Barnabas Monkeypants

I know a lot of people (most? all?) come to this site for one reason: to read my funny little posts. What? That’s not the reason? Right, it’s to see pictures of Henry.

We try and take pictures every day, because neither of us want to forget anything about what he looks like or what he does, but sometimes it gets really difficult. This weekend was one of those difficult times, and because of that, there are no new pictures.

He was fussy. He was crabby. He was annoyed that the Yankees weren’t going to make the playoffs. A huge storm rolled into the area, dumping more than 10 inches of rain in two days, and I’m sure all of the weather issues — the humidity, the odd barometric pressure, the rain pounding on the windows — didn’t help. For hours on end, the only real way he could be consoled was if he was being held or laying on us. And even then, he would still cry.

All of the strides he had made earlier in the week — sleeping a little longer, feeding from a bottle — went out the window. The car seat, which he once loved, now became his arch enemy, the Lex Luthor to Henry’s Superman. So a drive to a craft fair we were looking forward to, became one filled with screams and two impromptu changings (there’s nothing better than putting a new diaper on a baby in a Best Buy parking lot, I’ll tell you what).

The 45-minute naps turned into 5-minutes of quiet whining which quickly escalated into crying. (On Sunday, one crying fit actually made me laugh. Henry took a deep breath, filling his tiny lungs, held the air in, opened his mouth wide, his face turning red and his tongue vibrating, and held that position for what seemed like 30 seconds. It looked like a baby crying with the mute button on. Of course, that silence was broken with the exhale, a scream which I’m sure would’ve woken up the neighborhood if it wasn’t 4 in the afternoon.)

At around 5:30 Sunday evening, I sat down on the couch, Henry laying on my lap. For the the first time in forever he fell asleep, his deep, mouth-open sleep that we had been missing for days. This was a wonderful and miraculous thing except for two things. One, I was freezing. I was wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, and a cold front had come in cooling the city down. Two, I had to urinate. Badly. Kristen was in the kitchen, many rooms away, so I was alone.

But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t take the chance of waking him up. So, like the trouper I am, I toughed it out. For 90 long minues I shivered on the couch, my bladder painfully full. I was exhausted, and in such an awkward position that if even I wasn’t going die of hypothermia or suffer a deadly interal rupture, that there was no way for me to fall asleep as well.

And I was okay. Henry was with me, happily sleeping, and there was no way I was doing anything to wake him up. But here’s the catch. Yes, I was uncomfortable. Yes, I was cold (for a time). Yes, I thought I may die at any minute. But I had, in my arms, a wonderful, beautiful baby. My baby.

These are the sacrifices that I’m willing to make.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Barnabas. 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.