Robin Artemis photo gallery

At home in the fifth month, 11 August - 11 September, 2011

In the kitchen. Sparrow has provided Robin with this "hat" - the lid from one of my little teapots.

Watching us eat dinner. Takeaway, on one of our busy nights. Robin does seem to find all the time we spend eating alternately fascinating and boring.

Just looking around. He's really outgrown this jumper, it only just goes on now. So I've put it away in the box to sort out for later.

In pants and braces! I hadn't put him in pants until now as it just hasn't been suitable, but he's hit a patch where it works. Mainly because his suits are all a little too light weight for the weather, and putting a warm layer over the top works. These are the first pants that Maggie knitted for Sparrow, I know they fit around this age/weight. Robin has one of his classic "Mummy, pick me up" demanding faces on. This month I ordered a book for my mother's birthday that is about interesting and useful words from other languages. It mentioned a phrase from German which I can't remember now (though I've tried), which talks about this face with the lower lip pushed out and translates literally as something like "playing the insulted liver sausage". So James and I have started using the English form of the phrase. Robin really does put out his lower lip a lot when he's upset and wanting attention, and you can hear in his cry when he's doing it.

Playing with his sister's necklaces. She is probably asleep at the moment which is why he can play with them at all. He likes shiny things and had a great time pulling on these and waving them around. I'd be more concerned about them breaking if they weren't molded on rather than strung. The advantage of cheap beads, I guess.

Watching me hang out the washing. I talk to him about colours sometimes while I'm doing the hanging out, and this is an azul arrangement.

The two new suits I bought so that he'd have more of the warm or mid-warm weight ones instead of all the lightweight ones. We have lots of suits, but Sparrow grew into this size about two months later in the year (October rather than August) so they're all spring ones and it's just not quite warm enough for cotton yet. I was quite cross at Savers, too. They've rearranged their baby section into "girls" and "boys", it used to be just by colour. Separating the genders works well enough when you're selling a line of clothing and have twenty of each type in each size, but Savers being secondhand only ever has one of anything. So you look through all the shelves of the right size to see if they've got anything like what you want. Now they've put those shelves in two different places. And it's anyone's guess whether some clothes count as "girls" or "boys", especially when I tend to look for the unisex ones anyway and am hoping to find colours in the earth tones - green, yellow, orange, brown. Take these two suits - identical patterns, only slightly different fabrics - main difference is colour. One was in the boys' section, one in the girls'. Can you tell which? I'll give you a clue - the one that looks blue, is just a little bit purple. And boys don't wear purple, apparently. There was yellow stuff in both boys and girls, but I got this yellow suit from the boys' section.

Caroling and dancing on the change mat. Robin has a lot of fun here. I often end up leaving him a while because he gets so happy about it. I think he likes being able to see the flying origami - spends lots of time watching it. And sometimes he just likes being fully or partly out of his clothes so that he can wiggle and thrash to his fullest extent.

Robin does get a bit bored when I'm working in the kitchen, but if I give him something he can hold or chew he's much happier. Spoons are nice. He doesn't tend to hurt himself with him, and I don't have to supervise him ultra-closely to make sure he doesn't swallow them. When he chews on a spoon like this while watching his sister it does look a bit like he's trying to copy her. But I don't think he is just yet.

Tummy time in the chaos that is the book room. Robin has a fun toy...

...the "ocean grapes", as Sparrow calls it (and I have no idea why, but I don't know its real name so "ocean grapes" has stuck). I had left it flat on the floor, but Robin has managed to reach it with some effort and is tipping it up in order to grab onto it.

Not happy, Mum, fix it. He was enjoying seeing the room from up on the couch, but it was starting to get a little hard. Everything was getting a little hard. And he was hungry. I could tell by the cry. He's stopped making the "Lau" or "Now" cry almost completely, and it's been replaced by the stereotypical "Wah! Wah!" cry when he's just had too much (which is usually also when he's hungry and tired). (I laughed when I first heard this cry - I didn't think anyone actually said "Wah! Wah!" but he does :-) So a short feed later...

...and he's fast asleep. I think this was one of the days he had a nice long nap, too. I appreciate the days he sleeps for more than an hour and a half. Sometimes he wakes up early, asks for a feed, goes back to sleep and then sleeps for up to another two hours. It doesn't often happen at the same time as Sparrow's naps though -sigh-. I get quite tired on the days they tag-team and there's always one of them awake. But they each get more cuddles from me on those days, so I suppose there's a benefit.

Playing with the Slinky. It's an awesome toy, and he's got both his hands and feet into it quite happily. This one had been quite tangled but Michael spent an evening patiently untangling it when he was here and so Robin's playing with it quite easily now.

Such eyes.

And there's the cheeky smile! We see a lot of this expression too. Especially when he's watching his sister or me horse around. Or if he wants one of his parents to stay with him - we call it the "cute" tractor beams, where he just shines "cute" at you so that you can't look away and have to come closer. If someone else interrupts he'll glance at them, then go back to focusing on the original person again.