Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Happenings in her ninth month part 1, 9 January - 9 February, 2010

Back to index

Just after she turned eight months old we had our official child nurse checkup. When I pulled into the carpark, this is what was beside us. So, being a dutiful mum dedicated to the education and development of my child, I thought I should show Sparrow what her future career could look like. I think it was a little big for her to take in. The men wandering over to check out the truck all thought it was a great thing for me to take a photo of "him" next to.

The eight-month checkup produced the measurements 8305 grams (or 18 pounds 5 ounces) and 67 cm of height (though that was hard to get as she didn't want to stretch out), and that's average to above average for a girl her age. It also included some other fun stuff. The nurse checked whether Sparrow is seeing and picking up different sizes of things from blocks to hundreds and thousands, whether she responds to her name, her reflection, her carer, how she's standing, sitting and crawling - lots of little developmental things so that they can suggest types of play and other directions to go if a child is progressing more slowly in some areas. It's not a "does your child measure up", but a "how are they going, have you tried / do they like it when you do this or that?" kind of thing. I got asked if she was babbling and I said "not really", but within a day or two she was babbling almost constantly so I think she got a new idea while she was there. The poor little mite had the checkup at her normal nap time though, so some of the tests just resulted in one bleary-eyed little girl staring at the nurse and going "Yes, that's nice, you've shown me your hand before, it's a hand, can I *please* go to sleep now?"

Nappy-free time. It's hard to keep her on the towels now because she's so active, so the carpet gets piddled on fairly regularly. By the end of the month I had given up trying to put towels down at all, and just gone to using the EC nappy-free techniques to try and keep accidents down during her nappy-free time. If I'm not too tired that works well, but I've been tired and cranky a lot this month so my miss rate averages one or two a day. It was less, but I care less now. I am going to get the carpets cleaned sometime soon anyway. And it's fairly easy to tell when she's pooping now, because she'll stand up holding onto something (often me) and say "Mam,". So as long as I'm paying attention I catch the poops pretty much when they happen whether the nappy's on or off.

She says Mum a lot now, though it comes in variations of Em, Hmm, Mmmm and MiamMiam as well as MumMumMum. It has a range of meanings. Many of them are "food" or "attention", but can also include

She has sort of worked out that Mum is a word, but she uses it to mean anything she feels like saying, and addresses James and I pretty much identically.

Playing on Daddy's lap before bedtime. She can get Thingamybob off the chair arm herself now, and still finds it fascinating when she's on the rocking chair. She doesn't sit with us on the chair very much any more unless she's zoning out before falling asleep. There's just not enough room for both her and the wiggle.

I started her figurine collection during her eighth month. She had been given the little good fortune angel that you see her eating here, and I wanted to have figurines that were more than just the usual over-thin Caucasian females posing. So I started looking for variety, of cultures and races, of women doing things and being active rather than just standing around in pink dresses. On the shelf you'll see my first purchase - the Hawaiian lady who is having a grand old time. I've added more since then, but these were the first two. They were happily living on the shelf, and Sparrow would occasionally look up at them. Then this day she very deliberately used the boxes to climb herself up to standing and reach onto the shelf and pick the figurine off it to play with. She loves playing with them. We've had to move the whole set well out of her reach, as her "play" often involves smashing them together and I've had to glue quite a few bits back on -smile-.

Meals were a bit tricky this month. There's still quite a few things we're eating that she can't have yet, but she knows she wants whatever food we're having and is very persistent about climbing on and over us to try and get to our plates. Mostly I tried to make food for us that was also Sparrow-friendly, but one night we just had to have pizza with garlic bread. James said "If only we had a little table or something to put our plates out of her reach", and I said "We do". The card table's been a good solution to a few different problems, and she is quite happy to crawl around under it and continue playing. The CD player underneath her is a favourite toy - it has a handle you can lift, and doors that pop open when you hit buttons, and it plays music that you can change when you turn the knobs. If I want to listen to a song the whole way through I have to keep her away from the player.

She is also completely fascinated with our laptops. Fair enough, we spend a bit of time looking at them, though I only really get to have laptop time when she's asleep or in care (which is why these photo pages take a while to get to). James however is on his probably at least fifty percent of the time that he's home and awake, so she knows it's competition. I have tried to convince James to sit on the cushions instead of the middle of the floor so that she doesn't have to climb past him and his screen to get to all the rest of her toys (and neither do I), but he doesn't appear convinced yet. We are still having some disagreement between us whether he is actually "looking after Sparrow and giving me a break" if he is playing a game on his computer at the same time. That worked when she wasn't mobile but not any more (if it still worked, I'd get all the Christmas pages finished in a week!), and I don't think he's quite kept up with her changing attitude. I spent a lot of this month having trouble getting any time to relax or destress. But it has given me some amusement to see that Sparrow has developed the strategy of trying to shut our laptop lids when we're using them around her. Good girl.

Morning cuddle time. I just thought the two of them were adorable. James is much more patient at putting her to sleep than I am, and much more patient with her upsets and bothers. He says it's because he's had the extra years of practice reading me, and it's true that she has a lot of the same mannerisms. She likes cuddles with him.

And more sleepy cuddles. This was a day where she didn't want to sleep lying down, it had to be upright and cuddled.

She is now stable enough to be good with riding on our shoulders. Unfortunately, she thinks this is a great excuse to pull our hair. She LOVES hair, it should all be hers. So while I've tried the riding-on-shoulders thing a couple of times, it's not become a regular feature of our days.

I heard this "donk" sound, and then heard it again, and looked over. Sparrow was half-standing, half-leaning on the window ledge looking out at the pot plants. She was so fascinated that she kept leaning forward to look at them better and hitting her head on the window, then pulling back, then leaning forward and hitting her head again -sigh-. She likes the plants out the front, and I've started taking her out there now as it's an easier space to control her garden explorations in than out the back. Now that she's actively exploring I have a lot of work to do in the back area before she can roam safely.

She is playing with a lot of my musical instruments, and anything that can make music is just great (including using my belly as a drum). She loves the pennywhistle and this recorder, but thankfully hasn't worked out how to blow them yet. I had to take the pennywhistle off her though as she managed to find an edge on it sharp enough to cut into her gum when she chewed on it like this. There was this great "I hurt" wail when it happened, and it took me a day to work out how she'd hurt herself. She doesn't like you looking in her mouth.

The piano is also a favourite. She can get to it at her whim now, and loves to stand at it and bang on the keys. Sometimes it's even harmonious, though I think that's by accident. I have however had to instigate another "no" rule: "no climbing on the piano". That includes not even if the cats are just on the other side of it.

Aww, how sweet. This is Thomas. Thomas *looks* like a sweet and innocent kitten, but he is in fact A Herd Of Thundering Elephants, and at two or three a.m. every morning he sheds his innocent kitten disguise and steps out in his secret identity to Take Over The House. Back and forth, up and down, all at full speed with especial attention to the favourite hiding place under Sparrow's cot. I have had a few nights of interrupted sleep thanks to him waking the baby at times when she would have otherwise gone back to sleep on her own. Normally he and Katerina aren't in the house overnight, they stay out in the sunroom. But on hot nights we have to have the windows and back door open, and like most Melbourne residences there are no window screens. They're just not a consideration here, rather than the necessity they are in Perth.

Quiet time in the cot. I instigated this as a temporary-but-possibly-permanent idea, to try and get over the whole "as soon as you put me in the cot I will start screaming and sobbing" thing. So every day, about once every hour to hour-and-a-half, I'd come in and lie her down in the cot for five minutes of quiet time. The idea was that if she had just one toy (always the same one), and she was taken out of the cot after a consistent interval, and we did this regularly, she'd start relaxing when she was put in the cot instead of tensing up. And then, hopefully, this would happen at one of the points when she was ready to go to sleep (because we were doing it so often), and we'd be able to start building back in the "go to sleep in the cot" habit that she lost a couple of months ago. The results have been mixed. She is better about being in the cot now, but the concept of "quiet time" hasn't stuck at all. What you see here is pretty much what you get, except that you can't hear the singing-at-the-top-of-her-voice. Lie her down and she's straight over and up to standing. The cot is now her favourite place to practice standing, the rail is at just the right height to hold onto. I have mostly given up on this as it's not doing what I needed it to, but I might bring it back again in a few weeks after we've tried a different approach for a while. Quiet time is probably a good habit to have.

More quiet time. Looking out the window is a new thing. She can see the birds going in and out of the trees in the middle of the Circle, and looking at everything out this window was really quite awesome. I'm glad she is spending some time looking at things further away. We don't get a sense of distance here so much.

Being put to sleep in the stroller. When she got a place approved for family daycare, I had a week to think through any routines I wanted to set. Eating was fine: I just started not breastfeeding her between 9 am and 12:30pm, and gave her a fruit morning tea around 10 if she was awake and a solid food lunch at around 12 noon. That's the food routine that she would be in at daycare, so we just made that our routine too and she had a week to get used to it. Sleeping however was a harder problem. She lost all her good sleeping habits a while back and we spent a lot of this month struggling with sleeping. There were a lot of days where it would take me forty minutes to get her to sleep and then she'd sleep for twenty-five. She was good at going to sleep up until she was around six months old, but since then all her sleep cues have got mixed up - we don't put her in a sleeping bag anymore because it's too hot, she spent a lot of time not going to sleep in her cot because we were away. And she can't just lie still and zone out like she used to because now she's mobile and will sit up, stand up or start crawling without even being fully awake. To complicate things, she spent this month changing from three sleeps a day to two (usually longer) sleeps with longer waking periods between, so her sleeping and waking times were all over the place. So I had to come up with a way to cue her to go to sleep regularly and easily that didn't rely on James or I being there. The solution was the stroller - she can't see who's pushing her, and it reclines to a good sleeping angle. So now every morning I put her to sleep for her morning nap using the stroller, and it takes maybe five or ten minutes then she sleeps for up to two hours. The carer would prefer that I taught her to sleep in the cot, and so would I! but this was something I knew I could make work in a week. And it means she has a familiar place to sleep when she's at care. Now I just have to get going on the cot routine. Again. Not much I've tried this month has really been right.

Nothing unusual about this photo, except that this was the first time she managed to crawl up onto these cushions herself. She also managed to work out how to go down the single half-step between the hallway and streetside door, though she did that head-first. So up and down are now a serious consideration. She likes to head straight for the edge of the bed and try and crawl out into space, and I am working on trying to get her to turn around and go down backwards when she comes to a big drop.