Sawyer Can Roll Over! And Also, Some Unrelated Pictures!

SO… Sawyer (age ~7 months) has never been one to roll over. She is a particularly chill kid. So much so that one occasionally questions if she is conscious, and/or somehow spending her unobserved moments (and they are few) getting totally baked. (That’s the whole thing about koala bears, right? Aren’t they totally stoned all the time? …I mean, the “whole thing” BESIDES being totally cute.) Given how excited she gets about the small pink sippee cup she contentedly knaws on / “drinks” from during dinner, I have no problem percieving her as one of the stoner college colleagues I have great retrospective affection for…

Uhm. This post started off like it WAS going somewhere, but seems to have lost it’s way.

Uhmmmm. Right. Sawyer rolling over.

Again– she has never been one to roll over. We have dutifully given her “tummy time,” and she has taken it with a startling equanimity– but never gotten frustrated enough to try and change her orientation. When you think of it in terms of effort vs. motive power, perhaps it was a little like asking a good-tempered Airbus A380 to do a chandelle turn. That having been said, she has defied expectation & managed to do it, and file the technique away in her little baby brain. (Can’t be THAT stoned, then.) The act itself is quite humourous to observe, however. Imagine, if you will, watching someone who is sunbathing suddenly try to hail a cab, and then breaching like a whale in pursuit of the hand she threw over her shoulder.

I will obviously have to film this for you, reader.

The act of rolling is so funny, in fact, that on several occasions she has gotten upset about the amount of noise her siblings (and parents) have made following one of these manouvers and started to cry. (And that’s what we like to call POSITIVE reinforcement.) I should say at this point that Lana was firmly convinced that Sawyer would crawl (and possibly walk) before rolling over. Our older children developed their own individual (and FUNNY) styles of getting around, so this would have not been terribly surprising. Eli used to do an astonishing wounded soldier/crab crawl that allowed him to move kind of like a bishop & kind of like a knight (which was HI-larious), and Finley used to do that cheap-remote-control-car thing where you were forced to go straight if you went forward, and were forced to turn to the left in reverse (meaning that facing the other direction required a time-consuming 4-point turn). SO, if Sawyer had required resetting like a high-centered turtle each time she had ended up on her back, it wouldn’t have been all that big of a deal. We are glad she can do it now, though. It’s got to be good for her self-confidence.

—   —   —   —   —

And now, with NO transition whatsoever, four pictures!

This is the view from the Back Step of the flat, looking back towards The Private Garden (approximately 180 degree field of view):

Looking Toward The Private Garden & Summer House

Walking down the path, and looking back towards the terrace, you see this view of The Private Garden (approximately 135 degree field of view):

If you walk through the doors barely visible on the right of the image, you will walk into The Summer House, which Lana has been using as here office and retreat. Here is an image of the interior (which is, confusingly, an octagon– I screw it up by presenting approximately 300 degrees in my field of view):

The Interior of The Summer House, Where Lana Has Been Working

Finally, just beyond The Summer House is The Common Garden, presented here– you can see the roof of The Summer House to the left, and slightly further left the gate between The Private and Common Gardens (approximately 270 degree field of view):

The Common Garden Behind The Summer House