Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Development in her twelfth month part 1, 9 April - 9 May, 2010

Popcorn! Check it out! I decided to try a new kind of healthy tasty treat and see how she went with it. She loved playing with it, did eat some but mostly enjoyed just taking it all out of the bowl then picking the bowl up and sticking her head right into it to see what more was in there. It was one of our more messy games, but that's why we got a new vacuum cleaner before she was born (though I did keep finding bits of popcorn tucked in different places for the next few weeks). The Pyrex bowls are great, I'm glad I have them - she can look in and through at whatever I'm cooking or making. I held her up in front of the microwave while it was popping and she seemed a little confused and fascinated all at once. We will have to try it again now that she's seen and touched the end product. That hand in the air is a "Attention Here Please" gesture, sort of like she's grabbing you to bring her down where she is.

Her crawling is getting better and her ability to get herself under things is also improving. Up til now she hadn't really mastered staying low enough under something to not hit her head, so while crawling and climbing *over* things was OK, going under things still tended to be a bit of an obstacle. She is rapidly improving but still hasn't quite got this sense of spatial awareness quite right - she's gotten herself under the chair here, but can't work out how to get back out because it involves getting herself under that bar as well, and there's not very much space to do so. Plus I think she can see over the bar, so thinks she should be able to go straight and hasn't worked out that she can't just follow the way her eyes are looking. So this is one stuck little baby.

Sleeping on the lounge cushions for the first time in a long while. She generally doesn't fall asleep on the breast anymore, but occasionally nap time and feed time coincide just right. And her sleep patterns were shifting around a bit this month - by the end of it she was starting to do just one sleep a day regularly. But at this point it was still two, and they were getting a bit longer (phew!). So this day she fell asleep in my lap, I held her for a while and then carefully put her on the cushions. She is so much bigger now, you have to be careful to make sure she's really on them and doesn't have legs hanging off.

Watching the world go by. Standing at the window looking out is lots of fun, keeps her busy for a surprising amount of time. She also likes that hat of mine, and laughs when I put it on my head.

Here, let me drool on you. So much drool this month! We'd got one new front top tooth at Easter and its mate was arriving about the time this photo was taken.

The pre-bath routine. James has started the water running and is having a shave. When he's done the bath should be just about ready. From the first sound of the tap Sparrow is in there, standing holding onto the edge of the bath, watching the proceedings, slapping the side of the bath and roaring with excitement. She's dropped her rubber duck in and will watch for the moment that it starts floating, which is always cause for further excitement. Later this month we bought a squeezy bath elephant as well, during a trip to Baby Geppettos in... Olinda, I think it was.

Sparrow is still not generally allowed to watch television, so we have to slip in our favourite shows while she's sleeping. We were in the middle of this episode of Doctor Who when she woke up, so I hit pause and went to see if this was just a temporary wake-up-and-go-back-to-sleep or if she was actually up for a bit. She decided she was up and I brought her back into the living room with us for a little, leaving the screen paused on the basis that we'd be going back to the show in not too long a while. Sparrow is really keen on faces, and carefully crawled over to the TV, pulled herself up in front of this one and started giving the face on the screen kisses. She is quite sure that's what you do with faces, and loves giving kisses.

She is very good at eating grapes now. It's nice that it's still grape season and that we have so many nice kinds. I got the green seedless for her and the deep black ones for me. She decided she preferred the black ones, helped herself and didn't seem to mind the seeds at all. Though maybe this is because she still only has the four front-most teeth so doesn't tend to bite or chew the seeds at all yet.

I put the barrier up across this door now so that she can sit near it when the door's open and look out at the garden - which she likes - but not go outside unsupervised. She's playing with the football which she seems to like, though hasn't really got any idea of what to do with any ball yet. Mostly she just laughs at me when I try and handball it around. I can understand laughing at my ball handling skills. Those are her three nice warm suits on the line behind.

You might recall that last month I had a picture of her trying and failing to pick up the toilet rolls and drop them in the toilet. Well, she's no longer failing. I don't think she knows what to do next though. This was the first time she'd managed it, and she was giving me very much a "Now what?" look. She has not yet discovered flushing, thankfully. We'd got our toilet roll movable sculpture up to almost thirty rolls at this point, but the number decreased after this.

Clothes sorting time. I hadn't done a sort for a while, but we went to another second-hand baby market and picked up some new stuff - including the lovely dress she's wearing - and then I went to a couple of other second hand stores looking for long-sleeved shirts and wintery clothes and got some more stuff too. So it was time to have a quick look through and try on a few things to see if there was much outgrown. To my surprise she hadn't outgrown all that much. She'd gone from 0000 to 000 at around two months, 000 to 00 at around five months and had started wearing some 0 clothes at eight or nine months. At this age we'd expect her to have been starting on the size 1s, especially since she's still a chubby-looking baby. But she was still working her way through the larger of the 00s and getting into the 0s, and the 1s were still too large. I think she's skinnied up a bit over the last month, so the 00s were managing to still fit even though she was a little taller. In this sort I took out a lot of the 00s that were left, particularly anything summery.

Playing pat-a-cake with Thomas through the door. I still spend a fair bit of attention managing the way they play. I sometimes suspect Thomas of missing an entire hemisphere of his brain, he really doesn't learn well. But his mother wasn't the brightest of cats either, so I will wait patiently. This photo is also a better look at the new dress. We got two on this last baby market trip, partly against my better judgement. They're not particularly warm dresses, and by the time she's walking well enough for dresses to be suitable to wear it will probably be too cold for her to wear them. But they're nice dresses, not ickily girly, so I'm hoping that skivvies and tights and legwarmers underneath will solve that problem when the time comes, but right now it's not needed. Dresses are only for really special occasions because while she's standing well she still has to crawl to get anywhere. And does she crawl.

One of the new long-sleeved tops, orange and navy stripes with the blue pants Mum found when she was here. I like this little outfit a lot. The top is one of those that snaps over the crotch, so we'll see how long it continues to fit her, but it's a little big so it should last a while.