Barnabas Monkeypants

Our downstairs neighbor (and someone who we are nominating for sainthood) Lillian looked after Henry for a couple of hours on Friday while I was away in Texas and Kristen had to run into work. Our child is something of a ham, so he’s more than happy to have a new person to smile at or laugh at or show off his wild, crazed arm wavings, and Lillian’s eats it up.

Lillian was lucky enough to have the chance to change his diaper while she was there, so after putting him on the changing pad, taking off his pants, and removing his Ernie-styled Pamper, she reached for a baby wipe. And couldn’t find them. She looked and looked and eventually found them in a white contraption plugged into the wall. It was the wipes warmer I mentioned earlier, something that Henry enjoys quite a bit. (He’s an aristocrat! I expect we’ll be peeling his grapes soon as well.)

Of course, she got a big kick out of this, and when Kristen came home, she called us yuppies. Now, the use of the term yuppie may have dated her a bit, but we got the point. She sees us as parents that are already loading up on every possible contraption known to man, each less necessary than the last. But, honestly, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Compared with some people we know, we’re baby minimalists. Yes, we do have some silly things (the biggest being wipes warmer), but we’ve held back.

The one thing that we haven’t bought yet and is on our radar is the camcorder. We’ve taken plenty of pictures of Henry, but because he didn’t really do anything (except for being exceptionally cute and cuddly) for the first two months of his life, we didn’t think that we would need one. Now, though, he’s started to do things… exciting things… that we have to capture for all eternity.

Recently, he’s begun shoving things into his mouth with glee. At first, it was just his fist. Now, however, it’s objects. Toys, mostly. He’s not an expert yet, and he’ll miss his mouth as often as he hits it, but it’s really fun watching him trying to figure out the basics of spacial relationships. Kristen grabbed our digital camera, which has video recording capability (although not very good), and she shot this short piece of film.

It’s Henry’s first starring role, and it involves him, a stuffed frog, and an urge to gnaw. The quality’s not great, and it’s a bit out of focus at times, but I hope you enjoy it. I’ve only watched it about 500 times today at work.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 3:03 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.