Barnabas Monkeypants

I always try my hardest not to exaggerate when talking about Henry and Kristen.

(I’ll wait while you pick yourself up off the floor. Back? Good.)

But this past weekend I was more nervous than I have been in more than 9 months. Why, you ask? Well, Kristen abandoned us went on a short overnight trip to see a friend in Colorado. Now I’ve taken care of Henry for full days plenty of times (and enjoyed every minute of it) and I’ve put him to bed on my own as well with no problem, but I’ve never had him all by my lonesome through the night.

Lately, Henry’s been a bit clingy, especially with Kristen. He wants a few more hugs, wants nursing sessions to last a little longer, and needs you to linger  little longer when putting him in his crib. This has been happening not just during the day or when we put him to bed at night, but also in the middle of the night when he’s been waking with a little too much frequency. While this is never a fun thing (waking at midnight, 2, and 4 never is), it’s at least bit easier when there are two of us and when one of us has working breasts. (Note: that’s not me.)

So in preparation for a bad night, I had 4 — count ‘em 4 — bottles at the ready. I hunkered down to sleep on the couch in our family/play room, just outside the door to Henry’s room. And even though I was only 10 feet (if that) from his crib, I had the baby monitor perched right next to my ear.

Well, exhausted (more in anticipation than anything else) I went to sleep at 9:30. And I waited.

Nothing at 10, nor 10:30. Eleven was fine, too, but at 11:30 Henry woke up not just crying but screaming. I ran to the fridge, grabbed a bottle, ran to Henry’s room, and frantically tried to soothe/feed him. And… it worked. He ate, burped, and fell asleep in my arms.

Sweating profusely, I stumbled back to the couch and collapsed, dreading that this would happen again in just two hours.

But… it didn’t. Henry slept through until 6 the next morning, and he woke up in a great mood. I did, too.

The rest of the day was your typical father/son fun. We went for a walk (twice), went to the park (ditto), drove out to Costco to get some tasty seafood, and, of course, got matching tattoos. (“Mother”, naturally.) When Kristen got home that night, Henry was asleep and smiling, curled up in the corner of his crib (as usual).

I guess the moral of the story is that I can take care of Henry on my own and she need not worry. (Honey? Please, please, please never leave again. Please.)

So other than Kristen escaping for a night of sleep, what have we learned this week?

We learned that Henry has got waving hello and goodbye down pat. Okay, he needs to work on the wrist a bit, but when we or our friends wave at him, he waves back, and even occasionally grunts out a “buh-buh”, which is as close to bye-bye as we need.

We learned that Henry has discovered his… er… privates. Whenever we take off his diaper, whether to change it or put him in the bath, his hands shoot down there and he starts grabbing for his goodies. We’re not really sure what to do. We don’t want to chastize him. I mean, he’s not doing anything wrong, really, just finding out what’s happening in the nether region.  I suppose it’s just part of him discoving his body. As soon as he yanks too hard and finds out that it hurts, he’ll probably stop. Hopefully.

We learned that Henry is still fighting eating anything that isn’t pureed, but has improved in that his kid puffs I wrote about last week aren’t immediately spit out of his mouth but instead lets it roll around on his tongue and makes wonderfully funny faces.

And we learned that Summer may finally be here. Sure, it’s still cold at night (the heat actually has come on the last three days), and, yeah, it rained nearly every day this week, but it’s getting darker later, the ice cream shops are opening for the season, and the lifeguards have started to show up at the beach (although who in their right mind would be swimming in Lake Michigan now is beyond me — the water temperature is in the 50s!). Winter in Chicago may be brutal, and there are weeks in July and August that can be unbearable, but for the next 12 weeks, there won’t be much complaining on the part of the Chelis.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 9:40 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.