Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Sparrow helps with the housework, 17 May - 23 June, 2009

The first six weeks of Sparrow's life, I've been in recovery from the Caesarean. James has been working at home because I'm not allowed to drive or to lift anything heavier than Sparrow, and if he's not here I'd probably just do it anyway without thinking. But with him here, he gets more time to adore his daughter, and I can interrupt his work as I need to to request lifts of either kind. It's also been good because it's a slow way for me to adapt to the house-oriented Mum kind of life, as primary carer and housewife. So I'm teaching myself how to fit all the various household tasks in, which I could already do well enough, but now I have to do them one-armed and sometimes left-handed, in between feeds and changes. It's nice to have James around while I adapt, and very peaceful. Here's some photos from this time period.

Sparrow is helping me hang out the laundry. My routine is to set a load of laundry washing first thing in the morning after or during her first morning nappy change and feed, usually somewhere between 7 and 8:30 am. If it's a load of normal clothes, I get James to bucket out the water onto any sections of garden that need it. If it's nappies, I get them soaking in hot water, and eventually, step by step, get them washed and hung out. James carries the basket of wet laundry to the line for me and I do the rest. At first I was hanging out the laundry one handed while carrying Sparrow, then I started putting her on the ground under the line once she was better able to see things (and as she got bigger and heavier and hard to hold onto at the same time as pegging nappies). Often though she was passed out for her morning nap and I just left her sleeping and dealt with it all very quickly (along with having my morning shower, which is the other thing that gets habitually fit into that nap period).

And here's Sparrow helping me sort the laundry. Sometime in the late afternoon she and I will bring the laundry inside, at the moment that's around 4:30 give or take half an hour. Anything needing drying (usually most of it, this time of year) gets thrown into the dryer. Sometime in the evening I'll remember it's there and bring the basketload of dry stuff inside for sorting and putting away, which may or may not happen as part of a quiet night. I do a run of laundry most days, nappies need to be done two out of three days, regular clothes for the three of us get done maybe one out of two days.

Sparrow and I are rewriting a rainwater quality management plan and checking through quality monitoring documentation. Actually, we'd just finished, and this is a well-earned nap. Technically not housework, but I still have little bits of writing to fit in here and there.

Sewing the star quilt, so that we have two quilts to lie on, sleep on, get changed on, carry around with us for any of those occurrences. Especially important now that Sparrow has mastered the art of upchucking across a square foot of fabric, or furniture, or clothing.

Gardening. I have some plants that needed potting out before I went into labour, and they have started to get a bit sorry for themselves (I still haven't done it though). Others, such as one of the roses, seem to be happier for the neglect. James is doing most of the watering in these six weeks as I can't carry more than half a bucket of water at a time, and hoses still aren't allowed. Mostly what I do is weeding. Once she started being able to see, Sparrow liked looking at the plants and the sky more than looking at the loungeroom, so I've been stalling on taking her back inside even though it *is* quite cold.

A Spudlet with the spud plants. She was not impressed, but I couldn't resist.

Sparrow is helping me clean up the bedroom. I'm sorting, putting away and hanging up all the piles of unwearable clothes that have accumulated on the floor during and after the pregnancy. You'll notice that (as in most of these photos) helping equates to sleeping nearby. It will be fun to have a set of "helping with the housework" photos when she is a little older and is able to grab things and move around, to compare.

Cooking has been the trickiest thing to manage. You can't do most of it one-handed, and there's a lot of things I don't want her close to (like spattering hot oil, or her klutzy Mummy wielding a blunt knife). Sometimes she's on the floor, but the kitchen is very narrow, I drop a lot of hot or sharp things, and my proprioception's not great so I was cautious about using the floor as a solution. Here's me trying out keeping her in the carrier while chopping a few things. It wasn't totally successful as she only really likes being in the carrier when we're walking, and standing preparing food isn't enough movement to keep her content. Mostly I just left the cooking for times when she was asleep or being held by someone else during these six weeks, and there were plenty enough of those. It helped that James had no travel time, so he could take her from me as soon as he finished work and I could go have a break from her and do some creative cooking while he got cuddle time - a win-win situation there for the two of us.