What We’ve Learned: Week 6
Nothing has changed much in how I feel when I leave the house every morning. I hate it. I hate walking away from Kristen and the baby, not able to see them for hours and hours and hours. It doesn’t help that as soon as I get home from work, we begin the 2-hour-long process of getting him to sleep for the night (which is always a fun time).
But here’s the thing. When I walk in the door and start talking, Henry’s head starts whipping around. I move to one side of him, his eyes follow me. I move to the other, and his head comes along. He recognizes my voice! This is wonderful!
Then, I’ll swoop in and pick him up and pull him to my chest for a big hug, and he’ll lay his head back and just stare at me. So now, not only does he look at me and smile at me, but he actually recognizes me and wants to look at me (you can’t say that about many people, I’ll tell you what).
And every time it just melts my heart.
So what I’m saying is this: although not seeing him for 10 hours just breaks my heart, I quickly forget about it once I get home. (Until the cycle starts the next morning.)
And what else have we learned this week:
We learned that while the cats will run away as fast as they can the second they hear Kristen’s mother’s high-pitched voice, Henry loves it. (I liken her shrieks to a cross between an out-of-tune Mariah Carey and a jet engine.) This troubles me. What does this bode for his future musical tastes? Not good. Not good at all.
We learned that Henry is a ham. He could moan and cry and wail at us for three straight hours (which he’s never done, but I wouldn’t put it past him), and someone other than Kristen or I would come up to him and the tears vanish. The cries stop. The wails? What wails. It’s just all cooing and smiles and finger grabbing. I think Henry has a good future ahead of him as a door-to-door salesman.
We learned that, yes, our son has eyebrows and eye lashes. Henry has been quite advanced in nearly every baby-type activity. He was quick to eye contact. He was great about holding his head up. He smiled (the non-gas variety) well before the books say so. But he lacks in the hair department. (At the hospital, the nursery was filled with babies with full heads of dark, wavy hair. And there was Henry, with his bald orb.) He’s grown some hair on the top of his head — fine and light — but it’s not coming in that quickly. But now his eyebrows (he had no more than a half dozen hairs a week ago) and his eyelashes (he sprouted his first few this week) are coming in. This is a good thing for him, because when he’s charming the ladies, nothing helps better than batting those lashes.
We learned that Henry likes to look at the cats. He has yet to reach for them, but he’ll follow them as they pace in front of him. (In a related “what we’ve learned”, we learned that Cecil likes, while Henry’s asleep and in Kristen’s arms, to lick the baby’s forehead.)
And we learned that we really love having a baby in the house. The other evening Kristen and I were alternating rocking Henry to sleep (one of those nights when it seemed the only thing that would calm him down was being held — although he set a 3-minute limit before it was required to switch to the other parent), and Kristen looked at me and said, “I wish we had a barnful of these.” The image of about 342 babies sleeping in a barn made me happy, and I couldn’t have agreed more. I don’t know if we’re going to have another baby (who knows what the future holds), but the idea of having another one (and another and another and another) sure sounds good right about now.
Of course, ask me about that again while he’s teething.
