Barnabas Monkeypants

I’m not much one for routines.

I’d love to be, of course, but I always seem to go astray after only a day or two. I try and set a schedule of doing X for Y minutes every day, but I soon find something else to X and Y. Kristen would love me to stick to a routine of shaving every day and I have every intention of starting to do that. Honest. But it probably won’t happen.

Of course, Kristen and I have been able to get Henry into a good routine, which in turn forces us to do the same. Pretty much our Monday through Friday day goes something like this:

6:00 — We wake up. Sometimes one of us (not mentioning any names but that person just happens to be 20 pounds) wakes up a little earlier, which means we start earlier. Those are not good days. Henry eats his breakfast.

6:10 — Kristen jumps in the shower and I entertain Henry while simultaneously getting various types of bottles ready. (Both those filled and those ready to be filled.) I’ll also eat some toast or cereal. I once considered making bacon and eggs. Thankfully it only took me 10 seconds to snap back into reality. Who has time to make bacon and eggs?

6:30 — Kristen’s out of the shower and we switch places. I can only assume that’s she’s eating some toast or having a bowl of oatmeal, but sometimes I suspect that she’s eating bacon and eggs.

6:50 — We pack bags. Our own bags, Henry’s bags, bags full of cat litter. A couple of times we’ve forgotten various bags (running on 5 hours of sleep can make you do that), but thankfully we’ve never taken the wrong bag to work. (I’m looking at you bag of cat poop.)

7:10 — We load up the car, strapping Henry into his new big-boy car seat (he’d gotten too long for his infant car seat), and head for the train station. Kristen drops me off there so I can catch the 7:20, and then she drives over to the family who we nanny share with, where super-nanny Silvia and Vivi are waiting to play blocks. (Every morning it’s the same there, too. Blocks start the day.) Kristen then drives back to the train station where she finds a parking spot and races to the train to catch the 7:50. Whew.

8-ish to 4:30-ish — We don’t like to talk about this time. It’s a gray, gray period of our days.

4:35 — I get the train from downtown, arrive at Rogers Park station at 4:58 and drive over to get Henry. There super-nanny Silvia gives me the lowdown on the day (how long were the naps, how much did he eat, how many poops did he have, how close is he to crawling). Then I drive back to the train station to pick up Kristen (and usually our friend Melissa) by 5:28. We’re home by about 5:35.

5:45 — Everything’s unpacked and it’s playtime. This could include the jumperoo or the puppets or just rolling around, but there’s always a lot of giggling and smiling and pointing (Henry’s three favorite past-times). We watch him closely for a face rub or an ear pull or a yawn, which means it’s time for…

6:45 — The bath. Kristen, because she’s a lady person and I’m not, is the one who supplies most of the food. (She does a lot more, of course.) Because she and Henry have that going together, I, in turn, needed something that I always do. That ended up being the bath, where we play with rubber duckies and squirting seahorses and washcloths (oh, how he loves that) and try and get him as clean as possible without getting too much water in his eyes.

7:10 — Dried and dressed in his nighttime best, this is often the one time where things are murky. If he’s looking really tired, Kristen feeds him and he’s off to sleep. If not, we play for a few minutes and feed him some yogurt or fruit or something tasty to pass the time until he can’t hold back the yawns.

8:00 — He’s asleep and we start dinner. The next two-and-a-half hours usually goes by in a murky haze as we try and have conversations and eat dinner without falling asleep too soon. By 11 we’re asleep too and hope that Henry can make it until morning without waking up, so we can start all over again.

I have to say, I really like this routine. I like everything about it. And most amazing is the fact that on a daily basis I’m waking up at 6 in the morning. That is something that I never in my life thought I would do.

So other than wondering where the day goes, what else did we learn this week?

We learned that Henry has figured out that when things go behind his back (a cat, a toy truck) they just don’t disappear. So now, he looks around, looks behind him or behind me or behind a door. That brain of his is always working, it seems.

We learned that pointing is still Henry’s favorite thing to do, so much so, that he even points in his sleep. I don’t know if he’s dreaming about looking at cats or waiting for us to kiss his finger, but chances are when we check on him in his crib, that finger is straight out.

And we learned that Henry is just about the happiest baby there is. The first thing we hear about him from friends (right after how darn cute he is) is that he’s got the best temperament of any baby they’ve known. And it’s true. He’s always smiling, always happy, always ready to play or eat or give you a hug. Kristen and I lucked out, for sure. It’s amazing because as much as we love him (and boy howdy do we love him) for being our son, he being how he is has equalled where he came from. It’s a pleasure to be around him and we couldn’t be happier. Everyone needs a Henry, I think.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 7:59 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.