Barnabas Monkeypants

I had a really long post I was ready to put up yesterday afternoon (about super heroes no less) when I got a call from Kristen. She asked me to come home on the earliest possible train because Henry was in his crabbiest, fussiest, most unhappiest mood ever. And she needed help.

For the past couple of days, Henry has fought naps. He has fought feedings. He has fought playtime. He just doesn’t seem to want anything and yet having nothing is even worse. What’s likely happening is that he’s just at the point when everything new is hitting him all at once. You can tell that he can see more clearly (his stares last more than just 5 seconds now); he finally realizes that his hands and feet are actually attached to him and he wants to move them at all times; and he doesn’t want to miss a thing.

That means, unfortunately, that he wants to be held all the time, carried around so he can look at everything. While there is nothing better than holding a baby, holding an exhausted (and by extension crabby) baby all day is very tiring.

And, like I said, Kristen needed help.

So I jumped on the 5:10 train, got off at 5:37, and ran home. (Running is not pretty for me any more. I’m old, graying, and 20 pounds overweight. And I sweat. Boy do I sweat.) I came through the door, to a sleepy but agitated baby and an even sleepier wife. I grabbed Henry, forced Kristen to sit down, held him, fed him a little (until he screamed the bottle’s nipple out of his mouth for the tenth time), and then put him to bed. I had to go back into the room a couple of times to calm him down (he gets his legs pumping like a frog and it’s difficult for him to fall asleep), but he eventually fell asleep at around 6:30.

Here’s the thing. For a hectic 45 minutes, I tried my best to do whatever I could to make him happy. But Kristen does this all day long, Monday through Friday (and part-time on the weekends). And while Henry is extremely happy and fun and babylicious 95% of the time (heck, I just got an e-mail from Kristen saying that he’s been great and taking long naps all morning), when he isn’t, she’s often the first and only line of defense. (To add to all this, she also is working a few hours from home every day.)

And yet, when I come home and apologize for the rough day she had, she brushes it off like it was nothing.

I don’t really have a conclusion here. I don’t want to say that I’m proud of her, because that sounds like I didn’t think she could be a good mother (which is ridiculous). I guess I just want to say that Kristen is an incredible, patient, loving, and doting mother, that Henry and I couldn’t have asked for anyone better, that I’m so glad that 12 years ago I interviewed her for a job (and even though she was grossly overqualified) and was hired.

And Friday I’ll write about super heroes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Barnabas, Kristen. 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.