Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in tikiwanderer's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 13th, 2009
11:01 am	Six months and four days ago I sat down at James' computer to install the connection software for my new phone. The drivers seemed to take forever to install, which wasn't helped by the fact that I was still getting waves of really bad back pain that hadn't settled overnight. Because they took so long to install and I was watching the clock, I realised that the waves of pain were coming semi-regularly, maybe two in fifteen minutes - and I had several fifteen-minutes-es to measure this with. At this point, the penny finally dropped that I was in labour. So the six-month-old Spudlet has finally gone to sleep, and I've grabbed myself some second breakfast and sat down with the installation CDs and my new laptop thinking "I'll just quickly install this software now while she's asleep". The window's come up saying "Installing drivers, this may take a few minutes" and I've gone... oh, yeah. This is not a quick thing! But I am thankful - I have no contractions to be timing this time. So it hopefully won't seem like forever. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
3:54 pm	Update on catching up with people in Perth. We'll be in WA between the 14th and the 28th, or there abouts. Most of this will be spent with family. However (as noted) we'll be at the Swancon open programming meeting in Kings Park, and ****ADVANCE NOTICE**** we will organise a catchup on the beach one evening somewhere between the 23rd and 28th, where anyone who would like to is welcome to stop up and say hi. the caveat is that this will be on a weekday night, and it will be in Yanchep (or possibly in Quinns Rocks). Though we might see if we can organise it to be somewhere accessible from the train line. Not sure of details yet, but just so you know in case you care. If you care but this is all too hard, we'll also be over at Christmas time and again around Swancon (I think - Swancon's not on Anzac day this year, is it? Because if it is I've double-booked my conventions...). (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
3:52 pm	We will be in Perth shortly. James, Sparrow and I are coming to WA for two weeks. Six days of that will be with my mum on the family farm in Albany, six days will be with James' parents in Yanchep, and two days in the middle will be at a wedding in Dwellingup. I know that sounds like all the time is taken, but we are hoping to manage to catch up with people anyhow. Still working out all the bits, but I would like to let you know *now* that we will be at the open programming meeting for Swancon in Kings Park (which I think is Sunday the 22nd, yes?) so anyone going to that will be able to catch up with us there, before or after. We have a cute baby you might like to see. And us, of course. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
4:20 pm	Some thoughts on roadtripping with the Spud It's actually been pretty easy travelling with our baby. How it works and how we have to manage it changes as she changes, but it's been pretty good. It helps a lot that I have been very no-fixed-routine with her, relying on communication, cueing and timing for all her main needs: food, cuddles, attention, sleep, nappy changes, play. It means that she's pretty good about all these things, they don't have to happen in a specific place or following an exact pattern. She's flexible, and she just lets us know what she wants or needs, and we stay flexible enough to provide it. So, we just had a four-day road trip. We went up to Sydney, saw friends and family, came back slowly along the coast road. Up to ten hours travelling each day. She was fine with it. We finished the trip remarkably unstressed, after arriving each day at the place we'd chosen at pretty much the exact time we'd told people we would. It wasn't that we hurried, in fact quite the opposite - we'd allowed a lot of extra time in our predictions, and we always used it. Right down to (for instance) when we were arriving in Eden, had predicted 6 pm and were going to be forty five minutes early - and fifteen minutes out from the town she threw a feral-hour wobbly and It Was Time To Get Out Of The Capsule Right Now. So we stopped for cuddles and a feed - not for long, but just enough that we drove into the motel driveway at 5:58 pm. A typical day for us was that I got up with her at around 6 am and we'd work on the basics - cuddles, roughhousing, difficult play (toys that are around the limit of her current strength and dexterity), having a wash, and so on - while James got another hour or so's rest. We'd get at least one poop out of the way and get her into her day clothes, and she'd get plenty of thrash time as well as chances to talk to and charm any people that happened to be around while we were doing all that and making sure we were packed up and ready to go. About the time we'd be ready to leave she'd be just starting to get tired and ready for her first sleep, so we'd put her in the car and drrrrriiiiiivvvvve on. When the Spudlet wakes up she tends to be a little dopey for the first few minutes (like her dad) and then is happy to talk and play on her own for a little while, maybe with a little parent interaction. So she'd be ready to get out of the capsule at about the time her parents were ready for a toilet stop, food stop, driver change, or a stop to poke around at something interesting. We'd do all that, have an extended break to make sure she got food, change, cuddles, thrash time or whatever else was needed (and so did we), then hop back in the car for another leg with one of us sitting next to her for talk and play (including toys, books, singing etc etc) for the next half hour or so - then she'd be ready for her next sleep, and we'd drrrrrriiiiivvvve on. We'd just repeat this until feral hour, when it'd get slightly more complicated but even that wasn't too bad. She'd just be a little more restless than she normally gets. Letting her set the pace worked extremely well, and meant pretty much no stress for us most of the time. If she was asleep and we stopped driving she'd wake up instantly, so we had to balance whether or not something was worth us stopping at with whether or not we wanted her to sleep quietly through an extra half hour and cover an extra fifty km. That meant I missed a couple of potentially interesting things, but given all the things we *did* see I didn't feel cheated by this at all. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
8:56 am	The Anti-Submarine Clip I would just like to note that the car seat we're looking at buying comes with an anti-submarine clip. I am not sure why a child car seat needs defence mechanisms against submarines, but it is apparently important. Though I also note that it's not used in toddler mode, but only in child mode (once they get to about eighteen kilograms and above). Apparently babies and young toddlers are not suitable prey for submarines. Either that, or they expect the older children to go in much more adventurous places where there is a higher risk of encountering wild submarines. I should add to this that we did stop in Holbrook on our four-day roadtrip this weekend. Holbrook is the town which has an entry sign giving its altitude as 120 metres or somewhere in that range, followed by an entry sign proclaiming it the Town of Submarines. This always makes me feel like some submarine captains got seriously lost somewhere along the way. But when we stopped there, we did NOT take Sparrow to see the submarines because she was too little for it to be useful or relevant. So maybe the age thing for the anti-submarine clip is more logical than I realised. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
6:06 am	The time-travelling wife... or endocrines... [The following conversation occurs after an extended bout of crankysnark.] J: I wonder if PMS can travel through time. T: -laughs outright- It would explain something. J: (TV announcer's voice) PMS So Powerful... it can arrive two weeks early. T: -giggles- J: This is a bad time to make jokes about that sort of thing. T: No, it's a great time. Two weeks from now would be a bad time. J: No, this is a bad time. A great time would have been a couple of minutes ago when I walked in the room and stood in the doorway, because then I wasn't in arms reach. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
3:13 pm	New Sparrow photoblog entries New photoblog entries: Grandma's birthday visit, October 2-8 2009 Driving the Great Ocean Road, 3-4 October 2009 (Comment on this)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
9:59 pm	The sign for "busting" Help and consideration and suggestions wanted, from people who are into words, sign language, odd things or toilet humour. The background: We are starting to introduce formal sign language with Sparrow, using the Australian Baby Hands material which is based on Auslan. We already have some sign communication, particularly for "food" - not the formal Auslan sign but just an mutually understood signal. I began reinforcing her gestures for this when she was just a day old. The signals she makes have changed as she's developed more strength and awareness of her body, but she's been able to signal for "food" right from the getgo. And that's saved us all kinds of stress and probably cut the crying at least in half if not more. Now, she knows she has hands and feet and is starting to use them for a lot more things. Within a month she'll be at an age and stage of development where she will probably be able to start making signs back to us. Maybe. If she feels like it. There's always some wiggle there -grin-. For now it's just us performing the signs that we choose and hoping she learns to associate them with the words and concepts. So we're picking our first four or five signs and introducing them one at a time. First was one I'd wanted to introduce ages ago but didn't have a good signal for: "hug". Or "cuddle", it's the same sign. She often wants cuddles, and will sometimes ask for food as a way to get them. So it was an obvious choice of sign. The second sign was "daddy". James voted this one in, and I like it. We've been using that one to her a few days now. The next few signs though were a much harder choice. I am voting for one of "food", "hungry" or "eat" plus one of "thirsty" or "drink" when we begin to introduce her to solid food in a month or so. So there will be another two signs. A month after that, or more depending on how the signing is going, I'd like to introduce "more" and "finished". Knowing that I have four signs that we'll bring in in the next three months or so, I don't feel a need to start with five immediately. So we're trying to pick the other important ones that we might start now. "Bath" is our next one, we'll start with that tomorrow. It's fun, and something we're happy for her to ask for. That leaves two other important concepts to choose between: tired/sleep/bed and change/poo/wee/toilet. The Baby Hands book suggests "bed", and it's an easy sign, but she often doesn't sleep in her bed. I'm trying to think what I would most like her to tell us: that she's tired? that she wants to go to bed? that she wants to go to sleep? We'll think a little about it. But it's pretty easy at the moment to tell when she's tired - her I'm-tired signals are large, obvious and pretty much identical to mine :-) so we don't really need to introduce a sign for that. The problem: The one we really want to have a sign for is the whole toilet-and-nappy complex of concepts. Australian Baby Hands suggests using "change". But I'm hesitant about that, because I am trying to get into the habit of changing her just before she wets the nappy. It's an early step of what's called "elimination communication", where you are reading your baby's signals that they're about to wee or poo and dealing with it as it happens - which means you can have a lot more nappy-free time (and less nappies if you're so minded). "Change" is a sign you'd use *after* they'd wet the nappy, most logically, because it's a request to change the nappy. "Toilet" would be good if I was moving on with partial-EC, but I'm kind of being slack so it's not worth using until there's a situation where Sparrow is actually encountering the toilet. So I was thinking about all this, and thinking about how instead of the noun "food" or verb "eat" I want to use the adjective "hungry" and instead of the noun "bed" or verb "sleep" I want to use the adjective "tired", and I had to ask: what is the equivalent word for the feeling of needing to poop or wee? In English we're a bit coy about such things, and tend to make coded statements like "Can I use your bathroom?". So far, the only word we've come up with is "busting". Which the Auslan signbank doesn't have an entry for. Is there another word? Or useful piece of Auslan slang? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
8:57 pm	Happy Happy Survey There was an article in a vaguely recent Big Issue by Helen Razer about the overabundant use of the concept "happy" in branding and marketing. I didn't read it - I was distracted by the MIL at the time - but I made a mental note of the idea and kept my eyes open to see if anyone other than Target was doing it (their "100% Happy" slogan has been irritating me since its onslaughtset). I was just beginning to think she might be right, and just beginning to forget the whole idea when I was rung by one of my banking institutions to take part in a customer survey. The survey started out with the explanation that the following questions would be on a scale of one to seven, where four was "happy", seven was "absolutely delighted", and one was "extremely unhappy". The survey guy politely asked me to get a pen and paper and write this down so I could have it in front of me for my reference. OK so far. And we got a fair way through the questions, too. Then it hit. Him: "Now, you said that you've used a [banking institution]'s ATM in the last month. On the scale from one to seven, how happy did you feel about finding one where you needed it?" Me: "I didn't feel anything. It's an ATM." Him: "You have to give me a number between one and seven." Me: "OK. I didn't really think about it because it's the ATM at my local shopping centre and I always use it, so it's good that it's in that place I guess. But I didn't think about it." Him: "So how happy were you?" Me: "Well, I guess maybe a five. Because there is one there." Him: "OK, a five. And on the scale from one to seven, how happy were you that it was clean?" Me: "Clean? I didn't look at how clean it was. I just put my card in, pressed the buttons and took the money out." Him: "Yes, so if four is happy, seven is absolutely delighted and one is extremely unhappy, what number would you give on the scale?" Me: "None. The question's irrelevant. I never consider whether it's clean, only whether it gives me money." And this is where we got stuck. I refused for about two minutes to give him a number that described my feelings of happiness for the cleanliness of his ATM. Eventually I gave him a "three", because that was just the neutral side of "four". He said "So you were unhappy." I repeated "No, I didn't look and I didn't care." And I stuck to my three. The succeeding questions were not quite as bad, but still difficult. I kept insisting that "happy" was not a word that ever applied to my use of an ATM, which is when you get down to it nothing but a tool, and not one that requires any skill to operate or that produces individualised results either. I don't measure my happiness when I cross the road and the crosswalk works. Some things in life just happen. There are good bits in every moment, but my experience of emotions at an ATM is purely and simply limited to whether or not the money's gone into my account yet. You know the feeling, the one where you see the balance and go "Yes! I have money to spend!". Or, "Aw, shucks. The balance is $19.76. Guess I'm not getting out my $20 today. But I was so close!" Trying to apply variations on the theme of "happy" to how clean the ATM was just reminds me of a species evolved from a spacecraft full of telephone sanitisers. I realised after he'd hung up that I would have liked him to have had one more question in his survey. Along the lines of "how happy have you been with taking part in this process?". That's a people-interaction thing, it involves effort and thought on my part which invokes emotions, and hence I can describe quite minutely how happy or unhappy I was with it. In fact, I'm doing so now. But it doesn't seem to interest the bank... (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
3:31 pm	The baby expo We went to the baby expo this weekend. I went Friday, then took James (and his credit card) back on Saturday. Actually, Saturday was fun as the Armageddon Multimedia expo was on in the next bay of the exhibition centre, so there were lots of people walking around in Very Interesting Costumes. Although James did say that we were going past the expo for people who couldn't get any and heading for the expo for people who'd gotten it too often. Shopping with James is interesting. And make no mistake, those expos are firstly and almost only an excuse to shop. There was useful information here and there, true, but it wasn't exactly made easy to separate out from the constant offers of stuff to buy. Anyway, the thing about James is he likes to impulse buy. I would much rather agonise over the decision. Well, I hate the agonising and being indecisive, really hate it, but I much prefer going through that and being completely sure I've considered everything and am happy with my choice than to just pick something and hope to be lucky. Because generally, I'm not. This also means that for me, retail therapy costs much less, because I put much more effort into a purchase so the "high" takes longer to occur and lasts longer too. James however is of the mind that he used to be poor, and now he has disposable income, and it's called disposable for a reason. He is also a lot luckier than I am at impulse buys. So the day I went on my own I came back with thirty-seven dollars worth of purchases. When we went together, we added around $650 to that. But because it was both of us shopping together, and specifically for things we've talked about regarding Sparrow and items or problems we know we need to consider, it was a very well targeted $650. ( What we thought was worth buying, including a new and much sexier maternity bra, a black dragon nappy, flushable nappies for travelling, a FunPod and more: ) (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
6:28 pm	Signs of our times 1. Walking through K-Mart, we saw a stack of Monopoly boxes of various themes. On closer inspection, several of them came not with paper money but with a battery operated EFTPos-like scanner and swipe cards. 2. We bought one of those "grow your own mushrooms at home" boxes at the hardware store. It has a cutesy cartoon of some cross between a garden gnome and Papa Smurf on the front, with a village of fairy mushroom houses behind him. You know they're houses not because they have chimneys with smoke coming out, but because they're covered in TV antennas and satellite dishes. 3. I am carefully and steadily removing stitched-on brand labels from the front of Sparrow's clothes and toys. Because, when I was a kid, we wore the tags on the *inside*. [1] [1] It's true. I know that was back in the 1970s and 1980s and some of the people reading this won't even know that such a time existed, but I still think that anyone who has to have the name tag on the front of something is either really dumb or has a really dumb mother who can't remember what things are. Having the tag on the front when you got on the school bus was guaranteed humiliation for most of the day. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
7:16 am	Generations in the planning Generations in the planning. We say that when we mean something's taken a long time to set up. There's not much that seems to be planned on that scale these days, at least not in our contemporary Australian culture. But it strikes me that the phrase can also mean "people of different generations contributing to the plan". Mum's just been over to visit. She and I have a lot of shared perspectives and attitudes, naturally enough, especially in certain areas. So it seemed quite natural for us to have a conversation like this: Mum: Apparently there is a new kind of inverter coming, not here yet, that will isolate you from the grid if it goes down so that you can still use whatever solar power you're generating. Me: That would be useful. (thinking of the recent time when Mum's self-powered house had a blackout because everyone else's did) Mum: It occurs to me though that I'm not going to need most of these things. I mean, they talk about 2030, but I won't see that. Me: You might. You'd be... eighty three. So yes, it'd be me and Christopher running things, but you might still see it. Mum: 2030, and 2050. You're right, I will probably see 2030, and maybe even 2040. But not 2050. (we both pause to think about the various projections of rainfall and climate up ahead) Me: Sparrow will be 40 years old in 2050. (glances at the infant capsule with sleeping baby in the back seat.) So it'll be her problem. That's really kind of awesome. That's one of the things I like about my family. We do plan for the future, and on a scale of generations rather than just the next ten years. OK, being farmers helps with that because you have to - Christopher and I have already had one conversation about when we need to start cycling new trees into the main orchard so that we don't have mass crop fail at a single age, and we'll no doubt have another one. Because that will probably happen during our watch. Also a conversation on which tree crops to replace the existing ones with when the rainfall drops below the level at which we can sustain our current numbers (it's dropped eight inches in my lifetime, and is expected to drop more). And each of us in the family keeps planning and researching in our separate domains to continue to protect the health and self-sufficiency of one tiny little area of land, as well as of the great country surrounding that influences it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
11:41 am	The city of windows, and the lands where the dead travel. Another dreaming moment. There is a window, a large one like the gap between two tall buildings as you cross the street. It has no glass. Through it I can see a tree-covered mountain, blue in the near distance, and some smaller rising hills below it. The air between here and there is rich with the invisible colours of twilight and singing the silent notes of a fading sun. It's beautiful, peaceful, I can feel on my skin the call to fly in that space, I know the scent on the breeze. And I know I'd like it there. But I don't go through, because I know that the place on the other side of the window is one of the places where dead people go, and the living must never walk through that gap until their time has come to move on. Instead I walk through the city of windows, and see from a distance the lands where the dead travel. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
8:52 am	Two years on: Me: This was a good idea. James: Yes. I'm glad you said yes. Me: Me too. I didn't know why it was going to be a good idea, I just knew it would be. And it was, it just got better and better. James: (proudly) Well, I'm all about the better and better. Me: I am going to remind you that you said that at some inconveniently awkward moment. James: (lingeringly and lovingly) No you won't. Me: Your Jedi mind tricks do not work on me. Happy anniversary, beloved. May twenty years go by as fast and as joyously as two years have. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
1:11 pm	Being green with an infant part 2: water Continuing the series of posts about how having an infant affects the sustainability practices of this household, and what we're doing about it. So far I've written one on energy, and there will be one on materials, resources and waste coming as well. I acknowledge (as a couple of very clever people have pointed out) that just having a child is in essence not sustainable given our over-populated state, and I'm not trying to be The Greenest Person Ever Who Gets It 100% Right All The Time. I'm just looking at what changes when a minimalist ascetic hippie-influenced ecowarrior with no shoes and no furniture suddenly has full care and charge of a new small person in a society designed to over-promote baby consumerism. I would also like to mention that (as in the other post) I am not including the effects of nappies here. They're a complex triple bottom line problem and will have their own post. This is just the everything else about daily life. ( Water in, water out, and the Little Squirt ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
7:14 am	Dreams overlapping with reality - I must be sleep deprived Having a weird few moments of dreams and reality overlapping this morning. First, I had a fairly vivid but non-consequential dream early this morning about a theatre class making 30-second film pieces in a small town somewhere on the Alaskan coast. The location is someplace I've seen in a few dreams in the last month or two, it gets allocated various names and this time it was called "Alaska", but really I don't know where it is. It's pretty though, even if I did almost freeze my feet off this time. You can read the one-sentence version of the dream here. It was only after I woke up that I thought about a dream starring a talented and slightly unusual lecturer training theatre students in storytelling using film as a teaching and expressive medium, someplace far away that was very cold, and thought to myself "Wasn't angriest looking for jobs like this?". Then, I lay down next to Sparrow to look at the picture book we got from the library yesterday. It's a coffee table book with pictures of Spain. I opened it to a few random pages, and to my startlement saw some that I recognised. Another recurring location I had in my dreams a few months ago was an island called Zanou, which I placed off the west coast of what I picked as New Zealand. The photos in this book that are so strikingly familiar are of the Canary Islands. They're off the west ocast of Morocco which is very different to New Zealand, but even so it was, um, remarkable. It makes me want to go there and study their agriculture, because that's what the dreams of Zanou were about. It did get me googling to see if there *was* a place called Zanou, and apparently there is, in Romania. Hard to tell from Google Maps, but the satellite view also implies some similarities in landscape to my dream island. Oddly, as I started googling for more pictures of the Canary Islands, I turned up a two-sentence profile on a man from Romania (and approximately the right region) who was now working in fisheries in the Canary Islands, with a Greek-sounding name. Given that in some of the dreams I was a farmer descended from Greek fishermen, this was just one more overlap I wasn't expecting. All pure coincidence, I'm sure. But still, it suggests that today is going to be an interesting day. I wonder which way the wind is blowing outside. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
8:21 pm	The Extrovert Loner As I was putting together the photoblog pages on the weekend, I noticed something interesting. I think of Sparrow as quite extroverted. She loves interacting with people, will smile at them and even talk to a lucky few. And she loves attention. Sure, I think most infants do, but she certainly practices charm with diligence. Take, for example, a recent moment in the library when I had a run-in with a librarian on a day when I was short of sleep and had missed lunch and had forgotten Sparrow's carrier so was holding her over my shoulder and she'd got heavy rather a while before. Here I am, in tears and angrily crying/whining at the librarian who is Being Helpful in exactly the wrong ways and making my poor confused brain feel like the baby brain never left, and from behind me I hear "Cootchicoo! Aren't you cute! What a lovely smile!" and all I can think is "Traitor...". Anyway, that sort of thing is not unusual. Even when she's really tired and mid-grizzle, she can summon up the energy to look people in the eyes and give them a big baby gummy grin. It's only in the minute or two before she's actually falling asleep that she can't be bothered with this people thing. What I noticed was that I don't have any photographic record of this. What the photos show is a little girl who consistently ignores all attempts to play with her or to get her attention or to interact. She's quite happy on her own, thank you very much, she's doing something over here, stop interrupting, maybe if I ignore it it will just go away. That was quite a surprise, so I stopped and looked more carefully. What I saw made sense though: She interacts with adults, and she ignores other children. This may change as she gets older, but for now it's pretty standard. I should clarify that by "adults" I mean anyone who is self-mobile and speaking and somewhat autonomous, so everyone over the age of about seven. Basically, anyone that can choose to come give her attention, she will expend energy on, but other babies aren't yet of interest. I think this is not unusual with young babies - they have to get a little older before other children become interesting. Her main interest is making sure that the suppliers of food, comfort, warmth, entertainment and other useful things remain wrapped around her little finger :-). What will be interesting is to see how much this pattern remains as she grows up. I'm dubbing it the Extrovert Loner, because she really is mostly happy without lots of other people around. The times she is most cheerful are when she can interact with things on her own terms, and there's not too many or too few things or people, and the chaos is controlled. Large groups of people tend to make her tune out - she'll pick one person and focus on them. Often me, but not always. It displays this distinct combination of loner traits like trying to avoid too many people and too busy a setting, and extrovert traits like that heavy application of charm. I have to admit, I find a certain personal sympathy to this viewpoint. I liked growing up on the farm because life was full of a thousand and one things that were not annoying, and I could play with people and then go home to the forest. I miss that now. (Comment on this)
8:18 pm	Truffle followup Just to note that my first attempt at the buttercream-style ganache failed. Well, sort of. It failed at being ganache. It is either too hard to work, or melting. However, if you put spoonfuls of it into chocolate papers and let them set, it makes fantastic chocolate "coins". The funny thing about this is that I was using (or thought I was using) proportions that you would use to make icing, so I really wasn't expecting to get something that set hard and stayed hard at room temperature. Oh well, more experimentation needed (darn, what a shame). (Comment on this)
11:58 am	Toy development The toys Sparrow first liked were by and large those that made a noise, or were shiny, or that she could watch move (though that developed a fractionally little later). A little later I was able to intrigue her with coloured things like big pictures, or by taste/smell and texture things (here, lick this) which she'd eagerly stick a tongue on and roll it around while making faces. In the last three or four weeks (from maybe three and a half months old) she has simultaneously developed both the ability to grab and the desire to chew. This has changed the whole toy scene radically. The tambourine is no longer number one favourite toy. Instead, number one is the origami Kusigama ball that Rory made at the origami party. Why? Because it's very lightweight, and covered in points of folded paper, so she just about can't fail to pick it up if it's near her hand. Any random wave of the fingers will bring them into contact with something she can grip onto and lift it with. And then, it's straight to the mouth, unless she decides to just hold it and squish it and palpate it with both hands for a while first. It is starting to look a little tattered! The tambourine is probably number three favourite now, it's still shiny and rattly, but now we don't play with it by looking at it or trying to touch it or bang it. We play with it by grabbing any bit we can and sticking it in the mouth. Metal jangles, mmm-mmm. She can also hold onto it well enough to hold it on her own for a little. She had a couple of teething toys that different people had given her, and we've had to try them all out before finding one that works. One has become number four favourite toy. It's a little red and blue soft animal about 7cm by 7 cm, with a hard yellow plastic teething ring under it. The whole thing is small enough for her tiny hands to hold onto and manipulate. We had a ring of ice-gel keys, but they just kept hitting her in the face because she couldn't control all of them at once, so she would stop chewing on the keys and start chewing on the ring that held them because that was easier for her to manage. We also had a soft gel ring, but it smelt awfully horrible from slow evaporation of the gel inside (plus whatever plastic they'd used to make it), and it just screamed horrible plasticiser chemical poisoning to me. I'm not keen on the other plastic ones either, but at least I know she won't break bits off and swallow them. The best teething toy though is her number two favourite toy, which possibly even draws with the kusigama ball for number one. It's just three interlinked plastic links, one round, one rectangular, one square, with a couple of textures here and there. Very simple. The people we bought the cot from gave it to us. She loves it - the plastic links are just the right size for her to hold onto, the way the links are entangled makes them quite easy to hold, and there's no one bit that is better to chew so whatever lands in her mouth is fine. We keep this one in the car capsule, and it will keep her entertained for simply ages while we drive. I should point out though that there is one toy that supercedes all of these, and that's her parents. Any grownup will do, but parents are particularly cool because they pick you up and roughhouse with you, and aside from chewing and grabbing she has a strong preference for "games" that let her use her strength. Like sitting, "standing", "dancing", "flying" and other such things that parents are so good at facilitating. Playtime is fun :-) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 28th, 2009
10:17 am	Sparrow's fourth month - new photoblog pages Sparrow's fourth month: Time at home Meeting and greeting Includes fashion parades, mothers group time, meeting a cat, nerd trivia with a raygun,and more. Edit to add: also in this month we had a day trip to Echuca, and went to Continuum 5 (Sparrow's first science fiction convention). Those have their own pages already up on the blog. We also had an origami party, and that will get its own page sometime soon when I finish finding all the photos for it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)