Niether here nor there

I am so exhausted by the end of the day, I never feel like I can get ahead but I'm not really behind so I guess I'm grateful. The kids keep me busy non-stop from 7:20 a.m. until 9:45 p.m. so that doesn't leave a lot of me time. That's okay, I know they are only this dependent for a short amount of time so I'm trying to enjoy it. I got the rest of my cards out today and made some candy, two things that have been guilting me. My daughter is getting so excited for Christmas; now that we have made it past her birthday I feel like we can hype things up more. I went food shopping yesterday, I am too embarrassed to even share what that cost me but we should eat well. The last package (that I know about) arrived today, so maybe the delivery man + barking dogs = woken up baby will get better. Speaking of which, my son (he just turned four months) has not been sleeping too well as of late. He slept through the night the other night, but that doesn't really count because he was in his swing all night. I do not intend for this to be a permanent solution so I refuse to become dependent on it. The next night I left him in the swing but turned it off and he slept a good six or seven hours. Since then things have been getting progressively worse. I am lucky if I get a couple of three hour stretches. I suspect there are a couple of things contributing. 1) His thrush is back, I really don't know how much this bothers him but he has been having more gas which makes him much more restless. 2) I have been eating some of the things that I know bother him, thus contributing to more gassiness. 3) He is working on rolling and sitting up, always trying to practice so he is getting less daytime sleep. 4) I'm wondering if he might be ready for solids. Whenever I'm eating, he is staring at me and "chewing". I didn't start my daughter until almost six months and I was planning on doing the same with him. I don't have a reclining high chair so I don't have a good way of feeding a baby who is not sitting up yet, but could be be hungry? He eats about every 2-3 hours during the day, but he has become a lot more distracted lately so he is not putting a good effort into a lot of those feedings. He nurses really well at night, I'm afraid he is starting to become dependent on those nighttime feedings as his major source of nutrition. I thought maybe the frequent waking may be because I usually nurse or rock him to sleep, so today since he didn't want to nurse or rock to sleep I just laid him down in his crib when he was tired and gave him a kiss. He has some mild fussing and fell straight to sleep. Great, except he never slept more than 20-30 minutes. At night when it becomes apparent he isn't going to go back to sleep without eating I will feed him and he goes straight back to sleep, we do this until about 7:20 a.m. when he is up for the day. This involves somewhere between 1 and 3 nursing sessions per night. Will this get better? Will I ever have one of those fabled babies that you put in their crib and they stay there asleep for 12 hours? Any advice?
Oh yeah, one more thing: my husband went shopping for my presents today (I told him I didn't want anything, but anyway) at Fleet Farm. For those of you that this means nothing to think tractor supply store that sells absolutely everything you could ever need (if you live on a farm) :) I'll keep you posted.