In the beginning of this month, Ingrid was moved up to the next group at nursery. Normally the whole group of children move through nursery together, but now the oldest children in one group were shifted to the next group, in order to make space for more young children. (For economic reasons the nursery needed to either let go of staff or take in more children. They chose the latter, and all the children queueing for places at this nursery were young ones. Hence the reshuffle.)

It wasn’t a huge change, really. The groups have already spent time together, especially while they’re outside, and towards the end of each day when the groups shrink as kids are picked up. So she was familiar with the staff and some of the kids too. Still, it meant a lot of new experiences for Ingrid. From being near oldest in her group, she’s now among the youngest ones. The new group is larger. And of course they do other things that the younger kids haven’t tried yet, and do things differently.

Possibly as a result of this, or possibly for some completely different reason, Ingrid has been really tired. The kid who was staying awake until 9:30 in the evening, is now telling me she wants to go to sleep sometimes before 8 o’clock. And she means it: sometimes she asks me to tell her a fairy tale instead of reading a book, so she can lie down and not have to look at the pictures. And after the story she is asleep within 5 minutes, instead of the 40 it could take as recently as early autumn.

Also perhaps contributing to the tiredness, Ingrid had a serious growth spurt early this month, with a LOT of eating. She was eating huge portions, and for a few days she asked for meals at two-hour intervals. That’s mostly past us now, but one thing that’s become part of our daily routine is having a banana on the way home from nursery.

Earlier this autumn Ingrid brought home her soft doll from nursery. During the schooling in period, back in 2008 when she started there, each parent was given the materials to make a soft doll for their child. They used those dolls daily in some activities (singing I think). Now they’re no longer using them that way, so the dolls were free to go home. Ingrid has become really attached to hers, and for several weeks she’d take the doll with her to nursery every day (and also take it with her wherever we went during weekends). It’s the closest she’s had to a comfort blanket, but now it seems to be waning in importance.

After nursery we often go to the library. They’re only open two evenings in the week, and most weeks Ingrid’s more than happy to utilize both. Mostly we read books there, but when it’s time to go Ingrid often says she wants to borrow a book, and then picks one more or less randomly. Often she loses interest in it by the time we get home. It’s the routine itself that’s important. When at the library, one borrows books, so that’s what we do.

At home there’s a lot of movie watching going on. So much so that I’ve started keeping an eye on the clock and putting an end to the fun after about an hour. Eric ripped several DVDs worth of old Disney shorts to MP3, and Ingrid’s learned how to play them all on her own. There’s a shortcut to the right folder on her desktop, and Eric set up her profile for single-click to open stuff. She turns on the computer, chooses her profile, opens the folder, clicks on a random movie in the list, and then “makes it big” with Alt+Enter. Pausing and unpausing with space bar is old hat. She even knows that when an unwanted “label” comes up (like a warning from the firewall) you click the red X to get rid of it. She still likes to type letters on my laptop, too. (Hmm… perhaps we should just set up Notepad on her profile?)

Last month’s game of bears continues almost every day. The two of us are both bears, and we have to hide ourselves under the duvet because it is winter and we need to go to sleep. Then she gets up, just like Alfie in When Will It Be Spring?, and wakes me and tells me it’s summer already! Sometimes I’m allowed to do like Alfie’s mom and tell her that she’s wrong, it’s still winter, and we go back to “sleep”, but other days she tells me “but let’s PRETEND it’s summer”, as if I wasn’t aware that’s what we were doing. During “summer” she picks nuts and berries and honey for me, and then it’s autumn and we start all over again.

There’s less counting going on now, and we can actually pass houses without reading out all their numbers.

Language-wise Ingrid’s doing great. I no longer have any worries whatsoever about her ability or willingness to learn Estonian in parallel with Swedish. She still often switches to Swedish when telling me about stuff that happened during the day at nursery, but in general she is fluent in Estonian and almost always uses it when speaking to me. Of course there’s lots more to learn – all the grammatical irregularities and more advanced sentence structures and so on. But even if she stops here, even if her underlying Estonian skills never get better than this (apart from gradually growing her vocabulary) she will get by. If she were dropped in Estonia without anyone to help translate what she says, she would manage. Most importantly, she knows to ask “what does xxx look like” when there’s a word she doesn’t understand.

Last month’s trend towards polite language continues. There’s quite a lot of “can I have some more milk please” and “could you help me with this”. We’re also hearing more and more expressions and phrases she is obviously picking up from nursery: “look at what I am doing!” and “you can take it if you want” and “we can pretend that it’s [something]” and so on.

Other such phrases confirm my impression that she’s (unusually?) sensible and willing to follow rules. This afternoon when a boy asked her about some toy at nursery, “is this yours?” she replied “no, it belongs to the nursery, everyone can play with it”. Quite often she tells me “you have to share the toys”. Indeed she’s sometimes so sensible that I worry she has no chance to make her own mistakes and messes and learn things herself. She tells me “you have to be careful when climbing here, otherwise you can fall down” and reminds me to keep to the side of the road when we’re walking home, so we don’t get hit by a car. If an adult gently suggests something, she often takes it pretty much as an order, so I try to suggest as little as possible.

Favourite foods: anything starchy (pasta, cereal, rice, bread); anything with ketchup. Bell peppers, sweetcorn, peas and beans of all kinds.

Foods she absolutely refuses: mushrooms and aubergine, both for their squishy texture I think.

Favourite movie: old Disney shorts.

Favourite book: none in particular; our reading is pretty evenly spread over most of our books.