Barnabas Monkeypants

I am old and creaky, and as such, not particularly flexible. My knees pop when I get up, my back hurts, and I think I have a broken a bone in my left foot.

Henry, on the other hand, has no such problems. In fact, I don’t know if he (or any baby for that matter) has a lick of cartilage in his entire body. I also suspect that his innards are made up of the same substance that is found in Stretch Armstrong. At first, I was incredibly gentle with him and would carry him around as if he was some fragile piece of art glass. I’m still careful with him, obviously, but I quickly realized that he’s not going to break if his arm moves or if his leg dangles oh so briefly off the side of his changing table.

This fear was worst when I would put clothes on him. It’s difficult as it is trying to get his arms through his sleeves or his socks on without worrying that something is going to go awry. It also meant that it would take 35 minutes to get him dressed in the morning.

Now, however, with my fears (mostly) gone, I can dress him in under 10 minutes, pulling his legs through his pants with reckless abandon. (It would take even less time, I suspect, if I would cut down on the tummy kisses.)

What I’m saying is this: Henry is very flexible. And we found out just how flexible this week when he did something that isn’t listed as a milestone in any of those baby books: he put his foot in his mouth. Those two things — his foot and putting anything and everything in his mouth — are Henry’s two favorite things, and when he was able to put them together (not unlike mixing chocolate and peanut butter), it was nirvana.

All I want is for Henry to be happy, and if that means five toes in his mouth, so be it.

So, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that Henry and the cats have a developed a love/oh-my-God-what-is-that-thing relationship. Our son sees those cats as his newest plaything, and anytime they walk within three feet of him, we literally have to hold him back from him lunging at them, grabbing onto their fur, and pulling them into his open mouth. Needless to say, Georgia and Cecil give him a wide berth. God help those poor cats when he starts walking.

We learned that Henry’s hair is starting to fill in nicely, but it’s still hard to see in pictures because it’s very fine and very light. Both Kristen and I were toe heads up until we were four or five, and Henry’s certainly going to follow in our footsteps. Blond is beautiful.

And we learned that our son has regressed just a bit in his sleeping, and has begun to wake up two (or even three) times a night. Henry’s growing like a weed — both physically and mentally — and I think that he’s just a little overwhelmed. As such, he doesn’t really like to sleep; he’d much rather be awake and moving around and looking and… well, growing. So he wakes up at 11:30 and at 3:30 and is raring to go. We ask him nicely if he just wouldn’t sleep all the way through, but he just smiles and laughs. We think (and hope) that this isn’t going to last much longer, because as much as Henry is great to be around and play with and laugh with, it’s not so fun at 3:30 in the morning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 8:43 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.