Boo Hoo
There is nothing that cuts to the marrow of my soul more quickly than hearing Henry cry. I’m not talking about the whine that he recently learned (the one thing he’s learned that I’m not proud of) or the whimper he often musters up when he doesn’t want to take a nap.
I’m talking about the cries that are more like wails. Tears fly from his eyes. His face, contorted, turning completely red. His hands clutching in a vice-grip fist.
Now he doesn’t cry very often, but there are three times that it’s bound to happen:
Taking a bath. He’s still not into bathing, and although he can go for a few minutes merely looking happy, by the time we’re rinsing him off, the shrieks start happening. They last all the way through the drying part, the lotion application, the diapering, the ever-so-difficult putting on of clothes, and only stop when he’s being hugged and sung to and reassured that everything’s fine or, more likely, when he finally gets some food.
When he’s hungry. This doesn’t happen when Kristen’s around, because she’s quite good about feeding him right-this-second-please-mommy-I’m-hungry. When I’m alone, however, sometimes that 90 seconds it takes me to warm up his bottle or get him into a good position or that realization that he’ll be eating from an inferior, rubber nipple sets him off. The only good thing is that when I finally am in position with the warm bottle, that noise he makes between the screams and the eating — a cross between complete unhappiness and complete ecstasy — is really wonderful.
When he’s been in his car seat too long. For Henry, too long could be 30 minutes or three, you never really know. But he always seems to get ornery, then whiney, then screamy right about 7 minutes from home, so that last mile, when every stop-light seems to turn red just before you get there, is torture. You can’t stop and soothe him, because you’ll just have to put him back in the car seat, so you trudge on, Kristen shushing, me singing, trying to make him less miserable.
The thing is, Henry’s crying is so short-lived and so infrequent, it’s almost a novelty. We’ll say things like, “Remember that time that the baby melted down at the mall?” and it’ll just be that time. He’s so well-mannered, so happy, I think both Kristen and I can deal with his tears every once and a while.
(And, of course, we’ve been saving the tears in a bottle so later on we can rub it on our wrinkles. It has recuperative powers, don’t you know.)
