Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Takes and out-takes in the ninth month, 9 Jan - 9 Feb, 2010

This page is all about the clothes and the poses. Those moments where she was just so cute I couldn't help but grab the camera. Like they said of the actresses of the 30s and 40s, "she gives good face". However: there was just one hitch. She's now very mobile. And she thinks the camera is Really Cool. So, many of my attempts to catch her being cute turned into sequences of a baby's face getting closer, and closer, along with extreme closeups of hands and tongue (eeww!). This page is about the great takes - and a few of the better out-takes.

I like chocolate-banana icecream. A lot. Now, where did you put that empty bowl, I need to stick it in my face.

I went to put a size-00 singlet on her and found that she'd definitely outgrown it. So we took a trip to the shopping centre, partly as an excuse to go stroll around in air conditioning for a couple of late-afternoon hours (the hottest part of our summer days, the temperature often reaches maximum around 4:30 or 5 and stays at maximum until 7). It was a very hot day and she hadn't had much rest - just couldn't drop off for long. So we strolled, she slept, and I bought a five-pack of size-0 singlets in "boy colours". They only had two pack-types, one with dark pink, light pink and white and one with red, green, dark blue and light blue. She looks so good in red and navy I don't know why anyone would go for the pink.

The singlets were the trigger to go through her clothes again and work out what was currently her size, and what she'd outgrown. The top right pile is too small now, the lower left pile is still too big. She was not overly patient with the tryings on of everything, it was a bit rich to be put through sleeves so often. So it always takes a good day or so to do this. But we got through it. She spent this month wearing both the bigger 00 clothes and the smaller 0 clothes.

The hat Oma made with the alpaca wool we gave her in November. Wonderfully colourful and eccentric, and it and the matching jumper will fit well this winter. Sparrow loved playing with the hat, and was a bit disappointed when I packed it away for later. I think she really wanted to eat the pom-pom balls some more.

She likes to crawl all over me. I had the brilliant idea of trying to photograph this from underneath and get her looming over me. It turned into a battle for the camera.

Every month at some point I've managed to catch her wearing a "hat" of some sort. Here is this month's recycled fashion moment, courtesy of the catfood tins. They are awesome to play with because they make such great noises, and they're a good size for small hands. She can't put the tins on her head herself, but she thinks having them fall off is funny whether it's on my head or hers.

I forget what I was trying to take a picture of here, but just as I pressed the button the camera lens suddenly filled up with Baby. It's not a bad picture of her face, and for once there's not a massive booger hanging just inside her nose. She hates us taking her boogers away and is surprisingly good at preventing it. She may be a natural at Aikido.

She was being adorable at me and I tried to get a photo of her being cute in this little dress-top. It's not one she wears often, but it is cool and comfortable on the warm days. This is the only photo I got of her that shows the dress. See how she is looking up with that eager and acquisitive expression? She's seen the camera, it's my mobile phone which is shiny mirrored silver. She wants it.

All right, you try and take a picture and I'll try and eat your phone, and we'll see who wins.

The Tigger suit was one of the things I pulled out of the boxes to try if it got cool enough. One night, it did. This is the thing about Melbourne - one day it's 42 degrees, the next it's 22. I've tried to avoid anything that's branded or with copyrighted characters for her, but the tiger stripes are fun and nice and bright. And I suspect her cousin Mimi will enjoy wearing it next after Sparrow grows out of it in a couple of months. I have decided that the best animal for Sparrow is probably a koala - she likes to cuddle up close and she still has that nice rounded big-bottomed shape even though she's starting to lengthen out a bit and her rolls of fat are starting to vanish. Even her daycare lady picked up the resemblance without any prompting. According to my "meanings of the animals" book Koala was the ancestral protector of all the waterways, which I think is lovely given that I spent all the pregnancy working on water projects. So I will keep an eye out for an appropriate koala outfit to try on her at some point in a couple of months when we're past the heat.

I still love the way this little green shirt looks - I've always liked that kind of sleeve, even though I think ruffles are the spawn of the pit of demons. She looked very cute sitting here talking to her Daddy and showing him the toy-of-the-moment, one of the cat collars we tried and discarded as unsuitable. It's shiny and it has a bell on it, and she loves it. She apparently likes trying to feed it to Daddy, too.

We went to the ReUseItBaby market again, looking for clothes in the next couple of sizes. In particular I was after hats - none of the shops have suitable hats, despite it being high summer. Apparently people only buy hats at the beginning of summer, and no child ever loses theirs or grows out of it after that. I shouldn't be sarcastic, but it was irritating (Sparrow has done both). All daycare places have a no-hat-no-play rule, and I'm starting that with Sparrow at home too in order to reinforce the rule. I hadn't been too serious about it til now ourselves because we don't have a yard, the balcony's shaded whenever we go out there and she's not up to playgrounds yet. But now that she's started daycare she has to have a hat, and one that will Stay On. So we hunted for hats, found some nice ones and along the way found other little beautiful things like this dress. It really suits her, except that the skirt is a bit long so when she crawls she occasionally gets it trapped under her knees and ends up crawling up the inside of the dress then gets stuck.

Hello, cheeky Daddy's girl! This was taken on the last morning of the month, and that morning she was all about Daddy. She even followed him through the house when he left for work, and sat at the door asking him to pick her up while he was putting his shoes on. He did, of course - how could you resist this face? The shirt is a new one that we got at the ReUseItBaby market. People kept saying to me "Oh, so your next one's a boy, is it?". Which was funny and disturbing because they didn't seem to think girls would wear collared shirts or anything that wasn't pink. The clothes for her age, still at less than a year, are getting so horribly gendered already. Even a lot of the boys' stuff I wouldn't put on a boy because it's so unnecessarily cliched, and the girls' stuff is just horrendous. It was also funny because they were obviously assuming that I was pregnant with the next baby. I really need to start losing weight. Ah well, when the breastfeeding slackens off I will work harder at it.