Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

General bits, 9 March - 9 April, 2010

It's a bit hard to make out, but the remnants of her roseola rash are across her chest here. She's still feeling a bit warm.

She keeps getting better with a cup. This one is still a lot bigger than her mouth, so there's a certain lack of accuracy involved, but it doesn't stop her. Her enthusiasm is still unbridled.

Hanging out with Daddy while he washes a round of dishes. That's a salt-and-herb grinder she's attempting to chew on. You can see I gave up on having a blanket in the kitchen for her, and not long after this the pillow went too. The whole space is hers. I sweep and mop the kitchen floor quite frequently now.

Whatever noise you just heard from over here, it wasn't me. By the way, there's some great stuff in this cupboard. So have you finished the dishes yet? You need to pick me up.

She was fascinated by the towel I wrapped around my hair and kept trying to play with it, but by the time I got the camera she'd moved on to playing "dentist" instead. This was one of her favourite games this month. She loved reaching into people's mouths and looking at their teeth. She only had the bottom front two at this point - the first of the top ones came through right at the end of her eleventh month and the second one a week later. So teeth were still these weird things that she didn't really know what to do with but everyone seemed to have so many of them! I had fun making different sounds at her while she was exploring, and watching her get fascinated by which bits of my mouth moved. I had to be really careful not to bite her fingers though because she would keep trying to jam them in my mouth at all kinds of unexpected moments. Singing her to sleep was occasionally a little hazardous - if I tried to fake her out by shutting my eyes while I sang I'd sometimes find a small curious hand unexpectedly attempting to insert itself between my moving teeth.

Eating grapes. It's been grape season well and truly, and she loves them! I can give her a stem with a few grapes on it and she will pick them off with her fingers and eat them, or put the stem in her mouth and pull some off. She's quite capable with them. She will sometimes keep chewing on the stem too, and half an hour later I'll think to myself "What is she eating, what has she found?" and go and look and it'll still be the stem.

Another blurry photo - it's getting so hard to catch her when she's still now! She's eating yoghurt, and having a great old time. She loves the natural unsweetened yoghurt, possibly because it's nice and tart. It does end up everywhere - she eats some with me holding the spoon, some with her holding the spoon, some by dipping her fingers straight in and then putting them in her mouth, and sometimes just tries to faceplant into the bowl. And she happily uses both hands. So there is always yoghurt everywhere after we've had some. But I don't mind, it's an easy snack to have on hand for her and she always likes it. That's one of the little catfood tins there that I'm serving it in - they are great for baby-sized serves of food and it doesn't matter if she starts banging it on the floor or throwing it around the kitchen. Also wonderful magic defrosters.

Kisses from Sparrow.

Here, you can share this Newtonian prism I've got too. It's very tasty. Mmm, right-angled acrylic with complete internal reflection.

She loves the CDs. In particular, this bit of pulling the cubes off, dropping them (see the one in midair?) and getting all the CDs out. She hasn't quite got the hang of opening the cases when this photo was taken, but she worked it out by the end of the month. I spent a lot of time putting CDs back into their cubes and putting the cubes back in place.

I went to the shops to get broccoli for dinner. Sparrow decided that she should be carrying and holding the broccoli, and that she wasn't going to wait for dinner. She happily chewed on it all the way back home. No sense of scale - it was obviously all meant for her mouth. I later added broccoli to my list of "foods she likes that I can serve at her birthday party".

What's in here? The toilet rolls are a movable "sculpture" - James and I rearrange them into patterns if we're in here for a while. Sparrow thinks they're fun to play with too. I had to laugh though. She obviously wanted to try dropping one into the toilet to see what happened. But she can't pick them up from standing. So she'd sit down, pick up a roll, then try and stand. Standing up is still tricky and she needs two hands to hold onto the toilet to do it, so she'd unconsciously drop the toilet roll as she pulled herself up. Then she'd get to where she could lean over and look, start to bring her hand over and look at it in surprise because it was now empty. She'd look down, see the toilet roll on the floor, reach for it, realise it was out of reach, and sit down to grab it. She must have done this on repeat at least three or four times before giving up.

Eating toast. One of her morning rituals is cuteing at Daddy until he gives her bits of his slice of toast. She likes toast. In the morning "Dada" always has toast. So "dada" now means Daddy, and toast.

Elsa came to visit. Elsa was my babysitter back when I was seven or so and she was a young backpacker from Ireland visiting farming family on the other side of the hill from us. Now she's a languages teacher in Mornington. Which should be close enough for us to visit, but Melbourne's big enough it took us a whole term to get organised about it. Sparrow loved Elsa, just laughed and laughed with her.

We don't have a lot of rules that she must follow, because I know how well rules get followed at this age. But there are a few - no playing with power cords, no playing with plastic bags and No Feet On The Piano. I need to point out that right now she's not *really* breaking the rule, she's just dropped something over on the other side and is reaching to get it and the feet are just stopping her falling. At least, I think this is the logic she's following. The fact that she deliberately dropped it on the other side so that she'd have to climb is something I think I'm not supposed to make the logical connection of.