Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Fifth month, 9 September - 9 October, 2009

This month was all about the hands. And a bit about the feet, and a lot about chewing, chewing, chewing. But the hands were a big feature.

Going out for a drive. Still a little cold some days, cold enough to be worth putting an extra layer over the top of the main suit. This is the complete suit that Oma made and she always gets compliments in it, we didn't often get to wear the whole lot at once but suddenly Melbourne decided to have some of the coldest days it had had all year. So on it all went. She outgrew the pants this month, but the hat and jumper are still good.

She kept trying to roll this month. The day she was four months old she rolled once, and then that was it, no more rolling. But we started getting a lot of what you see here: arching, kicking the legs up and flying with the arms while on the tummy, and trying to flip herself over. She really doesn't like being on her tummy, so I guess there was some motivation to try and get off it. But she never quite got it, except maybe once by accident. Her parents did help a couple of times though when she got too tired and it got a bit much.

And another attempt. OK, Mum, I got this far, now what? She was pretty good at getting the legs up, but also very good at propping her arms just right to keep her from tipping, which led to much confusion. The bottom would lead, but then have nowhere to go.

Four months old, and it's time to have her second round of vaccinations. This time, I planned an extremely leisurely day with absolutely nothing else that had to be done. I also took along two ice packs - plastic bags of ice cubes wrapped in little towels, as one friend had suggested. I put them on the vaccination spots as soon as the needle came out and kept them on for the fifteen minutes that we have to wait at the clinic afterwards. She grizzled and cried with the vaccinations as expected, but didn't have any secondary waves of pain later in the day like she did last time. So the icepack trick worked, and I didn't have to resort to Panadol. After the vaccination she and I went down to Altona and had a leisurely sit at a cafe, while I had hot chocolate and cake and she had lengthy cuddles and got to talk to all the cooing grandparent-types that came by. She loves that. It's the same cafe that we went to with Maggie and Gordon, and they do wonderful cakes even if I can't eat them very often. So we had a very peaceful day, went home after this and had some extra sleep and cuddles and it all went very well. Does this look like the face of someone who's had needles to you?

Well, to me it looks like the face of someone who is about to try and steal my caramel macadamia cheesecake for the third time and wants to know if I'm watching her. But then, I was there when it happened.

I had to laugh while we were waiting at the clinic. A little boy and his dad were waiting too, and the dad had brought a special bag of foil-wrapped chocolates for the boy to choose from as a reward. Sparrow was fascinated by the bag of shiny things and kept looking at it and opening her mouth. The dad noticed and said "That's right, this is chocolate. Remember that word, choc-o-late. You get to ask for it when you have needles too." -grin- She gave him this fascinated look that suggested she was committing every syllable to memory.

The potato plants had died back - the same ones I photographed her with a couple of months ago. So we dug through the boxes to see what we'd grown. Here's the haul - at least three different kinds of baby potato, maybe four including Royal Blue, Conga and a couple of more generic ones. So then we had to photograph the baby potatoes with the Potato Baby herself (James often calls her that). She likes being held to sit up, can't manage it herself yet but her head control is strong enough to stay like this if we support her. For dinner that night we steamed the potatoes and served them with butter and a little garlic salt, and it was a truly magnificent meal. The Congas turn into blue-purple fluff on the inside so they're always fun to eat.

She likes a little roughhousing, and Daddy is always willing to oblige. This was a game she particularly liked this month. She's starting to stand if heavily supported too, and loves trying to do it though she couldn't do it for more than a few seconds at this point.

See? I'm standing! Oops... oh... ooohhhh.. wait, where's my foot? ...whoaaah... Yep! Still standing!

She has been drooling soooooo much. We decided to try a bib on her again. I hadn't really had any need for bibs up to this point, they didn't really help with her possets (projectile) or feeding misses (a foot and a half of pressure in six directions at once, thank you genetic inheritance). But around about this age we discovered that putting a bib on makes the jumpsuit stay dry a lot longer. Only one of the bibs we had still fit her - she has a chubby neck (a chubby everything!) - and we tried it a couple of times, but ended up deciding that the bib was more trouble than it was worth. Somehow she just always managed to turn her head to somewhere where the bib wasn't and then let fly, and then after a few goes she worked out how to take the bib off and chew on it (it was such a great toy). Which did make her sort of a self-cleaning baby seeing as it still got to absorb most of the drool. But it was just as easy to give her a little washcloth and let her chew on that as it was to try and keep the bib on her. So we've mostly abandoned the bib idea again until she starts on eating.

I. Do. Not. Like. Tummy. Time.
Or. Pink.
You. Will. Obey. Now.

She really doesn't like the tummy time, and always looks a little put upon, but some times more than others. It's funny how firmly she makes her attitude felt -smile-. She was not enthused about this outfit either, curiously. It has little ruffled pants in the same pink polkadot fabric as the ruffles on the sleeves. Some clothes she will grab straight for (and possibly chew), and others she will try and push away and grizzle if you put them on. Almost everything that Oma has knitted is in the first category, but this outfit seems to be in the latter category. I've allocated it to the change bag as a spare outfit in times of emergency, and it seems to work well there.

"I've just woken up, and I think I like today".
Sleep was an issue this month. A couple of nights after she turned four months old she hit what I later found out is a reasonably common developmental spurt when a whole lot of stuff all happens at once. And suddenly she went from sleeping four hours at a time overnight and just gesturing for food when she woke (which was always enough to wake me), to waking up crying every one-and-a-half to two hours, desperate for food and inconsolable. I couldn't work out why all her good sleep habits had suddenly disappeared. After just a few days I was so exhausted that if her midday feed and nap coincided I'd lie down on the bed, attach her to the nipple and pass out myself, waking up forty minutes or so later when she'd had enough of food and (presumably) her own nap and started kicking or thumping me for entertainment. I just couldn't stay awake. After two weeks of this I couldn't even remember what it had been like to ever sleep four hours in one hit.

After much checking of all the sleep habits we'd built up for her, to work out what was going wrong, I was baffled. She could sleep in any room, in dark or light, with music or noise or quiet, with us or without us, in her sleeping bag or without it - there was nothing she was dependent on in order to go to sleep. I finally realised that it wasn't that she couldn't go to sleep by herself in the middle of the night, it was that she'd formed some waking-up habits that were going wrong. Like in this photo - she's woken up, I've gone and talked sweetly to her and given her a cuddle, and she's just very happy and totally cute. I also found out about this developmental spurt that also causes sleep problems around this age. Just as I worked all this out and started wondering if there was anything I could do now that I understood the real problem, it was finally over and she went back to sleeping for longer stretches.

It does make me wonder if this is when the sleep schools get a lot of their business - if I hadn't found out it was normal (and temporary), I'd be wondering a lot harder what to do next. I had to be careful what I said to the nurse at the mothers group, too - we had a sleep specialist in one week (just as a fill in for our regular nurse), and she started out by saying "Now, you all have them in cots in another room, you're not doing anything weird or alternative, are you?". I nodded along with everyone else - if she was going to blame Sparrow's sudden change of sleep patterns on being in the same room as us then it wasn't going to be a helpful conversation. As it was she left me feeling awful because when someone said "how long is a catnap?" she said "Two hours or so", and I said "Oh, Sparrow only sleeps half an hour at a time". (She was, too - just one sleep cycle. Sometimes with extreme consistency: every two hours on the dot she'd fall asleep for 35 minutes. Unless I was needing her to.) The nurse's response was "She should be sleeping more than that, you have to start trying to resettle her when she wakes". And I first thought "Oh, I'm doing it all wrong", and then looked at Sparrow when she woke up and started asking for play and thought "No, I'm doing it right, this little girl knows what she wants and right now it Is Not Sleep." Why should I stress just because the nurse thinks that That's Not The Way It's Done?

We went to the Star Wars exhibition at Scienceworks. Our membership gave us free tickets. It was fun to be walking around on the floor seeing how the exhibition had been put together and knowing that I wasn't having to run any activities or manage anything to do with it. A lot of the floor people are volunteers from the Melbourne Star Wars fan clubs, and they were quite happy to stop and talk to a little baby who liked waving lights.

The exhibition was very strongly object-oriented, with only a little bit of interactivity (as you'd expect for an exhibition on a major cultural icon). I thought a lot of the objects were fascinating, especially when you compared the ones made in the 1970s to the ones made in the 1990s - the ways they'd made things look mechanical or old or home-made were quite different. Sparrow put her attention into exploring the flavour of the carrier straps.

By far the thing she enjoyed most on this visit was when we went to the Planetarium. We saw the new film on climate change, which was really quite fascinating. Sparrow isn't supposed to be watching television but it's hard to avoid with a 360-degree full dome projection, especially now that she stays awake so much longer. So she watched a fair bit of the show, especially when the narrator started getting (unfortunately) strident towards the end. It's a pity, but she made her voice very school-marm-ish for the last section (which really doesn't add to the film), and everytime Sparrow started to tune out she'd get startled back into looking around again. The best bit though was when they showed a moving picture of the galaxy. Sparrow caroled up at it with great joy and excitement, which completely amused the Planetarium presenter (one of my old workmates from both Scienceworks and CERES). Apparently some traits are breeding true mother to daughter.

Kitchen time. It was just at the end of the last month that she started properly grasping and holding things, and at about the same time she also started to chew on anything that goes near her mouth. Being a big believer in providing real objects to play with, I'm collecting a small pile of appropriate things by her pillow in the kitchen. The tea strainer is a popular thing for picking up, waving and chewing on. So is the double-ended melon-baller I once won at a Tupperware party, and this is probably the most use it has ever had.

However, her attempts to hold, manipulate and eat kitchen objects do not always have the expected results. It's Spring Racing Carnival here, give her a flower on the bowl and she'd fit right in with the fascinator ladies.

Another problem with eating things is that (as James puts it) she has no sense of scale. Personally, I think she's not trying to get it all in, she's just finding out the texture of things with her tongue seeing as it's more sensitive than her fingers at this point. But James says he can recognise the frustration cry she makes when it doesn't all fit, so maybe. She certainly has a ways to go on recognising orientation, and when something is turned the direction that will fit or not fit in her mouth.

And this would be... Exhibit A in the "no sense of scale" evidence pile...

A serious conversation with Daddy when he came home from work, possibly all about the things she'd seen that day. Or not, you never really know. One last wear of this lovely jumper, but it's now outgrown too. And put aside for her little brother or sister, if we get organised to do that.

We went to visit Charlie and Kristen. Charlie has just turned two years old, and thought that sharing his toys and blankets and pillows with Sparrow was great fun. Sparrow was a little curious, a little bemused - it was one of her more sooky I-want-to-be-held days, and an active little boy is a new thing, but she was pretty good with it. And it was great to see Kristen again.

At the library. We make semi-regular trips there to get picture books of one type or another. Anything with big pictures is good. And it's a peaceful place, so she tends to like it.

On the train. Sparrow and I went into the CBD for errands and met Daddy when he finished work. She likes charming people on the train, and they will often hold her and talk to her - she gets passed around a lot. These four ladies thought she was completely wonderful. She liked them too - the lady on the left started clapping at her, with a big smile, and Sparrow was fascinated - she'd never seen anyone clap before. So that was the funniest thing ever. Laugh, and laugh, and giggle, and laugh, with lots of "do it again" motions. The lady was happy to oblige, and kept up a steady run of mugging smiles and clapping for several stations. I think it was beginning to grate on the nerves of some of the other passengers. But it's so much fun when Sparrow smiles and laughs at you, how could you stop?

Almost five months old, and playing with the new toys that Grandma contributed. The links came in a pack of 28 which I thought was overkill, but it means that we can have a string of six in the change bag, a string of six in the kitchen, a couple of threes in places where she often lies around... it works. Part of me doesn't like always giving her plastic things to chew on, but they are great for leaving her to play on her own for a while and not worrying if she's bitten any bits off to swallow.

The day before she was five months, she had a new surprise for us. She suddenly discovered that she could make the giraffe puppet move - with her feet. This was the best game she'd found yet. Lift the legs up, up, up, and then kick down as hard as she could. She only hit the giraffe every second or third time because she tends to keep her feet too wide instead of together, but it's a start.