Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Excursions in the twelfth month, 9 April - 9 May, 2010

We made it to the PlayShak a couple of times this month with the mothers group. Sparrow enjoys it more when there's other kids there but doesn't really play with them that much. She still likes to take off and explore, then come back and see what people are doing. Crawling is lots of fun, I think. I was hoping she'd start climbing on all the nice padded things they have here because she does so much climbing at home, but so far there's no interest.

The bouncy platform is really a lot of fun though. And much better on a school day when there's not the older kids running across it. After my mother visited the air mattress she slept on was still out and Sparrow and I discovered that she could have plenty of bouncy play on that at home too.

On our way to Hannah's birthday party. Apparently cucumber is tasty and you should have some, or at least look at it with great interest. Though it's possible that what she's doing here is pointing at our reflection in the phone (which is what I use to judge which way the lens is pointing). I picked Sparrow up from her morning daycare and the party was just around the corner but not for another forty minutes so we stopped in a park to have some nature time and eat some more lunch. Sparrow likes cucumber, except on the days where she doesn't. A lot of her solid food preferences are a bit hit and miss. Being in a park is never hit and miss - she loves poking around on the ground and looking up at the trees. Not that it was a particularly exciting park, there was only one tree that counted as enough of a tree to sit under, but we managed.

At Hannah's birthday party. Hannah is sitting over on the mat. Mali (the baby standing next to Sparrow half out of the picture) had her birthday the weekend before I think, or the weekend after. Kit, Hannah's mum, had us playing a party game or two and that was fun - we passed a ball around the room and when the music stopped whichever mum and bub had it had to do an action of some sort. The babies only had a limited amount of patience, but it was fun to try. Sparrow tried the birthday chocolate cake and decided she definitely liked it. So then she proceeded to find adults holding a cake plate on their laps and pull herself up by holding onto their knees and give them the Big Eyes Of I'm So Cute to see if they would feed her any of their cake. She was totally shameless -sigh-. And it worked, too, she got several extra mouthfuls of cake. I think our little talk about using your powers for good and not evil may have to come earlier than I thought. And maybe more often. Though there's an argument for chocolate cake being on the side of good...

"No, Sparrow! Don't drink the ocean! You don't know where it's been!!" -sigh-
Melbourne gave us one last gasp of vaguely warm weather one weekend early in April, a lovely autumn day. So we went to the local beach for the first time, down at Williamstown. I don't think much of the beaches around Port Phillip Bay. I know they talk about gold sands and turquoise water, but when you're used to Perth's deep blue water and white sand this all just looks dirty. Sparrow was interested in the whole concept though. We walked her down to the water, she stopped, looked carefully at it, then leant forward and started drinking. A second before when I pressed the camera button James was standing straight, looking out to sea and keeping one eye on the small child, but when the photo actually took it caught him just in that moment of "What the! Sparrow, no! Quick, grab the child!" -grin-.

Sparrow had a bit of a play with the seaweed, and with the sand - the wet sand was great, she ate lots of it.

After this she then wanted a real drink. For some reason this beach water didn't taste like the bath at home, and it made her thirsty.

I am lying on my back enjoying the warmth. Sparrow is looming. This is a new thing for her, and she leant against me for most of it, but she seems to be enjoying it. That's one of the shirts I wore when I was a baby that my mother brought over on her recent visit.

Playing with Daddy, being lifted into the air. She used to hold her legs out straight Superman-style when you "flew" her, but now she tends to let them drop.

Picnic time. Just a little picnic, an attempt to get the people who'd signed up to the Sharehood all together to meet. It's a slow process of getting people to meet each other before the system can really work, and you need to run some regular events to let people meet and get used to the idea and ask questions in order to build up enough local involvement. So here we are at the first Sharehood picnic. Only one person came though out of the five or six invited - I'd hoped for at least two. And he was a diabetics educator so didn't really want to share our extremely sweet Lebanese pastries :-) But that's OK. I need to run another one, maybe in a month, and maybe a coffee gathering instead of a picnic given that it'll be winter shortly. Sparrow had fun crawling around on the grass, the rug and us, and trying tiny little bits of the rosewater-and-shredded-wheat slice.

We spent Anzac Day weekend at the Australian Druid Assembly in Cockatoo. There were thirty to forty people, druids and family, squishing into Vicki and Peter's main loungeroom along with their three Scottish Deerhounds, Maggie, Puppy and Laird. Sparrow and the dogs got along just fine. Sparrow got her ears cleaned on a regular basis and got put on one of the dogs' back for her first "pony" ride. The only trick was keeping Laird out of Sparrow's breakfast bowl, but everybody had to keep him out of their bowls. I got quite cautious whenever there was a "communal" bowl of cream or dipping sauce because if everyone thought someone else was guarding it, it was guaranteed to have been "sampled" by the small horse I mean dog. Sparrow was surprisingly good in the ceremonies, too, patient with all the theatrical rigamarole and even saying her "lines" on cue (to only my half-surprise - she may be her grandpa's granddaughter :-). She loved having all of the people around and all the regular noise and activity. Group camps are going to be a popular choice, I suspect.

At one point she crawled off into the back loungeroom. I gave her a minute's head start then followed her to see what she'd found. She was sitting fascinated next to Murray, who was practising a song for that night's informal Bardic Free-For-All, and was quite happy to stay there and listen to him for a surprisingly long time (at least three or four minutes :-). I think this is the weekend where music really came alive for Sparrow. She liked listening to it before this, but suddenly she was surrounded by people who were making it with instruments and who were jumping in and singing songs thirty-people-strong. And who were sitting and listening to other people making music. Suddenly it became something that you could make and do, not just sounds inside a box. She's seen me occasionally playing with instruments but I don't think it had really sunk in, it was just something funny that Mummy did sometimes. After the weekend I noticed her being a lot more attentive to music and playing with it more.

Storytelling at the Bardic Free-For-All. The Assembly's Chief Bard, Michael, opened with the story of Taliesin. Sparrow didn't seem to mind the storytelling but didn't really get into it greatly. She's not yet really into stories and books that we can tell, and a long fireside story like this one can't hold her attention for too long. I really loved it though. I don't know what James would have thought, because he wasn't there - he'd decided to drive home and back to get the air mattress that we'd forgotten and have some quiet time on his own. That should have been a three hour round trip but was more like four and a half with accidents and football traffic.

Sparrow was happy to get cuddles from all and sundry, and go talk to and engage with lots of different folk. She particularly liked Val, a friend from Margaret River who stayed with us the night before the assembly, and Amanda. This is Amanda. It was nice having so many folk there who'd keep half an eye on which way Sparrow went. James and I were always looking after her, but there was one moment when we were trying to set up technical stuff for the live cross to the Order's Chosen Chief in the UK but it wasn't working, and she took advantage of both of us being slightly distracted to hightail it out of there. I suddenly looked up and said "She's not with me, she's not with you, James, where's our daughter?" and Ngatina called from the hallway "She's here!". Apparently she'd paused on her way out of the room and looked at Ngatina with a look that clearly said that she knew very well she was escaping, was Ngatina going to stop her? and Ngatina decided to follow her. They got as far as the apple basket in the hallway, where Sparrow was busily trying to select which apple to eat - a task requiring much consideration and thought and repeat study of different apples. Then she got one and started gnawing into it with great glee. It must be lovely to have front teeth. So that was our first "Ohmigod we've lost our daughter!" moment.

William Ricketts' Sanctuary - a daytrip within the Assembly. Sparrow slept through a lot of it. It's not quite as dark as it looks, that's just the effect of the flash. But it was dim and misty, with the tall mountain ash trees shrouding their canopy in mist and the fern trees dripping softly with forgotten rain.

When she did wake up, Sparrow wasn't that interested in the sculptures. However, this spider web covered in dew was obviously a toy she was meant to have.

She did like the running water at this fountain / water sculpture. She likes falling water, to the extent that at one point this month she found her way into the toilet and stuck her head between James' legs while he was trying to pee to get a good look at what was going on and see if she could catch it. Needless to say she got evicted from the toilet rather promptly. Ah, the downfalls of her being able to open doors that aren't latched.