This is English, right? I mean, these are English words, but this makes no sense.”

I’m writing about this today because last weekend, Kristen got a knitting reeling machine. (It was given to her when someone saw her request on Free Cycle.) It’s a pretty cool contraption: it will help ball up yarn without all the tangling and cursing. (I do the tangling; Kristen does the cursing.) It’s made in Japan, and I’m not sure if it was just poorly translated or it was written out by someone who had very little grasp of the English language.

For your pleasure, here are the instructions, with all its wonderful incoherence. I have not changed anything. Enjoy.

Necessaries for Knitting

K.M. All-Powerful Reeling Machine

Main Features:

A) Being equipped with convenient metal connector, this tool is attachable to wherever you may wish, in the three directions – vertical or horizontal or diagonal. So there is no trouble at all like entangling of thread or yarn.

B) It is holding type, and made entirely of metal. The connector is of the utmost convenience and permanent use.

C) This reeling machine can be used for all kinds of thread or yarn. Because you can expand or contract it as the case demands, either for hand knitting thread of small reel or for woolen yarn of large reel.

D) The part where thread or yarn are reeled on is covered with vinyl. By this protection, thread or yarn never gets tangled or dirty.

E) This machine is also convenient for washing of old woolen yarn, as small or large reel is made at your will by the use of handle attached

F) Push the red button and adjust the size of machine-reel. Please.

Directions. When you open or shut it. please give it a slight swing. just as you do with your umbrella or parasol.

Kristen has made, over the past several years, countless false and scandalous accusations that I, as a child, had a mullet. This has led to many disagreements between us, because, as everyone knows, I never had nor I never will have a mullet. You see, she once saw a picture of me as a 14-year-old where I had longish hair all over, and, the way it happened to be parted at the side, it looked mullet-ish. But it was not a mullet. There was never any hair sculpting, no mousse, no nothing.

Of course, my opinion may change as Henry’s head of hair has begun to naturally grow into “business in front, party in back”. You see, Henry was a slow grower in the hair department (he didn’t really have much on his head until he was around 7 months or so), and when it did start to sprout, it grew mostly in the back and sides (his monk’s tonsure).

Now he’s got a fully covered noggin on top, but the back had a head start. Luckily, he’s got quite a bit of curl back there, so you can’t tell how long the hair is most of the time. But when it’s wet or when he’s just had his winter hat on, it gets mashed down and it looks like he should be wearing a wife beater and a trucker cap.

This will all be remedied, of course, when we finally decide to get him that haircut, but for now, his ‘do is something special.

There is nothing better than watching Henry develop as a little person. Each time he does something new, I want to give him a cake and buy him presents and give him a big hug. (Usually, he just gets the hug.)

But with each new thing that he learns, there are always bumps in the road (sometimes literally). With walking, there are the trips and falls and bruises that come with it. (With running, multiply those bumps by two.) With talking, there are the challenges of listening to him yell out “shit” in a crowded store (instead of “sit”) or “cock” (instead of “truck”). (Sorry for the blue language.)

And lately, Henry’s been feeding himself more. Not the picking it up with his hand and shoving it in his mouth, but using forks and spoons. Henry is good with many things; his aim, however, is not yet up to snuff. So spoonfuls of food tend to end up on his bib or the tray of the highchair or the floor as much as in his stomach.

As such, half of each meal is usually Henry feeding himself and the other half us feeding him.

Yesterday morning, however, things changed. I strapped him in his highchair, and he wailed. I tried to put on his bib, and more wails. Sliding the tray in, elicited the biggest wail of all. And when I spooned up a heaping pile of apple yogurt (one of his favorite flavors), he swatted it away.

He wanted nothing to do with me and my evil food. Not in the standard situation. Instead, he walked over to the table and chairs that his grandfather got him for Christmas, sat down, and said, “Eat.” So I put the yogurt in front of him, handed him a spoon, and, with no bib around his neck, he proceeded to eat the entire container.

Okay, not the whole container. Maybe half. The other half ended up on the table (which he smeared around a bit), on his green sweatshirt (just out of the wash), and in his hair (apple yogurt as a conditioner? perhaps).

And he loved it. He had the time of his life, with no wails.

Next up, of course, is to have him cook his own meals, and then ours. (And, most importantly, do the dishes, too.)

For Henry’s first birthday (lo those many months ago), we bought a big cake for the guests and a big cupcake for the birthday boy. This worked out well (though the big cake was too big and the big cupcake wasn’t big enough to satisfy Henry’s baked-goods appetite).

We got the cakes at the Swedish Bakery, a place just south of us in the Andersonville neighborhood. (If you want to go back and relive the birthday magic, you can read about it here and here.)

Quick aside: Chicago, for those not in the know, is a city full of different neighborhoods, many of which were various ethnic groups settled when they came to the city. So, Andersonville was where the Swedes came. Logan Square was the Norwegians. Lincoln Square the Germans. And you’ll never guess who moved into Ukrainian Village! (I really like this city.)

Anyway, when I ordered the cakes, I had asked if they made tiny little cakes to match up with the big ones. While they had small cakes, they were fancy ones, with berries and fancy fillings and fondit, stuff that Henry would probably not really like. He wants 1) cake and 2) frosting. That’s it.

So instead, I asked for a cupcake. Not a regular cupcake, but the biggest cupcake they had. And they delivered. It was tasty.

Fast forward five months. This past weekend, Kristen wanted… no needed a cupcake. So Henry and I headed off to the Swedish Bakery to get cupcakes. We were waited on by the woman who took the cake order for his birthday.

“You’ll never guess,” she said.

(I have no idea what she meant, but I went along with it.”

“What?”

“Because of you, we’re now making smash cakes.”

“Uh… great?”

Now, if you’re like me (and not really aware of such things), you ask what a smash cake is, and you’ll be told that they’re little cakes that you give to kids so that they can go all Animal on them. Crush them. Mutilate them. Smash them. (And possibly eat them.)

“You did that all for Henry,” I asked.

“Well, not for him, but it made us realize that somebody will buy them if we offer them.”

So there you have it. Henry is singlehandedly changing the face of baked goods for children in the north side of Chicago.

(Now that I read this, it doesn’t seem as exciting as it was on Saturday. No wonder Kristen wasn’t very interested when I called her breathlessly from the parking lot.)

On Wednesday, I flew out to New Jersey — to my company’s home office — for a planning session.

Now a significant part of my job is traveling, and each year I have to go on around 12 business trips. The bad thing about these trips is that it takes me away from Kristen and Henry. The good things are that the trips are short (no more than 2 days) and I’ve been accumulating a lot of airline miles so I can get a couple of free flights this summer if we decide we can (afford to) go on vacation.

This trip was no different. Off I went Wednesday afternoon, and I walked through the door this morning at around 10:30. And as I’ve done this many, many times, Kristen has gotten to be quite an expert at doing solo parenting in getting Henry up and dressed in the morning and feeds, bathes, and gets him ready for bed in the evening. He’s a pretty easy going kid, and even when there’s just one of us around, it’s not too difficult.

Well, according to Kristen, that’s changed a bit now that Henry is not only mobile, but super mobile.

We used to be able to sit him down with a toy (or toys) and walk away for a minute (with an eye on him, of course) and get dressed, make lunch, brush teeth, etc. But no sitting any more for our Henry. He’s running around like a mini-madman just as he needs to get his shoes on or his coat or hat.

We’ve been thinking about attaching a tether to his pants so he can’t get very far or, if he does start wandering, it’s just in a circle, like some May pole in his bedroom.

I don’t have to travel again until consecutive weekends in March, so who know where he’ll be by then. Likely plotting the overthrow of the household as Kristen is making his oatmeal.

So, other than Henry getting to be a handful, what else have we learned this month?

Well, we learned that Henry’s learned how to throw a tantrum. Not terrible ones, yet, but when Kristen went to pick him up from our nanny-share’s house on Wednesday, he just didn’t want to leave. There was just too much fun to be had, you see. So Henry dropped to the floor, going limp as a noodle, and he screamed bloody murder. Kristen and super-nanny Silvia just looked at each other as if asking “what the heck just happened here?” as he writhed on the ground. Kristen picked him up (not without some difficulty), gave him a smooch and a hug, and he got better, but this is surely signs of things to come. Shudder.

We learned that Henry’s vocabulary has continued to expand, and each day it’s a new word or two. (Today, we taught him “pocket” and “potato”.) The funny thing is, he still babbles incoherently, but it’s mixed up with real words. So he might say, “open up jee joo rah lah lee apple button.” Henry, what does “jee joo rah lah lee” mean, exactly? He’s also stringing words together. So it’s not just “more”, it’s “more hummus.” It’s not just “bath”, it’s “go bath”. Soon he’ll be composing poetry. We’re certainly bad parents in that we haven’t been writing down all his words, but I guess it’d be around 40 or so. Fun stuff.

We learned that Henry has become an expert at flicking light switches. Now he’s been turning lights on and off for a while now — it’s nothing new — but now when we hold him up to the switch, he’ll flick it up and say “on” and flick it down and say “off”. (Actually, he says “oss”, but we know what he means.) I don’t know why this makes me so happy.

We learned that Henry still has all his hair and is still in his crib.

And we learned that there is nothing more fun than having Henry go over to the bookshelf in his room, bring one of his favorites to you, back up into your lap and sit down, and follow along with the story. His body is always warm as he rests against your chest, his hair smells fantastic, and when he holds onto your hand in between page turns, it melts your heart. It’s wonderful when he repeats words from the book (dog! horse! feet!), and it’s wonderful when he mimics what’s on the page (play the drums, blow the dandelions, pick a booger [yes, because from Yummy, Yucky, “burgers are yummy but boogers are yucky”). As much as I love playing with him and feeding him and giving him a bath, there’s nothing better than reading him books.

I don’t know when this happened, but out of nowhere, Henry is running. While he’s no Carl Lewis (does that date me a bit?), he has decided that walking just isn’t good enough and he needs to go, go, go as fast as he can, wherever he can, whenever he can.

It’s great to watch him run. His arms are in the air, he’s usually making some king of screeching, happy noise, and he’s going in any and every possible direction. While I love this to bits (and I’ll talk more about it a bit later), it has meant that there have been a few more bumps, bruises, and bleeding of late.

He’s run head first into the corner of tables, he’s tripped over toys, shoes, and rugs, and he’s even fallen on his face for seemingly no reason (although it’s usually when he’s getting tired). On Sunday morning, he got a big bruise on his forehead when he banged into a door, and ten minutes later, after his tears had been cleaned up and he was back to his old self, he proceeded to fall down and get a bloody lip.

In ten minutes time!

I don’t think he’s particularly clumsy and I’m not really worried. I just think that he’s just a toddler.

Henry and I went to a coffee shop/indoor playground right before New Year’s, and it seemed like every kid there his age was covered in cuts and black-and-blue marks. It’s like a rite of passage or something.

So here’s my favorite running story that I promised above.

Yesterday, being a holiday, I had off and Kristen had to work. (She works every day, it seems.) So Henry and I got to play together and go have some Thai food (he loves those noodles) and get some much needed undershirts at Target.

Right before heading out for our errands, I had to use the bathroom. So what I did was close all the doors in the house, and “trapped” Henry in the hallway. On one end was the bathroom, and on the other was… Cecil.

Cecil’s not one of the brightest animals on this planet (in fact, he’s fallen into the 3rd percentile), but he is good at keeping Henry occupied.

So, as I’m doing what I have to do (and that’s all I’ll have to say about that),  Henry is running up and down the hall, chasing the cat. Every time they get to the end, Cecil stops, slides on the hardwood floors, runs in place (like Scooby-Doo), and then comes running the other way, with Henry following.

This went on for about 3 laps back and forth, each time with more screams from Henry, and all I could think of was, “why the heck do I have to be on the toilet at this time without easy access to a camera!”

Luckily for everyone, there were no injuries sustained, and both Henry and Cecil got good and tired and Henry was nice and calm for our car trip and Cecil slept for four hours straight.

Good times.

As Kristen and I have both written lately, Henry was eating everything in sight. Any foodstuff within arm’s reach was quickly gobbled up with a cry of “eat! eat! eat!” While that has subsided (he’s back to his standard meals and snacks), the outcome of the gorging has finally arrive.

Henry’s clothes suddenly no longer fit.

Yesterday, Kristen was dressing Henry and put on his classy Spider-Man t-shirt, and the sleeves, that once comfortably went down to past his wrist, are now barely past his elbows!

This morning, she put on his spiffy plaid pants, and they rested just below his knees!

(Of course, being good parents, we didn’t change his clothes. Although we did vow that it was the last time he’d wear them. If we remember.)

This, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise. I mean, he’s nearly 17 months old (gulp), and that is at the end of the 12-18 month clothing range. But I was hoping that he’d be able to stretch out the use of this lot of clothes for another few months.

Unfortunately, we’re probably going to have to do the clothing purge (where we go through his drawers and pack away all the too-small shirts and pants) and head off to the mall to get him some replacement garb.

And you all know how much I love the mall…

My last two years of college, I lived in apartments pretty far away from campus, first on the edge of Shadyside and East Liberty and later in Friendship (yes, that was the name of the neighborhood). The University of Pittsburgh is in Oakland, which was a 45 minute walk or 15 minute bus ride away, and I was more than happy to be a little distant from campus.

The only problem was on (those few) evenings I wanted to hang out with friends who lived in Oakland (especially South Oakland, where the apartment buildings were extensions of the dorms, it seemed), I would end up having to crash on their couches instead of trudging home. (In Pittsburgh, not every bus line ran 24 hours, and late at night, their frequency left much to be desired.)

This wasn’t a terrible thing, as sleeping on floors or sofas isn’t uncommon to most 21-year-olds.

The exception was with my friend Missy Jo. When I went out with her and her friends, I always ended up sleeping in bed with her. No hanky panky, people. It was just that Missy had the uncanny ability to fall asleep and never once move until she woke up.

She would get into bed, lie as close to the edge as possible (giving me plenty of room), fall asleep, and remain completely motionless. No head turning. No flipping. No restless leg. Nothing. Completely still.

I mentioned this to Kristen the other night, and she said that she didn’t move when she slept. Hogwash. While she’s no Exorcist girl, she’s been known to give me a few good kicks to the shins.

Anyway, I bring Missy Jo up not because I’m reminiscing about the good old days of Pittsburgh but because of Henry. (Of course.) You see, I’ve been thinking of when to start to transition Henry to a toddler bed. The crib he’s sleeping in now has a side that can be converted to a shorter (and open) railing, one that will make it easier for him to get in and out (when he so desires). Most experts say to wait until your child is around 18 months (just 2 1/2 to go) before you do this, but I think that we may have to wait a little longer.

Why, you ask? Well, Henry is a whirling dervish in the sack. He twirls around like Curly Howard, always finishing up his nap/sleep in a different position than when he started. Sometimes he’ll be curled up in a corner; other times he’ll be splayed out in the center, his body perpendicular to the wall behind him. Often, all the blankets and stuff animals will be thrown out of the bed, but just as often, they’ll all be collected into the middle of the crib, like a plush monument to sleep on which he rests.  (That was poetry, my friends. Poetry.)

The other thing about getting Henry out of his crib is that he’s still sleeping in a SleepSack. These are really great for keeping him nice and cozy when he sleeps (and when we put it on him, it’s always a good signal that it’s time to calm down and get ready to snooze), but they’re not so good with walking.

In fact, he can’t walk in them at all.

So before we change the rail of his crib or get him his own “big boy bed”, he needs to do two things: stop moving so darn much and move to a wholly blanket-based sleeping experience.

(I’m completely insane, people. Completely.)

Kristen and I have written about Henry’s pants problem numerous times, but if you’re a new reader (ha! fooled you! like we get new readers), here’s the gist of it:

Henry’s tall, lankiness has made it difficult for his pants to stay up, and we’ve had to resort to rolling his pants at the waist to keep them up.

But here’s the thing. We were wrong.

You see, for the past couple of weeks, ever since he kicked his cold, Henry has been eating like a madman. And all that eating has made him get a little chubby again. (Never as chubby as when he was a baby, because that’s just too much and too precious and likely never repeatable in this or any lifetime.) His arms and legs have meat on them, and his stomach (especially after a big meal of pierogies and applesauce) is good and round.

And yet, his pants continue to slip down.

Now, I’m a scientist (in my own mind), and if you state a hypothesis (Henry’s too skinny) to get the reasons for a problem (why are his pants falling down) and said hypothesis becomes null and void (he’s not so skinny any more) and yet that problem is still happening, you’ve got to go back to the drawing board.

And that’s what I’ve done.

So I can confidently say that the reason for Henry’s pants problem is this: he has my butt.

I have many physical faults. My eyesight is terrible. I’m highly uncoordinated. I don’t digest dairy products particularly well. But my biggest fault is that I have a completely flat behind. If it weren’t for obvious anatomical characteristics, I doubt you could figure out where my back ends and my butt begins.

And Henry, poor, poor Henry, has inherited said butt.

This is going to cause many problems in the future for him (namely, it’s very difficult to get down on the dance floor while trying to shake something that just isn’t there), but it’s also causing problems now. Any and all pants, whether they’re buttoned or snapped, with elastic or without, all slowly creep off his person. It’s a tragedy.

I’m sorry, son. I’m so, so sorry for what I’ve brought upon you.

Can you ever forgive me?

Year in reviews tend to be a bit schmaltzy and usually include some sort of photo montage of people who’ve died. I’ve started and deleted and edited and started this post again and again and again, and I can’t seem to find the right things to say.

I mean, I don’t know if Henry will have another year where he’ll change more. He started off being the cutest ball of chubbiness, then went on to being the cutest ball of rolling chubbiness, to a lanky spaghetti of sitting up, to a wonderful crawling monkey, to where we are now… a kid who runs around the house and tires his parents out quite quickly.

(In between, of course, there were a lot of other milestones and weight fluctuations.)

But I don’t want to look back. No, here are Barnabas Monkeypants (with the newly designed logo), we only look forward. For 2010 (which is so strange for me to type), we’re looking forward to Henry talking in full sentences, jumping, becoming completely potty trained, transition him to a toddler bed, begin learning calculus, and more. Much more.

We’re going to try and travel more, too. Henry’s a free ticket until he turns 2, so I’d like to drag him and Kristen along to some of my work trips (it looks like we’ll be in New York City in March and we’re definitely going to make our way down to Florida soon) and have him charm the pants off of people in many, many states.

We’re going to continue to experiment more with food, making sure that Henry is comfortable eating everything. (Our child is not going to subsist on chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, I’ll tell you what.)

We’re going to try and keep Henry away from the television.

We’re going to start Henry taking swimming and gymnastics classes, to make sure that he is properly prepared to win gold in the 2028 Summer Olympics in New Delhi.

And we’re going to continue to make sure that Henry is the happiest kid around, that his laughing will never stop.

That’s not too much to ask for, is it?