What We’ve Learned: Week 53
At one point in my life, I was skinny. Tall, gangly, uncoordinated, friends in college lovingly called me a big piece of spaghetti.
(These were some of my best friends, too.)
While I’ve filled out quite a bit since then, I’m still pretty uncoordinated and still tall.
So what does this have to do with Henry? Well, on Monday I took him in for his one year check-up, and although there were tears (his vaccine shots have moved from his thigh to his arms — ouch — and he didn’t like them one bit), for the most part Henry charmed the nurse and doctor and came out with a clean bill of health.
Everyone’s favorite part of the visit was the measuring. Henry now weighs 21 pounds and is 31 inches tall. That means he’s in the 95th percentile for height and the 30th for weight.
My son’s a spaghetti! A real chip off the old block.
The doctor’s not worried — Henry’s growing, he’s happy, he’s hitting all of his milestones — but I still want him to fill out a bit. And while I’m sure that he’s going to be tall and skinny as a kid and teenager, I just hope that he won’t be as uncoordinated as I was/am.
So other than Henry gettin’ all pasta on us, what else have we learned this week, the first week of his second year?
We learned that Henry can stand! All on his own! Okay, okay, it’s only for a few seconds and it’s only when he doesn’t really know that he’s doing it. When he does realize that he’s not holding onto anything, he quickly grabs onto Kristen or me or the couch, but pretty soon, he won’t have to do that any more. (That makes me a bit sad.)
We learned that Henry took his first spill this week that caused a (*gasp*) injury. On Tuesday, he was standing up, holding on for dear life, when he saw super-nanny Silvia coming toward him with some cheese. (Oh, cheese! How he loves cheese!) He let go of what was keeping him upright, reached for the cheese, lost his balance, and crashed, his bottom lip catching the edge of a play table. There was blood, people. He cried for about 15 seconds, but then noticed the cheese again and decided that eating was more enjoyable than crying, and quickly forgot about his fat lip. I wanted to take a picture for posterity, but Kristen convinced me otherwise. We don’t really need to remember this, do we?
We learned that Henry’s sleep has improved, so much so that every other night he’s actually sleeping all the way through. I suspect that it’s because Henry has grown out of whatever phase he was going through; Kristen, however, has another idea. On a few occasions, Kristen has asked Henry to please, please sleep through the night, that we all need to get some uninterrupted hours or else we’re all going to crack. She did so Tuesday and, lo and behold, he complied. Now you’re bound to ask, why doesn’t she do that every night? I’ve asked the same thing, and her answer is simple: don’t go to the well too often, or it’ll run dry. (She’s quite the philosopher.) All I know is that the next night, when she didn’t ask him nicely, he woke up at 3 am. Coincidence?
And we learned that, related to the previous paragraph, Henry is really starting to understand what we’re saying. We’ll ask for a kiss, and he’ll kiss us. We’ll ask him if he wants to eat, and he’ll smack his lips. We’ll ask him if he wants to play with the cats, and he’ll flap his arms and kick his feet. He’s talking all the time, and sometimes he’ll come up with a real word (or something close). It’s great watching him learn (among other things).
What a kid.
