Barnabas Monkeypants

Our evening ritual is pretty set in stone.

We play until 6:20 and then head off to the bathroom for the daily tub. Scrubbing in all the cracks and crevices is quite  fun, especially his chubby ankles and wrists. Then we dry him off, apply the butt cream, diaper, and put him in his pajamas.

Normal stuff, right? There is nothing out of the ordinary here. But our Henry is no dummy. As soon as we get one of his legs into PJs, he starts to cry in protest. But he’s not really crying. There are no tears. There are no sustained wails. It’s a pathetic moan, actually. A moan of protest for him to not go to bed.

Henry is wonderful at pretty much everything. He rolls like a champ. He smiles at everyone. And he shoves more objects into his mouth than Dom DeLouise. But he is a terrible actor. Henry, as you read this 15 years from now, you can’t fool us, pal. We know you’re tired, we know you’re hungry, we know that you want to stay up and play some more. But we also know that there is absolutely no reason to cry. None.

See, we know what real cries are about, son. The mouth is completely open with the tongue vibrating with a high frequency. Tears are streaming down your cheeks. When we try to make you happy (jiggling, smiling at you, squeaking Sophie the giraffe), there is no consoling you.

But when you do the fake moans, the crocodile tears, the slightest distraction makes crack a smile.

Sometimes I want to give him some pointers. Like, don’t go from 0 to 60 in a snap. Go slowly, work your way up from a soft groan. Meander around a whimper. Then, when we’re all aware that tears may come, then you start to cry.

I’m only sorry that by the time we have that oh-so-important father-son talk, when I can really impart my fake emotion advice, you’ll already be too old.

So what else have we learned this week?

We learned that so many things that Henry does, so many things that we take for granted, are incredible. I mean, he can now sit down, toys strewn about, and can actually entertain himrself for 5 minutes. That’s just wonderful. I mean, he’ll sit there, reach for one toy, stare at it a bit, shove it in his mouth (of course), and then, if it merits such a thing, he’ll shake it or twist it or toss it away. More and more, he’s become a real person. Amazing.

We learned that he can have a cold for a long, long time. The sniffles became a full-blown cold about 10 days ago, which eventually developed into a cough, which meant that breathing and sleeping were a challenge. Because regular cold medicine was out of the question, we tried many things to make him feel better. Voodoo didn’t help. Nor did hugs and kisses. So we just had to wait it out. And wait and wait. And now the sniffles are nearly gone and the coughs only happen once ever 90 minutes. We hope that by May the mucus streams will be dammed. We can only hope.

We learned that the best possible thing that Henry has done is also the most subtle. When we’re playing together, and Kristen or I are sitting next to him, sometimes Henry will, while not even looking at us, reach out and put his hand on our thigh. He’ll hold it there for only about 5 seconds or so, but just that little “hey, you still there, daddy?” is a great feeling.

And we learned that Henry’s hair has now grown in enough so that, if ever I get the urge, we can manipulate it into a faux-hawk. I’m not saying I will, and I’m not saying you should check back daily for possible photos, but it could happen. And if it does, it’ll be awesome.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 8:42 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.