Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Eighteenth month part 3, 9 Oct - 9 Nov, 2010

Arriving at the playground at Newport. It's a nice way to spend a little time that's not one of the playgrounds we often walk to (and which I do get tired of). This playground's by the child health centre and the library as well as the train station and shops, so there's often parents and kids around playing or snacking or tossing balls.

This is at the Newport Lakes playground. She's been running around happily, came up onto the little bridge with me when I got on it, explored the railings (under and up) a little, then claimed a drink. I think this is one of the last times we used an old baby bottle for water - I found a much better toddler's water bottle that gives better flow and is more practical for drinking, and was pleased to drop the "bottle" completely. The only place we kept using it was for her midday milk at daycare, for the next month or so until I found a better more "big kid" alternative for that too.

Same playground. Sparrow sees something she wishes to play with and is making tracks for it. If you're wondering why there's a grey stripe at the bottom of the photo, it's one of the ones that got damaged when my hard drive died. Most of the 9000 or so photos I have of Sparrow survived, but about 150 had errors more or less. I had backups of some of those 150, but not the ones between August and December 2010 (which was when most of the 150 were - it was selectively the most recent and biggest that got damaged). I'd feel sadder about this if I wasn't vaguely embarrassed that I have over 9000 photos of her and she's not yet two. At least digital is cheap - if I was paying for film development it'd be way too much!

Our closest playground, and the quickest one to walk to. Sparrow used to love the slide here, but for some reason recently she's got leery of it. Lots of this kind of thing - getting up to the top, putting one foot forward and then back again, like she's testing the water...

...and then backing off and having a little sit down, safely back from the edge. She's OK from the bottom of the slide, but stopped liking trying to go down from the top herself.

I was so tired this day, I just sat down and watched her. She climbed up the slide as far as she could, then turned around and slid down herself, then did it again. And again. I just smiled and laughed and made the occasional "Whee!" noise and hoped she'd exhaust herself without my needing to move. By now I'm into my second trimester so not nearly so tired so often, but there were still some pretty exhausting days. More often I was struggling with being vague and not able to keep my mind on what was happening. Cheering her on the slide was about as much mental effort as I could cope with.

A little bit of blue sky, and James has packed us into the car and we've gone to the main playground on the Williamstown foreshore. Sparrow's just worked out where we are and is getting keen.

This little girl had a ball, and Sparrow got very excited (she's so keen on playing with balls at the moment). They ended up with quite a nice three- or four-way game of ball, passing it back and forth (and occasionally to me).

Seeing as James was with me this time (as opposed to my previous visit to this spot), we were game to walk up onto the wharf. Sparrow had a bit of a look at stuff but mostly just liked walking on the timbers and climbing over the edge. Luckily at the start of the wharf there's a second jetty running parallel and then perpendicular and it's only a foot or two below this one, so she had an obvious place to climb up and down (and charm passersby as she did so).

Some adventure play at home. I thought Sparrow might be up to finger paints by now, and it was a warm enough day to make a mess. So I found a couple of easy recipes for finger paint and tried one. Turns out I'm not very good at making it, or at least didn't pick the best kind of recipe. So I ended up with this lumpy stuff that just stuck to everything (see her nose?).

Sparrow seemed interested in feeling the stuff at first, but it turned out to be a major energy expenditure for me. All she wanted to do was eat the stuff. And then the cats turned up and wanted to eat it too. So I was fending off four different small creatures all of whom were insisting that they were hungry and this was the obvious solution. I gave up soon afterwards, it was just too much. I should point out here that the cats don't know that this is a food tin, they've never seen them in context. I got them from Mum already emptied and cleaned. The cats are just up for trying anything in case it's food, especially if the humans are eating it. And Sparrow sure was! I must not feed her really really lumpy cornflour and water often enough, the poor deprived mite. Or something.

Some of the mess at the end. The colours did get everywhere. Thankfully I'd known I'd need to clean up with as little strength as I could get away with, and had prepared to contain the mess accordingly. I was very grateful for this. She went in the tub, the newspapers got picked up, and suddenly most of it had vanished.