Barnabas Monkeypants

On Wednesday, I flew out to New Jersey — to my company’s home office — for a planning session.

Now a significant part of my job is traveling, and each year I have to go on around 12 business trips. The bad thing about these trips is that it takes me away from Kristen and Henry. The good things are that the trips are short (no more than 2 days) and I’ve been accumulating a lot of airline miles so I can get a couple of free flights this summer if we decide we can (afford to) go on vacation.

This trip was no different. Off I went Wednesday afternoon, and I walked through the door this morning at around 10:30. And as I’ve done this many, many times, Kristen has gotten to be quite an expert at doing solo parenting in getting Henry up and dressed in the morning and feeds, bathes, and gets him ready for bed in the evening. He’s a pretty easy going kid, and even when there’s just one of us around, it’s not too difficult.

Well, according to Kristen, that’s changed a bit now that Henry is not only mobile, but super mobile.

We used to be able to sit him down with a toy (or toys) and walk away for a minute (with an eye on him, of course) and get dressed, make lunch, brush teeth, etc. But no sitting any more for our Henry. He’s running around like a mini-madman just as he needs to get his shoes on or his coat or hat.

We’ve been thinking about attaching a tether to his pants so he can’t get very far or, if he does start wandering, it’s just in a circle, like some May pole in his bedroom.

I don’t have to travel again until consecutive weekends in March, so who know where he’ll be by then. Likely plotting the overthrow of the household as Kristen is making his oatmeal.

So, other than Henry getting to be a handful, what else have we learned this month?

Well, we learned that Henry’s learned how to throw a tantrum. Not terrible ones, yet, but when Kristen went to pick him up from our nanny-share’s house on Wednesday, he just didn’t want to leave. There was just too much fun to be had, you see. So Henry dropped to the floor, going limp as a noodle, and he screamed bloody murder. Kristen and super-nanny Silvia just looked at each other as if asking “what the heck just happened here?” as he writhed on the ground. Kristen picked him up (not without some difficulty), gave him a smooch and a hug, and he got better, but this is surely signs of things to come. Shudder.

We learned that Henry’s vocabulary has continued to expand, and each day it’s a new word or two. (Today, we taught him “pocket” and “potato”.) The funny thing is, he still babbles incoherently, but it’s mixed up with real words. So he might say, “open up jee joo rah lah lee apple button.” Henry, what does “jee joo rah lah lee” mean, exactly? He’s also stringing words together. So it’s not just “more”, it’s “more hummus.” It’s not just “bath”, it’s “go bath”. Soon he’ll be composing poetry. We’re certainly bad parents in that we haven’t been writing down all his words, but I guess it’d be around 40 or so. Fun stuff.

We learned that Henry has become an expert at flicking light switches. Now he’s been turning lights on and off for a while now — it’s nothing new — but now when we hold him up to the switch, he’ll flick it up and say “on” and flick it down and say “off”. (Actually, he says “oss”, but we know what he means.) I don’t know why this makes me so happy.

We learned that Henry still has all his hair and is still in his crib.

And we learned that there is nothing more fun than having Henry go over to the bookshelf in his room, bring one of his favorites to you, back up into your lap and sit down, and follow along with the story. His body is always warm as he rests against your chest, his hair smells fantastic, and when he holds onto your hand in between page turns, it melts your heart. It’s wonderful when he repeats words from the book (dog! horse! feet!), and it’s wonderful when he mimics what’s on the page (play the drums, blow the dandelions, pick a booger [yes, because from Yummy, Yucky, “burgers are yummy but boogers are yucky”). As much as I love playing with him and feeding him and giving him a bath, there’s nothing better than reading him books.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 10:15 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.