Barnabas Monkeypants

Teeth. Those darn teeth.

Henry’s top two front teeth are finally coming in, and this has wreaked havoc on his nighttime sleeping. Every two hours he wakes up, his fist shoved all the way into his mouth.

It’s been a few months (and a few months with a baby makes everything foggy), but I don’t remember it being this bad when his bottom chompers broke through. We’re trying everything — Motrin (well, its generic equivalent), those homeopathic tablets (that probably do nothing), refrigerated toys that he can gnaw on — but nothing seems to make him any less cranky at night.

And it’s really only at night. During the day and when he’s napping, he’s fine (although he’s back to shoving everything possible into his mouth). When the sun goes down, it’s like the teeth turn into some sort of nocturnal oral monsters, out to ravage the mouth of our son.

Here’s the bigger issue, though. So far, he has two teeth out, another one on top that is nearly broken through and the one next to it that will be arriving any day now. That’s only four. There are many, many more to come. Including molars. MOLARS, PEOPLE! I hear horror stories about the crying and chewing and (ew) drooling and interrupted sleep, and I don’t know what we’re going to do.

I wonder if Henry would consent to skipping all this teeth stuff and going straight to dentures.

Henry? Whaddya think?

So other than the fact that Henry’s pearly whites are terrorizing our peaceful existence, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that two of our friends recently had baby girls (one only yesterday, in fact): Tigerlily and Fiona. Both are very, very cute, both have more hair already than Henry has after 11 months, and both will soon be vying for his affection. Because that’s what he does. He’s a player. So congratulations to everyone involved.

We learned that Henry has learned to press the same button over and over and over again, meaning that, for what seems to be 15 hours straight, we all have to listen to some terrible electronic version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. I know that babies love repetition. I realize that if they find something to be fun or funny or surprising, they’ll do it over and over. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t quickly become so horrible that you want to get up and run screaming out of the room. So help us out, Henry. You don’t always have to press the red button. Go on to the orange. Try the yellow. The green one is calling! Live a little.

We learned that our new favorite trick that Henry can do (and we’re trying to get it on video because it is soul-crushingly wonderful) is that he will roar. Say to him, “Lions like to roar: rrrrooooaaawwwrrrllll!” (And try, if you can, to ham it up as much as possible.) He’ll look at you, smile, and roar back. “Rrrrrruuuunnnnhhh.” It actually sounds a little like he’s trying to poop (more on that later), but after the first time he did it and we dutifully checked his diaper only to see that there was nothing there, we realized that he was roaring. Next up are meows, barks, and the way that mommy yells at daddy to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor.

We learned that preparing for a birthday party is easy when the man of the hour really has no say in the matter. “Henry, you want any special kind of cake?” “Lalalalalala… durrrr…. Uhoh.” “Chocolate it is!” (We sent out electronic invitations to the party a couple of weeks ago. If you didn’t receive one, it’s likely because a) we didn’t think you liked us any more, b) you live in a far-away state or country, or c) it went into your junk mail folder. If you didn’t get one and would like to come and have cake and hot dogs and watch Henry chew on random things, drop me a line and you’ll be sent all the pertinent information.)

And we learned that (pause for a second to warn people that the following paragraph is related to bowel movements; you have been warned) Henry’s poop has become a wonderful, no magical, thing. Poop wonderful? Magical? Let me explain. As long-time readers know, Henry was a multi-poop sort of a guy until he was around 7 months old. Long after he was supposed to go down to once a day (or less), he was still pushing out three or four. Suddenly, however, his GI tract caught up with every other baby his age, and he slowed down, so much so that we’d have to give him some mushed prunes to eat to help jump start things. The past few weeks or so, as we’ve been introducing more foods, he’s gone back to once (and even twice) a day. But the real exciting thing, the thing that is wonderful and magical, is that his poops are now the consistency of Play-Doh. No more messy, loose, running-up-the-back-of-the-diaper poops. No more poops that you have to immediately run to give him a bath. No more thinking, “My god, how does a baby have that much inside of him?” After him learning to crawl, saying “Dada”, not flinging food at me and actually eating, and (yes, it has happened before) sleeping through the night, this is the greatest thing that Henry has ever done.

And I’m not exaggerating, either.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 1:46 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.