Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Nineteenth month part 2, 9 November - 9 December, 2010

It's time for my first obstetrician's visit. I think this was the first one, anyway. So I looked up the location of a nearby playground where I could take Sparrow before or after as part of the morning excursion. This is the Lions playground by the Western Bulldogs' home ground, just down the road from the Footscray hospital/specialist medical area.

It's a very accessible playground, lots of ramps and small steps and interesting bridges to walk on that aren't too challenging. So she can get around it quite well. And I can choose how much I want to run after her. She loved just running up and down the rubber-matted ramps.

Also a good time to have morning tea. Sparrow is very interested in this concept of chocolate-milk-in-a-box. I didn't get it back off her until it got to the point where she couldn't work out how to get the last bits with the straw. Those bendy straws are not ideal, really. And she doesn't know to tip the box down, not up.

Working the car controls. It's such a fun thing. I just have to reset the aircon and airflow when I start the car, it ends up on quite random settings.

Dinner at Taco Bill.

State election time. Sparrow is helping us vote again. This time James is wearing her on his back, so that he can fill out the Senate forms without her grabbing the pencil or the form. We are waiting to see which loony Victorians manage to accidentally elect - the Labour Democrat should be out (the one who thinks his electorate needs to be protected from the malicious infiltration of renewable energy), but there's bound to be another loony given the way the large number of minor parties fall into the preferencing. James and I were personally hoping for the Sex Party candidate to get in, but they got tipped at the end by one of the minor conservatives.

We went to visit Trevor and SueAnn to drop off their order from the Tupperware party I held. Sparrow is wearing one of their microbead cushions as a hat. She quite liked their place. James and I had to be very wary though, it's filled with lots of very exciting Lego that Sparrow would have loved to have taken apart as destructively as possible. Maybe when she's slightly older she'll realise just how cool SueAnn and Trevor are and how one should be very nice to their things in order to get to play with them.

Out for a walk, and we discovered long grass. This was very exciting and tricky to walk through.

Playground stop, I think after daycare, at the playground in the central reserve in Altona. It's such an easy place for us to stop, and Sparrow can climb these stairs up to the slide herself.

At the South Kingsville playground, she decided she wanted to sit with Mummy for a bit in between running around. I took the chance to try and get a mother-daughter photo seeing as I hardly ever get myself in these photo pages. Most of them didn't come out that well (I can't aim the camera easily when I can't see it!) and this is the best of them. I'm writing these descriptions several months further into the pregnancy (almost to the end of it!) and it's odd to look back and remember that she used to be able to sit in my lap like this. Hasn't been the case for a couple of months now!

Some good warm spring rain. I loved the rain in November and early December. It came from the northeast, an unusual direction for this area. And it was always so wonderfully warm. You'd get these sometimes-quite-heavy showers but not accompanied by the usual bitter freezing south-west winds. Lots of thunderyness too. Sparrow and I managed to be out for a walk a few times when the showers came through, and she loved being able to play in the rain. Especially if we were just downstairs, where she could run in and out from under the shop awnings as she chose.

Playing with the car again. I think this might have been the day I asked her if she was going to drive home and she firmly said "Yes", so I said "Good, Mummy will enjoy being a passenger for a change".

Indulging my love of taking good photos. The storm was so magnificent over the bay but so clearly not where we were, and the colours and patterns were lovely. Sparrow didn't watch the sky, she was climbing on the sea wall.

This was a very special day. It was the first day I ever saw her jump. With some encouragement (OK, with a lot!) I managed to talk her into getting both feet off the ground at once when she was stomping in these lovely big puddles. She only managed it a couple of times and wasn't very confident, and then didn't do it again any of the next times we encountered puddles, but jumping in puddles has now been established as An Important Fun Thing To Do That Mummy Approves Of.

More puddles. And those are more of the clothes I got from Mara as well. It was the perfect time to get given a few pairs of little shorts, and I loved the Chinese martial arts girls on the t-shirts.

Sparrow decided to push the stroller herself while we were at Highpoint. I sat on the comfy couch and watched as she pushed it up and down the mall. Her ability to steer around other shoppers isn't that good, so there were a few moments of amusement as people realised this stroller coming towards them wasn't moving on its own and was also a little erratic in its direction. But she had fun. And I got to sit down for a bit.

Quietly exploring the Williamstown Botanic Gardens. For some value of quiet.

Sparrow and I found an abandoned playground. A nearby primary school had closed up, but the playground equipment was still there. On one structure was this curved tunnel, which Sparrow managed to crawl through all by herself even though she couldn't see the other end. It was a bit scary and tricky at first, but she was very proud of herself once she'd done it and went back for a few more goes.

A very painful and difficult visit to Melbourne Zoo. We left home just after nine a.m. for what should have been a twenty five minute drive but which took almost an hour. I got there needing to pee very badly, and couldn't find any toilets anywhere (poor maps, "discreet" (i.e. bad) signage, the toilets I did find being closed for cleaning). I'd gone with the intent of going straight to the walk-through bird aviary and then seeing what we felt like after that - it was the one thing I really wanted to do. And it was the first thing we did, just about - here we are in it, at 11:30 am, more than two hours after we'd left home and more than an hour after we'd got to the zoo. You can probably guess from that that it was also the last thing we did as we both needed to go home and have lunch. In between I'd had a meltdown over the toilets thing, to the extent that the zoo staff had actually called first aid for me because they were worried about this mum collapsed on the ground having hysterics and unable to breathe. (I *could* breathe, just not enough to answer their questions between sobbing attacks. Making them feel better wasn't high on my priority list given that I still hadn't found an open, working loo at that point. Sparrow was fine, she was just waiting for me to get over it so she could get out of the stroller.) But eventually we found our way to the aviary (with some difficulty given the poor maps/signage and with path closures not being marked until you got right to them), and we both enjoyed it. I would like to go back sometime and go through it again now that I know how to find it. And when I'm not going through a large hormonal meltdown. Thinking about it still makes me angry though. I want to go fix all their signs with a large marker pen.