Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Some random moments and events
Sparrow's first visit to Oma and Grandad, 22-28 November, 2009

A quiet feed. Jo took this photo.

I'm not sure what this expression was about, but I had to include it.

Ditto with this one.

And even more so here. No idea what she's thinking, but I giggle whenever I see the picture.

Fast asleep in the baby carseat. This is the new one that we bought to bring on the plane with us. It fits in James' suitcase and it's easy to install and move between cars. It also has the nice feature of allowing us a clear view of her face. She seems to like the increased vision too - when she fell asleep in the car the first few times in this car seat she'd have her face turned towards us so she could see us.

Visiting friends of Maggie and Gordon. We had a lovely cup of tea and some really great classic muffins. The 70's produced some excellent recipes. Unfortunately, in the incident famously referred to by Aunty Joanna as Muffingate, Sparrow managed to eat some of the muffin too. Not ideal as it was full of all kinds of ingredients and textures she wasn't up to eating yet and that her system might not tolerate well (being only just on the earliest kinds of mush). So I was a little on alert for the rest of the day to see if any problems came up, though I wasn't necessarily expecting any.

Sparrow enjoyed the pillow nest, and the dear old dog was pretty good too.

You can spot the people who have grandchildren - somehow there were baby toys of about the right age and ability handily within reach. Sparrow never seems to mind being handed toys, though she consistently has only limited interest in the stuffed-animal variety.

We visited James' work - the Perth office. It was ostensibly so that he could make contact with the Perth section of his team and company who he hasn't seen for a while, but it was mostly to show off Sparrow given how much he talks to them about her. This is Ravitha, James' boss, who he hadn't actually met in person before but had only spoken to by phone and net.

Sparrow meets the CEO of the company, and immediately tries to steal his tie. He commented that the way James talks about Sparrow sometimes sounds like he'd go to work with her strapped to him if he could. That's probably not too far off the mark :-)

Saying hello to more people around the office. I enjoyed the visit - it was obvious that James gets a fair bit of respect from the people who work with him and they were pleased to see him. And delighted to see our little charm machine too.

Sparrow, this is your Aunty Jo as she would like to be remembered in your posterity. I'm paraphrasing, I think she put it slightly differently when I took this photo, but I am using not having gotten to these captions for ten months as my excuse for a dodgy memory. Jo, feel free to correct me. This is also Joanna's kitchen - we've arranged to borrow her house for a get-together to catch up with a few more friends and let them meet Sparrow.

Talking at the table with Kerry and Grace. Sparrow's having some water, maybe - she was starting to get really distressed and unsettled.

More people - mostly science and physics and electronics types, including my brother. James is way off in the background there with Sparrow and a few other people like Terry and Karen and their boy. Sparrow got progressively more and more upset, and no food nor drink nor comforting could make it better - there was a definite problem that was bothering her and giving her pain. She cried and cried. Eventually James caved and gave her Panadol because leaving her in pain wasn't helping any - I always hold off on painkillers because they can hide what the actual cause of the problem is, especially with a baby who can't communicate, but it was past the point where we were gaining anything useful. Our best guess was that the muffin she'd eaten earlier was now giving her problems as it passed through. Both James and I were stressing out quite a bit because she was so upset. So her Daddy gave her the Panadol, then I tagged with him and took a turn carrying her for a while while he settled his own nerves back down again. The Panadol took effect while I was holding her, and she got suddenly back to her normal cheerful self, smiled at everyone like she couldn't miss this chance to wind them around her finger and then promptly fell asleep, exhausted. Poor little mite. She was completely fine the next day so we figured it had to have been a short-term thing like a digestive discomfort. The side effect of all this was that she made a very strong association between being held by me and pain going away, even though it was all due to her Daddy. So for the rest of the trip and a few months afterwards any time she got hurt or uncomfortable she'd be definite about wanting to be held by me to make it better, and would settle much more quickly where possible if I was the one doing the holding. There were some advantages to that, even if it is a bit ironic.

James and I have taken a quiet walk in the sunshine down to the shops at Yanchep. We're also taking the opportunity to have some garlic chicken balls from the takeaway counter there.

Sparrow is quite definite that she should be sharing these enticing-smelling things and is seriously straining herself to get to them. No, little one, absolutely no way. They're so far beyond your current dietary tolerance it's not funny, and we already know what happens next. We'd not seen her strain for something like this before though so we were quite amused.

Lying on Daddy, holding her foot and waving it madly. She really enjoyed doing this at this age.