Barnabas Monkeypants

I’m never sure when to get worried about the baby, whether something is worthy of worsening my impending ulcer or not, so I pretty much worry about everything. EVERYTHING.

On Saturday morning, I was worrying because Henry hadn’t had a poop for more than 24 hours. All I could think of was a clogged innard (to be gruesomely detailed by a baby gastrointestinal specialist), the surgery required, and all the terrible complications thereof. After 45 minutes of extreme worry (Kristen was none the wiser, thankfully), Henry decided that he would have the largest bowel movement in the history of bowel movements. It was fantastic, like he was attached to some poop spigot, so large that when we were changing him, he decided that he wasn’t quite done, and pooped some more.

I was quite relieved. Being relieved because you’re witnessing something like this is usually grounds for some sort of institutionalization, I think.

Soon after, we were allowed to go home, and Kristen and I were both quite glad to finally get out of there. We packed up all our stuff, I made a couple of runs to the car, and then we strapped young Henry in his car seat and headed home.

(I threatened to drive 18 miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive, but Kristen made me go the speed limit. I called her the lost Andretti child.)

It was extremely strange walking into our place with a baby. All of a sudden, it was real. Not that it wasn’t real in the hospital (it was, believe me), but here we were, no longer protected by doctors and nurses and people who deliver you food and take out your trash. There weren’t people there to come and take the baby for two hours so you could take a nap and not worry about having to change him. There was nobody.

It was just the three of us.

And the cats.

We placed Henry in his vibrating chair (it’s quite amazing… and soothing, too), and allowed Georgia and Cecil to come up and look at him and smell him and flinch when Henry decided to move his foot. There were several times when Cecil looked up at me with his head cocked to the side as if he wanted to ask, “He’s just here for a couple of days, right?”

We’ve let them in the room with Henry (always supervised, of course) a few times since yesterday afternoon, and it seems as if they’re getting used to him, or at least his smell.

They have to, because we’re keeping him.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Barnabas, Health, Kitties, Worry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.