Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Nineteenth month part 4, 9 November - 9 December, 2010

Eating watermelon, an important part of the coming season and something that involves great attention. This might have been the first watermelon for the summer too, certainly a relatively warm day (finally!).

My friend Mara stopped by with a bag of clothes I might like, and this dress was in it. She'll outgrow it fairly quickly I suspect, or it'll seem that way now that the weather's actually started to get warm, it may not get too many wears. At this point though I don't think I knew if the new baby was going to be a boy or a girl, so I didn't mind collecting an extra winter dress or two. And tartan's fun.

We bought Sparrow a potty, finally. It's this little red turtle which also doubles as a stool. We showed her several in the shop and it was the one she didn't run away from. Not sure at what pace we'll take introducing it, at the moment it's just hanging around in the loungeroom becoming familiar. Successfully so, it appears, it gives her great reach onto the piano for Elton-John-style dancing-while-playing. She's playing along to Minnie Riperton at the moment.

Kisses for Daddy.

And now while he's distracted, I'll pick his pocket.

Helping Mummy cook, from the safe and controlled vantage point of the Funpod. I finally got around to installing the front piece on it so we can use it as a standing place. That means the high chair now becomes a low chair, it stays on the floor, but it's good to be able to have her up and watching me. Gives me much more freedom to actually do something complicated in the kitchen if she can see what's going on. I think here I was making crockpot bread. Which came out like a stone log, as usual. I really have never mastered bread, don't know what it is.

Cardboard box time. I thought she'd play with this more than she did, but she did try it out a bit. More interested in pushing it around the room than in playing in it, possibly just a little too tricky/tall for her to get in and out of at this point.

Straight out of the bath, and playing on the first item to hand - the stool. She likes to stand and sit on it.

Playing with Daddy one weekend morning. She loves to climb and roughhouse. James is generally willing to assist.

She loves wearing my glasses.

A special day. She insisted that I not help her spoon and eat her yoghurt, and did it all herself for the very first time. I'm quite happy to encourage this kind of independence, the better she is at feeding herself the better off I am. It was convenient though that she chose a time when she was easy to clean up afterwards. The child health nurse visit at this age asks you about their ability to feed themselves with a spoon, and I had to admit she hadn't done much of it because when it's very cold so they're in Michelin-man-layers of clothing and your house is almost entirely carpeted there are a lot of times when you just don't have the energy to deal with the results of the learning process. But now is a good time for her to make up for lost time.

I finally decided I'd had enough of the way we dealt with toys, and got organised. I have these toyboxes for a reason! So all the toys that weren't currently suitable for Sparrow got taken out, and all the toys she's currently playing with got put in, and now if I want to distract her with toys I can just pull out one of the toyboxes and that's sorted for the day. And at the end of the day it's really easy to put them back into the box and put it away. She's even willing to help put them away, sort of. Much less stress on me in terms of the nighttime pack up - I'd been getting very tired of the amount of work it took to get things away well enough that I wouldn't trip or stand on them in the dark of the night. This made it much easier on everyone. I think this might have been when I began the rotation, too, with some toys put aside in a box to be switched into the toybox in a few weeks to be "new" then. It wasn't until midsummer that I got that rotation more methodical though.

I had Sparrow up in the Funpod watching me make dinner. Then I discovered, a few seconds after she did, that she could reach the container of sweet potato I'd cut for microwave cooking (that's my new Tupperware "Tupperwave" special microwave cooking thingy that I'm using). And she discovered that she liked uncooked sweet potato. I carefully didn't stop her stealing as much as she possibly could of it. Which turned out to be a good thing, as she hated the cooked version and wouldn't touch it. But raw is apparently fantastic. I have a lot of blurry, out-of-focus shots of her taking more and checking to see if I'll stop her in this photo set.