Barnabas Monkeypants

For the most part, Henry has been the kind of baby that, when playing with a toy or a stuffed animal (or a shoe), can go from one thing to the next without any real huge attachment. Sure, he likes Mouf Mouse, and, yes, he likes his toy car, but if he didn’t play with one of them for a few days or if we took it away and replaced it with something else, he wouldn’t mind a bit. Out of sight, out of mind.

Well, that’s all changed. He’s suddenly become very attached to certain things and will crawl his darnedest to get to them or get very unhappy when we take it away. No longer can we so easily distract him with something shiny or squeaky. Those days are over.

(An aside: One of the pet duties that I’m terrible at and Kristen is a wonder is cutting the cats’ nails. She’ll pick them up, flop them on their back on her lap and start snipping away. Well, our old cat Frank never liked the nail cutting, no matter what we did. Wrapping him in a blanket or towel only made things worse. He’d try and bite and scratch and just in general do not nice things. So, whenever it was time, Kristen would get him ready and I was told to “distract the head” — scratching behind the ears or in the edge of his mouth or his chin. Anything, really, for the 45 seconds it took for the snip snip.)

Back to Henry.

A lot of the attachment to things now is that he finally realizes what they do. No longer are things merely put into his mouth (although he still likes that); now they’re shaken or buttons are pressed or they’re rolled across the floor. And when he finally understands something (discovering that pressing these certain buttons make this certain terrible song play over and over and over), well, watch out, because he’s going to do that 312 more times.

This all ties into a “what we’ve learned” post in that the past week, Henry has learned how to brush our hair. When we left the hospital to bring him home, we were given a “gift bag” of sorts. For $30,000 (or whatever it cost, before insurance), we got some squirt bottles and a bunch of diapers and some funny super-stretchy underpant things that Kristen wore with icepacks stuffed in them. (Don’t ask.)

Oh, and a baby. But that’s not really important right now.

One of those gift items was a soft, plastic brush. It’s the kind of brush surgeons use to scrub with. We were told to brush his head after baths to stimulate hair growth. After waiting for 5 months for hair to appear, we’ve been using it as a regular brush as well (stimulation be damned).

Well, on Tuesday, Kristen sat Henry in front of a mirror and brushed his hair (it’s nice and soft and fine), making a somewhat exaggerated show of what she was doing. She then put the brush in Henry’s hand and dragged it across her own head, saying, “See, Henry, mama’s hair needs brushing, too.” And then (this is exciting, people) when she let go of Henry’s hand, he leaned back in and started to brush her hair on his own. It was more of a bonking motion with brush in hand, but it was clear he was mimicking what she’d just showed him. AND THEN (yes, it gets EVEN better) when she said, “Can you brush Daddy’s hair, Henry?” he bonked my head also. Yes, Kristen and I positively swooned.

Our son, the hair stylist!

There is nothing better than to watch Henry learn how to do new things. Of course, it makes him go a little nuts. The night he learned that a rattle was there to, well, rattle, he woke up four times. Tuesday night, as he pondered perms and braids and fades and whatnot, he woke up three times, each time not wanting to go back to sleep.

It’s almost like Christmas, really. He can’t get to sleep because he’s so excited about what’s going be under the tree the next morning, not realizing that Santa (mommy and daddy) are not waking up until 7:30 damnit because we were up past midnight trying to put the goddamn bicycle together!

Okay, maybe it’s not like that at all.

But it was great nonetheless.

So, other than Henry aspiring to be the next Vidal Sassoon, what did we learn this week?

We learned that yes, we can take Henry to a wedding in the suburbs at 6pm on the 4th of July and have it be okay. Granted, we had to wait out cocktail hour out on the street because it was just too noisy by the bar for the baby, and granted, we only made it through the salad course of dinner, but all in all, we rated the experience a success. We were nervous that taking him out so late (! yes, 6pm is late  for a lil’ guy who is sound asleep by 7) was going to be disastrous for his mood, but he was happy to ham it up with our tablemates and all the assorted strangers who came by to remark on his cuteness. He was so hopped up by the whole experience that he chattered all the way home. We were a little concerned he’d have a hard time sleeping that night, but we got home, he fussed a little when we changed his diaper and then passed out. Woot.

We learned that Henry is getting more and more confident about his locomotion every day. I think the realization that he doesn’t need one of us to get the toy he wants for him because he can go get it himself has really empowered him. When he sees something he wants, he lunges for it. He pulls himself up on the coffee table to better grab at the TV remote. Moreover, he’s not so worried about falling over anymore. When he starts to tip over, he throws out an arm to catch himself. He’s figured out how to hold his body upright when sliding down a slide  and now shimmies himself forward instead of waiting for one of us to give him a push and support him on the way down.

We learned that Henry looks redonkulously cute in a suit. As our regular Monkeypants readers know, we are attending Kristen’s friend Jodi’s wedding next month. Well, last weekend while trolling around the ultra-depressing Old Orchard mall (I say “ultra-depressing” because of the current lack of shoppers and the incredibly desperate SALE signage everywhere), we espied a super sale going on at Janie and Jack. Ordinarily I avoid Janie and Jack because it is just too outrageously expensive, but when we discovered a navy blue suit and matching yellow button-down shirt heavily marked down, well…we caved and bought it. Because we are weak and cannot help but frivolously waste money on what will amount to a stupendous one-time photo op. So…stay tuned! There will be pictures, and lots of them.

We learned that Henry is likely teething again. He’s drooling like mad, he can’t seem to keep his tongue away from the lower left-hand side of his mouth, and he’s whiney as all get-out. If that doesn’t scream TOOTH ON THE WAY, I don’t know what does. It’s affected his sleep, too, which means Kristen and I are back to looking more Night of the Living Dead than usual. And if all that weren’t enough, Henry has also ramped up the separation anxiety to the point that he howls when Kristen leaves the room.

Finally, we learned that two of Henry’s girlfriends may well become best friends. We had Vivi’s parents Meghan and Kyle over along with Katia, Steve, and their daughter, Zoe, for a July 3 barbecue. Zoe was very affectionate with Henry but was quickly distracted by Vivi, who is just a few months younger than her. The two of them buddied up right away and spent lots of time practicing how to jump up and down. (That’s me over there on the left demonstrating the proper technique.) After Zoe and her family had to leave, Vivi kept saying “bye bye” and looking for them. We’re going to have to work on getting some play dates set up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 7:29 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.