We had some friends over for a cookout today, and as we were all sitting around eating hot dogs and hamburgers and drinking wonderful Mexican Coke, someone said (and I don’t remember who) that next month Henry will be 1 year old.

Next month! Jiminy!

Now sure, July has just started and Henry’s birthday is not until late August, but this just reinforces everything I’ve thought (and people have said) about how fast the first year goes.

A month ago, he wasn’t crawling.

A month before that, he just started to wave.

A month before, he had  learned how to get on his hands and knees.

And so on and so on.

I don’t know to feel about all this. Should I be happy and excited that he’s growing so fast, doing all these new and exciting things every day? Well, sure. But I don’t seem to have the time to savor any of it.

Last Saturday, we went to a friend’s baby shower, and Henry decided that it was time to pull himself up using the handle of a baby walker and take a tentative step with its help. Everyone thought this was such a wonderful and terrific thing, but I wanted it all to stop, to slow down. (Thank goodness I was in a different room when this happened or I may have started crying right in front of all those people.)

What’s a father to do?

Nothing, obviously.

But I just want to make everyone know that while Henry may be turning 1 next month, IT’S STILL SEVEN WEEKS AWAY!

So other than dreading Henry growing up, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that Henry attracts some strange people. Today we went to the post office and this husband and wife standing behind us wouldn’t stop talking about him. “He’s an angel. A cherub! Where are his wings?” “Look at those eyes. You can tell he’s smart. He’s going to Yale.” “No, not Yale. Dartmouth.” Henry, of course, is hamming it up the whole time, smiling and laughing and waving. At least it makes standing in long lines a little more tolerable.

We learned that Henry, always a great mimic, has now mastered the “mwaa” of a kiss. This is a great improvement of previous kissing attempts, which usually meant a wide open mouth, a lot of slobber, and ferocious (yet loving) bite with his two teeth. (Kristen would get these kisses on her cheek; I would get them on my nose.)

We learned that Henry is starting to actually enjoy “reading” books and not just gnawing on them. For the past couple of months, whenever we would sit down with a good book (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example), Henry would grab the book and (like everything else within his reach) start chewing. We could hardly get past page 1. Now, however, he’ll sit there with us, turn the pages (maybe a little too soon), and make it through at least half the book and sometimes an entire one… or two. I’m thinking by next summer, our nighttime reading will be War and Peace.

And we learned that watching Henry crawl around the house is always good for hours of fun. That boy can move.

In the span of a couple months two summers ago, two of our cats (Betty and Sonja) had to be put to sleep. Francis, our third cat, was lonely, and we felt that it was our duty to find him a new friend, to help him stay young and spry.

So we went down the street to a local no-kill shelter, Felines, Inc. This old graystone was two floors full of cat of all ages. We didn’t want to adopt an older cat for fear it would dominate Frank, and we didn’t necessarily want a kitten, because they always get adopted, and we wanted to maybe take one home that wasn’t a slam dunk.

Kristen and I start walking around the place, petting various cats, and one of the volunteers was there with us pointing out the various personality traits of each animal. This one was surly. This one needs to be an only cat. This one is on its last legs. There were cats there that, she admitted, were lifers, that were going to live at the shelter until they died.

Kristen fancied this furry gray cat that purred when she scratched him behind his ears, but he seemed quite indifferent to me. There was a tortoise-colored one that I liked, but Kristen thought that she was too old.

All the time that we were looking at different animals, this one, youngish black and white male cat kept on following us. He’d run circles around our feet, rub up against our legs, and prance on his tippy-toes when we reached down to pet him.

He was full of energy, and he was wonderful.

“He’s the one I want,” I told Kristen. (An aside: since Frank, Betty, and Sonja were all brought into the marriage by me, Kristen said that she was going to pick out the next animal. Uh… not so fast, woman.)

“He is cute,” she said. (And he was.)

“We’ll take him,” I told the woman.

Not so fast. You see, this cat — whose markings on his nose made him look like Jimmy Durante — was dropped off a few weeks earlier with his sister, and they wanted the two of them to be kept together. “Where is she?” Kristen asked.

“In here.”

“Here” was a cupboard above a sink where a small, furry cat was huddled. She was afraid of everything, especially some of the other more agressive cats. (They weren’t mean or nasty — just overly playful.) So the staff made up a small bed for her there and she was happy. Kristen picked her up, and the small cat curled up in the crook of her arm.

So we paid the adoption fee and took them both home. We named them Cecil and Georgia (for no specific reason), and after a few weeks of all of us getting to know each other, we’ve been a happy family.

Why am I writing this now? Because when we brought these two animals home with us lo those months ago, we both assumed that it was two cats. How wrong we were. One was a cat: Georgia. She’s sweet and loving and although she doesn’t always clean her butt as much as we’d like, she’s all feline.

The other, however, is a dog. There’s no doubt about it. Cecil does not run or prance or even scamper down the hallway. He bounds. Cecil will pick things up in his mouth, and run off with them. And most of all, he lets Henry beat him up.

Most cats I’ve known do not do well with babies and young children. But while Cecil doesn’t love Henry (as Henry certainly loves Cecil), he puts up with him. He lets Henry pull on his fur and tug at his tail and even (yuck) put his paw in his mouth. (That one was my fault. I was a bit lax on stopping that from happening, and it was only in there for a second or two.)

Surprisingly, Cecil was even okay with Henry starting to crawl. He was spooked a bit at first, but only for a moment. (He was spooked even more when Henry finally got into second gear, if you know what I mean, but that too was all in stride.) This is what dogs do, people. Not cats.

I still want a dog (a Bernese mountain dog, to be precise) and I’m sure Henry will want one too, but for now, Cecil will do just fine.

Kristen is the photographer in the family. Where I barely have the ability to point the camera  and press the button so that something resembling a picture appears, she knows how to frame things and when is the right moment for the best image and when the flash is needed or not.

(Side note: The next time you talk to Kristen, tell her she has to start using the good camera that she bought a couple of years ago. It’s a fantastic piece of equipment, one that she worked very hard selling some vintage clothing to afford. I think it would produce some photos of Henry that might actually break the Internet in half.)

As much as she does an amazing job of taking pictures so we won’t forget anything about Henry’s baby-hood, we also wanted to go to a professional to get some fancy-shmancy pictures. After Kristen did a ton of research, we pared it down to a few different people. After I stopped hyperventilating seeing how much everything was going to cost, we chose a photographer in the southwest suburbs, Marmalade Photography.

We originally had our session planned for two Fridays ago, but a combination of Henry being sick and a strong chance of thunderstorms caused us to reschedule for last Friday. (It was also blazing hot that day, not so good for me and my excessive sweating. Luckily it was really pleasant three days ago, although I still sweat quite a bit.)

So on Friday, after leaving work at 2:30, I went home, packed all of Henry and my and Kristen’s various outfits, stuffed the diaper bag with every possible Henry-related item, and loaded the boy into the car, and drove down to pick Kristen up at work.

Now Friday afternoon in Chicago means one thing: traffic. I got to Kristen’s office at 4:00, and what should’ve been a 45 minute ride out to the hinterlands took more than 2 hours. By the time we finally got to what is commonly known as “the middle of nowhere” (actually, Wilmington, Illinois), we were all geared up and ready to (as the kids say) get our session on.

You’d think that after a long time strapped into a car seat with barely 20 minutes nap would’ve made Henry a crabby young lad, making everything more difficult, but, of course, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. As soon as he saw the camera pointed at him, he started to ham it up, showing off his two little teeth, smiling all the time. Marianne, the photographer, said that many parents will tell her that their kids are really laid back and smile easily and they’re no trouble at all, and yet when it comes time for the picture-taking to start, they clam up or pout.

Not our Henry. He smiled and laughed and played with the flowers and grass and dirt. (He also ate a clover flower and a bug or some sort, but eating strange things is nothing new with him, is it?)

To our amazement, when it got past 7 (what we like to call the witching hour), he didn’t want to stop. After the picture taking was finished, we headed back into the studio, and Henry crawled around, showing off his new-found talent, trying his best to impress yet another woman. (I tried to explain that she was married already, but you can’t stop a player like our son.)

Marianne gave Henry a lovely gift basket and sent us on our way home, where the ride went without a hitch and Henry slept the entire time.

This morning, a preview was posted on the Marmalade blog. If that first picture of Henry is indicative of what we can expect from the rest, I think we’re going to have to get a second mortgage to pay for the 150 pictures we’re going to have to buy.

You thought Raphe was just being funny when he said Henry ate sand, didn’t you?

Henry still wakes up in the middle of the night about 5 out of 7 days each week. It can happen anywhere between 11:30 and 3:00 in the morning. When we hear him crying, Kristen will shove me and I’ll trudge back to his room to get him.

(By the way, it’s not real crying. There are no tears. It’s more of a loud moan, accompanied by a “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa”. And when I get back there, he immediately stops.)

Here’s the thing: even though we’re waking up from a dead sleep and usually leaves us less than fresh the next day, it’s a good thing because after he has his midnight snack, I get to carry him back to his crib. You see, as I’m walking back to his room, he’ll always put his head on my shoulder and fall asleep, right in my arms.

This is the thing with Henry. Every thing that may not seem great ends up being completely wonderful. He throws up all over me? Sure, but then he says “Dada.” I don’t get more than 4 straight hours of sleep? He falls asleep in my arms, his head resting on my shoulder, his hand grasping my thumb.

Week after week, any negative is completely overshadowed by something ten times as wonderful.

What a baby.

So other than completely adoring this baby, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that summer has finally hit Chicago, and Henry is experiencing real heat for the first time in his short life. Other than a little prickly heat, he’s dealing with it splendidly. His father, on the other hand, is not enjoying it one bit. I hope that he takes after his mother in his sweat production.

We learned that Henry has learned to turn when crawling. This is more difficult than you’d think. He’s gotten pretty darn good at going in a straight line (even better if there’s a cat or a shoe waiting there for him), but to turn or come back, he has to sit up, pivot on his butt, get back down on all fours, and start crawling again. This is both time consuming and full of wasted movement, and something had to change. And change it did, as today, he crawled all around Kristen, with nary a pause or butt pivot. (This reminds me of the one and only time I ever went water skiing. It was on the Delaware River about 20 years ago. Out there on the skis, I could get up fine and ski for a few hundred yards, but as the boat turned, I was unable to stay upright as I leaned into it. I tried and tried and tried, but nothing. Luckily Henry has no such problem on his hands and knees. But wait’ll he gets on the water!)

And we learned that Henry enjoys eating sand. Yes, sand. He won’t put a Cheerio in his mouth without gagging, but he has no trouble shoving a handful of beach into gaping maw. What a baby.

One of the things that people are most surprised about with Henry is his early bedtime. He usually is asleep before 7:30 (and more often than not 7:00). Now, this isn’t really our choice. By 6:00, he’s starting to rub his eyes and tug at his ears (sure signs of sleepiness), and as we dry him off from his bath a half-hour later, there are some crabby moans and plenty of yawns. After plenty of smooches and a feeding, he’s off to slumberland.

If we had our druthers, he’d be up an hour or two later. We want to see him more, play with him more, watch him crawl. But he is unwilling to oblige.

To make matters worse, Henry is slowly eliminating his third nap, meaning he last snoozes around 2:30. For him, a boy who loves to sleep, going more than 5 hours without curling up in his sleep sack is pure torture. (For us, too.)

Now there may be some of you out there who feel no sympathy for us because they have kids who have a difficult time getting to sleep, either for naps or overnight.  But think about it: you’re getting to see your kids more than we are Henry! In fact, I have to sneak into his room (without Kristen’s knowledge) and stare at him just so I can get my daily baby quota.

Eventually, he’ll stay up later, and likely will get to the point when (like Kristen and I and probably every other kid out there) we’ll be running to his room and catching him reading comic books under the covers with a flashlight.

At 8:15.

Yesterday was Henry’s 10-month birthday and my first Father’s Day. (We had donuts to celebrate.)

Overall, it was a great day and weekend, somewhat dampened by the cold that Henry was fighting (and losing). Friday night his sniffles turned to an all-out mucus fest, and he spent most of the time moaning in his sleep. Saturday morning we took him to the doctor’s where we were told that he was a terrifically well-tempered patient and, more important to the issue at hand, just had a cold and nothing worse. (I’m looking at you, swine flu.)

Just a cold didn’t stop him from having some spectacular mucus episodes, but I won’t get into the gory details. Instead, I’m going to get into even more gory details. (A warning: if you’ve got a delicate stomach, you may not want to read further.)

On Sunday evening, Kristen, Henry, our downstairs neighbor Lillian, and I all cooked out and had a wonderful dinner on the back patio. Henry was much better than Friday or Saturday (sniffles nearly gone, no fever), and he was bouncing about and having the time of his life making everyone else laugh.

At about 6:45, though, he started to rub his eyes and make some unpleasant groans, signalling it was time for bed. So up Kristen went (I stayed down and finished my dinner, since I had been holding Henry while everyone else had been eating), and she put his pajamas on and fed him and put him in the crib.

Now, when Henry is placed in his crib, he does one of three things, each happening about an equal number of times. The first is that he immediately rolls over to his side and falls asleep. The second is he doesn’t fall asleep right away, and instead starts chattering to his blanket or his fish mobile until, after 5 minutes or so, he zonks out. The third (and most unpleasant) is he starts acting generally unhappy when we walk away, leading to moans, cries, and crocodile tears, which necessitates one of us going in and rocking him for a while (or, in even worse situations, rocking him and feeding him and comforting him for a long while) until he’s so exhausted he has no choice but to fall asleep.

When Kristen walked away, Henry was doing the second option. By the time she got back down to the patio, three floors below, he was closing in on the third, and it was quickly escalating. So I shoveled the last of my dinner in my mouth and went back upstairs where, after only 2 minutes or so, Henry was in the middle of a spectacular meltdown.

He was there, on his hands and knees, wailing, the tears jumping out of the corner of his eyes like a cartoon. To make matters worse, he had also a full (and quite smelly) diaper. So I swooped him up in my arms, held him close, and told him that everything was going to be okay.

This did nothing to lessen his anguish, however, and he cried even more, now with the tears splashing onto my glasses so I was nearly blind. (Slight exaggeration.) Just as I was walking him over to the changing pad to get him out of his dirty diaper, he got very rigid, placed his hands on my chest and pushed so that he was looking right at me, and proceeded to vomit. All… over… the… place.

It was on my shirt, my shorts, my shoes.

It splashed on the floor behind me and on the curtains.

It drenched the small throw rug I was standing on.

And it smelled like rotten cheese.

And then, because it wasn’t horrible enough, he did it again.

After he finished (there was nothing left in him, I reckon, after two purges), he looked up at me and smiled.

So I kicked off my shoes, walked to the back door, stuck my head out, and yelled for Kristen to get up here.

She came running up and we got everything clean and ready and stripped Henry down (and got my shirt off) and headed off to the bathroom for another bath (for him) and shower (for me).

But here’s the kicker: as we’re walking down the hall to the bathroom, both Henry and I smelling something fierce, me not in the best mood of my life, he puts his head on my vomit-y shoulder, smiles, and says, “Dada.”

What a great Father’s Day.

It is my fervent wish that Henry grows up to be just like his dad. The world needs more people like Raphe in it.

Every day this week, either Kristen or I have looked at Henry and exclaimed (to no one in particular), “He’s changed again! He looks completely different! He’s getting too big! Why am I yelling?”

Other than crawling (which he’s yet to master), the biggest change in Henry of late has been his appetite. Early on, he was very hesitant to eat any solid food, and there were many funny faces to prove it. Slowly, we went from wet rice cereal (very wet), to stiffer oatmeal, to applesauce, to other fruits and vegetables, and so on and so on.

And just as slowly as we added new foods to his diet, he began to eat more. That first month or so, it was only a couple of teaspoons. Then, when we were giving him food from a jar, he could barely eat half a jar.

Well, things have changed. Now, twice a day, Henry eats a jar of something (fruit, vegetable, or animal/vegetable mix) and yogurt. That’s right, not only is he eating an entire package of something, he’s eating two entire packages of something. And he actually enjoys it.

We’ll shovel a spoonful of something in to his mouth, and as we’re digging for more, Henry will be ready, his mouth open, his legs kicking.

All this eating, of course, has meant that he’s growing fast. His thighs are getting chubbier, as are his arms, and after his dinner, as we’re giving him his bath, he has a round belly.

There are still some food issues. He doesn’t like anything too solid (no Cheerios, no table food), and he likes yogurt too much (sometimes I have to feed him veggies in between yogurt spoonfulls lest he not eat anything green at all). But overall, he’s becoming quite the baby food connoisseur.

And let’s not forget the prunes.

So, other than Henry taking eating to the next level, what else have we learned this week?

He crawled! Henry crawled! Isn’t that enough?

Henry crawled for the first time on Sunday.

To Cecil, of course.

It wasn’t a very long crawl (only about 4 strides), but it was very exciting. We were out in the living room and Henry was sitting and staring at the cat. He plopped down on all fours, squealed, and headed off to grab hold of Cecil’s ears. He lifted his left arm straight in the air and it landed about 3 inches in front of him. Then the other arm. Then his back right leg, and then his left.

And then he did it again!

Cecil, used to being able to easily get away from an approaching Henry (rolling isn’t the quickest way to get around), was dumbfounded to see Henry coming at him and fast. So he ran away, leaving Henry empty handed.

Unable to hold himself up after such a strenuous two-foot journey, Henry flopped on his stomach, and started laughing.

That was Sunday. On Monday, he didn’t crawl. Today, nary a saunter. And I suspect he won’t do it again. This is the pattern for our son: do something new and exciting and then wait a week before doing it again. It happened with rolling and with getting himself into a sitting position and with sticking his foot into his mouth. (Okay, so not everything was a real milestone.)

I guess we’ll just have to wait for this weekend for more crawling around. At least this gives us more time to prepare and put bubble wrap over all the furniture.