He's much less stable on his feet than I remember the boys being when they were 18 months, and he falls over a lot. He has a funny little stumble-waddle, where he barely picks his feet up when he walks. When I was home with him Wednesday this week he had a major mouth-bleed twice in a matter of hours. It looks like he split his frenulum. I actually had to pick out chunks of his own flesh from between his bottom teeth. There was blood everywhere!
The 45 minutes between when the big boys arrive home on the bus and when we sit down to eat dinner is a crazy, crazy time, especially (as has often been the case lately) when Jeff is out campaigning and I'm by myself. Even if Reed has been home with me all day, and especially if he's been at daycare, he needs time with me. But the big boys have to come in, drop their school stuff, use the bathroom, and then find and do their homework. It's not yet been a struggle to have them do their homework, because they seem to find it interesting and fun, but because they can't read the instructions (and even those of us who can read the instructions still find the Common Core instructions inscrutable sometimes), an adult needs to be hands-on pretty much the entire time. Then there are multiple papers that a parent needs to sign every night, and dinner needing to be prepared. So lately I've been putting Reed in his highchair with a crayon or pencil and paper so that he can do his "homework" just like his brothers. He is so happy to be doing what they are doing that he will scribble on the paper or eat the crayons for a good while.
About six weeks ago I was reading the blog about Theo and Beckett when they were about this age, and I was stunned that I had reported that they loved reading, that they pulled books out to have read to them, and that Beckett in particular would often sit reading to himself for 20-30 minutes. Reed wasn't doing any of that six weeks ago, and I was a bit alarmed about how deprived of reading he has been, how it was all our fault for not reading to him as much as we did with his brothers, etc. And then within a week, maybe partly because I did start making a concerted effort to take opportunities to read to him, and maybe partly because he became developmentally ready, he became very interested in books. He's not spending 20-30 minutes looking at books like Beckett did, at least not yet, but he's spending 5 or 10 minutes, and he's sitting still to turn the pages and look at several books at a time.
Friday Reed and I finally got to spend the day visiting Auntie Alexis and the boys' first cousin, Mary Kate!
Oh my gosh Reed. I'd cry too. -Anne
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