Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Day to day stuff around home in her fifteenth month, 9 July - 9 August, 2010

I like polenta porridge! What, is there a problem?
We still limit how much she feeds herself compared to how much we feed her, and this is why. Everything has to be squeezed in one or both hands before being accepted into the mouth, and sometimes the squeezing is just too distractingly fun to remember the eating step. Some days I cope with this fine, other times we just need to get the eating over and done with. It's really amazing how far she can spread something like this though, and she has so much fun doing it.

She had been asleep, and I heard a little noise so went in to check on her, and this is what I found. She can step over the bars and out of the cot herself, but usually doesn't. She just flirts with it as if to say "Come and pick me up or else!". We did one time this month have her climb out on her own and get off the big bed herself too, but there was some encouragement involved on my part to make it happen. She gets off the big bed fairly well 99% of the time now. Her sleeping is getting much better too now that she's had all the teeth she's got due come through - there was one last one this month and now we should have at least three months of no teething before the next four are due. That will be nice, and help us rebuild the good sleep habits that she lost in three months of constant teething. She sleeps reasonably well in the cot in the daytimes, usually at least an hour and often around two hours. Night times she's in bed with us now. This month we decided to re-embrace co-sleeping, as it was just too cold. That window behind her cot collects a lot of dampness and she was always coughing and waking herself up and we couldn't keep her warm enough at night. So back into our bed she came, and started sleeping beautifully and hardly waking up at all. I like this a lot! When the weather warms up we'll start sleeping her in the cot at nights again, because she does prefer having a little more space than she gets with us and sometimes tries to make that space by kicking me in the stomach. I am never impressed.

On the box. My laptop has been living on top of the two toy storage boxes for a little while now. It's a handy height for connecting to the TV to watch downloaded programmes after Sparrow's in bed (watching through the computer is handy seeing as most shows we might be interested in go to air at a time she's awake). It was also nice because I could leave it open and work on something, a sentence here and a quick search or weather radar check there, while she and I were playing in the loungeroom. We've been turning the heater on and spending a lot of our daytimes in this room. However, Sparrow has now worked out how to get the laptop back within her reach and if I start typing will climb up on the box and start trying to hit the capslock key. Holding down the Help key makes interesting noises too. So this tactic was nice for a while, but is no longer working -sigh-. I'm reluctant to move the fabric box away as it itself is an interesting toy for her, she knows how to take the lid off and take out the interesting materials. And it's a block to the pile of power cords and cables immediately behind, though it doesn't work too well at that because she just drops an important toy over the box then climbs over the box "just getting the toy". It's more an encouragement for the cables to remain out of sight, out of mind than an actual preventative.

The Calculator - this week's new toy. I took Sparrow with me on one of my Sustainable House Day inspections, and they had a similar desktop calculator sitting on the coffee table that she was quite excited about. It was funny, actually - the couple whose home it was have lots of grandkids and had said "Bring Sparrow, that's fine!" and brought out several toys for her to play with but she wasn't interested. Instead she found the rack of keyrings for all the houses they are working on (they have a green building company) and spent most of her time standing under it saying very loudly in Baby that she wanted all these keys please. And then managed to distract herself with their calculator. I thought it would be a good thing to get her one of her own, especially one with big buttons and a good-sized display. The next day I saw one just right at the post office, and bought it on the spot. Sparrow loves it, she happily pushes buttons. I think the little angled screen makes it more like a "laptop", so if her Daddy and Mummy are both typing on their laptops she can type on hers too and is surprisingly content. At least, that worked for the first week. Then she twigged that she might not be getting the best deal out of this situation :-) It's remained of partial interest over the month, though her keeness ebbs and flows. She doesn't have any connection between what she pushes and what happens yet, it's way too abstract for her current level of understanding. James has talked about getting her one of those push-button play station type things, the kind where you push buttons to get sounds and lights, which I think is horrendous but which I'd be willing to consider borrowing from the toy library to try out.

Sparrow is playing with some of my hair ribbons and telling the other baby all about them. I am not sure if she knows it's her reflection or not - she knows to compare the picture in the mirror to the picture in real life, but has amazing conversations with this other baby and will quite happily play with them for some time.

Having fun in the garden. I decided that this little pot left over from a failed cutting could be counted as acceptable loss. Sparrow was delighted, and happily sits there pulling dirt out, putting it back in, spreading it around with her hands. I think I need to get this girl a sandpit, or a bigger box of dirt to play in. One that's cat-proof.

She was cute wandering around in these overalls. She was a little bored I think and was looking for things to get into that she might not normally. On the hunt for Chiff, so we say. She found my box of baby/nurse papers, then some CDs (which she hasn't played much with for a while), managed to climb over the clothes boxes blocking them to get to the rest of the CDs, knocked a lid off one box and strewed its contents around at her creative behest. On the floor you can just see part of the Christmas Fairy dress that she's outgrown. She likes to take it out and play with it.

Sparrow's legs came up in these huge bumps. I think they were mosquito bites, they certainly acted like bites, but they don't usually come up like that. So we weren't sure what caused it. James mumbled about fleas, and I haven't seen any sign of any but it was worth washing and sun-drying all the bedding anyway just in case. I do that a little less often in winter because, well, you can't sun-dry when there's no sun. Thankfully we had a really good drying day that weekend and I did several loads to get everything done.

That meant making the bed, and I have help. That's Sparrow under there. She is gleefully diving under the sheet as I shake it up into the air and let it settle down. When James first moved in I'd do that to him when he was making the bed and I think he found it a bit bemusing (as well as just getting in the way :-). It's nice to see that Sparrow gets the same glee from it, she's started doing this without any prompting. Must be genetic.

Sparrow is under the sarong. She had so much fun with the sheets she started looking for other things to cover her head with. This is the sarong Mum bought for me in Darwin, and it works wonderfully. She can lift it and put it over her own head and go wandering around. Or I drop it over her head and leave her to stumble on, though I try to make sure there's a beanbag in the way somewhere. She loves this game. I think this sarong is particularly good because the coloured lines on it glow from underneath when you're looking through them at the light.

Sparrow's interest in putting things inside things gets quite creative at times. It turns out that the wooden pegs from the pull-along "bus" are exactly the right size to fit in the hole in her stool cover, and she worked that out all herself. They fit tightly enough you can even make the cover spin like a top, which amused her when I tried it. This month she worked out how to get one of the pieces into her puzzle ball - the circle, which doesn't require any turning to make it match up. We have two different puzzle balls and the little container-with-holes-in-the-lid that Mum gave us that work on the same theme. During the course of the month she managed to get the hexagon and the square into the little container, got the idea of turning them just enough and was always very proud of herself when she got one in. It still appears to be trial and error though. She seems to remember which hole worked to get a piece into and tries the next piece there too before trying any others, and isn't too precise about trying to make the shapes match up by turning them. So she's not identifying and matching the shapes so much as remembering that that particular hole can fit things through it.

One day when we came home from shopping the supermarket's forklift was out and ready for driving. Sparrow quite enjoyed this, though I had to run and grab her when she decided to get down without actually looking to see where down was.

This month we started playdough for the first time. Kath had given us a whole bunch of home-made playdough for Sparrow's birthday, but I'd held off trying it until I was more confident about her not just shoving it straight in her mouth. Now that she spends so much time squishing her food, it seemed like a good point to move on to texture play. And it worked fine - she played with it for a few minutes before trying some in her mouth and then trying to claw it back out of her mouth again (it's very salty stuff). So we've been doing playdough for five minutes here and there every so often, usually stopping when she loses interest in handling the dough and starts focusing on trying to eat it. She's still mainly just handling it, taking it in and out of the container and poking her finger at it, rather than trying to make shapes with it or experimenting. Playdough's also a potential creative play, which will be nice as we don't really have a lot of "imagining" type games that she and I play. I've been much more focused on physical skills, sensory development and motor control and also music/maths type stuff, figuring that the imagination and roleplay type stuff will happen naturally on its own given how many real objects she plays with. It's not like I can tell if she's making up stuff with her toys at this point, most of the time the gabble could be anything.

When we were in Darwin I got some good ideas for homemade toys from our chance encounter with the Funbus. Here's the ones I've made so far. The chocolate container Sparrow is holding is a shaker, it has haricot beans and tapioca inside it for two different kinds of shaking sound. I've since covered it in wrapping paper to make it look less like a chocolate container. The clear bottle with beads is also a shaker, but one that you can turn and look at the stuff inside it - I filled it with lots of random beads and objects from my broken jewellery pile and craft box. Sparrow likes shaking both of them, doesn't spend so much time looking at the bead one (though the (slightly older) girls at her daycare did). The Funbus had done that type with rice, so that the objects were only sometimes revealed, but I decided that seeing all the interesting things at once was more interesting than waiting to try and work out if you'd found them all yet. I am not known for my patience. The bottle with liquid is a fun thing - it's oil, water, food colouring and glitter. The glitter tends to remain suspended in the oil, so when you shake it the oil and glitter disperse through the water but then slowly bubble back to the top again. And turning it around slowly makes gloops of oil and glitter detach from the bottle sides and float away.

The last item on the floor there is the Flaming Kitchens DVD, which I've tried watching bits of with Sparrow a couple of times. Flaming Kitchens is a series of short recipes, where they've filmed someone making a recipe from their culture and singing a song in their language to go with it. So sometimes I try putting one on to see what she thinks (and so I can learn a recipe too). Sparrow is still not really interested in TV, and I think that's good. She does enjoy the songs and the dances, and looking at the person talking. Mostly though she gets excited about the TV being on because then she can go press the menu buttons at the bottom of the set and make the picture turn to snow. I have not learnt as many recipes as I thought I would because I keep missing crucial steps! Short musical bits do seem to be potentially tolerable though, so I should be OK to try the Little Pim German videos sometime in the next six months (if I've got them by then). They have that kind of short fun musical structure.

I finally got the sewing machine cleared (or at least a path cleared to it) and finished the disco dress! Sparrow loved it, started wearing it immediately, loves picking it up and holding it. Here you can see she is accessorising it with a pair of her father's underwear, which she has taken an absurd liking to play with. She will go get two or three pairs out of his box and play pinwheel with them around the bedroom before wearing them over her head. At least, they usually come out of his box. Sometimes she gets them out of the dirty laundry basket, so any clothes on the floor I have to check to see if they're clean or need washing. She redistributes quite competently.

On the box again. It's such a great place to be when Mummy is working on something or has gone to look at something quickly. This is post-bath, and so she's not only next to my computer but next to the heater as well. Don't get better than that. Oh wait, yes you do, you could also be within reach of The Telephone, which if you pick it up has this funny curly cord and buttons that go beep when you press them. I can't move the phone anywhere else so I've just made it out of bounds, but when she's standing on the box she occasionally chooses to forget that rule. The thing at the back with the hand- and footprints is a canvas for Connor, one of the kids in the mothers' group. His mum Kirsty has been getting all the rest of the toddlers to do hand and footprints. The canvas came to my place this week for a mothers group catchup, and we got Sparrow's footprint on there (the black one) along with a pink hand from Hannah and an orange foot from Willow. It's not very easy to paint and plonk a flailing limb onto canvas, especially if you don't want the paint everywhere else as well. so we did it while there were extra sets of adult hands to help. I need to return it to Kirsty so she can get the remaining kids on there too.

One of my attempts to allow the baby and the cat to both enjoy a peaceful sunny morning while keeping them separated. Not so successful an attempt. Katerina likes sprawling on the cushions but was unsure about being confined in such a small space, especially when Sparrow started thumping the top of it and trying to put her toys through the holes in the basket. Katerina's not the brightest of cats, but she's smart in certain specialised ways and worked out very quickly that if she leaned against the side of the basket it would move over the edge of the cushions and she could drop down and out that way.