Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Out and about in her eleventh month, 9 March - 9 April, 2010

At Luisa and Frank's housewarming. Sparrow is happily drinking from her water bottle while I try not to eat all the olive dip. Luisa introduced me to olive dip when we both worked at Science in Public a few years ago and it's still delicious. So was the rest of her food - they got married recently and she had new kitchen implements to try out on the housewarming guests. We did not complain!

We got the grand tour of the house and garden, of course, and it was lovely. This little red rocking chair was just the right size for Sparrow.

One of the features of the house was this little wine cellar and secret cubby under the stairs. Sparrow was fascinated by all the people sitting under here, but very cautious about going in. I think she knew that the little boy there wanted to close the door and wasn't going to be super careful about whether she was in the way.

I'm having coffee with one of the mums from the enviro group, and this is her youngest daughter. She's a little upset because Sparrow has just taken the cup that held what was left of her babycino, turned it upside down to tip all the contents out and then managed to steal froth and cover her face with it. She's not got the hang of cups yet, didn't have any idea what froth or milk were, it was just an interesting thing that the other little girl had and she took it. -sigh- I forestalled further interference by putting her up on my seat, giving her her own water bottle to drink from and standing next to her so she couldn't fall off. She managed to find a way to twist around me and slip off anyway, landed on her own bag so it wasn't much of a fall but it still scared her a bit. Between two little girls who weren't having a great time, this coffee chat didn't end up lasting very long!

We do the daycare trip routinely now. One day she was grumpy on the way home from daycare and then went quiet. I looked around when we pulled up at home to see what she was up to, and saw this. That's a damp nappy in the car from when I dropped her off in the morning, and apparently it's quite tasty. She knows she's not allowed to chew on nappies, so my having left one where her feet could pick it up and pass it to her hands was a great treat. Someone is very satisfied with herself.

This was a great night out. Hobsons Bay has a festival that the council puts on, and there were fireworks at night. This is Sparrow's first experience of fireworks. They didn't start til about 9 pm which was a little late - she's normally going to sleep between 8:30 and 9, but she was OK being out and about. Lots of people to look at, there was music playing on the stage, lots of kids waving bright lights of various types. I was tempted by some of the multi-coloured light sabers and the amazing colour-changing-crystal fairy sword, but we restrained ourselves and only bought some churros to eat while we sat on the grass and waited. When the fireworks started over Cherry Lake Sparrow clung to me and hid her head, but then kept turning around to look at them because they were pretty. So first verdict is "This is scary, Mum", but she liked them anyway. As long as she could hold tight to me she was fine.

Our neighbours Sam and Blagowa had their handfasting up at Silvan Reservoir on the autumn equinox. Very pretty place. The ceremony was fun - way more intricate than the wedding James and I had (you should have seen the number of ribbons they ended up having tied around their hands!), but with lots of nice touches. So here we are, dressed up in the park.

Sitting on the grass is fun. Thankfully she managed to avoid any of the plentiful prickles (I was less lucky). I think this is the first public airing of the liquorice allsorts outfit. It got quite hot whenever the sun came out from behind the clouds, so the booties did get removed along the way.

Sparrow's daycarer Joanne was going shopping with all the kids and asked me if Sparrow had ridden sitting in a trolley yet. I said "No", as she'd only been in the infant capsules to that point. She'd outgrown them, but we hadn't been shopping since to try trolleys. So Joanne tried it when they were out and apparently it Did Not Go Well. Sparrow didn't like being in the trolley at all. I figured that I'd better give her another go or two to get used to it. So a few days later I was going to Bunnings, and it was time for a trolley ride. She was just fine, loved it. Admittedly, she does like Bunnings - there's a particular attraction that fascinates her there...

...the giant ceiling fans. She spent most of the trolley ride craning her neck upwards to watch them. I was investigating clotheslines, because it had occurred to me that moving the clothesline to a spot under the laserlite out the back would mean I could leave my clothes on the line on those days when it's intermittent showers and drizzle, and could move more of my plants into the spots where they get rained on, instead of having the clothes in the rain and the plants in the dry. It seemed quite logical to me. I didn't find any good solutions though.

Lily's first birthday party. Lily is the oldest baby in our mothers' group, so this was the first of a series of parties that will happen over the next three months. Many of the other little girls were in dresses, but for Sparrow I've stuck with the neutral collared shirt and just her dragon nappy. Dresses get in the way too much with her crawling at the moment, and the nappy is quite elegant. Though we did have to change it to a plain one halfway through.

The Tunnel of Doooommm, haha haha!!!! Most of the babies at the party wouldn't crawl through this. Sparrow definitely wouldn't. But she and Willow did check it out pretty carefully before deciding. Sparrow does so much more of a frog crawl than most of the other babies - she tends to keep her hips quite splayed and low and her feet wide, not up on her knees as much as the others. We'll see if that changes as she gets more practice at the crawling, though it may just be that I dress her in clothes (or lack of) that let her move freely and without restriction. Most jeans won't move like that.

Here's the whole mothers group together, or at least all of us who made it on the day. There were plenty of other family and friends at the party too, but this space got taken over fairly thoroughly by the almost-one-year-olds. James was surprisingly in his element being surrounded by lots of little baby girls, and they loved him too.

A different mothers' group outing - we're at the Creme Cafe, where we met quite a few times to start with. I think this was the last time we met there for quite some time, as all the babies now are too active to sit with us for long. We take over all the highchairs when our group arrives! Sparrow had sat on my lap every time we'd come to the cafe before, but this time we tried the highchair and it wasn't too bad. Not entirely satisfactory for long periods though, especially as I hadn't brought a lot of food for her so she got bored pretty quickly once it was gone. I cut the cafe time short so as not to try her patience with it.

So we left the cafe and did a quick shopping trip around Coles across the road. It was also an excuse to try her in a trolley again. This is after the shopping, I've loaded it all into the car and gone to take the trolley back and she very much was giving me the look "Mum, you've forgotten something".

I had fun trying to take this photo though. The lines of trolleys are very pop-art in their pattern and rhythm, and the colour is quite bright. Sparrow was moderately patient mainly because the coin-trolleys all have this little chain that hangs off the coin box, and she thought that was a great toy to play with while she was waiting for me to hurry up and pick her up again.

We're at Scienceworks! I wanted a copy of the Melbournes' Child newspaper and thought Scienceworks would have one. It didn't, but I used the chance to go upstairs and see if Sparrow wanted to play in Nitty Gritty Super City - the area for children under 8. It's better if a child's two or older, really, but I thought there might be some bits she could interact with. However, I hadn't taken into account that it was school holidays. The floor was its usual total high speed chaos, and one little baby found it a bit overwhelming and far too noisy. So we had a look at the Lego City and tapped on a few things in the Music Dome, then got out of there. I promised her we'd go back on a school day sometime when a small baby could be taken out of the carrier safely.

This is the Playshak, down the end of the street. I was starting to think that a certain little baby could use a wider range of things to safely climb on, given how much climbing she was trying to do at home. You know, getting to explore over and under and in and out and all those things. One of the mothers group ladies mentioned this place, it's only a three minute walk away and it costs $2 for Sparrow to go in until she's thirteen months old. I'm not super keen on these artificial playhouses but Melbourne's weather is a bit erratic and the local playgrounds aren't very close or suitable for her yet. So I thought we'd try it. This is the infants area. Sparrow explored it a bit but was quite hesitant to really play with anything. She doesn't seem to have the hang of playing easily with new things. She looked around a bit from where she was, but stayed put rather than crawling up to the toys.

The ball pit wasn't too bad, but again, a little hesitant to really play with anything. She didn't mind standing at the edge holding a ball, but diving in or crawling through it didn't seem to even cross her radar. Possibly the biggest problem was that she was much more interested in the other children, none of whom were using the infant area.

What she found the most fun was simply crawling across the huge central floor area, with tables and chairs and people walking back and forth. Look at all this space - a little baby can crawl for ages! We will come back at some point and see if she gets a bit more comfortable with it.