I am strangely and repeatedly surprised that Henry continues to grow. I seem to expect him to be a static being who will remain a baby forever, but he isn't so little anymore. He has 8 teeth now and he tears around the house like a super-commando on his belly. He yells, "Muh!" when I bug him too much.
I have always been fascinated by human behaviour and have found parenting an infant to be a veritable fun house of stimuli, reactions and reinforcement. Henry, as I'm sure all munchkins are, is extremely observant of his surroundings and continually tries out different sounds and actions to gauge the responses. I have two favorites.
The first is fake coughing.
Henry loves attention. He loves people watching what he's doing and getting to make his funny faces and noises. He is a shameless flirt and is quite confident in his ability to amuse someone once he has hijacked their consciousness. He has a large bag of tricks to get my attention and could write a manual on how to make his Mom laugh if his little fingers could type. His dilemma, however, has been how to reliably gain a stranger's attention.
When he was smaller, people would fall all over him. But now that he's a grabby shopping cart monster that does a lot of random yelling and hooting, passersby are quicker to write him off as a bratty kid and continue without notice.
The little turkey, in his infant wisdom, has overcome this barrier. He has discovered that if he coughs loudly, people will always look. It works 100% of the time. It's also a brilliantly broad-targeted strategy as he will wait until we are near 3 - 5 people before he begins to "choke". This will cause at least 40 - 60% of the unwitting strangers to turn suddenly to see if he needs infant CPR, giving him a variety of suckers to choose from.
Then he can turn on the Henry show. They are putty in his hands.
The second thing he's doing started quite innocently last night as I was putting him to bed. We had been to two separate Superbowl parties, so he was pretty wound up from being Party Baby for several hours. I sat in the rocker and held him while he got all of his alligator-twists and owl-hoots out.
As he was just starting to really settle and drop his head into the crook in my neck, I felt his little body tense a bit. Certain that he was going to thrash one more time before conking out, I was unconcerned.
And then it cuts through the darkness - the scream-fart.
Henry gets a bit backed up now and then with all of the new solid foods and he used to cry when his tummy would hurt. It seems that he has again evolved. The scream-fart is a combination of a fart worthy of a large adult man and a shrill scream. It appears to relieve the pesky abdominal pressure whilst providing a reason to randomly screech. The two things together are certainly greater than the sum of their parts.
In the darkened room, time slowed down and I tried to tell myself to behave like an adult and not laugh as he was almost settled to sleep. I knew he couldn't see the expression on my face, but I was unable to control the massive belly laugh that the scream-fart had caused. I lasted about 4 seconds and then busted out laughing.
Henry, now extremely pleased with himself, also begins to chuckle. So there we are in his dark little room, strongly reinforcing the scream-fart. This is not recommended in the Baby Behaviour Manual.
I eventually got him to sleep and then went to tell Mark about our adventure. I hoped that Henry would forget about this, but I underestimated the positive reinforcement combination of Mom laughing, the relief of farting and screaming at the same time and getting to stay up later. The scream-fart has visited us again today, unfortunately for me, with the same response from me.
I've always wondered how I would handle opportunities to be a proper, adult role model. I assumed that it would be tough to keep a straight face at times, but I had not anticipated this level of assault. I am powerless to the scream-fart. I am, however, really looking forward to the next thing that is too hilarious not to laugh at. I can't even guess what it will be.
