Barnabas Monkeypants

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, it’s actually sunny here. And Henry stops to smell the peonies. (The rain destroyed them the day after they all bloomed. Damn you, rain!)

Here he is in the big boy bed. As you can see, it’s just his crib with one of the sides replaced with a short rail. We talked the big boy bed up for a month or so before actually making the change. Henry was super excited about the whole thing. The first few nights, it took him a long time to calm down and just sleep, but once he fell asleep, he stayed asleep. He had similar problems at naptime, and spent about two weeks ill-rested and cantankerous. He’s doing better now, though.

Henry’s very proud of the big boy bed and will show anyone who expresses interest just how he climbs in and gets under the brand-new Lightning McQueen-themed bedding. It’s an exceptionally cute display.

However, now that we’re almost three weeks into this big boy bed business, I think he’s having second thoughts about being a big boy. He wants nothing to do with sitting on his potty (just when we thought his poopy diaper days were behind us!), he doesn’t want to walk up or down stairs anymore, and he’s constantly asking either me or Raphe to, as he puts it, “picky up.” I am slightly concerned about how he will react to being moved into a new bedroom later this summer, and then to his new sibling later in the fall. Oy vey.

Henry has boundless energy and sure does love to run. Sometimes when we pick him up in the evenings after work, he runs down the block instead back to the car, forcing us to chase after him. The kind of funny thing is, he still does his bouncy toddler happy run that’s he’s done since he could run at all. That is to say, he doesn’t have a very even gait or look terribly coordinated when he’s doing it. (Indeed, I’m often worried he’s going to topple over while running.) I attribute this to the fact that he is very tall for his age and must have a very high center of gravity. Note that in the photo to the right, he is the same size as four-year-old Zoë.

Now that we’re going to be a family of four, we need a larger vehicle. As it is, Henry kicks the front seats of the Forester when sitting in his car seat. We would never be able to drive anyone else around if we had two car seats in the back. Plus, Suzy Subaru is going on 10 years old, and has needed expensive repairs each of the last two years. It’s SO time.

So we’ve been hitting up various car dealers to find the right car for the expanded Cheli family. Raphe is vehemently anti-minivan. I am trying to keep an open mind. My must-haves are heated seats and a sunroof. Raphe’s must-not-haves are sliding doors. Henry’s partial to anything that features lots of buttons and hidden compartments. We’ll see how this all pans out.

It’s farmers market season again, which means we spend Saturday mornings in Evanston perusing the goods. Henry is excited about the prospect of more garlic cheese, which he hasn’t had since last summer. Unfortunately, the Wisconsin cheesemonger he adores so much has not yet turned up at the Evanston farmers market. Luckily, we are able to distract Henry from his disappointment with brightly colored flowers and mock threats of making him eat strawberries.

Let’s see…what else can I tell you about. It’s not very exciting (unless it’s your kid, I guess), but Henry has been experimenting lately with using time words. By that I mean, he’s trying to sort how to express when things happened in the past. According to him, pretty much everything that has ever happened to him happened either “yesterday” or “when (he) was a little baby”. So, although he went to Zachary’s party more than a month ago, it was “yesterday” as far as he’s concerned. And although we’ve been reading him Each Peach Pear Plum since he was about a year old, he says “I was reading this when I was a little baby”.

OK, I’m outta gas. I can’t think of anything else interesting to write about tonight. You are all going to have to nag Raphe now to update you on things. It’s been, what, like six months since he wrote a What We Learned post? Get on his case, willya? He doesn’t listen to me anymore.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Barnabas. 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.