Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Around the house
Tenth month, 9 February - 9 March, 2010

I work on the principle that the whole house is Sparrow's to roam in. This month she really began to take advantage of that. She follows us from room to room, goes looking for us if we're out of sight, and if she gets bored in one spot will go find something else of interest. So here is a tour of our flat, courtesy of Sparrow. This is not unlike how many times we go back and forth in one morning and how much distance we cover.

Nappy free time at the CD player corner. CDs and the player are still a favourite toy, as are the pile of rock specimens hidden under the grey shirt on the left (that's why they're hidden :-). She can get CDS in and out of the player and their boxes, so some have taken a little damage, and she likes to get more CDs off the wall collection if I've put them away. I play things she "suggests", so we might listen to Clannad one day, Santana the next and Monty Python the day after that. Nappy-free time generally goes without incident now, though at the beginning of the month I was still missing maybe one wee a day and Marty Robbins (being at the top of the stack) took one for the team once. I started giving her nappy free time after she'd been awake an hour or two and gone through her first couple of wet nappies instead of first thing, and the miss rate dropped dramatically. Nonetheless our carpets are going to get cleaned very soon now. This photo shows her hair - it's quite even and a soft light brown now, though the tips are still quite fair. You'll also note the careful positioning of the power cords - computer cables are all under the couch and the plugs not in line-of-sight. I finally got some Australian-fitting socket protectors too so that's all sorted now.

I had pulled the manchester boxes out from under the bed to put linens away, and Sparrow thought they were great for climbing on and over and onto. She loves to climb now. We still have a ladder in the loungeroom but thankfully she hasn't worked out how to climb that yet. Standing is still a lot of fun - her record during this month for an unassisted stand was eleven seconds. Mostly though she holds onto things and walks herself along to points of interest. For instance, she'll grab the bedhead, stand up and walk along to her Daddy's alarm clock and start pressing buttons. I await with amusement the morning she works out how to turn it on while James is still asleep.

I finally worked out where I put all my stuffed toys, and added them to the pile in the hallway. There's a couple of fairy bears with crinkly wings, a big chameleon hand puppet that makes her giggle if I put it on and "chew" her hands and feet with it, and another of the birds with accurate bird-call recordings. So she now has the Sacred Kingfisher from Oma, and my Pied Butcherbird to listen to. Mostly she just chews on their beaks. I will probably find more of those along the way, or put them on the birthday/Christmas present suggestion list.

Entertainment in the kitchen. Sparrow stands on one side of the door, Thomas stand on his hind legs on the other, and they try and pat each other's hands. I'm not sure if they think they are playing the same game or not. I am just pleased that the door stays closed very well. Sparrow likes to lean on the door, and a couple of times has shut me out because I couldn't open the door to come back in without either knocking her over or sending her falling face first down the steps. She has learnt to respond to my requests to either sit down or shift sideways to lean on the wall so that I can open the door safely.

There's that ladder, next to the neatly arranged shelves of fiction books. I spent a bit of this month getting them sorted out and it's been nice to have them within view (though it means I spent a bit more of this month with my nose in a book than I normally do). Sparrow's slowly growing figurine collection is there too. She was trying to reach them by holding onto the ladder, which is why I took this photo, but she stopped when I got the camera out. I started collecting figures of ladies who weren't just ultraskinny AngloSaxon posers wearing pink. She loves them, though has to be supervised playing with them because she wants to either eat them or smash them on things. This month's additions include the two mermaids (in blue) and a deep black and chunky African water carrier (not in this photo). I was tempted by a Greek tambourine player in 1600s clothes and a Dutch washerwoman of the Masters era, but they were a little overpriced for a collection that will be pretty hard-worn. It's cute when you show her a new one - she gets this look on her face that says "Really? Is it all for me to eat?", opens her mouth wide and begins to carefully insert. You say "No, not for your mouth" and she stops, looks at it for about five seconds then begins again because *this* bit is Obviously For Her To Eat.

Playing at the mirror. It's been another favourite toy this month. I can sit on the end of the bed and she'll crawl over to me and up my leg to say hello, then catch sight of herself in the mirror and crawl over to give the other baby kisses, then see me in the mirror and crawl back to me, and repeat. One day she did this for about ten minutes straight. I was sleepy and just sat there, and she had a great time. I thought I was quite clever getting this front-and-back shot of her. She likes playing in the bedroom now that it's been made mostly safe for her to explore.

Playing with baking dishes in the kitchen. I was trying to get a photo of her with the cupcake thing on her head, but it'd come off a fraction of a second before I pressed the button. I now have a "kids' cupboard" set aside with kitchen stuff she's allowed to play with so I can just open the door to that and leave her to rummage. You may notice that the nature pictures have all been taken off the cupboard doors. I got tired of constantly telling her she couldn't have them and finding ways to stop her removing them, so I just let her remove them when she felt like it and took them off her as soon as she did. It took her two days to remove all thirteen.

Playing in the hallway. It has turned out to be a really good space for balls. She's fascinated with balls rolling around and has loved watching me throw and catch things for quite some time. I need to get her another of the balls that her Grandma gave her for Christmas (and that we left at Grandma's because it didn't fit in our suitcases :-) - our local KMart has them for $6 so next time I'm down there...

New rule: *NO* climbing on the piano. Not even if the cat is on it, and not even if there's something just within reach on the table on the other side. When she's playing the piano I can keep an ear on what she's doing even from the kitchen. This particular event led to a series of noises that to a trained mother's ear sounded like trouble, so I came in to look and this is what I found. The branches on the table are from an ornamental LED light that Mum gave me back when Sparrow was about a month old. The LED string has now been shredded by collusion between the baby and the kitten, so I was removing the branches and electronics for safety. The top of the table is no longer safety.

Bath time. She is all ready to jump in, and doesn't know what Daddy's waiting for. She likes going into the bathroom and looking around, and I think sometimes is asking if it's time for a bath or shower. If you have a shower or bath without her she will make very clear signs that she'd like to come too. Right now she is bouncing up and down so hard that it was quite difficult to get a photo that wasn't blurry. One night she got two bonus showers because she kept asking James if she could come in. She got the first shower, got dry, then made her way back into the bathroom before he'd finished and gave him the cute-out until he relented and picked her up again.

Sometimes though she is just optimistic. Hey look, it's the bathtub! -hint hint-. She does like using it to stand up.

The Spud with more spuds. I'm holding one, and so is she but she's trying to chew on hers. I had to move everything from the balcony inside so that they could reseal and re-waterproof it. In the process I cleaned up a couple of boxes and discovered a few random potatoes including one that somehow wasn't in a box at all but just in a little pile of dirt between boxes. So I did a harvest run. The cats and the baby both find this indoor garden intriguing, though I'm having trouble convincing the cats to go all the way to their litterbox when there's all these convenient boxes of dirt right here.

Playing the piano. She's taken to "playing" it from the back side. I don't know why, unless she thinks it's easier to stand there instead of on the sheepskin. But she likes to stand there and bang away at it, hitting the keys is apparently optional.

The desk room. She's not allowed in here. You can probably guess why. I work on the principle that the whole house is hers to roam in as much as it is ours, and she certainly thinks so too. But I make an exception for this room: it's the one we've put everything into that needs controlling, containing, managing or simply complete removal when it comes to an inquisitive baby - and the door stays shut. What this really means is that all the *interesting* things are in here. So I was putting some stuff away, she followed me in here, and you should have seen her face light up. She just didn't know where to start, there was so much cool stuff. It's not too obvious in this shot, but her feet are already busily playing with the bamboo trellis while she looks around at all her options. I hadn't thought she was getting bored with all her other stuff, but there was a distinct difference in her demeanour when she came in here. Much more alert and inquisitive and playful. So I need to get a bit more variety going out in the main rooms, and cycle stuff through more frequently. I will be tidying up and cleaning this room in the next month or so, because we can't really use it ourselves anymore and I need to get back to my sewing machine. And I want to clean the carpet! So hopefully it won't look this bad for too much longer.

The bedroom. Believe it or not, this is an area that is mostly baby-proofed. Or, it was. She's much better at climbing than when I first went through here and set it up, so I need to do something about all my mysterious objets-de-shelf. Those boxes and bags in front of her are my lingerie, sorted into "good", "maybe" and "fantasy", where "fantasy" means "sure, one day you'll be a size 10A again". At least, they *were* sorted. She likes to pull out the brassieres and play with them. I secretly hope that when I next put them all back and have to work out what's in what category that I'll fit more of them than I did when I first sorted them.

A sunny morning at the end of the month, with everybody exploring the playroom and looking at the sunlight.