Barnabas Monkeypants

Oh, hey. Hi! I bet you thought this day would never come. Raphe is out returning some crap from Ikea (leftovers from the bed debacle he wrote about some weeks ago), so I thought I’d do hubby a solid and take care of today’s WWL post.

As you all know, we have two cats here at Casa Cheli: Cecil (aka CC) and Georgia (collectively known around here as The Bananimals, The Whiny Feline-ys, or Those Goddamn Cats). What you probably don’t know (but may perhaps have deduced, given their nicknames) is that these cats are insane. The crazy didn’t really show until they’d been with us a few months. But once they were fat and comfortable and secure, they let it all hang out.

They fight constantly. They howl at doors when we lock them on the other side. They tear up the furniture. And every morning at about 3:45, they gallop up and down the hallway for a minimum of ten minutes. They fight. They fight. They fight.

The cats are not happy about the baby. He monopolizes our attention and he makes unpredictable jerky movements that usually end with a fistful of cat hair in a clammy hand. They give him very wide, very wary berth.

This does not stop the cats from wanting time with their favorite humans, however. And to get our attention, they have turned up the dial on the annoying behavior. I’ve been getting sick of this, so I finally just stopped closing doors behind me every time I move from one end of the house to the other in hopes that they’d just calm the heck down. Now I let them join us in the family room after Henry’s asleep. And while they used to leap on the countertops and snatch errant pacifiers, now they mostly just lay on the sofa with us. Success!

…Or so I thought. Sure, they lay on the sofa with us, but they also lay on the sofa ON us. The moment they spot a lap, they are in it. The moment there is a reclining body, one of them is mounting the belly. As soon as one of us is stationary, one of the cats is right there to take advantage of the warm body. Granted, there are no more bloody brawls at the kitchen door. But the constant demands for attention are possibly even more annoying than the usual caterwauling and carrying on.

Anyway. What does this have to do with Henry, and what we’ve learned? Well, this week – nay, this month, really – we’ve learned that co-sleeping (that is, sleeping with the baby in our bed) is a good way to placate a crabby baby, but perhaps not the best way. We had been letting Henry sleep in our bed because he went through a particularly rough growth spurt that had him nursing every two hours or so for several days running. I was so tired from constantly getting up with him that I finally just let him stay in the bed so I could half-sleep through his marathon feedings.

As it turns out, like the cats, once you give an inch, the baby takes a mile.  Suddenly, it’s not good enough to just nurse him and then cuddle him for a few minutes before putting him in the crib. No, now it takes upwards of half an hour of sleeping next to him (yes, with boob in mouth) for him to fall asleep. And since we’re not swaddling him anymore, he’s not this neat little bundle of motionless baby. Instead, he splays out spread eagle between Raphe and I and kicks all night. And because the tastiest meal around is right there next to him, he wants to constantly snack. Yes, it is wonderful to have Henry’s soft little body between us in bed. But he has become so insistent about getting his way lately that it has also become possibly even harder to get a good night’s sleep than it was before we began these co-sleeping shenanigans.

And that brings us to our other big lesson for the week: crying it out also sucks. You see, to get Henry to go down for the night and to get his sleep back on schedule, we did what so many doctors recommend, and let him cry until he fell asleep. Granted, the two times we did it, it took only 10 and 20 minutes, respectively, but those were possibly the worst thirty minutes of parenthood to date. There is simply nothing worse than listening to your baby cry. He sounded so plaintive and also so incredibly pissed off. But he got it. And now he’s back to putting himself to sleep at night without the big production.

(Sheesh, this post is running long. I’ll wrap it up.)

Other stuff we learned this week:

We learned that pureed carrots look exactly the same on the way out as they did on the way in.

We learned that Henry now makes very good sustained eye contact. He has long made eye contact with us and with other people, but he didn’t maintain it for very long. I think this is a sign of him maturing socially.

We learned that babies can apparently sometimes get hives after they’ve been sick for several days running. I took Henry to the pediatrician this morning because he woke up covered it big red welty blotches. Raphe, after consulting the Internet, diagnosed them as hives. I insisted on taking Henry to the doctor anyway because 1) I wasn’t going to leave him at the nannyshare looking like that, 2) I don’t believe that The Google is the last word when it comes to identifying skin ailments, and 3) the blotches were frankly frightening. Dr. Taxman declared the blotches were hives. When I reported back to Raphe, Mr. Smug all but said “I told you so.” (Raphe’s smugness, however, is not something I learned about this week–I’ve known about that for a loooong time. I love you, honey!)

We learned that Henry has rediscovered his tongue, and lately there’s nothing anyone can do to get him to keep it in his mouth. He doesn’t know how to lick, so it’s just hanging out. Every now and then it connects with some part of me and…well, yuck. It’s slobbery. Also, it’s not just his own tongue he’s interested in: he also wants to see – and more importantly, touch – mine. Henry’s fingers keep trying to find their way into my mouth. Double yuck.

Okay. I’m not Raphe, and I’m out of practice when it comes to writing, so I don’t have some cute way to end this post. It’s novel length, anyway. Maybe none of you readers has even made it this far.

[Raphe here. I've been trying for nearly a year, since I started this thing, to get Kristen to write something. And all it took was for me to nearly go insane sitting in suburban Chicago traffic heading to Ikea. While I certainly don't want to do that again, I wouldn't mind Kristen doing more writing.]

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 9:53 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.