Developmental Update continued

This is the 800th post of Team Lovebo, over just about five years. It's been a fun way for me to keep track of milestones, record funny events or thoughts, and share photos and videos of our lives. Thank you for joining me and our family here!

More about Beckett and Theo at 4.5 years old:

Beckett is effusive, fun and enthusiastic. He is a risk-taker and runs fast and hard at all times. He loves being rough-and-tumble with his classmates and friends and brother Theo. He loves wrestling and hippo rides on mama's back and being affectionate and touching his friends and family. Beckett also loves words and letters and everything verbal. He loves to rhyme and switch the first letters of words and learn the meaning of every strange word he encounters in adult speech and books. Beckett knows more of his letters even though he's not as good at actually writing them. Even when it looks like he is not paying attention, he is watching and listening and often blows me away with what he has quietly observed and put together to make sense of a situation. He also has an incredible memory and looks for patterns to figure out what will happen next based on what has happened before. Beckett also loves imaginative play, both by himself and with Theo, and often narrates his imaginative play out loud as a book is written (“'Let's get them, guys!' Lightning said. 'On my way!' Finn yelled.”) He is very competitive and does not like losing games, even of chance, and can get bent out of shape when Theo out-runs him on the way home from school.

Theo is thoughtful, kind, and precise. He lives to draw and color, and he has a specific aesthetic that he likes. He went with Jeff to pick out the Christmas tree because I suspected that he had a particular idea of what the tree should look like. He loves to draw ninja turtles and superheros and his family, and gets better and better every day. When he wants to draw something new, he usually asks an adult to draw it first, which I resist because 1) I'm worse at drawing than he is, 2) I feel like he should try himself, to improve his skills, and 3) I feel judged by his discerning eye when my attempts inevitably do not meet his expectations. Theo is sometimes a more considerate friend, such that when we're playing a game and he's winning he'll say, “It's okay, you'll catch up too, right?” Theo is more easily entertained by himself, including in the bathtub. They've been taking more baths separately recently because Theo loves to “swim” in the bath, going underwater and holding his breath and opening his eyes while he takes strokes. Theo is precise with his letter-writing even though he's less interested in what letters mean or how they combine than Beckett is. Theo is a wonderful older brother to Reed, playing with him, singing to him, smiling at him, and delighting in Reed's sounds, turning over, and smiles. When we are busy getting out the door and I have to set Reed down to get everything together to leave, and Reed gets fussy, it is usually Theo who attends to Reed and tries to calm him down. 

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.

Meatball Soup

Reed has had a diaper rash on and off for a couple weeks as he's had diarrhea. Our childcare provider, Rachel, suggested a baking soda soak bath. It seemed silly to use enough baking soda in the regular bath to make a difference, so I put some in the soup pot and soaked his tiny hiney in there. It turned out that he quite enjoyed it, and he was very secure in it. The funniest part was that Grandma Joanie and Grandpa Stu were here for the day and had left to take the big boys to school, and came back expecting that Reed would be in bed for his nap. They came into the kitchen talking and relaying a story about school drop-off, and then realized Reed was just chilling in the soup pot in the sink.

Beck likes taking baths with Baby Reed. Theo doesn't so much because Reed's seat takes up a lot of room in the bath and Theo likes to stretch out (see post from last week). Both of them like pouring water on Reed after I have soaped him up, and especially squealing "Look at his tiny penis!" Way to give the kid a complex.

 I like this picture because it captures how Beckett feels about Reed. He likes him, but he's also pretty mad at him for taking his Mama away from him and for hogging all the attention.

Grandpa Greg was too sick to come but Grandma Kathy came for a day visit a week ago and we had a great time reading and playing together!

First parent-teacher conferences

Thursday night Jeff and I went to our first parent-teacher conferences. I was (still am) getting over a yucky cold so I wasn't in peak form but Grandpa Stu and Grandma Joanie held down the fort at home, making dinner and taking care of the three little guys so we could go. The conferences were only scheduled for 15 minutes each, back-to-back, but we got there a little early for Beckett's and got about 25 minutes with his teachers, and then got to Theo's teacher at the end of her scheduled night, so we had about 40 minutes with her. We totally lucked out, getting the teachers in such a relaxed and easy setting.

Theo's teacher, Ms Donna, told us about all the things they are doing in his classroom to encourage learning through exploration and play, and about their observations of Theo in their environment. They see Theo as watchful, somewhat timid with his peers, and yet very clear about what he wants to do. Theo spends a lot of each day drawing and dictating or writing descriptions or narrations of his drawings. He has definite preferences about the writing implements, the size and type of paper he uses, and the amount of time he needs to complete his pictures to his satisfaction. Ms Donna conferred with us about how much of the songs and the group time he is absorbing. I have heard him singing many of the classroom songs, and retelling stories they read, and trying out the games and skills they're practicing together. I'm still puzzled that his teachers can't always figure out what he's doing when he pauses to think before he does something. They seem to think he may not be understanding what's going on, or is confused about what to do next. Our experience of Theo is that he is quite certain what he wants to do, but he's thinking through the steps and doesn't care what he looks like while he's figuring it out. But what's reassuring is that his teachers clearly love and appreciate him, and they unquestionably support what he wants to do while encouraging him to move out of his comfort zone to try new things. Theo tells us about the little girls in his class that he likes spending time with, and he has a couple buddies with whom he likes to draw and write. We were able to confer about some of his favorites, to compare notes about who he talks about at home and who he spends time with at school.

Beckett's teachers have a somewhat different classroom, with a 13-4 boy-girl ratio and a crew of rough-and-tumble boys. His teachers are more of a disciplinarian crew, at least partly because they kind of have to be. But it seems to me they love Beckett just as much as Theo's teachers love Theo. They report that Beckett is "a boy"--that he has his boy buddies that he wrestles and plays rough and runs around with outside. They say he is very attentive at story time and has "on point" questions about the story and what unknown words mean. At school, Beckett is a good friend, is very good-natured, and is helpful to his friends. He has one buddy at school, Ny'Asia, who can be very talkative, especially at meals, and they have gotten in trouble at meal times more than once when they have been getting each other laughing so hard that they fall off their chairs or knock over their food. We have been noticing at home that it seems like Beck speaks with an accent sometimes, especially when he says phrases that are not familiar to us, like the other day when we asked the boys to put on their shoes so we could leave, and Beckett did it, and Theo hadn't yet, and so Beckett said, "Theo, are you waiting for an invitation?" The accent was kind of hard to place, at least for me, but we thought maybe it was a Southern accent, which doesn't make sense because the boys don't know anyone with a Southern accent. Then we went to the parent-teacher conference and realized it's the way his African-American teacher speaks! I think Beck picks up on the differences in language and likes to try out different voices and ways of speaking. So if you wonder why Beckett is speaking with an apparent drawn-out accent, that is why. I learned some more about the way the "accent" developed here.

On this bath day Theo did his usual lay-down-in-the tub, submerging almost his entire body save a few inches of his face. Beckett then laid down on top of Theo, using Theo's belly as a pillow. Theo was singing a made-up song, loudly, so B has his fingers in his ears to block the sound.