Reed

Reed is now 9.5 months old. His skills are: sitting, smiling, laughing, using toys as tools (using one to reach another), and stuffing just about everything into his mouth. He eats more than I ever remember Theo and Beckett eating. Maybe I just didn't realize how much babies like to feed themselves. If I put something on his tray that he can grab himself and shove in his mouth, he will. I have seen him eat a quarter of an avocado in one sitting, a quarter cup of spicy bean and corn chili, tofu with spicy peanut-garlic sauce, black and kidney and pinto beans until the end of time. Favorites seem to be mixed vegetables, like the ones that I get that are frozen. When we've had chicken pot pie the last few weeks, Reed has gone to town on the peas, green beans, corn, soybeans, and carrots from the mix. Especially the peas. He's also tried cookies with frosting (Friday at the boys' Valentines' Day parties), cake, and noodles. He liked beef in the chili I made for New Years Eve. He eats grapes and blueberries until the food runs out. In the mornings he usually lets me feed him things from a spoon, so he eats lots of oatmeal and rice cereal and full-fat plain yogurt. Friday morning he ate six or seven bowls of yogurt (I lost count). No crawling yet, but he's doing lots of sitting, leaning, reaching, lunging, and rolling to get where he wants to go.

His sleep has been erratic lately. Two weeks ago he went three nights sleeping from 7 or 7:30 til 7am. Since then he's been up one, two, three or more times. One night he woke up every hour from 8 until midnight, then twice more before 7am. It looks to us like he's about to start crawling, plus he has four teeth (two up, two down) that are fully out along with three more working their way out now. Maybe he just has a lot going on. The nights I've given him ibuprofen before bed he hasn't seemed to sleep any better. And it's not like he can't put himself to sleep, because many nights I put him down and he's awake and chatting and rolling over for 20-30 minutes before he puts himself to sleep, and many nights I wake up in the middle of the night to him mumbling or singing to himself, and then over several minutes (never crying) he just goes back to sleep. So I'm not really sure. I wish we were all getting more uninterrupted sleep, though!