Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Our little socialite, meeting and greeting in the fourth month, 9 August - 9 September, 2009

The delightful Miss Lisa came to visit Sparrow, all the way from London. Well, she came to visit Sparrow's parents, too, but there were many hugs involved so it was all good. We had a lovely dinner and conversation. Of course, with such a distinguished visitor, after the fine dining experience you see here we had to take her someplace sophisticated and with quality entertainment.

That's right, a Nerd Trivia night at Trades Hall, compered by Scott Gutter Monkey Pollard (the same Scott who was present at Sparrow's birth). There we met Madeleine Hoxley and her husband Dave, plus other new friends, and did our best to answer questions like "Which came first: an aglet, or pencils with an eraser on the end?". Sparrow was not much help at this, though she did contribute to the "what song is that?" music questions with a little caroling of her own. Mostly she watched the lights and the ceiling, which were old-fashioned in that good old deco kind of way and kept her fascinated for most of the night. She definitely liked seeing all the people.

In fact, it went so well taking Sparrow out to this, and it was so much fun, that we came back again the next week. Unfortunately, not with Lisa. Our table made an attempt to get the bonus points for "most geeky apparel" by bringing a steampunk-style ray gun, which Sparrow is wielding here with a distinct lack of alacrity. Fire, baby, fire! We failed in that bonus, but we did get a different bonus when one of our tablemates produced a well-hung-puppet Pterodactyl.

Throughout Sparrow's third and fourth months I've been going to mothers group. It's an eight week program run by the council, and it's the government's chance to deliver us all the approved messages. But it is still fun, and nice to sit around and chat with other new mums who are around the same point but have different ideas and backgrounds. Sparrow is one of the youngest so I hear about a lot of things before they happen, which is helpful. Many of them don't happen, because she is really very little trouble. That, and I tend to work in a child-centred fashion and most of the problems people generally describe are the ones you get when a parent is trying to make an infant fit their beliefs or needs or patterns. My more tribal (and chaotic) approach reduces a lot of that.

I have enjoyed the social outlet of the mothers group. Sparrow has benefited less from the social side of things, not quite being up to much interacting with other children yet, but she has enjoyed the change of scenery and listening to all the people talk. Here she is lying on the floor next to Willow, who is doing the "I'm so excited!" leg raise. (Sparrow doesn't quite do that - both because she's younger and still gaining the strength, and because her nappies are a little wider so she tends to bring her legs up to the side instead of straight to the belly. Once she gets the hang of bringing the legs up straight she will be rolling very soon after!) Willow started trying to interact with Sparrow, so I moved Sparrow's mat closer. Willow then spent a bit of time trying to grab Sparrow's hand, or possibly the shiny dress (it wasn't clear). Sparrow however never looked at her, just kept watching me. She will look around, but she tends to watch the other mums rather than the other babies. She likes to charm people, but focuses on grownups. I think she knows which people she gets the most leverage with. People in the "grandparent" category get special smiles, though I'm not sure how she tells them apart from other adults.

Another development this month was that we put her in the Ergo carrier without the infant insert for the first time. She had been getting close to ready for that for a while. It really is so much easier to get her in and out of this way, though it does still seem to mean her legs are very splayed, more so than when in the pink check wrap. I just keep feeling like we haven't mastered the Ergo somehow. I will have to find the instructions and go through them again. This photo is taken at our front door, by the way, if anyone is ever trying to find it. That's the supermarket's forklift.

These photos were from our trial walk when we put her in the carrier sitting up for the first time. She fell asleep before we got home so we left her in it. It was so cute how her head was tucked in between the strap and James' chest. She's still small enough for the back of the carrier to keep her head from falling out too far if she dozes off.

James found it quite comfortable to do general household stuff while wearing her in this configuration, definitely better than the previous style, but she did wake up pretty quickly once we weren't walking at a steady pace. Kitchen cleaning and cooking just don't have the same rhythm :-)

Here we're at the second mothers group I went to, the Mama Green one, which was really a set of child-friendly workshops rather than a mothers group. There was still a set of messages each week, but it was many complex messages rather than anything simple, and more about being told how to do stuff rather than communally sharing how we went with different issues. It was on sustainability, and turned out to really be aimed more at people who were new to the ideas (as opposed to having worked in educating people about them for the last ten years :-). It was still fun though. It was led by Tanya Ha, who is a green communicator of quite some note - it was interesting to watch and see how she chose to place herself and place issues. Sparrow liked watching the Powerpoint slides each week. I decided that I considered them "pictures" rather than "television", because even though they were bright and light, they only changed about once every ten minutes instead of thirty times a second.

There was a fair range of ages of kids at this workshop, and many of them were in a creche so it was actually more of an adult's session normally. But there were a few children like Sparrow, young enough to be better coming along with Mum or Dad (yes, we had one dad in the group). This photo is from the last session, where a lot of the kids were playing (we often went overtime so even the older ones came back from the creche by now). Sparrow is the youngest by a few months, so not nearly as mobile as this little girl. Also not as outgoing. I was happy to allow them to interact while I watched closely. Sparrow was not entirely amused, though bore up under the strain. She was particularly unimpressed when a fifteen-month-old dropped a danish on her head though. He'd been eating it, had eaten the fruit out of the middle, and once the rest of it was no longer interesting (I agree!) he simply forgot he was holding it and let go. So Sparrow has started gaining a wider panoply of social experiences, I guess. The look on her face was priceless. It does remind me of something another friend said, which was that their daughter's reaction to childcare was "I don't want to go back there, all those small people are boring and they smell". -grin-

When we went to Sherbrooke Forest last month, I'd tried to catch up with a friend in Upper Ferntree Gully at the last minute, but she wasn't free. So we arranged a visit one weekend this month. It's an hour and a half's drive out, so we timed it to get to Ferntree Gully just before a nappy change was due. James is getting very good at these car backseat changes. You can see her whole outfit here - the matching overalls and jumper that Maggie made (it was quite a cold day, and colder on that side of the city), plus the hat that Sarah got for us at the Botanic Gardens. This is the last time she wore the overalls, they were outgrown but not because they were too small - when we got her home from this trip we discovered that she'd worked out how to turn her head and chew on the shoulder buttons.

Once our little girl had a dry nappy, we went and found the Ferntree Gully bakery for lunch. Sparrow is quite used to hanging out in bakeries now, I think.

Then it was up to Elkie's place for an early afternoon visit. Elkie lives in a house tucked into a wonderful native-forest-style garden, and Sparrow was quite intrigued by the trees out the window. Elkie prepared us a horoscope when Sparrow was born, and during this visit she explained a little about what some of the features were. I took away the mental note that Sparrow's three top things - sun, moon and ascendant - are all in fixed signs. Astrologically, this means one little girl whose mind will be Made Up and who will Know What She Is Doing, Thank You Very Much. This further implies a very entertaining teenagerhood. But I was expecting that already, so we'll see how that all pans out.