Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Happenings in her ninth month part 2, 9 January - 9 February, 2010

No, I'm not interested in my lunch. I'm going to leave it here on the floor and come look at what you're eating. What is it? Baked beans? They're my favourite! I might have said yesterday that they must have come from a diseased goat's bottom, but I can't remember yesterday so you shouldn't either.

She is funny now with food. She insists on trying to stand up while eating (if she's not strapped into her high chair), so you get this wavery baby trying to simultaneously pick the food up and lean on the plate with the same hand. It gets a bit messy. She has developed quite a liking for baked beans after an initial cool reaction, and likes all the legumes a lot. If she's being fussy with her food I can always tempt her with split pea soup or refried beans. She had a great time picking the baked beans out of my bowl and eating them. She has also started feeding us her food, the same way we feed her. This is cute (if awkward) when she is trying to put, say, a door wedge into your mouth and mostly just waving it randomly at your face, but a little gross when it's the rice cracker she's been gumming all the edges of and turning into a soggy mess.

We finally got organised and got permission from the landlord to fix shelves to the wall. They're Elfa shelves, so they only drill in at the top of the wall and the shelves themselves hang from the top rail. Our first step was to get the equipment for drilling. Our second step was to go get replacements for the stuff we had that didn't work so well - the cordless drill wasn't powerful enough to drill into the brick, and my stepladder was too short. This is our new ladder. It's got nice wide steps. Sparrow is quite happy to crawl around under it, and the cats can leap up on it and be out of reach.

Eventually we had suitable equipment, all the pieces and a plan... but discovered we were missing one thing: someone who could drill a neat straight hole into masonry. Neither James nor I really had that down. With practice we'd be able to do it, but practicing on the wall of a rental flat generally isn't a good idea. So I called in a handyman and said "Can you drill me a line of holes along the top of that wall there?" and he said "Sure, I've got everything I need in the truck". One massive superpowered drill and a lot of noise later, the top rail was installed. Great, problem solved, even though he did threaten to charge me double for having James' Eagles scarf on the floor in this very strongly Bulldogs-supporting neighbourhood. Then it was just a case of getting the shelves in and putting stuff on them. Sparrow liked watching them work, except for the noise bit.

This has meant a whole bunch of rearranging in the main lounge, which is good because now all the stuff Sparrow isn't supposed to play with isn't there. She kept us on our toes during the rearranging stage though. There are two pull-out drawers in the toybox. One has toys that are OK for her, one is full of stuff that really isn't suitable yet. Guess which one she was constantly finding her way to. She thought these drawer-boxes full of toys were a great new thing for her to interact with. I've always thought they were a good design.

Fitting the brackets to the shelves. Sparrow is helping, and has managed within seconds to get to the only bit of plastic in the whole thing and start trying to rip bits off to eat. (Plastic bags and power cables are such an attraction, and sometimes when I put them out of her reach Thomas goes and gets them for her. I am not impressed by the collusion.) The brackets shouldn't have been as complicated a job as they were, but trying to get all the brackets and hanging bars and shelves lined up took a while. It went much faster when we found out that if you put the brackets on the wall bars first then the shelves will clip in quite easily. If you do it on the floor it doesn't work.

More loungeroom rearranging and tidying. I was putting all the puzzles into a box for the top shelf seeing as many of them either have small loose bits or would insolvably suffer from a baby energetically losing bits. I let her play with a couple of the ones that she'd be OK with while I was working. She took the one that is the two metal loops that are supposedly stuck together, a type of puzzle I can never solve, started to put it in her mouth, then decided it was too awkward and took the pieces apart so she could put one on the floor and eat the other. I have no idea how she did it.

I got apples off my trees this year. Just three, but they smelled very apple-in-the-sunlight, fresh and redolent. I showed the first one to Sparrow and she got quite excited, it had to go in her mouth, and I thought well, why not? Seems like a perfectly good reaction to me. She had a great time trying to chew on it with her two bottom teeth. When I cut the apple up for us to eat the flavour was just as good as it smelled.

I've been using the WiiFit a bit, and James too occasionally. It's fun - a computer game that you control with your body instead of your fingers, which oddly gives me better odds in most games. Sparrow watches it sometimes when we're playing. She likes the upbeat silly music, and thinks the dancing around that we do is funny. And then she gets bored and plays with a toy or Thomas for a bit, and then looks back to see what we're doing. My fitness routine with the WiiFit has come to consist of rounds of the games that I can play without her getting so bored she starts asking to be picked up. (The one where I pretend to be a flying chicken is OK about half of the time.) The game she likes most is the Advanced Step. It's just stepping on and off the board, I don't know why that one is great, but it is. And if I put her in the carrier and then do it with her strapped to me, she laughs and laughs and laughs. I have made a little cartoon figure for her so she can now "play" it too, though the console is smart enough to say that she's too young for the games. Instead it runs a special "baby weight" program, and that's nice. It weighs me (without saying the result!) and tares itself then gets me to pick her up and measures the weight change. So we can record her weight on a regular basis if we care to do so. At the end of her ninth month she was around nine kilos, give or take a nappy and a wee.

Bathtime. Du badst? Wir baden! Sparrow likes to stand holding onto the edge of the bath, and now she can get herself into the bathroom and to the bath without our assistance. She thinks this is great, and one night just near the end of the month she got two showers because Daddy was having one and she kept going in and asking to get picked up. Bathtime with Daddy is still lots and lots of fun.

Playing with Thomas. Her current favourite trick was to gently and carefully take hold of a paw or tail, and then vigorously and swiftly yank it up and down repeatedly. Both the cats and her parents tell her off instantly when she does this, and she hasn't quite worked out why.

Helping me put the dishes away. It's probably worth knowing when you see this picture that all the baking dishes on the floor were in the cupboard already when we started. The kitchen will be my next re-baby-setup project now that the main lounge is mostly sorted and the hallway's been cleared of books and paintings. It's worked well as it is for some time, but the recycling box has now had to be raised, and she's not far off accidentally opening the cupboard doors. So I need to find a way to lock those down, especially the rotating one which you can pinch yourself in quite awkwardly. I know, I do it to myself by accident about once every one or two months. I also need to rearrange the contents of the cupboards so that one of them, probably the one open here, is OK for her to get things in and out of on her own. I think it's great if she wants to play with the metal and silicon baking trays.

She has taken this huge liking to her own reflection. When I took this photo she had climbed into the laundry basket on her own in order to get to this mirror, and started "kissing" her own reflection. She likes giving kisses, though I still need to encourage her not to chew at the same time (ow!). So now the mirror is one of the best toys, followed immediately by our shiny reflective silver kitchen rubbish bin which she also appears to attempt to fit into her mouth wholesale. I have washed the bin fairly thoroughly now, and it's gone on my list of chores to repeat each week.

Right near the end of the month she'd been doing fine on all her other foods, and eating regularly, and it was time to start slowly introducing dairy. Those little white flecks you see on her high chair table are goats cheese. I started her with a hard goats cheese after eventually finding one that I thought was palatable enough that I could eat it with her. She was a little underwhelmed, but did OK. Next I went for a sheep's milk cheese, and that was quite a tasty one and she has eaten heaps of that one. We didn't start cow products in her ninth month, just the other dairy animals, and only stuff that's already part-processed (you aren't supposed to give babies straight cows milk before about twelve months, though it's OK baked into things). Yoghurt will be next, and cow-origin cheddar. They sell goats' yoghurt downstairs in the Arabic grocery, and I am wondering if I have the stomach to eat it myself. Probably not. I should try, though, as I think the goats milk is supposed to help your immune system and overall nutrition more than cows milk does. Or maybe that's a myth propagated from *my* childhood -grin-.

The card table is making another appearance, and hosting a game of Scrabble. That's another thing that now needs to be kept out of her way! She is happy enough to play under and around it, as long as we're interacting with her as well as playing the game. You can also see the shelves with stuff on them, though I'm still sorting through all the books and getting them on in order (it's an intermittent process that I was doing during my daytimes with Sparrow).

The hallway, now cleared completely of books and paintings, vacuumed and turned into another toy space. It makes a nice place to distract her and also contain her, and gives her a long length of space to crawl back and forth in and play with a ball in. The mats down make it seem like a space, and also hide the worn patches in the carpet where she can pull bits off to try and eat.

Pick me up. Please pick me up. Mummy, Pick Me Up! It's one of her strategies to get definite parental attention - to crawl to where she's sitting at your feet like this (which is nice in the lounge room, awkward when I'm frying something in hot oil in the kitchen :-) and make grizzles. The step that comes after this is to start climbing up my legs so that she's standing and holding onto me, crying all the way. As soon as you pick her up, the tears magically vanish...