Barnabas Monkeypants

Henry’s sleep has gotten a little better the past two nights, although he’s still waking up a more often than he did just a couple weeks ago. He’s improving, though, and I’m sure, before you know it, he’ll be going through the night again.

Unfortunately, it probably won’t be this weekend. You see, two terrible, horrible things will be happening on Sunday that are so earth-shattering that it will surely rock our family to its core (insert sinister theme music). First off is dreaded daylight savings. Henry was just a little too young to be affected by the falling back in November, but now, as a mature 6-month-old, it’ll sure to send him for a loop as we spring forward.

I’m not sure why it will be so bad for him — it’s not like he has to wake up at a certain time, he doesn’t have a job to go to, he doesn’t have a TV show he really wants to stay up and watch — but from everything I’ve read, it’s brutal for kids his age. And brutal for us.

The second reason he’s going to have some sleeping trouble is that we’re all heading down to Florida on Sunday for a quick trip. Henry will get a chance to see his grandfather again and meet, for the first time, his great-grandmother (who we lovingly call Oma).

Now maybe I’m a little biased, but I think he’s going to charm the pants of that woman, and he’ll surpass all the other 5 great-grandchildren and quickly become her favorite. (Note to other family members: I kid, I kid. I’m sure she loves all them all equally.)

But travelling on a plane, sleeping in a crib that’s not his, being in a different time zone, being surrounded by saltwater fish… it’s not going to be pretty. This is not to say that we won’t have a great time down there, and we’re all looking forward to it, but don’t be surprised if the blog entry for Tuesday goes something like this:

glorp slurg hurp norf kraloob

We’ll survive. Barely.

So what else have we learned this week?

We learned that avacados will not be on the menu again any time soon. After the banana debacle, we tried apple (nope), and then avacado (double nope), so we went back to good ol’ rice cereal and oatmeal, and he was happy. Our previous entries into fruit and vegetables have all been the homemade variety (crushing our own banana, cooking and then mashing up apple), so in desperation, I went out to Target and bought a couple of jars of baby food (organic, naturally). One was sweet potato (never a more palatable color than that orange, I’ll tell you what) and the other was applesauce. We tried that one first and, reluctantly and with many a sour-puss, he ate some. I hope this doesn’t translate into a picky eater later on, because we’re not serving him macaroni and cheese and chicken fingers every night.

We learned that when Henry is asleep in our bed, snoozing between Kristen and me, he likes to shimmy over to one of us and snuggle up. I’ve mentioned in the past at how Kristen has ice cold hands and feet, which have returned after a warm-up during her pregnancy, but the rest of her body emits heat somewhere between the sun and a panini press. Henry has taken after his mother, and is quite the little crock pot, and not 10 minutes after he’s started to spoon with one of us that we wake up in a pool of our own sweat. Fun times.

We learned that Henry’s finally slowing down on the poops (thank you, God) to the point where he’s at one or two a day. This makes everyone happier, because that boy had more bowel movements than [insert high frequency metaphor here].

And we learned that, if you haven’t figured it out already, Henry is the best baby we could ever have hoped for, that every hope and dream we had has amazingly been surpassed. Every day with him is a great day. A day with less sleep, sure, but a great day nonetheless.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 10:14 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.