Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Changes in the sixth month, 9 October - 9 November, 2009

We got a stroller at the beginning of the month. I'd held off getting a pram because I didn't want to carry it up and down the stairs - juggling a newborn baby and a large mechanical item up a poorly-lit and uneven set of steps with a bend halfway just didn't sound fun. Strollers generally aren't suitable for children under six months because they haven't got the strength or control to sit up yet, but we found one that reclines enough to be suitable from three months onwards. I chose this one because it is quite light-weight, doesn't look like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, isn't overly technical and folds up with one hand according to the literature though in actual fact it takes one hand, one foot and a bit of grunting. James chose it because it is a Maclaren and they are aeronautical engineers who also make racing cars. He also checked that it pushes and steers very well so you can take tight curves and fast bumps (it turns out to be eminently suited to making vroom-vroom noises). Sparrow decided she approved because it was tasty. Our family embraces diversity of perspective.

We decided to take it for a test run straight after buying it, and went around the corner to Pipeworks Park. In hindsight we should probably have done something about our blood sugar levels first. The straps were tricky to adjust to the right starting size, the sunshade covers her head but not her legs, and the clasp of the five-point harness looks like it should do up any way but the one that it actually does. But we got it worked out, and once you know how it all goes together it's pretty good.

So here we are starting off down the path. I'm laughing because this is thirty seconds after we've paused to check the stroller's wheels and had it start running down the path without us. We caught it very quickly, and then worked out where the brakes and the wrist strap were.

At the end of a successful walk around the park, the Living Museum of the West and the big pipe tunnels.

This is my first outing on my own with her and the stroller. We went for a walk around Altona in between stormshowers, stopping at the library and the supermarket. Sparrow still had mixed feelings about the stroller at this point. She could see everything, and that was good. But she wasn't getting carried, and that wasn't as satisfactory.

This is in the Louis Joel Arts Centre - she'd fallen asleep in the stroller for the first time ever just before we got there, and then their office phone rang and startled her awake so she had to concentrate on charming the bunch of old ladies doing creative knitting instead. Doesn't this face just say to you "Pick me up"? It took another few walks before she worked out how to go to sleep in the stroller again.

At the beginning of the month we started on sleeping her in the cot. She'd outgrown her little bed insert and was rapidly claiming a good half of the bed on her own. So we put the cot next to the bed with one side down, and she now has her own little space and Mummy and Daddy get to have all of their bed back. Here she is getting used to spending time in the cot, I've just lain her in there to look around for a bit and chill out. She had a few day naps in there before moving in at night too. She's taken to it fairly well, she likes having the room to stretch right out.

We give her just one toy in the cot - it's the elephant that my mother thought had a lot of appeal, and Sparrow loves it too. It stays in the cot and she gets to play with it when she's going to sleep or when she wakes up. It's worked quite well - it means when she wakes up from a nap she starts playing on her own, and I usually hear that and come in. So she doesn't have to always cry to get my attention. I have however had to take it off her once or twice in the middle of the night to encourage her to go back to sleep. Its ears are crinkly, and at two a.m. they sound VERY loud. I'm trying to use the elephant as a sleep cue, and that sometimes works - she will lie in the cot and look at it and be too tired to do more than make a vague effort at reaching for it, and when that happens she's usually asleep within two minutes.

More time just hanging around. I stopped doing this within about a week - she got quite used to the cot. So did we - instead of having her hang around with us in the evening while she napped, we'd put her in the cot and she'd start a full evening sleep while we did other things. It was great to have a little bit of quiet time back for just us. The only problem was that this meant she started her long night sleep - usually around five hours but very occasionally as long as six hours - as early as seven thirty, which meant she'd wake up at midnight. Before that it might not have started til nine-thirty but I might not have to feed and change her til three thirty. Swings and roundabouts there.

I took this just because all the colours were so harmonious and pretty. You can see her very ladylike "ducks on the pond" suit, and also the bed insert still in position (which she was still sleeping in for that week). The nice thing about putting her in the cot was that I could put her down still awake and know that if she didn't go to sleep immediately she wasn't going to roll anywhere. She wasn't rolling yet, but she'd worked out how to wiggle the two inches it took to get a toy within reach, and I didn't trust her not to find her own entertainment by suddenly learning how to roll if I left her before she was just about passed out (which is why many of her day naps were on the floor). So the cot solved that problem and let me continue teaching her to go to sleep without needing us there.

She still occasionally slept on our bed, especially if I'd gone to sleep with her - we like having slow cuddly sleeps. This was during one of her long naps - she finally started having one to two hour naps on a semi-regular basis, usually when things had been very low-stress and physically soothing with either a bath or cuddles or suchlike. I slept with her for the first hour, then she woke up enough to demand a feed and went straight back to sleep again for another hour. I was grateful for the nap myself, and then got up to work on stuff. It's always a juggle deciding whether to spend that free time on sleep or on all the things you can't do easily while she's awake, but I got a lot more relaxed about that juggle this month. Stuff just happened as it happened.

We had been thinking about how to solve the high-chair problem. Having something for her to sit and eat in when she gets to that stage would be good, but we don't actually use chairs ourselves. We just eat dinner on the floor. The solution was a Funpod, which is what Sparrow is watching me attempt to construct here. It took a few goes, she had to watch me assemble and dissassemble it a couple of times when I got pieces around the wrong way. She's lying on one of the couch cushions because by this month she'd outgrown all the other cushions, and even this one she can plant her feet and push her head off if she decides I'm not enough of a distraction.

This is the high-chair part. It sits on the floor on its own as well as on its pedestal, so we can put her in it with us on the floor and all be at the right height. You'll notice however that she has a little way to go before she can use it - if you look you'll see that her arms only just barely reach the table bit, so anything on it will be out of reach. And she wasn't sitting strongly enough to use the chair until near the end of the month anyway.

The completed FunPod. The high-chair sits in this pedestal to give you the full height, which means I can have her at a good height for watching everything happening on the bench when we're in the kitchen making dinner. When she gets old enough and strong enough and starts standing, you can lift the high-chair out and they can stand in the pedestal itself like a step-stool. That means they can work or play at the kitchen bench right along with you, but they can't get to any other part of the bench (like the stovetop).

This month we had to face the baby capsule question. See how she looks like she barely fits in it any more? We'd only rented the capsule for six months, and that would be up on the 6th of November. In theory she was about to outgrow this one, but she wasn't likely to be heavy enough to go into the next type by the end of the month. We did a fair bit of research, and decided renting this one for an extra month to give us that extra little bit of time for her to fully outgrow it and get as big as she could before changing. And to give us more time to decide what we wanted to buy - the next capsule she has she'll be in until she's either four or seven years old depending on the type, so we'll have it for a while.

Right near the end of the month she started getting very active about trying to share our food. You can just make out the expression on James' face here as he realises she is trying her hardest to copy him. He has the sausage roll, and she has grabbed the other end of the wrapper and is gnawing away on that. We also found paper in her poo that she must have managed to swallow before I caught her with some and took it off her, so the don't-swallow-foreign-objects reflex had gone. So I started upping her food play - not so much so that she was eating, per se, but allowing her to gnaw and suck on a wider range of edibles and not worrying if she swallowed some of them. Especially with the leaves I'd been letting her play with in the garden. The main thing was to start working on flavours and textures a little more, and encouraging her to opt-in on the food-play rather than trying to teach her to eat solids - I figured that would come in the next month.

The most notable physical skills development happened at the end of the month. Here she is demonstrating her new favourite changemat trick - grabbing her own feet. This is a most excellent form of entertainment and keeps her distracted for quite some time. She has just done this for the first time for me in this photo, after spending most of the month raising her legs up. I changed her clothes a lot this month, because raising the legs on the changemat means that a little girl's little fountain gets aimed straight into her own armpit. If only we were all still so flexible. You'll also notice that her left hand is tucked under the singlet strap. At the time this photo was taken she was very definitely left handed, though that apparently changes back and forth a lot at this age. And she had also been having a bunch of problems with rash across her mons pubis. We couldn't work out if there was really a rash there, or if it was just that she was always scratching it so therefore a rash had formed. At any rate, she got a lot less nappy-free time for a while, and it was limited to however long we could keep that left hand out of the picture. This is only one trick we used - we had to keep changing tactics every time she worked out how to defeat one. Like when we were just covering the left hand... and then one afternoon I put a cover on, looked away for thirty seconds, looked back and she'd taken the cover off, transferred it onto her right hand and was merrily scratching away with her left again. Mummy was Not Fooled.

Here is an absolutely massive push-up. Surely she'll work out rolling soon...

And then, right at the end of the month, there was this. I know, it doesn't look like anything special, except that when we'd last looked at her she'd been on her back about two foot away and pointing the other direction. Apparently she *really* wanted that toy she's gripping there. This was the very first time we looked away and then found her not where we left her when we looked back. And this is where the fun starts...

Hey, now that I can roll, I don't have to stay on my back... suddenly she was insisting on sleeping on her side. Just like both her parents. She is so adorable. Here she's grabbed the elephant, rolled over still clutching it, and passed out. Nighty-night.