Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

22nd month, 9 February - 9 March, 2011

Sparrow is playing with the turtle potty - something we encourage to allow her to get familiar and comfortable with the object. You can see here she has a slight confusion with how it is supposed to be used. We did introduce using the turtle in this month, and I think she even pooed in it once, but she was very unhappy about the whole affair so we left it again for a while.

A trip to the baby-stuff shop. We'd worked out a couple of things we needed to buy before we were completely set with everything we needed - mainly a baby bath - and went to get one. (I'd tried to buy a baby bath earlier in the month, one of the ones that sits on top of your own bathtub, but it needed more edge on the bath to be stable than ours has.) Sparrow likes playing in their little play area, and this is the first time she managed to go into, over and down the little climbing thing all on her own.

The other thing we bought was this. It's a little seat-and-step thing that sits on your toilet so that they can just start using the toilet directly instead of going through a "potty" stage. I thought it might be a good alternative, not having ever been keen on the potty-thing anyway. So we put it together and set it up on the toilet, and showed it to Sparrow. She got quite excited, pointed at it and went up to have a closer look, then carefully picked it up and carried it back out into the loungeroom where there was more room to play with it. Not quite the right idea -sigh-. But at least she wasn't instantly scared of it, unlike my first attempt at buying a kids toilet seat last October or so.

We're at Officeworks. I've come to choose some kind of something-or-other to make the fabric books with. I was going to stitch them together for Sparrow and Mimi but have decided that given my time constraints and energy levels if I want to ever finish this project I might as well just glue or stick the fabric squares into something. So I'm looking at the display files. The trolley is with us purely to keep Sparrow either busy or contained depending on if she's in or out of it.

Sparrow much preferred being out of the trolley than in it. After removing and resorting a few files onto the floor and being made to put them back again, she decided it was more interesting to run up and down the huge aisles. I figured this was a more productive use of her energy and she was easy to keep track of. Just after I took this shot a big pallet of stuff came out of the warehouse entry on the right though, and that gave her, me and the pallet-driver a bit of a startle.

The best bit about Officeworks - I always try to make sure we go there with a little bit of time to sit at the kids' table afterwards. They always have paper there plus pencils or crayons or chalk or something for the kids to draw with. Sparrow likes it, and it lets me keep an eye on how she's going with different kinds of drawing tools - which ones she might be ready for. Today they had two kinds of pencil. One was much easier for her to hold but had a white layer around the lead so if you held it on much of an angle it didn't make any mark. The other kind wasn't as easy to hold well. She quickly decided these pencils were deficient and got bored with trying to make any randomly chosen pencil work, opting instead to sort them in and out of the box. So, pencils maybe OK, she wasn't trying to eat them for a change, but not yet intuitive. More interesting was the table. We will have to think about getting chair-and-table in her size for doing crafty-type activities.

The monster puppet has re-emerged from the toybox extra-dimensional subspace (i.e. the place where Mummy hides toys for a few weeks). The door streamers are still up (I was trying to leave them up til the equinox as she enjoys playing with them). And a new decoration has appeared - the flowerpot height chart.

Slightly closer up on the important part of the chart - her height is marked in from eight months (when she first started standing reliably), and there's various marks up to 21 months (her most recent measurement, done by me holding her against a doorframe and marking it with pencil then measuring the mark - easier than getting her to hold still long enough to measure her!).

Eating soup. It's heavy on the red-cabbage and mushroom, so the colour's a bit obscure, but the flavour's just fine. Sparrow is really quite adept with spoons for this sort of thing now. For some definition of adept that allows lots of mess. She can be a bit creative on how she makes sure the contents of the spoon get to her mouth.

When she was done with the soup, she asked for raisins. I didn't hear what she said, so I asked her to repeat it. She did, and then again. This is on the third or so repetition where she's pointing at the raisins while stretching and showing signs of boredom at how thick Mummy is.

Lunch at Alex's with the mother's group - mostly an excuse to come and meet Zac, the first of the new babies in our group to arrive. We all brought a plate to share for lunch, and we're sitting around eating, letting the girls play and sharing notes on the sudden change to dealing with two kids instead of one. Alex had an emergency c-section but is now mostly recovered, and I was envious of her quick recovery. Ruth and Rochelle here are due two weeks before and two weeks after me respectively, and I think when this photo was taken Ruth only had three or four weeks left to go so it was down to the pointy end for us all.

We'd walked over to Alex's and walked back. These two photos are on the way back, Sparrow was climbing on this wall and just looked a right picture.

We ran into Ahlia and her mother and grandmother on one of our walks past the shops downstairs, and the two girls had a nice time sitting on this step together and generally interacting. Sparrow always likes to sit here, and I think she liked having someone who would sit with her (I can't always get down that low at the moment, at least not and get back up again).

The two girls had a wonderful time exploring this pallet outside the corner shop.

Visiting one of the other mothers' group homes. I'm not the only one with the sewing machine out in the optimistic hope of getting a few things made before the new baby comes along.

Playground stop on the way to yet another obstetrician's visit. I'd gone to visit a lady who wanted to know about using cloth nappies, and given her a bunch of the freebies that Kristen gave me. She'd offered me clothes that her two older girls had grown out of, and I accepted a couple of pieces. Mostly they were way too pink, but this little dress was very nice. It was almost too small for Sparrow though so she didn't get to wear it much more than this once.

"Chips". This is one of my strategies for keeping Sparrow managed at times when we have a fair bit of waiting to do, seeing as I'm not in much of a state to run up and down the corridor with her. She can still run, of course, but having a container of cornflakes to eat for her morning tea means she is occupied for a surprising amount of time. Useful at the obstetrician's - sometimes we go straight in, other times it's up to an hour's wait. Depends on if he's running behind or has had to reshuffle due to attending a birth.