Barnabas Monkeypants

We spoil Henry rotten.

There, I said it.

And, really, every parent/grandparent/aunt/uncle spoils babies, and if they don’t, they should. Look, we’re not buying Henry a gold, diamond-laden rattle (not yet anyway), but when we see something that looks like it would be fun for him, we fork over the cash. And he loves this stuff, so where’s the harm? (No talking, bank account. You have no say in this.)

The only type of toy that I don’t want to buy him is that which makes the always annoying, electronic music. That stuff makes me want to shove pencils in my ears. But pretty much everything else is okay by me.

Last weekend, Kristen found a Kangaroo Climber for sale on Craigslist. This huge (and ugly) contraption is now sitting in our living room. It is a behemoth. It is hideous. It dwarfs pretty much everything around it except for the couch. And Hery loves it.

We sit him up at the top of the slide and he’s scoot himslef forward until he can whoosh on down. He doesn’t want Kristen or I to hold him while he goes down, so instead we hover nervously lest he fall the 8 inches and bruise our hearts. He stands on one side of the toy and Kristen or I will be on the other, and we play “peek-a-boo”, with our heads popping up and down in the holes.

Good times.

Then this past Saturday (rainy, cold) we all headed out to the mall to do some walking. The mall we chose — the Northbrook Court — is a posh, swanky one, and as we walked through Neiman Marcus, all these wealthy older women were falling all over themselves to get to Henry. (This has nothing to do with the story, per se; I just wanted to mention that Henry’s cuteness translates to the high-brow.)

After about ninety minutes strolling through the mall, Henry started to get a tad cranky, so we knew it was time to leave. As we were walking to our car, we passed by a toystore, where, in the window, was an orange Rody horse. Now Henry is not even ten months old, and he pretty much likes every toy we hand him, but he took one look at that orange horse and he literally tried to jump out of Kristen’s arms and hug that thing. (And when I say literally, I mean literally. Our friend Barb hates it when people say literally but mean figuratively, but in this case, it was true. Kristen had to hold him tighter lest he leap into glass.)

We make a detour into the shop, pull the Rody down from its display and onto the ground, and plop Henry down on its “saddle.” Well, never has he looked happier. He starts to bounce and buck and laugh and it immediately became clear that he had to have one. I mean, this was instantaneous love. They had other colors as well (it comes in a rainbow), so we pulled down a green one and put him on that, and while he hopped a little, the whole time he was staring at the orange one.

So we bought it. We had to. And he loves it (although not as much as the cats).

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Barnabas. 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.