Barnabas Monkeypants

If you take any advice from me (and, really, why should you) it would be this: If you’re ever considering the option of taking the red eye flight so you can spend more time with your family instead of being on a plane during the day… don’t.

Last Friday I flew out to San Francisco for work and decided to take the 11:15 PM flight back Saturday night. This would put me back in Chicago at 5:30 Sunday morning and back in our place by 6:00, ready for the day. That was the plan.

Everything was going great. The flight left only a half-hour late (not bad in these times). I fell asleep immediately and snoozed through the four hours in the air. I got off the plane, grabbed a cab (a nice, normal, non-racist driver), and walked through the door at 6:15 to find Henry waking up, a big smile on his face and his arms outstretched.

And then I proceeded to collapse from exhaustion and sleep for 6 straight hours.

For the next three days, I was in a complete funk, even more of a funk than usual. It completely knocked me for a loop, and every sleep deprivation issue that I had been dealing with for the past 37 weeks (now, why did I pick that number?) was doubled.

Kristen and I may sound like broken records, but the biggest issue we’re dealing with right now is lack of sleep. I knew that it would be like this early on, but I thought that by 8 1/2 months he would be sleeping through the night all the time and we’d all be happy and refreshed.

I have no clue why we thought this. Everyone we know with a baby around Henry’s age — everyone — deals with this. And everyone has the same issues. And everyone thinks they’re the only one. Sigh.

But that one flight back made everything so much worse. Thankfully, I have no more travel for work until the fall, but when I do, I’ll be happily wasting a day in the air instead of flying overnight.

And I promise that from now on, my posts will be more frequent and more coherent.

So other than making myself even more sleep deprived than before, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that Henry loves puppets. When my sister and her husband came to visit, my mother sent along with them a bag full of animal puppets. Some of them were from when Rachel and I were kids and others were from when my mother was a teacher, but regardless of where they came from, Henry loves them. And more important than he loving them is that it gives me a chance to do animal voices — most of which are in a British accent. (I have to admit that there is no person on the planet that does worse accents than me. Everything ends up being a cross between Irish and Indian. Paddy O’Patel.) Henry particularly likes the skunk (which looks a little like the cats: a plus) and the lion, and when he’s in a silly mood, a few seconds of lion puppet can make him hysterical with laughter.

Check out the video below — the giggling is infectious. (Also check out him getting poked in the eye at 1:10. We’re terrible parents.)

We learned that Henry is that close (I’m putting my index finger and thumb right next to each other) to crawling. He’ll prop himself up on his hands and knees, look around, kick his legs, and start thinking about what to do next. What is next, of course, is crawling, but he’s just not there yet. He’s crawled backwards a couple of time, but quickly gets nervous and stops.  Any day now.

(An aside: Henry has been waking up in the middle of the night on his hands and knees, as if he was sleep crawling. Of course, this makes him very unhappy, and he starts to cry, waking Kristen and I up. And the cycle continues.)

We learned that Henry points at everything. Everything is something exciting and interesting and is deserving of a point. Cecil gets pointed at. The puppets. Kristen, of course. My nose. The inside of my nose. The inside of his nose. Everything. It’s just another great thing to see, because when he points at something, he really, really looks at it. There is nothing more fascinating that seeing your child being fascinated. (If that makes sense.)

And we learned that Henry loves tart. Until now, he’s eaten breast milk and a variety of fruits and vegetables, but nothing with that much taste other than sweet. Yesterday, Kristen cut up a Gala apple and placed some pieces in this strange contraption. It allows him to gnaw on the apple through the mesh without a possibility of choking. The apple, while not tart by an adult’s standard, was very tart for Henry, so every bite, every suck, was followed by a face. (And you know what I mean when I say “face”.) It was hilarious, and, of course, he continued to do it until the apple was mashed up and he became interested in a raccoon puppet.

I can’t wait to give him his first lime.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 9:35 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.