Barnabas Monkeypants

People’s opinions change all the time. For example, when Kristen and I first met, she did not like barbecue or sushi (not at the same time, people; nobody likes that). Now, she loves them! Give her a half-rack of ribs or a couple spider rolls, and the woman will be sated for days. With Henry around, I’ve changed a lot, although mostly for his sake.

You see, the baby loves it when you sing to him. Loves it. Not necessarily kid songs, mind you (although, as I’ve mentioned earlier, he enjoys a little Bananaphone now and again); he really likes 70s singer songwriter stuff. Gordon Lightfoot, Paul Simon, David Gates, Elton John. And even Cat Stevens (although I refuse to sing Moonshadow).

For most of my life, I didn’t like this music. It had little appeal to me, compared with the moody new wave of my youth and the pseudo-intellectual indie music of my 20s. But it’s difficult to sing the synthesizer-heavy New Order to a three-month old, and when I tried to bust out my favorites from the Pavement catalog, Henry grimaced.

So I acquiesced and sang things to him that were about what most babies think about: lost love. (Well, that and drool.) And now the stuff has grown on me. Look, I’m not going to go out and buy these albums, and I’ll never dip into the pool of really bad 70s music (my child will never have to listen to Captain and Tennille, mark my words), but you have to do what you have to do.

And Henry has changed as well. He now loves the swing. In fact, he can’t get enough of it. When he’s a little crabby or a little whiny, we’ll plop him in, strap him down, and start singing to him or reading or just making funny faces, and he’ll just smile forever. I suppose we tried the swing out earlier than he was ready (and, looking back at some of those pictures we took of a screaming Henry in the swing when he was only a month old, he may just have been too small), but I like to think that, like his mother’s newfound love of sushi and my adoration of all things Dan Fogelberg, he’s changed for the better.

So, what else have we learned?

We learned that Henry is okay with someone who is not Kristen or me. For some odd reason, this makes me very, very sad.

We learned that the hair that so eluded our first born is now coming in like wildfire, although seemingly all grouped on a tuft on the top of his head, not unlike a human onion. It’s much lighter than the first hair that he got, and I figure, like Kristen, her brother, my sister, and me, he’ll be a toe head until he’s four or five.

We learned that even when you really don’t have $200 to spend on a video camera, you spend $200 on a video camera because you just don’t want to forget everything. (It is arriving in the mail tomorrow, and we’ll be sure to post plenty of videos for you to peruse.) Growing up, we had a super 8 movie camera (until a jerk broke into our house and stole it), but as much as my mother liked filming my sister and me “skiing” in our back yard (it’s in quotes because a) the skis were these strange red plastic contraptions that were about as effective as wrapping an empty cereal box around our feet and b) the hill in our backyard was on about a 4% incline, though that didn’t stop us from falling over almost immediately after setting off), it was pretty cumbersome to load the film, focus, make sure everything was set, and then go off to the photo shop to get it developed, then drag out the projector and screen, load… Well, you get the idea. (That was some sentence, eh?)

Today it’s much easier. In fact, the camera we bought ( the Flip Mino) literally plugs into your computer and off you go. As much as I admire my mother for filming my sister and I the old fashioned way, I think our way will be a little bit easier.

We also learned that Henry learned how to move an object from one hand to another. Next, we suspect he’ll start dribbling a basketball and try out for the Harlem Globetrotters.

We learned that, for some reason he has yet to explain to us, he’s begun waking up every other hour, starting at 1:30, something that the hadn’t done since he was about 7 weeks old. They say that around 4 months babies go through a sleep regression, and while I’m sure that’s accurate, I don’t particularly care for it.

And we learned that staying home with Henry, which I had the pleasure of doing for nearly 2 straight weeks and which I’ll be doing for another 2 straight weeks starting on the nineteenth of this month, is very tiring, very taxing, sometimes very frustrating, but ultimately more wonderful than my silly ramblings could explain. Every night I go to sleep hoping that I’ll dream of the winning lottery numbers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 9:28 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.