Barnabas Monkeypants

(This past week, I’ve seen Henry less than I’d like, so I had to wait until I got home and looked at him and smelled him and smiled at him before writing the latest weekly installment. I apologize for the delay. I know how so many of you wait for it each Thursday.)

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve met up with clients face-to-face who, up until now, I had only known through e-mail or phone. It’s nice to put a face to a voice, and it’s always a good thing to try and create something of a relationship with them — even if only on a just-more-than-business way — if only because you’re likely to see them a lot and talk to them and you want them to feel comfortable, that the guy responsible for creating their multi-million-dollar projects isn’t a real hammer head.

But I digress…

All of these people asked about Henry, and I was more than happy to show them pictures and tell them stories and go on and on and on. This is what new parents do. And what I ended up doing was comparing what we were doing with our son with what others did with theirs.

One said that they had their baby in their bedroom only two weeks before moving him into the nursery. Two weeks! After two weeks I was still waking every hour to make sure Henry hadn’t somehow gotten up and walked out the front door. (Note: he has yet to do this.) Another said that she has a video-cam set up at the daycare center her daughter goes to and has it constantly on in the corner of her computer monitor. We cannot compare to that level of craziness. And one said that he loves buying clothes for his daughter so much, he and his wife go to high-end children’s clothing trunk sales every weekend. Yikes.

But, universally, they all loved their kids. You hear people say that, how proud they are of their son or daughter, how much they love them, how much they think about them, but you don’t ever really know until you have your own.

I know now.

But enough about me. What have we learned about Henry this week?

We learned that he loves to grab faces. Mouths, cheeks, ears, eyes. Lay him on his back, put your head close to his, and smile, and he’ll reach up and start feeling around. He’s become much more aware of other people’s faces — and he’s much more likely to smile if someone else is smiling or frown if they’re not looking at him (but my goodness, why wouldn’t you look at him when you’re holding him?).

We learned that the last body part to get chubby on Henry is his torso. Chubby cheeks? Check. How about legs? Uh huh. Arms? Like sausages bulging in their animal casings. But his stomach is still flat. There’s nothing wrong with this, mind you. But when I’m blowing raspberries on his stomach (a repeating theme as I’m sure you’ve noticed), it’s nice to have a little more flesh to work with.

We learned that Henry likes to blow bubbles. Drool bubbles. I’ll leave it at that.

We learned that we think (can you learn something you’re not sure of?) he’s starting to teethe. Lately he’s been shoving anything and everything he can get a grip on into his mouth. A friend noticed that there could be something evil and ivory lurking under the bottom gum, and we have to agree. He’s young to start teething, sure, but it’s not unheard of. People have told me that the first two on the bottom, while no walk in the park, aren’t nearly as bad as the top ones. So we have that to look forward to. And, of course, if there is any advancement of the pearly whites, we’ll keep you posted.

And finally, we learned that Henry has one move that can melt the heart of even those most hardened souls. It goes something like this: I’ll hold Henry in my arms, his body pressed to mine, his head leaning against my chest. Another person — Kristen, our friends, stranger on the street — walks up to him, leans over a bit, and smiles (this is usually accompanied by some sort of statement on his cuteness). Henry, at first, does nothing. He’s toying with you. He’s toying with your emotions. But, after two or three seconds (which seem like hours), he’ll smile, and there’s a good chance that the person on the receiving end of the smile will collapse to the ground, likely losing consciousness. It’s those two or three seconds that does it. It’s not too much time that you have to come back with your prototypical “coochie-coochie-coo” or maybe make a funny face, but it’s just enough time that you have to wait for it.

Our son, he’s got timing.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 11:11 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.