Barnabas Monkeypants

It’s obvious that as soon as you look at Henry and then at Kristen or me, you can see the resemblance. He has my mouth and chin and Kristen’s forehead and nose, and people have remarked that he looks a lot like Jay (the uncle) as well.

Like Kristen and I, he’s also got a great sense of humor. (I’ll be sure to talk in a future post about all the different laughs of our young son.) And also like Kristen and I, he’s fond of burping and passing gas and having general gastrointestinal malaise. (Kristen, honey, I know I just told the world that you’re a bit gassy, but believe me, they already knew.)

The one thing that separates him from his parents is that Henry, God help him, is a morning person. (I am not. My mother has often reminded me that she would have to beg and plead for me to get out of bed, shower, clothe myself, and go to school, and would often stand at the bottom of the stairs yelling that if I didn’t get going, she would be late and get fired. You’d think that your parent losing her job would start you moving a bit faster, but obviously not in my case. I would eventually get downstairs, but I pushed the envelope every time.)

Get this: he wakes up smiling. In fact, as soon as he gets up and has had his breakfast, he’s ready to play.

Mornings have gone something like this. Henry wakes us up (not with crying or wailing, but with a sound not unlike the the flapping of angels’ wings), and Kristen feeds him while I take a shower and make her breakfast. I then burp him, change him, and, while Kristen takes her shower, we dance or I sing or we flail our arms and legs (and usually all three). This lasts for about 45 minutes until he wants to eat again and then nap. I then leave Kristen and him and trod off to the train station.

The thing is, until Henry was born, I don’t think I ever danced before noon or sang before eleven or flailed my arms before… well, I’m always flailing my arms.

But, yet again, he’s changed me. I don’t think for the better this time, but it’s change.

What else have we learned this past week?

We learned that we must remind ourselves of the first rule of diaper changing: doodle down. We’re both experts in removing the diaper, cleaning the affected area, and snuggly putting the next diaper on, but we’ve both forgotten in the past week that Henry’s penis must be pointing toward his feet. Why is that, you ask? Well, the diaper is quite absorbent in the undercarriage region and just above, but there really isn’t anything to suck in the moisture up around the top. So if it’s pointing upward and there’s nothing to take it in, it’s going to leak everywhere. Not fun.

We learned that we have to keep his hands very clean. Henry has discovered the art of thumb sucking. Okay, it’s not yet an art. It’s mostly just a “ram-my-hand-near-my-open-mouth-and-with-my-other-hand-push-it-in” sort of thing. But with his hands now near his gaping pie hole, we’ve got to make sure that he’s as germ and dirt free in the hands as possible. Now, I realize that he’s never going to be 100% germ free, and I’m not germaphobic at all, but, if we can, we’d rather reduce the number of strange one-celled creatures that end up in his mouth if possible.

We learned that Henry loves it when you talk to him. About anything. Just stare into his eyes and start yammering away. Recent conversations have included talks on bugs and cars and dinosaurs and cats and tummies and whether or not the Kinks were as important a band in the British Invasion as The Who. (I say so; Henry seems to disagree.)

We learned that in some ways, Henry’s no different than the cats. You see, he and Georgia and Cecil hate it when their nails are clipped. There is squirming and hissing and biting (you have to figure out who does what), and a general sense of unhappiness. Kristen is the master at clipping nails, but sometimes she needs help. That comes in the form of “distracting the head.” First developed as a way to calm the late-great Francis when he had to get a trim, it involves one parent clipping the nails while the other one either scratches behind the patient’s ears (for the cats) or waves their fingers in the patient’s face (for the baby).

And we learned that Henry has finally started to realize that his hands and arms are part of him and that if he reaches out in front of him, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to grab ahold of my cheek or his mother’s chin. And he’ll look at us, look at his hand, understand that they’re all in some way connected, and he’ll smile. That’s a pretty nice smile.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under What We've Learned. 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.