I’m no fan of bugs, but if I see one crawling around the bathroom (the favorite haunt of the many legged ones), I’ll grab some toilet paper and go smooshing. If Kristen sees said bug, there will be screams, prancing around on tiptoes, and likely tears. (This is where I, as the husband, come swooping in and crush that arrogant arachnid, saving the day. Sometimes I wear a cape.)

In Maine and Massachusetts there were, thankfully, no bugs to be found in the hotel rooms. Outside, however, was another matter. I don’t know what makes it different up there in New England — is it the salty sea water? the crustaceans? the accents? — but they make their bugs big. Really big.

Especially the mosquitoes, which I think were actually half-puma. They were gigantic and hairy, and when they landed on you, you could feel their weight. If you tried to swat them away, they fought back!

When we finally left Maine, Kristen and I were covered in bug bites, huge welts all over our arms, legs, and back. Not only were they itchy and uncomfortable, but they were red and quite obvious when wearing short sleeved shirts, shorts, or, in Kristen’s case on Saturday, a short red bridesmaid dress.

I’m still a little itchy, but thankfully the boils have begun to subside. Next time, we all have to remember to bring a gallon of bug repellent.

We were planning on going out for dinner (with our downstairs neighbor Lillian looking after Henry), but plans changed when our little boy went and got himself sick. This morning, after waking up from his first nap, he threw up, and this afternoon, proving that the morning puke was no isolated incident, he threw up again two times in rapid succession. (The first time was on the beach, the second time was in the stroller on the way home from the beach. Guess who got to clean that up?)

When we got home, Henry was sleeping in Super-Nanny Silvia’s arms (he was so tired that after he hugged her he just started to snooze). He woke up when we came over to him and even though he was obviously under the weather and exhausted, he still smiled at us.

It was sort of funny, actually. He would smile at us and laugh and try and play but then, moments later, he’d groan and moan and whine. We’d give him a hug, and that would perk him up until he’d start smiling again. That wouldn’t last, and he’d start moaning again.

Kristen fed him and tried to put him to sleep at 6:45. No go. I took over and did my fatherly best. After rocking him and singing to him for 20 minutes, he fell asleep in my arms but as soon as I tried to put him down in the crib he’d start crying. No, not crying. Howling. I tried again. After 45 minutes with a miserable baby wide awake, Kristen’s second shift began. She was able to work her magic and Henry finally fell asleep at 8:30.

Of course, this won’t last, as he’ll be up three or four times throughout the night, and Kristen’s birthday, which was to include sushi and perhaps a glass or two of wine, will be spent hugging and consoling and rocking a sick baby.

These are the willing sacrifices we make when we have a wonderful, amazing little kid.

I’m not so worried about this because he changes his looks more often than Bela Lugosi. But it has given us a funny moment or two.

(An aside: we have two sets of friends with young babies right around Henry’s age. In both cases, the parents are of different backgrounds [I refuse to say "race"; black or Hispanic or Asian is not a race. But I digress], and each has had situations where complete strangers have complimented the mothers on how cute their babies were and then asked where they were adopted from. First off, mind your own business, nosy strangers. Second… MIND YOUR MANNERS!)

Back to my story. Anyway, so a few weeks ago, we were at the grocery store, and I had Henry strapped to my chest in his baby carrier. He and I wandered (well, I wandered; he had no choice) over to the deli to get some lunch meat. I grabbed a number and waited for it to be called. It shortly was by a short middle-aged Asian woman. But before I could ask for 3/4 lb of the Sara Lee honey turkey sliced thin, she looked at me and pointed at Henry.

“Where the mother?” she asked. (Now I don’t want to sound racist or anything, but she had a really thick accent and spoke in semi-broken English — missing verbs and articles — and I’m trying to be as accurate as possible.)

“What’s that?”

“The baby. Where the mother?” She was a little angry now.

“Uh, over there,” I say, pointing to where Kristen was manhandling a cantaloupe.

The deli woman looks over at Kristen, then at Henry, then back at Kristen. She smiled.

“Ah, the mother.” She nodded. Then she got very serious. “Now what you want?”

I knew it was going to be a great trip when Henry expressed his displeasure wtih my impending departure by having an explosive poop 10 minutes before I had to jump in a cab to go to the airport. More poop came out of his body in that single poop event than has come out in a very long time. It was everywhere, and Raphe was nowhere, so it was just me, Henry, and the neverending smeary poop. I took it as an omen – and a good one at that. Great things were afoot!

The two days I spent in Denver were amazing. I got to catch up with Jodi’s mom (hadn’t seen her in more than 10 years!), get to know a little about Jodi’s fiancee (we hadn’t yet met), stroll around downtown Boulder, see Buffalo Bill’s gravesite (ask me sometime about the characters in the Buffalo Bill Museum…they were straight out of the Far Side), and ride an Alpine slide (woo!). I also got more consecutive hours of sleep Friday night (all spent dreaming of the cutest little round head this side of anywhere, natch) than I’ve gotten in a long time. AND I got to spend time with Jodi, which is just priceless. I couldn’t have wished for a better short getaway.

Jodi and I have seen each other more the past year than we have since college, and we’re going to meet again in several weeks for her wedding. There is simply no way for me to express how incredibly excited I am about this wedding and how proud I am to be a part of it. Jodi spent a long time wandering in the proverbial desert and to see her so happy now – well, it just warms my heart. Between Raphe and Henry, my life is as close to charmed as it can be, and my dear friend deserves that same shot at domestic bliss.

So, here’s to 33, Jodi! I love you as fiercely as any member of my family. This is going to be your best year yet.

That week in California was one of the best of my life (and I hope Kristen had a good time too). It began with a bright orange Mustang convertible (we never lost it in a parking lot, that’s for sure), continued with a lovely cottage at the same resort where John and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned, was full of tasty meals and wonderful weather, and, of course, a bag of the best cherries I think I’ve ever eaten.

Things have changed in those 5 years. We bought an apartment. We gained (and lost) many cats. And, most importantly, we now have a Henry in our lives.

But it’s been 5, wonderful years. I can’t wait for the next fifty.

Of course, I hate being away from home, especially on weekends when I get to spend so much more time with the family, so to make me feel a little better, I check the site out to look at some pictures of the greatest baby in the history of the world. (It’s true, you know. I’ve done research. There was a baby in 13th century Tanzania that nearly came close, but Henry is still in the lead.)

So I log on, and, lo and behold, there are four comments for the most recent post. Four comments! Huzzah! But, after looking at them, I just have one question for you, readers: Why the hate? Yes, we love Kristen, and yes, it was an enjoyable post, but with every compliment, does there have to be an attack on my poor, delicate person?

We may have to start blocking IP addresses if this continues, people.

You see, in the morning, as Henry wakes up, all smiles (and recently all groans), we like to pull him into bed with us so we can all lay around and smile and squirm and chat (his new favorite thing to do). With the old bed, Henry would sink into a deep pillow-top valley, never to be seen again. A new bed, we hoped, would allow him to actually have the ability to move around.

So with Illinois refund in hand, Kristen, Henry, and I headed of to Ikea Saturday morning.

(Funny thing about the drive. You know those green signs you see on the highway that show upcoming exits? It’s either a city or a street or a neighborhood. Well, as we are on I-55, about 15 miles outside of the city, there was a sign for I-355, and underneath it wasn’t any of those things. It just said: Suburbs. What the!? We are in the suburbs! Was this a road to nowhere? Some bizarre circuitous route to hell? It got very cold when we passed that sign, I’ll tell you what.)

Anyway, we get to Ikea. I’m not the biggest fan of this place. For the most part, the furniture is cheap and not great quality, but we tested out the mattress and it seemed pretty good and they had a bed frame that was fetching. Now Ikea is, for the most part, self service, where you have to grab all of the different pieces and boxes yourself, but with big pieces, like beds, they have employees there at the ready to help you make your long and complicated list and to bring everything to you after you pay. Also, we had to have everything delivered, another step in this process, meaning that after paying for the bed frame and mattress, we had to walk over to where they brought the stuff out, see that, yes, those were the items we paid for, and then have another person arrange them to be delivered to our house.

Are you still following? There will be a quiz.

So we bought the bed and frame and we scheduled the delivery (between 4:00 and 8:00 PM on Monday) and headed on back home where I proceeded to get incredibly sick with the stomach flu; just as I was recovering from the bronchitis that knocked me out for a month, this takes me down. (It was so bad that I was out of bed for all of about 2 hours on Sunday.)

By Monday, I was healed enough to go to work (I had deadlines that had to be met), and ready to get home that night to put the bed together (because, it being from Ikea, you have to put everything together yourself). Well, a few things went wrong. First, that 4-8 window? Well, the delivery van arrived at 11:30 in the morning. Silvia, super-nanny, was here to accept it, but it was annoying nonetheless. Second, a key piece of the bed — that being the sideboards — was not delivered. Why not, you ask? Well, because we never bought them. Yes, friends, you actually have to buy them separately. But the clown (I call him that lovingly) that helped us with our order never told us that we needed to buy it.

Wouldn’t you think that an Ikea employee, working in the bedroom department, would know to place such an item in our order (well, the customer service representative who Kristen spoke with on Monday certainly didn’t think so)? All was not lost, we thought, as we still had our old, generic bed frame that we could put the new boxsprings and mattress in and just head back to Ikea in a few days to pick up the missed pieces. That would’ve worked IF THEY FIT. But Ikea being a Swedish company, everything is in damnable metric, and no matter how much I pushed an shoved (and boy did I push and shove) they wouldn’t fit.

Disgusted, frustrated, and angry, I grabbed the car keys and drove back to the store that we shall not mention ever again. (And, in case you were wondering, yes, it is in the suburbs.)

I got back at 8:30, exhausted (remember, just 36 hours earlier I was kneeling in front of the toilet making horrible animal noises) and still angry, and proceeded to put the bed together.

We like the bed. It’s comfortable. The frame puts the mattress a little high off the floor, but we’ll get used to it. This morning, Henry woke up at his usual ungodly hour and, rolling around, he said he liked it too (no more sinking into the plushy valley). But we won’t forget all the hoops we had to go through to get the damned thing.

I have to pat myself on the back and say that I’m an excellent patient, meaning I do all the things that I’m supposed to: sleep a lot, drink plenty of liquids, and stay far away from dairy (which makes everything related to mucous a lot worse). Kristen, on the other hand, is a terrible patient (she’ll probably refute this, but it’s true). She refuses to nap, she goes to bed too late, and I’ve actually seen her sacrifice a goat in the back yard to please the gods and get the evil illness out of her. Henry is taking after me on this if it’s the last thing I do.

While I’m a good patient, when I get really sick — high fever, horrible coughs — I sort of break down. On a couple of occasions I’ve actually hallucinated during the night (one day you should ask me to tell the story about how I helped the ants make their ant holes by doing their division for them; did you know that ants don’t know their three times’ table?). Another time, when I had a really high fever, Kristen forced me to take a really cold shower and, standing naked as freezing water beat down on my back, I started to cry for no reason whatsoever. Bawling actually.

Good times.

So, I guess I’m not that good of a patient am I? In fact, Henry’s a better patient than I am, and he’s just five months old! Having a child is very humbling.

On Sunday Kristen was knocked on her butt with a nasty stomach bug, so bad that it didn’t really improve and she stayed home from work yesterday. (I’m sure she was just devastated — DEVASTATED — to no go in on a wonderfully cold and snowy day.) While this in itself is never a good thing, the fact that we have a young’n in the house meant that he, too, was likely to catch whatever she had.

So starting Sunday evening and all through Monday, Henry pooped with much greater frequency than his already much-too-often rate. I’ve noted this in the past, but most babies Henry’s age are down to one poop a day — some even skipping days between bowel movements. Not our son, who continues with his three or four a day. Our doctor said that, while not particularly common, we shouldn’t be worried because he’s gaining weight (boy is he ever) and not overeating.

Here’s the thing about Henry going to the bathroom. Right before he goes to the bank to make a deposit (this cliche is going to be the next great thing, people, so start using it on the ground floor), he gets very, very squirmy. He’ll twist his hips, lift his pelvis up and down, flail his arms and legs, and generally just lets everyone know that there’s something on the way.

Then he’ll stop, make a face not unlike what you’d expect someone to make while pooping, and there it goes. (Kristen has captured this face on film just once — it’s quite a rare sighting — but we’ve yet to release it.  I think we’ll break it out when Henry brings his first girlfriend home to meet us.)

This squirming is neither good nor bad; it just is. And this squirming is not relegated to his waking hours, as he does the same thing when he’s asleep. This is good for only one thing: when you walk into his room where he’s napping, if he’s broken out of his swaddle, he’s gone to the bank (see? it’s catchy); if he’s still fully swaddled, he’s just waiting until you change him into a clean diaper to go. (Oh, yes, he still does this.)

So back to yesterday. With his stomach problems going full force, Henry squirmed for eight straight hours. Poor kid. Thankfully, all that squirming meant he slept pretty well last night and today he’s been much better.

Oh, and Kristen’s feeling a little better, too.

Ready?

This past weekend, after Henry woke up from a nap, Kristen and I made a baby sandwich, which means I held Henry in my arms, Kristen wrapped her arms around me, and we gave him kisses and made funny noises and got him giggling. (Baby giggles are really quite fun.)

After we got him good and worked up (right after a nap is always the best time for this) and smiling and flailing about, Kristen looked at me and said, “Before he was born, I never knew I would love this baby so much, did you?” I said that of course I knew I’d love him this much, but then I had to change a diaper so I forgot about the whole thing.

Well, late last night, as I was supposed to be finishing up the first draft of an extremely exciting slide deck I was writing, I instead began thinking of what Kristen said and about how she was right. The way I feel about Henry is  so different than I had expected, and it’s different than any other love I felt — from Kristen, from my family, from Francis (poor Francis).

I mean, I love Kristen a lot. I would do anything for her. (In fact, I once said that, if necessary, I’d beat someone up to defend her honor. Instead of her feeling proud and safe, she laughed at me. Obviously someone loves someone a little more than someone else. Not naming the someones. Wait, I’m confused.)

But I love Henry differently. Not more or less than Kristen. Just differently. Maybe it’s because he’s the fruit of my loins. (I love that saying.) Maybe it’s because he’s completely dependent on us to keep him going (ie, change his diapers). Maybe it’s because he can smile at you and you practically collapse on the ground because it’s just so amazing.

But I get this ridiculous feeling every time I see him, and when I get home from work, I’m practically running up the stairs so I can pick him up and hug him and play with his hair and make him laugh. I always knew that I would do that, but I never knew that I’d want to do that so much.

I guess that’s what I like best about being a father. Not actually doing all the things I love to do with Henry — playing and reading and giving him a bath — but the way I feel when I’m doing it.

Great, great stuff.