Barnabas Monkeypants

I’m not much of a video game player any more. Before buying a Wii a year-and-a-half ago, the last system I owned was a Sega Genesis that I bought my senior year of college (lo many years ago), although I only owned one game (an ice hockey game that my best friend and I played incessantly).

Before that (lo even more years ago), my mother bought my step-father a Nintendo NES, and while he didn’t play very often, one summer my sister, her friend Jennifer, and I played a lot. We’d stay up until all hours trying to master a Super Mario Brothers game, each of us yelling at the other, rooting each other on, telling when to jump or duck or shoot fireballs.

I wasn’t very good. (Jennifer was.) And to make matters worse, every time that my sister and her friend tried to give me advice or remind me of what was coming next, I’d invariably screw up, Mario biting the dust.

However, when nobody was watching, when I had no pressure on me, I was great. (Okay, maybe not great.) But I was able to win the whole thing and rescue the damn princess only when there wasn’t anyone around.

What does this have to do with Henry? Well, he’s started to stand on his own. He pulls himself up, grabs onto something and, occasionally, he’ll let go and just … stand there. For about 5 seconds. And then he looks at us and BOOM, he’ll fall on his butt. Standing is Henry’s Mario!

It’s hard, however, to not watch him. I mean, we see him doing something new, something exciting, and we can’t not just stare at him, right? And if we don’t watch, how will we help him get over his performance anxiety? I mean, when we go to his soccer games and his piano recitals, are we supposed to close our eyes when he’s ready to score or when he’s playing that particularly difficult section of a sonata?

He’ll be walking soon. (Too soon, frankly.) And I just hope that we won’t have to watch his first steps by poking our head around a corner.

It certainly will hamper our filming of his every action.

So, other than Henry standing up for himself, what else have we learned this week?

We learned that Henry’s weaning himself off of baby food. While lunch and dinner used to be 2 jars of some pureed yuck, he now is eating more table food. Today, he ate some fresh steamed green beans (although not happily), some cheese, a yogurt, two chicken nuggets, some crackers, oatmeal, some waffle, and a jar of something orange (turkey? squash? who knows…). Within two weeks, I think he’ll be off the baby food altogether. And I can’t wait. (That stuff — especially the “meat” — does not smell good at all.)

We learned that Henry’s length is getting to be a problem for clothes. As I wrote last week, he’s really long, so his 12-month pants are highwaters. But the 18-month pants that are the right length (or close to it) are too big in the waist, so they fall off. What we need are draw-string pants, but not many brands make them. And I don’t think they make baby belts. Wait, Kristen is telling me they do. But they’re mostly by frou frou labels too rich for Cheli blood. No matter. I don’t think any of Henry’s pants have belt loops, anyway.

We learned that funny noises are the surest way to make Henry smile. Actually, we’ve known this for awhile. But let me tell you, we have to come up with new ones every few days. Once we make a funny sound too many times, it becomes old hat, and Henry stops finding it amusing. Kristen and I are so adept at inventing exciting crazy sounds, we’re like a couple of demented white (oh so white) scat singers. Just this evening, Kristen crossed a belch with a duck call and cracked Henry up for a good twenty minutes at bedtime. She nearly puked from all the burping, but that’s the price you pay for a happy baby.

And we learned that Henry’s hair is, miraculously, starting to curl. Around his ears and in the back, tufts of white-blond hair is curling up. Really, people. Can he be any cuter? I can’t imagine he can.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 9:38 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.