Barnabas Monkeypants

When Kristen was a kid, she had a bad banana experience. This involved her vomiting a recently eaten fruit, likely (grossness to follow) tasting the banana on the way up. Since then, she has not eaten another and, in fact, cowers at the smell of them. She will however eat banana-flavored Runts, which is the perfect candy.

(I had an equally bad experience with scallops when I was 8, and I won’t eat them either. This is usually a boon for Kristen, who gets piles of them on her plate every time I order bouillabaisse at our favorite restaurant.)

Kristen’s aversion to bananas affects Henry more than my hatred of  scallops, as one is a food that you can feed your soon-to-be-6-month-old child and the other lives in a shell and shouldn’t be eaten by anyone. Ever. So I went and bought a couple of bananas the other day hoping that, after the wonders of rice cereal, this would be the next thing Henry ate with great gusto and Kristen would stand several feet away observing the feeding, far enough away not to smell.

So on Sunday I mashed up about an inch worth of banana, added a bit of liquid, plopped Henry in his high chair, and watched as he, after two bites, refused to eat any more. No matter how much we cajoled, how much we smiled, how much we danced, he refused to eat any.

I took a bite of the banana and realized that it just wasn’t ripe enough, so I figured that maybe it was because of the slight bitterness. That was my story and I was sticking with it.

Fast forward to yesterday when we tried again, with the banana ripe enough. I again cut off an inch, mashed it up, added liquid, and set to feeding. Henry’s response, well… let’s just say that Kristen was happy. He again refused to eat the banana! This is a minor setback, to be sure, and this can only mean one thing:

He has to like the squash!

So what else have we learned this week?

We learned that, if Henry really puts his mind to it, he can have an explosive bowel movement that will cause us to have to throw away his pajamas. That’s the kind of determination that will certainly lead to that Nobel Prize we talked about earlier.

We learned that Henry still has his good nights and bad nights. On Sunday and Monday nights, Henry was kind enough to wake up every two hours, meaning that Monday and Tuesday, Kristen and I were running on fumes. (Henry has no such problem because he’s lucky enough to have three naps during the day.) But last night, we put the mini monster^TM to bed at 6:45 and he didn’t wake up until 5 the next morning. Sweet Mary, mother of God, that was wonderful. Of course, this means that tonight he’ll be up at 10, midnight, 2, 2:30, 2:45…

We learned that Henry is at the perfect size right now and we’d appreciate it if he just stuck where he is for a while. Please, Henry?

And we learned that the Federal government has deemed it right to give us $300 dollars because Henry was born last year, even though it was after everyone got their stimulus check. (We also got a bit extra back on our tax return because we added a dependant.) This reminds me of watching the news on January 1, when they always show the first baby born in the new year. The parents always seem so happy, although I wonder if they sat back and realized that because the baby took an extra 20 minutes to be born, they just lost a lot of money on their taxes. These are the things that keep me up a night.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 9:19 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.