Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Twentieth month, 9 December 2010 - 9 January 2011

I only need one page for photos for this month. I took zillions, but most of them are (or will be) in the Christmas pages. Once those are removed there's not much left! Just a few odds and ends of fun things that happened.

It used to be that when I picked Sparrow up from daycare the first order of business was to give her a feed. By this stage she'd mostly lost interest in the daytime feeds - we were only doing them on demand and she tended to be too busy to think of it. So here we are in the car just after daycare while I put bags and strollers and jumpers and other miscellanea wherever they go, and Sparrow takes advantage of my distraction to drive the car herself. So many buttons, so little time. I ended up completely weaning her this month, on the 1st of January (the first day back from being away). She didn't need it any more or care terribly much and it was getting too uncomfortable for me. She asked for a feed maybe twice in the next three days, was not bothered when I said "No, done now" and then forgot about it totally from then on.

James has started letting Sparrow ride on his shoulders regularly. This is the moment where he turned around to me and said "Is she actually enjoying this? I can't see her face from here". As far as I can tell, she thinks this is just fine. We had lots of "again"s.

Up and down the stairs at the local shopping centre. I'm glad James is willing to walk with her, I get quite tired doing this now. In the background is the pirate-themed indoor playground which is what she'd started playing on, but steps are just so much more fun.

Also at the shops. She's developed an interest in the rides. She calls this one a "horse" and I haven't argued it with her. She does get a bit confused that it doesn't bounce or rock no matter how hard she tries, unlike her own rocking horse or the ride-on things they have in playgrounds. We haven't put money in this one yet because it goes round and round, and I'm not up for walking in circles around with her to make sure she doesn't fall off. She's not perfectly stable. She could be, but she keeps wanting to stand on the saddle. We did try her on one of the other rides in the centre, one that's a little train or plane or something like that that you sit in rather than on, and she was a little amused but not completely convinced. I had to laugh at the time - she was howling to get into it and I was saying "you have to come around this side" and refusing to lift her in over the high awkward bit. One of our little old local grandmothers came up and said "Oh, come on, put some money in for the poor kid, she'll love it" and I had to say that I was going to, I just needed her to cooperate on the getting in bit -grin-

"Nose! Eyes! Hair!" Sparrow is delighted every time she passes this real estate sign at the flats next door that she can tell me what the bits of these people's faces are.

Sparrow loves sitting on this couch. I'm OK with this, it means that when she runs off into the sunroom on her own I know where she's going to start. The cats don't seem to mind the company either. This is I think the latest picture I have of Buckley the kitten (on the left), as he/she went missing just before we came back from our Christmas trip.

Katerina is not entirely convinced that she should be a pillow, no matter how many times Sparrow says "hug".

Toys. By this time I was into a good rhythm with using the toyboxes. Sparrow likes the blocks and wooden shapes and will ask me to "open" them for her.

Some quiet reading time. She will sit by the bookshelf and pull everything out, looking at the front of it and discarding what she doesn't feel like "reading" this minute. She is very much a bookworm. I never thought I'd be telling my daughter "no more books now", but sometimes I've had to in order to get her to come outside or do something physically active.

James has helped me move all the plants from the front balcony to the back so that I can set them up for easy watering while we're away. Sparrow is helping me test the sprinkler hose setup. She thinks the sprinkler jets are awesome. It's probably not legal to be using these again yet, but it means the lady looking after our cats can twice a week set the timer for twenty minutes and turn the tap on, and we have a chance that most of our plants will survive the weather while we're gone. I usually lose quite a few of my productive plants (or at least the fruit from them) on the December break, it was nice when we returned that just about everything had survived and was continuing to bear.

Back from our time away and out having a play. Nothing says it's a La Nina summer like being rugged up in a jumper and tracksuit pants two days after the first seriously hot day for the season. The supermarket guys downstairs were probably a little relieved at the drop in temperatures seeing as their icecream freezer's refrigeration unit broke down in the heat. We had people wandering over the roof all that weekend trying to get it going again.

Out for a walk, and Sparrow is keen to climb this fence. Can't get any further from this, but she's determined to keep trying. I'm not sure if she is sure that she can't get through it.

What? You're looking at me like there's something wrong with the way I'm dressed.
Sparrow's Oma bought her the pair of sandals, and her Grandma bought her the felt cat slippers. Sparrow likes shoes, likes wearing shoes (except when she doesn't), and likes putting them on and taking them off (though both require a little parental help still). She got one shoe on, demanded the next, and is now happily walking around in her shoes.

The Igor walk. We're not sure what this actually means, but she will sometimes just start doing this bent-knee bouncing waddle as an expression of... something. Emphasis, maybe?

This playground is on the way to the obstetrician's. We stop here before my appointments if there's time, for a playground run before it gets too bright to be out. I like this playground, she can mostly run over it without my help so I don't have to be as energetic as she is. And she seems to enjoy the combination of bridges and ramps that go around it.

It may be January but it's not the 6th yet, only the 5th. So the Christmas decorations are still up at the shopping centre, and Santa's chair is still in place. One little girl thinks it's a great chair, plenty of bounce.

Sparrow has started asking to stand in the Funpod while I work in the kitchen, so she can see what I'm doing. It's convenient for me too, means she's not underfoot. I often hand her some of her toys or various kitchenware to explore while she's in there. I really need to cut her fringe.

Not sure what this expression's about. Anyone would think I'd just given her a piece of lemon to chew on or something. (I hadn't, but I do sometimes if I have one. She likes them. I do give her bits of whatever I'm cooking with though, maybe it was something more "interesting" than usual -smile-.)

We were at Highpoint shopping centre waiting for James to get his Dad's birthday present from JBHiFi, and down from the floor above came this balloon gently floating. It kept Sparrow amused for quite some time. The little boy in the background had a few goes at holding and catching and throwing it with her too, under her watchful supervision. She quite enjoyed playing with it on this table, despite my occasional bursts of adrenalin when she started to walk off an edge without looking. Balloons are fun. As I'm sorting through these about a month later, Sparrow has come out of the bedroom (she's refusing to nap) and is sitting next to me and pointing at the balloon saying "Bonk! Bonk!" That's what she's currently decided balloons are called, despite our attempts to encourage her back to the more accurate "ball" that she started with. I suspect she is copying one of the sound effects I make when I play with balloons with her.

We decided at the end of the trip that we would grab dinner at the Pancake Parlour in the bottom "entertainment" part of Highpoint. Food's a lot on my mind at this stage of the pregnancy. Sparrow is helping select the menu. This turned out to be a great idea in terms of blood sugar, but had one fatal drawback - we were unknowingly there fifteen minutes past the time when they close all the lifts and elevators inside the shopping centre, and we were two floors below and half the centre around from where our car was parked. You can still get to all the car park areas, but it's a long walk combined with a fairly stiff climb up a quarry-edge-style cliff. Even knowing it was all ramp, I still wasn't going to make it. So James left me and Sparrow waiting and went and got the car for us. It would have been a very short walk if we could have gone internally.

Sparrow was easily entertained during the wait though. Someone had left a helium balloon floating free inside the Pancake Parlour, and she talked me into climbing up on a seat and getting it for her. She clutched it tightly the whole time, apart from this one moment in the baby change room where it flew free again for just a minute. I'd stopped watching it closely at this point knowing that the ceiling was low enough I'd be able to get it for her again really easily, which is what she's asking me to do at this moment.

Early one morning. Well, not so early by my terms. Sparrow is (as expected in midsummer) going to sleep quite late, and then sleeping in in the morning. She does not like waking up. Neither does her daddy. There are a few mornings where I quietly get up and leave them to it. She's not keen on any kind of sheet or blanket over her, goes to a lot of effort to get them off, but I was trying to keep the sheet on her this night because we had so many mosquitoes after the rains. La Nina summer, indeed.