Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Eighth month part 1: almost crawling, 9 December 2009 to 9 January 2010

The big theme of this month was almost-crawling. Sparrow kept looking like she was just about to crawl - bouncing on hands and knees, moving hands forward. This was very exciting seeing as we spent two weeks of the month away with grandparents and relatives who thought they might get to see her start to move around. Her aunty Jo even encouraged her with a sincerely fascinating demonstration, which I sadly have no photos of (though there is a video, be warned :-). However, Sparrow suddenly worked out that if she pushed back on her arms while trying to crawl she could get into a sitting position, and suddenly that became more interesting and she stopped trying to crawl for a while because sitting up was more fun. She did start crawling right at the very end of the month, after the excitement of being able to sit up wore off, but we had much amusement at her attempts in the meantime.

She's stuck. It's not obvious at first, but that's the rocking chair's rocker pressed into her nappy - and she can only move backwards, not forwards. It seemed like no matter where we put her or how we pointed her, she spent a lot of time backing into this chair. It was like it had its own gravitational pull or something. So I freed her from this stuck position and moved her over to the bookcase with two toys to distract her, then went back to the papers I was attempting to read through.

About forty seconds later, there was a frustrated squeak, and I looked over and saw her here, banging the back of her head on the crossbar. See? Gravitational pull, I tell you.

She was pushing up a lot, and getting on her hands and knees and bouncing. I have a photo of me at this age / stage with my dad copying me overhead that I quite like, and thought I'd try and get one of Sparrow at the same point, with James, for a fun comparison. Now I just need to find that other photo and scan it in.

What a great push-up! She'd sometimes get on her feet as well. But just hanging around like this was plenty of fun. Pushing back with her arms like this is how she'd end up further back from where she started (so frustrating!), and it's also how she worked out she could sit up on her own - just push back and let the bottom take you down...

Playing in the kitchen. She has finally managed to get to the toybox herself, tip it over and get things out instead of waiting for me to deliver new things when she's bored with the ones she's got. Ah, success! And satisfaction! It was really easy to do stuff in the kitchen with her once she worked this out, she could keep herself amused for several minutes at a time.

Some toys, however, became less suitable. The funnel has now been relegated back to the gadget box, though it did get a last moment of glory helping Sparrow audition for the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz.

Her ability to grab and manipulate is getting pretty good, as is her ability to wiggle herself around to get something she wants. I got to start getting a bit slack about how I offered her food around this time, because she could mostly sort it out herself (and would occasionally go foraging to see what she could find). So different from when she was newly born, when just having the nipple on slightly the wrong angle made it completely inaccessible.

The important thing about this photo is that she didn't start where you see her. She started around the corner to the right. The really important thing about this photo is that she did not once crawl in covering this whole distance. I think she was as baffled by this as I was. It was just a case of continually trying to move forward a step or two, then stiffening the arms and sitting back down, and ending up further back than where she started. Inch by inch this just somehow added up.

You also may notice the pictures I have finally gotten around to sticking to the kitchen cupboards. I'd been meaning to do this for a long time but hadn't managed to make any of the ones I had stick and hadn't solved that problem yet. Plus I wasn't sure that the pictures I had were right. Then this calendar turned up in the mail with exactly the right kind of pictures I wanted, and I went Bingo! Done! and put them all up. The only sad thing about this is that only a few days after this she suddenly got the hang of crawling, and has spent all her kitchen time since trying to find ways to rip the photos off and eat them. I really should have done it a few months ago when she was still stuck in one spot and needed more visually interesting things around her. Now if she gets bored she just moves somewhere else.

She can however be persuaded to stay in one spot with suitable distractions. Thomas is himself a distraction, and he loves the random things in her kitchen toybox as much as she does. So far they are being good at sharing, but I watch closely anyhow.

And if other things fail to distract, there's always more push-ups. So different now than at the beginning of the month.

Sometimes after a nap we'd hear her cry out, not just the "I'm awake" cry but the "I want help" cry. And this is what we found on several occasions. She has worked her way around and backed herself up and is now stuck. She's actually not completely awake here, she's having difficulty holding her head up because she's still half-asleep. And it's just too darn difficult for a little baby, get the parents in and make it their problem.

She has worked out how to sit up and reach into the toybox and get something out, instead of just trying to tip it over. So now if I haven't put out the toy she wants, she can deal with that. It also means we can play more with the idea of "in the box" and "out of the box". I wonder how old she has to be before I can convince her to put toys back in the box when she's done.

One last serenade on the piano, to finish this page. She got to this position, sitting by the piano, all on her own and can stay there with some ease now. So her sitting is very good, and so is her ability to get into a sitting position. She did start crawling the day before this photo. Not far, just a few steps, but it was crawling. So now if I put her on the couch near the piano she can get herself forward to it. That's better than the Wednesday before, when her daddy came home at lunchtime and brought the kitten in with him ("Excitement! Daddy's home!!"), then realised we were eating lunch so walked back out to put the kitten out again. She got this "Daddy, where are you going without me?" look on her face and then very determinedly started crawling after him. Unfortunately, the hands crawled six or eight steps and the knees only crawled three or four so she ended up sprawled on the floor all stretched out and a bit puzzled as to what went wrong. But within a day or two she'd got the hang of it. Wasn't crawling far, she was more likely to crawl just far enough to make her point and get the message across then ask us to pick her up and finish the job - the little slacker. But she was crawling.