Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Sparrow's second month, to 9 July 2009 - part 1

Smiling and grasping are two things she's started to do by more than reflex this month. Not necessarily with accuracy, but enough to add a little extra comedy and cuteness to our lives. Not that we needed more of that!

Just at the beginning of this month she started to stay awake long enough apart from feeding and changing to show signs of boredom. So it was time to introduce toys. I went through the box of things we'd been given for something that she would be able to look at, didn't have to hold, and that wasn't bigger than she was. This little flying insect thing that Linda gave us fit the bill, and it rattles, too! Sparrow showed absolutely no interest in it whatsoever at first, as you can see, but after we went to the zoo and saw the butterflies it suddenly became very cool. She'll watch it flutter around above her head with some fascination and smiles now.

James was home from work for three weeks of this month, the first two with leave and the third with a bad cold that made working from home a better option. This meant time for lots of morning snuggles with Daddy.

My mother asked what she could give us as a baby gift that would be especially useful to me. I thought about it and suggested a baby monitor. It's been very good, especially once James started working again. I can leave her sleeping and work on things, and hear when she starts to wake up. This has been particularly great because it's in this month that she's made the transition from mostly asleep in the day to awake for longer periods, so I never knew when she'd go to sleep or how long she'd sleep for. I started the month using her sleep periods to do housework, and by the end of the month was using all the awake periods to do housework. In this photo you can also see one of my morning survival tricks - at the change and feed around 5 or 6 am, Sparrow and I go back to bed in the lounge room and leave James sleeping. She doesn't always sleep then, sometimes it's cuddles and/or a lying down feed, but it gives James an extra hour or three uninterrupted. And it's so dark in the mornings this time of year that it's easy for us to settle in. Here I've cuddled her to sleep and then gotten up to have some "me" time, which I think I spent sewing her star quilt.

A special treat - visiting the cake shops of Acland St, in St Kilda. Well, a special treat for me and James, really. She only gets the cake second hand. But I do love looking in these windows, especially if I get to choose something to take home. For some reason, I was craving pecan pie around this time so I got a little one of those, and oddly it turned out to be pecans on top of raspberry jam and shortbread. I don't think they had really understood pecan pie. But it was all right. (I ended up making myself a pecan pie about a month later after not having been able to find a good one anywhere - and that was much better. Though I still don't really like pecans that much.)

Pulling faces and gestures. We watched this for hours sometimes. Oma knitted the suit, and that's the star quilt I made that she's lying on.

The Mayo family came to visit! From left to right we have James (who is technically at work and on the phone to a colleague, but came in from his exile in the study to say hello), Sparrow (watching the other children with curiosity), Beatrice and Felicity who are playing with a wooden wheel-and-axle pull-toy that was mine when I was their age and also a wooden car-race-thing I got at Geppettos (my favourite toy store in Melbourne), Caroline and Mayo himself (you'd think I would know his first name, but I think I've been calling him Mayo too long). It was great to see how Felicity and Beatrice are growing, and to catch up with Caroline and talk a combination of motherhood, breastfeeding, science and engineering.

Beatrice liked looking at and playing with Sparrow. Very friendly.

Sparrow was starting to spend enough time awake and lying around that I felt I needed to start having things up at the ceiling for her to look at. It's not a very interesting ceiling, really. So a little fishing line and a removable hook or two later, plus some left over coloured paper, and we have some hanging fluttery things that glow in the morning sunrise. At first she didn't take too much notice, but as I added to it over the next few weeks it got more and more interesting. When I first made it she was totally bemused by my holding a piece of paper up in the air and having it stay there when I let go. She knows about paper falling because I'd been distracting her by dropping torn-off pieces of coloured tissue paper on her head (her favourites are orange and blue, apparently). Then suddenly this piece didn't fall down. Her vision couldn't pick out the fishing line when I first did this.

Cuddles with Daddy.

My first outing to the city on my own after getting clearance from the obstetrician to drive and carry things. It's also Sparrow's first train trip. We are going to meet up with the Engineers without Borders mob for lunch, one of whom is organising the yearly conference and wanted to talk to me about possibly presenting a student's session based on the work I did at CERES. Sparrow loved the train trip - apparently it is excellent for sleeping.

First zoo trip. Sparrow slept through much of this too - she likes being carried. And we're not sure if she could see something as far away as the giraffe yet anyway. But we had fun.

We got a good stare going between Sparrow and the Meerkat, which got a few other zoo visitors going "Awww.... cute baby...".

And the best photo of the bunch: the butterfly house. Sparrow certainly could see all the fluttering flying things between her and the ceiling, and she was very wide awake for that...