Developmental update: 4.5 and 0.5 years

My big boys are four and a half years old, and Reed will be seven months old on Thursday. I thought it might be time for a snapshot look at what they're doing and interested in at the moment. So, from youngest to oldest:

Reed: has started rolling over, both front-to-back and back-to-front, pretty ably. He's interested in eating just about anything. I usually feed him yogurt, applesauce and rice cereal at home, plus these nubby little rice crackers he can hold himself, and he eats anywhere between one and three meals a day depending on what the rest of the family is up to. He also eats table foods here and there. He will almost always reach for apples, so he has had a lot of that, but he has also had squash and other squishy things we're eating. Tonight Theo and I made chocolate cupcakes so Reed had some of that too. He can pick small bits of food up (like cheerios) but isn't that great at getting that food from his pincer grip into his mouth. Though he is interested, for sure. He still spends a lot of time lying on the floor, rolling about and scooting himself up by pushing off from his feet, but he has not yet mastered sitting. He likes being in a more upright position, though, so he spends a lot of time in the jolly jumper, the bumbo seat, and the “baby vegas” exersaucer. Since we keep breaking our dining room chairs we've moved Reed out of his seat that straps into a regular chair and into a chair that attaches to the table, and he's sitting next to Theo for the time being. Usually Reed is leaning over the arm of his chair and trying to grab whatever's on Theo's plate. As for sleeping, it's truly hard to complain, even though Jeff and I still don't get enough sleep. Reed sleeps from about when we put the big boys down (usually between 7:00 and 7:30) until somewhere between 3:30 and 5am. Since he has gone all night (til 6 or 7am) we have been trying to follow the advice of the Sleep Lady Good Night book and trying to hold him off til then, but the result has been that we are up popping a pacifier back in his mouth over and over again three or more times until it's the designated “wake-up” time. It's possible that it would work if we were consistent about it over time but it's hard when it seems like things are always changing—he had a stomach bug about three weeks ago that made him have a BM in every diaper, so then it seemed like he was at risk of dehydration, so I fed him more at night, and then he had a cold and was congested so was waking up more. Last night when we were up from about 3:30 on, and Jeff reported that one of the times he went in Reed tried to nurse on Jeff's arm, it occurred to me that I fed the big boys at 1am and 4am until they were about a year old, and then just at 4am until they were at least 18 months old. So our plan as of last night was that I'm going to try going back to nursing him when he wakes up and then putting him back to bed, at least as long as it stays that he sleeps 8 or more hours straight before waking up. Then of course last night he slept from 7:30pm until 7am with no wakeups. So who the heck knows.