Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Ninth month - Excursions, 9 Jan - 9 Feb, 2010

Sam's birthday party

Sparrow and James at Sam's birthday party down in the main park at Altona, just at the beginning of February and the end of her ninth month. Sam is the son of Niall and Sarah of Science in Public, who I've worked for a few times across the last few years. This is his second birthday party, and it was fun to get an insight into what we have to look forward to.

Children, children, everywhere. That's Sam right up front, held by his mum, and his grandmother and several much-older siblings are floating through the picture too. Lots of party food. I loved the cake - it was a clever train, some parts of which were just icing on cardboard boxes with the windows cut in. The kids loved this - they could just eat the freckles and icing off the outside without having that silly cake stuff get in the way. Watching the gift-giving was fun too - most kids were approximately two years old plus or minus a bit, and the concept of giving someone else a present was still a little hazy. Especially when the birthday boy didn't want to open any of his presents or stop to say hello to anyone because There Was A Swing. I had to hide a lot of chuckles.

We had fun in the playground too. I put Sparrow in a swing and gave her a few pushes, she got to bounce in one of the little rocket-ship rockers, and we crawled around on the mulch a bit while Daddy went home to get us jumpers. Sparrow had hers, but we didn't have ours, and even on a hot sunny day like this one that park is very cold. There's always a strong cold wind coming right off the beach just across the road. When James came back I told him that I'd tried taking her on the slide, and he had to try it too -smile-. She doesn't mind the slide as much as she did the first time, though being held probably makes a difference.

Dads playing with the kids. Sparrow was pretty tired by this point as she'd missed her morning nap, so the demand was for nothing but cuddles, but you could still tell she was watching the other kids walking on the tree and thinking "I will do that".

Camping in the Brisbane Ranges

We finally got confident enough - and organised enough - and got good enough weather - to take Sparrow on her first camping trip. ("We" in this case is more James than me, I'm inclined to just jump into it :-). The Brisbane Ranges are quite close to home, maybe an hour and a bit's drive at most through tiny little back roads, and I've only been there the once. We drove up to Steiglitz and then into the south-western half of the park to camp at Friday's Campground. It's an old settlement area of some sort, with huge conifers and a couple of Mexican Pepper trees that have been there for a very long time and that appear to surround a long-vanished "house". Great shade to put a rug down for Sparrow to sit on while we unloaded the car. But she wasn't going to stay on it. She was determined to go find out what Daddy was doing, as soon as she taste-tested every fallen leaf between her and the car.

The tent turns out to be a great place to put her if we don't want her to crawl away. We sat her in it while we raised it around her, and that was Awesome. Even better was sitting her on the air mattress and then pumping it up - that was not just Awesome, but AWESOME.

Rice cracker, static electricity (see the hair?) and screaming for fun. It was a very Calvin moment.

A quiet campsite. I've just set up to cook dinner (a red-lentil-couscous-vegetable frying pan "stew"), and James and Sparrow are both having a nap in the tent. She's a little too small to help me cook with open flames in the wind, I think.

But she didn't think so. She was quite happy to help me deal with all the extra pots and pans while I stirred and waited.

One of our attempts to go for a walk. Each time we tried to walk off into the bush it would start raining. So we never got much further than this. That log in front though was interesting - it hides a geocache. While we were eating dinner a car pulled up and a dad and two kids got out and started walking around with their GPS. They eventually made their way to where this photo was taken, and started hunting around between firetrees and logs and rocks until they found the cache. Apparently there's lots of these across the country, and you can go looking for them, then when you find them you write in the notebook inside to say you were there and swap something in the container for something you've brought. They were having a great time exploring. I think that sounds like something we should try, especially now that James has one of those onboard navigator things. I'm always up for an excuse to explore.

Poor little muffin, so tired she passed out right where she was in the tent. Or not, she might have got into this position after she fell asleep. She has trouble not moving and likes to sleep on her tummy. We were working on packing up the camp, but pausing every time it started to sprinkle with rain, and I didn't want to disturb her unduly.

Setting up for another walk, wrapped up warm in Daddy's scarf. It reminds me of the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting, and others from that Dutch period.

Lunch on Sunday at Steiglitz, after we'd packed up the camp. We were going to grab some lunch and then drive over to the eastern section of the park to do one of the main walks - there are a bunch of short ones in one area. But James and Sparrow are sitting here looking out the window at a group of very bedraggled motorcyclists pulling up and firmly reprimanding the man who planned their social ride to coincide with a torrential downpour. We got inside just before it started, and decided that maybe our walk should be postponed. Steiglitz doesn't have electricity - it's a ghost town officially, though it does have a few residents. So the cafe is all on solar electricity, with bottled gas for the cookers. It's a nice place to walk around too. But we opted just to go home. Nice being close enough to do that.

Australia Day in Ballarat

We decided to go and visit Ballarat on Australia Day. I haven't really explored Ballarat, but it seemed like a good place to try. We started with lunch at their branch of the Beechworth Bakery. Sparrow is now old enough to share our snickerdoodles (that pastry you see on the table), or at least the fruit topping. She can't yet have the pastry or the custard, but that was OK with her - the blueberries and raspberries were just fine.

They had a playpen for kids, and Sparrow did quite well in it. Though she had a bit of an altercation with the other little girl there, over that green ring you see her holding. We're not sure exactly what happened, but we think she might have got upset that Sparrow started playing with it again when she put it down. Sparrow was quite focused on the green ring, and as soon as it was free would crawl and reach to get it. Ah, the wonderful world of sharing.

Next we went to the Aboriginal cultural centre, where they were celebrating Survival Day with a range of activities. We got there just before a didjeridu demonstration, and Sparrow was completely enthralled. She laughed at everything the performer did, which charmed him and the rest of the audience no end. She thought the didjeridu was excellent and the sound it made was even better.

The didjeridu was followed by a basket-weaving session. I got to revise my basic technique (which was good) and listen to the usual cries of "This doesn't make any sense" and "It doesn't look anything like yours" that you get whenever people are learning these arts. The English language can be so precise with words like "over", "under", "behind" and "through", and yet we all translate them so differently. Sparrow got down on the floor to help this boy and his sister with their basket, or just to play with them and be generally adored by anyone who'd given up on their basket. She thought flax was a bit tasty, but not too tasty.

Next stop: under a tree near the Botanic Gardens, to rest and relax a little. It was a warm day, we were all a bit tired, and definitely ready for another drink. Sparrow seems to like playing on the grass, though I had to keep an eye out for all the interesting-but-probably-not-edible twigs she wanted to eat.

I was keen to see the Botanic Gardens (as always), so we wandered in - and Sparrow looked at the great avenue of historic redwoods, zoned out and promptly fell asleep. Here we are sitting in the Sensory Garden having a little more quiet unhurried time, under the shade of a very large Eucalyptus globulus.

The gardens were quite well done. There were lots of very pretty spaces. I enjoyed the colour gardens (done with reasonably climate-appropriate plants), the water-lily bed, and the bright colours of the conservatory indoor display was fun too. There was also an amazing succulent round bed that was quite striking. The gardens were very much about artistry and beauty rather than being a collection.

We'd thought about going to the Australia Day concert on the shore of Lake Wendouree, right next to the gardens, and had enjoyed hearing the brass band playing while we walked, but decided that we were happy enough just to have dinner and go home. The restaurant (Da Vinci's) was very nice, and Sparrow seemed to enjoy it. She kept flagging the waiters down when they walked past, to our (and their) bemusement. She ate a fair bit of our dinner, too, though it was hard to get bits without sauce on them for her. I'd asked for my sauce separate, but then changed the order and that bit of it got lost so my meal arrived swimming in egg and milk :-( We were able to fish a few egg- and milk-free bits out for her though, and she got to discover that she doesn't find salmon that interesting. Spring onion, however, is great and she'll chew on that any time. She'd been refusing to eat anything, and I put a piece of spring onion in front of her and just waited. She looked at it, picked it up, chewed on it for about four minutes, then demanded more of our food and ate everything. James now has a greater appreciation of why I feed her the way I do sometimes, I think.

Visiting friends, and out and about

Who's this? Hello Flo, hello Nadia. We had a nice visit at Flo's house. Nadia is a lot more active than when we saw her last, though not too much yet (she's only about four months old now). Flo and I got to talk work a little (she's also a science communicator) and she gave me a few useful German phrases that she uses with Nadia. In particular I now know how to say "Wo gehst du?" (where are you going?) and "Was machst du?" (what are you doing?), and I need those two a lot lately for our little Miss I'm-Not-Doing-Anything-You-Need-To-Know-About. (Her response is usually to give me the "It's important baby business" look, combined with either "Don't interrupt" or "Are you coming?".)

The mothers' group I go to is getting a bit erratic about when and where we meet, now that some are back at work and the babies all have quite different daytime sleeping patterns. One day I blithely told James that we weren't going anywhere so he could take the car, and then a last-minute flurry of text messages confirmed a cafe visit that afternoon. Luckily getting there by bus is surprisingly easy, though we do have to catch two buses for someplace that's only five minutes away by car. So this is Sparrow's first bus trip. She liked it, though she likes any chance she gets to see lots of new people who will smile at her. The trip was mostly uneventful, except at the end of the return trip when some idiot complained that the driver had missed his stop (he hadn't, it was an express bus that didn't stop there) and the bus driver braked quickly just as I was stepping forward carrying Sparrow to get off at the "real" next stop. We got thrown forward about three metres, and it took a lot of control to avoid Sparrow getting her head smashed into the metal poles up the front. So I wasn't impressed, though I know how that kind of accident can happen. Trains are much more stable.

A new Taco Bill restaurant has opened up the street from us. They aren't the cheapest of restaurants, but I do love Mexican food and their meals are good. So we tried it out early one Saturday evening. It was early enough that it was quiet so Sparrow could crawl around the floor a little before the meals arrived (with me standing over her so as to avoid waitresses tripping on her). Then we got to feed her Mexican rice and frijoles, which she appears to love just as much as I do. We all had a very nice dinner.

We started going swimming this month. The local pool is quite nice - it's a salt and chlorine mix, so not too strong on the eyes or skin; it's all indoors so there's no worries about sun at this time of year; and it's well set up for small children with a walled off shallow area just for babies and small kids plus a long shallow "beach" section of the leisure pool which makes it easy to get in and out. Our first visit, as soon as we went in the water Sparrow started howling and giving us reproachful looks through her tears, clutching us tightly in the "don't you dare let me go" embrace. I felt like such a heel for having insisted on dragging her and James down to the pool. But eventually the sheer joyous force of the other children won her over. They were obviously having so much fun, she just had to get involved. So eventually she very cautiously splashed her hands, and thought about smiling, and then worked her way up to kicking and thrashing in the water with great glee. James thinks that her initial problem, apart from it being a big cavernous space that is very noisy when it's full of people, was just that the water was noticeably cooler than she gets in the bath. Once she worked out how to deal with that, she was OK. She and I have been back on a couple more warm days while James has been at work, and she really does enjoy it (you might notice her looking a little grumpy in this photo because the pool trip is over :-). The water is fun, and there are always other children who come up to talk to her and splash and say hello. I was thinking last year about putting her into baby swimming classes, but I might skip those in favour of general water play and save the money. She gets just as much out of playing with us as she would from the more formal class. The swim nappy I bought works great, and it's very simple to use. And it looks like stylish bathers so I'm happy with that.