Today, for Henry’s six-month checkup, due to Dr. Cahan being out and Dr. Weinstein being at their suburban office, we saw a third physician, Dr. Taxman. (Our nanny, who is studying to be an accountant, thought a man being named Taxman was possibly the funniest thing ever.)

Now Dr. Taxman was great with Henry, was very helpful and patient with the numerous questions I had for him, and gave a very thorough inspection of every nook and cranny of that baby. But then he suggested something that he and I differed on.

He asked if Henry was sleeping through the night. Now the answer to that isn’t easy. He has, usually when Kristen and I need it the most, slept from 7 PM to 5 AM the next morning. (We give him extra kisses those days.) But those are few and far between. Usually, he’ll wake up at around 11 and sometimes at 2. (Those days when he wakes up at both times we each withhold one kiss. I think he can tell the difference.)

He then suggested we begin sleep training where, when Henry woke up in the middle of the night, we should just ignore him. Eventually, he said, he’d go back to sleep. Ignoring him would mean, more than not, that there would be a lot of grumpiness, a lot of groaning and moaning, and a lot of tears (on both Henry and our parts). I just don’t know if I’m comfortable sitting idly by as our baby — our precious, delicate, 18-lb baby (okay, so he’s not delicate) — cries himself back to sleep, even if it means 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of wailing.

For some babies, this works. I’m just not comfortable trying it out on Henry.

Now we will start training him with baseball. I have a bat and mitt at the ready.

Our house is full of old furniture, comic books, clothing, and knick knacks that usually elicit strange responses from people who first come into our place. (What is that exactly? And where did you get it?) I think if I could live at any other time, it would be in the 50s, mostly because, even if McCarthy’s groupthink ruled the country, at least everything looked good.

Everything had a nice, clean line — nothing too busy, too garish.

And the music was wonderful. Early rock ‘n’ roll, the best country music ever, terrific instrumentals (they just don’t do those anymore, do they?).

For kids, this was the Golden Age. There were wonderful television shows, comic books, and cartoons that all just seemed to have that something — innocence and mirth all mixed together, I think — that made everything that much better. Well, over the past few years, I’ve been buying (when on sale, naturally) DVDs of some of those cartoons and, as you know, I have plenty comic books from that time, too. What I didn’t have were the records.

Then Kristen discovered this amazing site: Kiddie Records Weekly. Each week, the people who run the site upload between one and four different records (usually from the 40s or 50s, although occasionally from the 30s or 60s). You can download the ones you want and put them on your iPod (or whatever mp3 player you own). They are, to put it bluntly, amazing. They are entertaining, educational, fun, silly, and just plain terrific.

My favorites so far are:

Inkas the Ramferinkas: With voice talents of Pinkie Lee (who had his own popular kid show for years) and Thurl Ravenscroft (known by many as the singer of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and many Disney voices), this tells the story of a prehistoric dove that saves the brontosaurs from the raw meat eaters. Great songs.

Fuzzy Wuzzy: My grandmother used to sing this song (not as good as Rosemary Clooney does here, but I liked it nonetheless), and between it and its b-side (“My Chocolate Rabbit”), you have 5 minutes where you can dance around the house with your 5-month-old son in your arms.

Gerald McBoing Boing: A lot of you know this story by Dr. Suess, but having it read by the Great Gildersleeve (actor Harold Peary) makes it even better.

Happy Habits: So you want your child to say please? To wash up before eating? To play well with others? Well, Arthur Q. Bryant (better known as the voice of Elmer Fudd) tells you how.

Assorted Space Age Singles: Just listen. You won’t regret it.

I’ve only listened to a couple dozen so far, but if you don’t download one or two and put listen to them on your way to work, you’ve just got no heart. No heart whatsoever.

I know that Kristen, Henry, and I will be listening to these for many years to come.

More to come…

Now, with that out of the way, I have a funny story for you.

As much of an egomaniac this blog may make me seem, I am pretty humble. Honest. Here’s an example. For the past year, I’ve been taking writing classes at the Second City Training Center, which is the school attached to the comedy group’s theater. For the past couple of months, my class has been preparing a show (titled, lovingly, “The Devil Went Down to Denny’s”). Opening night was Friday.

I don’t know how I feel about the show. I think parts of it are funny, and I’m proud of what I wrote (I suppose), but it’s not as if it was produced on merit. My fellow students and I finished the program and Second City was obligated to do this for us.

So it opened on Friday, but nobody I know came (probably because I didn’t tell anyone the show’s specifics, such as the all important “when” and “where”). But Kristen got mad at me because I haven’t been talking about it, so here it is:

If you want to go to the show, it’s every Friday at 9 PM at Second City (which is on the corner of Wells and North Ave in Chicago). Tickets cost $10. The show lasts an hour, and there are at least a couple of laughs somewhere.

That’s not the funny story, however. After the show, we had a post-opening celebration at a bar across the street. All the writers and actors and the director went, and we all had a drink or two (or in many cases three or four). Now I’m not a drinker. I often tell the story of how when we moved into our last apartment the landladies gave us a bottle of champagne. When we moved out three years later, we took the champagne with us. Also, I wasn’t really going to drink much because Kristen was at home, 9 months pregnant, so I wasn’t going to do anything that could impair my ability to drive like a maniac to the hospital if necessary.

So I had one beer. (A $6 beer, by the way, which never makes me happy. That’s lunch, people!) I got home at around 11:30 (Kristen was already asleep), and went to bed.

Here’s the funny part (finally, right?). At about 6 the next morning, I feel a poke at my stomach. I wake up, and Kristen is standing there next to the bed.

“I need you to come with me,” she says.

This is it! It’s go time! Go! Go! Go! So I jump out of bed (as much as I can on a Saturday morning, a morning after I had that one beer), and follow her.

“Are you having contractions? Did your water break? Are you okay? Is it go time?”

No, not go time. She just wants me to look at the cat litter box. Because it smells really bad. And she wants me to do something about it.

At 6 in the morning.

This is not the first “false alarm” from Kristen. Last night, for example, I woke up at around 3 to see her sitting up in bed. Go time, you’d think, right? No, she was just eating some peanut butter crackers. Last week, I was in the living room and she calls out to me, “Raphe, come here. I need you.” I go rushing into the bathroom to find that she’s run out of toilet paper and needs me to get her another roll out of the hall closet.

Does she not know what every call across the apartment signals? Or that her sitting up in the middle of the night eating crackers could mean something?

The one good thing about this, though, is that I’m ready. Ready as I’ll ever be.

I think.

However, since things started ramping up for Barnabas, we’ve been going nuts. We painted two rooms. Reorganized offices, guest rooms, and storage lockers. Yard saled. Constructed countless pieces of furniture. Framed and hung pictures. Bought rugs. And even had time to play with the cats. Sleep, on the other hand…

And, except for one or two things, the place really looks great (if I don’t say so myself). There are still some things that have to get done that I cannot do (that ceiling fan in the dining/family room has to get hung by a professional and we have to get rid of that radiator in the guest room which I’ll need help with), but I think overall we’re ready.

Preparation is not easy.

It’s a good thing that after the baby comes, everything will be a piece of cake.

Right, honey?

I’m hoping that Caroline can start our first satellite fan club in Essex in the near future, and I’ll be keeping everyone posted on her progress.

So, last night we packed Kristen’s bags for the hospital. We have been putting it off for a while, instead doing other important chores such as eating ice cream and giving and receiving foot rubs, but at around 9 last night, Kristen felt some… rumbling.

Well, rumbling isn’t really the proper word. More of odd feelings in her lower abdomen — like a cramp — and tinglings in her legs. I don’t think I have to tell you that I was ready to drive to the hospital! Instead, we looked on the Internet and poured through all 142 baby books to see what was happening.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), they were just some Braxton-Hicks contractions (or false labor), and although they were uncomfortable and made falling asleep a chore, and Kristen’s still pregnant. But we decided that the next strange feeling may not be a warning, and we got to packing.

We had everything on our list except for two things. The first was a pacifier (or two or three), and we’ll be heading off to buy some tonight. The second was phone numbers.

Here’s the thing. I’m sure some of you want to know when Kristen gives birth. And while the national news will likely take a few hours to pick it up and break into your prime time television programs, you want to know right away. Right?

So, here it goes. E-mail me or Kristen (or Caroline is Colchester if you’re one of our European fans), and give us your cell phone or home phone number or whatever means you want to hear about this. I’ll probably post something here (with a picture or two), but it won’t be right away (or, really, any time soon).

If it’s by cell phone, you’ll get a text. It will likely say how big he is, what time he was born, what skin tone he has (I’m thinking he’ll be an Autumn, but Kristen’s sure he’ll be a Spring), and the Swiss bank account number we’ve opened in his name (Legos aren’t cheap).

If it’s a regular phone, you’ll get a 20 second call, but no bank numbers (the nurses might overhear).

Got it? Send me or Kristen your information, even if you’re pretty sure we already have it. Doesn’t matter. We just want all of it available in the same place so if I have to use my cell and not hers, there won’t be any confusion.

And no 900 numbers. Perverts.

Having a baby is expensive.

It’s almost like opening up a store. (Ah, retail as a simile for parenting.) The start-up costs are huge. You have to buy fixtures (crib, dresser), gussy the place up (painting), stock up your merchandise before the first customer comes in the store (onesies, bedding, toys), and advertise (this blog [which doesn't cost anything, per se, but it does take up some of my time]).

And then, when you finally have your grand opening, people flock to the store and buy stuff.

Okay, the metaphor ends there, but after all the things that we’ve bought (and have been bought for us), we don’t really have to buy anything else for a while — except for diapers and other poop-related products. It’s more of a wait and see so that maybe we’ll need this or we definitely don’t need that or I can’t believe we ever lived without the other.

Either way, our bank account will be happy once we stop having to buy everything in preparation and start raking in the bucks (remember, we’re selling photo rights).

For other people, it’s CIA-like monitoring of the baby’s every move. (The woman who sold us our sheets confided in me that she hooked up a video camera so she could watch her baby constantly in the crib.)

And for others, it’s complete and utter foolishness in not vaccinating them for fear of autism. (Autism is extremely scary; not vaccinating your child is scary. The fact that vaccinations do not cause autism means that not having your baby get those shots is child abuse.)

For me, it’s bumpers. What are bumpers, you ask? They’re the plush crib “wallpaper” that they say prevents your baby from hitting their head. Do they cushion the blow? Of course! Do they also cause babies to smother to death? YES! And no child of mine is going to smother next to a crib bumper!

(While that is a bit of a wild exaggeration, but the American Academy of Pediatrics says not to use them, and if you can’t listen to an academy, who can you listen to?)

Bumpers were first introduced in the good ol’ days when the crib bars were so far apart, kids could get their heads through them. So, instead of moving the bars closer, they added another thing for parents to buy. Well, eventually, everyone got smarter, and the bars are now all a regulation distance from each other. They haven’t, however, stopped selling the bumpers.

Sure, they now have very thing ones and mesh ones that are breathable, but really, why take the chance for anything to possibly tangle, strangle, or mangle Barnabas? (Nothing is supposed to be in the crib when they’re an infant. No toys, no pillows, no blow-up dolls. Nothing.)

Of course, buying a crib set was more difficult. You see, they all come with bumpers. Kristen volunteered to use the fabric from the bumper to create some sort of curtain accent, but I figure she really wouldn’t have much time to do crafty stuff in the near future.

So I went the whiny route. Those Lions sheets I linked to earlier? The ones that were stupid expensive? Well, I went to a local shop (one for crazy organic people) and asked if she would be willing to order the set without the bumper. You’d think these companies would like a customer’s money regardless of what they were buying, but she had to cajole them into breaking it up.

But they did (and at a nice discounted price, seeing as how the bumper is the most expensive thing in the set). The set, sans bumper, should be arriving soon and will be that nice final touch to Barnabas’ room.

His safe room.

1. I put the crib and dresser together. This is a momentous achievement seeing as how, if Kristen were to give birth to Barnabas today (which is not a good thing and we don’t want to happen), he would have a place to sleep. (Note: we have yet to buy a mattress for the crib, but that’ll happen soon. I promise.) From carrying the pieces up the three flights of stairs to final assembly, it only took about 4 hours (and that included a break for lunch and a short nap — look, it was a hot day and I was tired and I deserved a nap). And, while I’ve complained a lot about Wal-Mart in the past, the pieces didn’t turn out so badly, with only a small blemish on each thing (which was easily remedied by just turning things around).

2. The weather was fantastic. As many of you know, I loathe the hot, humid summer days that haunt this city. I’m wont to sweat… a lot… and when I sweat, I become cranky and ornery. The past couple of months, however, have been decent, and while I still get a good sweat on now and again, it’s been quite reasonable. Oh, how I long for those cold winter months where I can bundle up instead of trying to shed as many clothes as possible.

3. It was Kristen’s birthday. Sunday we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art to look at the large Jeff Koons exhibit that’s in town. (A note on Koons specifically and modern art in general: I really like art, all kinds. At one point in my life, I was very much against stuff that was too modern — silly installations, ridiculous video productions, a small red dot on a large canvas — but I’ve come to enjoy a lot of it if, when I look at it or hear it or watch it, it makes me feel something. But I think that art really fails when you need a monograph to tell you what the artist meant in different situations. If so, if the art really doesn’t speak for itself and needs someone to promote it, then I don’t think it works. Also, I think that an artist should be the person who actually creates the art. In Koons‘ work, he conceptualizes it, and then someone else builds it. To me, that’s missing the point of art entirely.)

Anyway, we walked through the museum and then wandered along Michigan Avenue for a while. We sauntered through the Macy’s and were mere feet away from seeing a would-be shoplifter get tackled by store security. If only we had our camera. We had planned to go out to a favorite place for dinner, but it was closed on Sunday (closed? how dare they!), so we went to another favorite place instead.

You say you forgot to wish Kristen a happy birthday? Get on that, people!

4. We washed, folded, and put away Barnabas’ clothes. Let me tell you something, people. There is nothing that will melt your heart more than folding baby clothes, because they are a) very cute and b) very tiny. Cute + tiny = knee-buckling adorableness. (You will find that noted in the inside cover of most math books right below the quadratic equation and the Pythagorean theorem.) Especially cute were the newborn items, because they were so small, it’s inconceivable how anything could even fit in them. I’m not sure if we’ll ever be folding these things again, of course, as soon, with a crying baby and little or no sleep, the onesies will be tossed willy-nilly into the dresser drawer.

So that’s good. The only thing not good about the weekend was that, as we were driving around yesterday, Kristen found and plucked out several gray hairs from my head. My worrying has finally begun my inevitable transition into old-manhood.

Goody.

But in the meantime, I’d like to continue my tirade against Wal-Mart.

You see, I’m going to admit something that I’m not proud of. It has torn my insides apart and keeps me up at night in fitful contemplation. Okay, here it goes…

We bought our crib at Wal-Mart.

Yes, yes. I said it. After proclaiming many times that we would never shop there again, we turned around and bought the Barna-bed and dresser from them. The thing is, we did research, we read reviews, we looked at safety, and compared prices, and the cribs there are what made sense. (We bought this one — I don’t know if it’s “mod” [most businesses don't really understand what modern is, I think], but it will look cool in his bedroom.)

There are some very neat and hip cribs out there that cost more than $1,000 (for example, this one is quite cool, but my god it’s $1,700!!!), but I’m not sure why you’d want to buy that. Cribs are pretty much universally safe nowadays (they have to be, with the cost of lawsuits and recalls), and this is not an heirloom that we’re going to pass down from generation to generation (in fact, it’s probably not a great idea to do that anyway).

Back to Wal-Mart, or as we like to call it, the eigth circle of hell. You see, they don’t actually sell the crib at the store. You order it online and then they ship it to the nearest store and you can pick it up. This “site-to-store” program should, in principle, work. It does for other businesses, such as Blockbuster or Borders or whatnot. Of course, at those places, they usually hire people that usually have some sort of customer relationship skills.

No, not at Wal-Mart.

So, on Tuesday, after work, we drive out to the store (right near the Leaning Tower of Niles, remember?), head back to where the site-to-store pick-ups are to be made, and press the appropriate button.

And then we wait. And wait. And wait.

Occasionally, people would pass by us and page for the appropriate person to arrive, but they never actually showed up. The “back room”, as they all referred, seemed to be a vast and desolate place where employees can never truly escape. At least that’s what I think, because nobody seemed to want to come out of the warehouse door. (Now the break-room door, that was used quite a bit. Slackers.) We called the store number to ask for a manager, but were put on hold, and after 5 minutes, we just hung up.

Here’s the crazy thing. The same people would pass by us time and time again, and they would just ignore us or smile. A couple of people couldn’t help us because they were going on their break. But instead of getting someone who wasn’t on their break, they just kept on walking.

Eventually, we left because Kristen nearly passed out from hunger (a slight exaggeration). We drove over to a slightly creepy restaurant, ate some sandwiches, and returned to Wal-Mart. This time, Kristen and I split up, me in the back of the store paging and paging for help, and she at the front in the customer service line.

Eventually, someone came and helped me (and another couple — who had twin infant girls), but even then, it was nearly a half hour until the packages came out from their warehouse. (I was also told that someone would be available to help me put the boxes in the car, but they, too, never arrived, so I did it myself.)

So as we drove away — at 9 o’clock — we made a blood oath to never, ever, EVER, shop there again.

Unless, of course, one of the things we bought was defective. Then we have to go back and do it all over again. God help us.