Barnabas Monkeypants

(I have to apologize: this isn’t one of my best posts. My lack of sleep and working three straight weekends have left me a shell of my former self. Hopefully, by actually not having to work this upcoming weekend, I’ll be able to recharge and get back into that Monkeypants way you all love tolerate so much.)

If anyone has an inkling to buy me an expensive gift, I’d like a night vision camera. Why, you ask? Well, I need to have some sort of photographic proof that Henry moves around more in his crib than any baby alive.

You see, when I put Henry to sleep at night, I put him on his back in the middle of the crib. Immediately, he rolls over on his side, curls up, and falls asleep. (He’s terrific going to bed, really. It’s the staying asleep that is sometimes a challenge.)

I’ll go in and check up on him after about 45 minutes, and he’ll be in the complete opposite direction from where he first fell asleep. I go back in again, and he’s curled up at the foot of the crib. Sometimes he’ll be pressed up against the side of the crib. Other times he’ll be on his side, his body arched into a letter C. Then, right before I go to sleep, I’ll check one last time, and he’s suddenly back in the middle on his back, as if he had never moved. He’s toying with me.

Henry hasn’t started crawling yet. When he wants to get from one place to the next, he’ll roll. Or skooch. Or pull. But mostly he rolls. But when he will start crawling, I expect him to do laps around the inside of the crib.

So other than the fact that Henry is a shimmyin’ machine, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that the back of Henry’s head, once bald because he slept on his back, is now full of hair. It’s not long like the top of his head (we could make it into a faux-hawk if we were so inclined to gel it up); in fact, it’s short and wispy and very fine and quite soft. But it’s so nice. (In fact, everything on Henry is soft. His hands are ridiculous. Have you ever touched an infant’s hands? Gold, Jerry, gold.) I’m trying to figure out a way to bottle it so, if necessary, I can pull it out at any time and rub it all over me. (Does that sound weird?)

We learned that while Kristen gets constant kisses from Henry (the open mouthed, messy kind), he avoids my cheeks. Even when I shave (and I have to admit I’m lax in that department), there’s rarely a smooch. What I do get, however, are hugs. Plenty of wonderful hugs. His hugs go something like this: with his hands, he grabs each of my shoulders and holds on tight, then he digs his head onto my colarbone and begins to gnaw away. It sounds a little aggressive and slightly messy, but it’s really great. Honest.

And we learned that baby teeth — even the kind that have barely broken the surface — can still hurt like the dickens when chomped down on your thumb. As he’s been teething, Henry has been shoving whatever fits into his mouth and biting and chewing. He will do the same to our fingers (it’s cute: he’ll grab my index finger and drive it into his mouth), but on Saturday, his two bottom middle teeth came out. You can barely see them, but, as he chews on your finger, you sure can feel them. I can only imagine how uncomfortable it is for him, but let me tell you, it’s pretty uncomfortable for us, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 9:10 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.