Barnabas Monkeypants

When I was 12 years old, I first read about the San Diego Comicon. The largest comic book convention in the nation, it was the mecca of comic book collectors, and for the past 25 years, I’ve wanted to go. I’ve dreamed of going. On several occasions I even made tentative plans.

For whatever reason — mostly money — I’ve never did make it. Also, in the past decade or so, the convention has shifted more toward promoting the latest Hollywood blockbuster (something that I’m not that into) and less toward comic books (something that I’m crazy about). Well, this past weekend, I headed off to the beautiful (and warm) to San Diego for the first time.

Unfortunately, the comic convention takes place in July…

I was there, of course, for work, where about a dozen times a year, I head off to some meeting in some random city, spend all my time in some hotel, not breathing anything other than recycled air. Stale, dry, recycled air. I wake up at 5 in the morning, don’t go to bed until 1 the next morning, eat terrible hotel food (it’s always the same thing: dry chicken, overcooked beef, tasteless fish), and drink too much wine.

Even worse than the travel, the bad food, and the long working hours, of course, is that I don’t get to see Kristen and Henry for 2 1/2 days. Because the meetings I have to attend always happen on the weekends, it’s even worse because instead of spending Saturdays and Sundays at the park, I have to get fun-time updates from Kristen via text. (That, and me being away from home, has made this What We’ve Learned post be a couple days late.)

This weekend, for example, Kristen bought Henry an early Christmas present — a toy shopping cart. (This was because when I took Henry to Trader Joe’s last month, he had a really fun time with their kid-sized carts.) And I missed all the fun. As he pushed the large, plastic monstrosity (everything large and plastic is, by definition, a monstrosity) up and down the hallway, one of our cats, Cecil, decided that he wanted to go for a little ride. So into the shopping cart he went (Elmo joined him for the ride), and around the apartment he was pushed. This went on for 10 minutes, Kristen tells me, and Henry couldn’t have been happier.

She took some video.

I don’t know if somehow he can translate this talent into a career, but if we find something, he’ll be the best shopper in the country.

So, other than Henry grooving to the grocery store scene, what else have we learned this past month?

We learned that Henry is much more sure on his feet. While not running, he’s walking very fast, swerving all around the house, around the park, around the grocery store. He’s also learned how to walk backwards. Not moonwalk (yet), but a swervey, stumbly walky that gets him back to wherever he started.

We learned that Henry loves reading (and having us read to him). For the longest time, he had a handful of books that he would go to every day, but lately, it’s been a different story. Now, instead of 3 or 4 books, it’s 5 or 6 or 7 a night. And the best thing about reading to Henry now, is that he’ll crawl into your lap, snuggle up, hold your thumb with one hand and turn the pages with the other. The best reading time is, of course, right after a shower, when his hair smells wonderful and he’s nice and sleepy.

We learned that Henry has been peeing in his potty like a madman. A MADMAN! Three, four times a day he goes! He loves it so much, it’s contagious. It’s gotten to the point where Kristen and I want to go to the bathroom on the potty ourselves! (Slight exaggeration.) I don’t really know what the next step is or how long it’s going to take to get there, but we’re all very geared up for #2.

We learned that Henry’s vocabulary has expanded to so many words that I can’t remember them all. (New ones in the past couple of days include “step” and “apple”.) Last week, when Silvia came in the morning (he says “Silvia” now, too), he went, grabbed her shoe that she’d just taken off, walked over to us, handed it to her, and said “shoe.” Then, this morning, he took one of the socks that I had brought into the family room to put on, walked it over to me, and said “sock.” Never have shoes and socks been more exciting.

And we learned that Henry has finally learned how to give kisses with a closed mouth and without him slobbering all over our faces. While baby saliva all over our cheeks was never a terrible thing, I prefer the dryer kind.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 10:41 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.