Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Out and about in her fifteenth month, 9 July - 9 August, 2010

We went to the Tim Burton exhibition at ACMI one wet Sunday afternoon. Apparently this was the good idea that everyone else had too, the lines for tickets were quite long, but they saw us with a baby and moved us to the priority line and we went inside straight away which was nice. Didn't have exhibition entry for a while, but were able to go in out of the rain and see the normal free exhibitions. They were quite good - and there was a big round couch in the middle that Sparrow loved so we were all happy. Our entry time came and we rocked up... to discover that neither of us had reset the timezone on our phones since coming back from Darwin the day before. They let us in anyway. The exhibition was good, you can certainly see that Tim Burton is a creative genius. I didn't like most of his art though, just a little too weird for me (and I bet that's not something you expected to hear *me* say). We also had hassles in that they nicely told us there was a baby change room in the gallery so we wouldn't have to leave for that (there was no re-entry) - but then wouldn't let us take the change bag in with us because it was a backpack and all bags had to be cloaked. So we just did the exhibition without dawdling and hoped it wouldn't be an issue. Sparrow didn't enjoy the exhibition much either - it was dark, full of people that wouldn't look at her and too crowded for us to be able to let her walk on her own so she got a bit cranky and difficult. The Imaginarium, a dark tunnel with glowing art on the walls, got a bit of her approval, and she spent some time curiously studying the carousel of strange creatures at the end of it but her final quite vocal verdict was that it shouldn't be there, put it away. She is a tidy soul.

One of many visits to the nearby playground in brief times of letup from the weather. She likes to play with the wet woodchips.

Under the umbrella. I forget where we were going but we needed a whole bunch of stuff packed into the car. We might have been moving the baby seat too. Sparrow sat on the grass under the umbrella and watched.

Taxi! We're on the top of the carpark at Altona Gate and I've let her walk her own way to the car, albeit closely supervised. Unsurprisingly the route she chose was a little indirect. She's giving the grand gesture of "That!!" and is off. Our ramble ended when she decided she really wanted to stand in the middle of the upramp and nowhere else in this whole almost-empty carpark would do. I like parking at the top. There are some ironbark trees that have a long flowering time across winter and their canopy is right at that height so they're always full of colourful lorikeets that you can go stand quite close to.

Late breakfast/brunch with some of the mothers group at a cafe in Williamstown. We just managed to squeeze around the couches. Having three toddlers "helping" with the food was an interesting challenge. The cafe seems family-oriented though, more than half of the tables had at least one patron under the age of 7.

I looked up some geocaching sites not far from us, after we'd had some success in Darwin. We decided to go out for a quick trip to this one, in one of Melbourne's many linear parks about fifteen minutes drive away. It was a really lovely spot just by the Western Highway, though you'd not know it was there. We enjoyed our walk in the fresh air along the side of the stream. I thought Sparrow would enjoy the outside time too, but she fell asleep just as we got there and woke up just as we left.

Sparrow and I are looking at one of the artworks in the Degraves St Subway galleries. It's lots of those plain pricetags with faces drawn on them all. Sparrow was quite intrigued by the structure and the tiny faces, though it didn't hold her attention for terribly long.

In a Chinese bistro in one of the many arcades between Flinders St and Flinders Lane. I'm having lunch with my friend Maia, and Sparrow is busily cuteing it up at all the other lunchgoers. It was quite a busy little bistro with people and tables filling the arcade and the shop space across from the restaurant as well as the restaurant itself. Made it a bit tricky to contain Sparrow, but it was OK, there were plenty of people who wanted to talk to her.

A rare sunny day, and Sparrow and I have escaped the house to hang out in Williamstown Botanic Gardens. I don't always remember that they're so close and convenient, and they are really pretty to spend time in. The ground was very wet and muddy, it doesn't thaw out quickly in the mornings this time of year, but Sparrow didn't mind that too much. She was willing to play with her ball a little bit. The thing that gave her most difficulty was that there was a groundsman driving a ride-on lawnmower over in one of the next sections, and she completely refused to turn her back on it just in case it came our way. It really made her quite nervous. I can understand that.

The mums' group is visiting Rochelle's, just down the street. Sparrow has found a corner of toys and is absorbed. No interest in the other people, though at this point there weren't too many others there yet. The thing with the red and green dishes in the middle is quite clever - you press the knob and it starts an air pump that blows the little balls up an airstream chute and then lets them fall down the ramps to the bottom again. The first time Sparrow accidentally pressed the button and the balls started popping out the expression on her face was totally priceless. I quite like it, it's got a lot more physics and interactivity to it than the usual musical funstations that just play music or say a word when you press a button. And it can clog up because of the Venturi effect, but that's easy and intuitive to fix, so there's some real tactile engagement with the laws of physics there.

Still at Rochelle's, but more people are here and there's a bit more social play going on. The little girl on the left is not normally in our group but she's the same age, so she got to meet lots of new people and was very shy about it.

At the beach. Some days after picking Sparrow up from daycare I stop at the beach on the way home. It's Altona Beach, so on the bay rather than true ocean, but none-the-less it's water to the horizon and there's that complex stillness that only deep nature has. I like the feeling of space and being able to see out through distance, when so much of our city time is focused on things really close up and never looking around. Sometimes after Sparrow's been at daycare it's good to give her time like this. She is happy to explore, too, there's shells, and sand, and seaweed, and stones, and so many interesting things. On this particular day she discovered what happens when the thing you put in your mouth and bite down on is old dog poo. Normally whatever she tries to eat she's very reluctant to give me, I have to fight her for it if it's something I don't want her to chew on. But not this time. I held out my hand and said "Give it to me" and she spit out what she had loose and was quite willing for me to reach in and fish out the rest. I was quite surprised until I realised what it was. Oh well, healthy immune system. I did wonder though if rinsing her mouth out with the local seawater would make things cleaner or if it was more biologically active. You never can tell around here.

Another day at the playground, in between drizzle patches. The slide was a bit wet but able to be dried. Sparrow had a few goes on it and is now convinced that sliding is the best game ever. She loves the slide. Can't climb up to the top of it herself, and usually tries to go the direct way back up the slide because she hasn't got the idea of going around, but she's willing to have lots of goes on it. Though she did start to have problems going down because she hasn't quite got the idea of keeping her feet together, so one leg starts to drift sideways and then suddenly she's got one foot wedged against the side of the slide and is starting to go down in split position. You can also see in the second photo that chewing woodchips has never become old.

At the playground again, with wattle flowers in her hair. We'd had a bit of a nicer patch of weather that day so I'd walked a bit further, we'd investigated a further bakery and a silver wattle tree (they're in flower now) and carried a sausage roll to the park for sharing. Sparrow shared most of the sausage roll with me and then realised that this playground that she now recognises was at the other end of the big grassy space. So there was a bit of standing and pointing and stentorian yammering until I got the message that she wanted to go to the playground. She even walked almost half the way there herself before I took pity on her and carried her the rest of the way.

Babycino! We're in the cafe downstairs. Sparrow is having her milk on the run, walking back and forth with a death grip on her cup. She was really quite cute in her determination to not miss any part of it.

Sparrow was starting to get bored with her toys. I'd done a toy shuffle a day or two before but it was still getting a bit tame. I felt we needed a new toy of some kind as a new distraction for a while, some kind of new possibilities. So we went on a trip to Kmart to wander through their toy aisles and see if anything seemed appropriate. There's not much, and I wasn't expecting much. Sparrow was quite taken with the big wall of bright red footballs, but she already has a kid-sized one and I told her that if she wanted a grownup-sized one she'd have to ask her daddy. He'd be happy to buy her a football and take her to the park to kick it. She looked at me rather blankly. We did see some stuffed animals that moved back and forth and had eyes that lit up when you touched them, and once Sparrow got over her startlement at the cobra hissing and waving its head at her with glowing golden eyes she got quite excited and started patting every animal on the shelf to see if it would do something. Most of the toys at Kmart though are from tv shows and various kinds of brands rather than anything generic, and I usually try to avoid those. I thought I might make an exception for one of these two action figures though. James and I both watch wrestling so I know both of these two characters, and they're both reasonable wrestlers and not just real-life-dolls-in-bikinis. Sparrow has the lady doll collection which I haven't added anything to for a while, and I thought having a woman with visible muscles might be a good addition. But I was indecisive about which one and Sparrow didn't seem to go for either particularly, so I left it for later. I ended up with a five-pack of toy cars as our morning's prize. Sparrow thought they were interesting and different for the first day, then ignored them for a while. She took a couple of weeks to warm to playing with them and decide that rolling them around was fun. That's fairly normal for most of her toys, she takes a while to become seduced by the possibilities.