An ordinary month with no major developments or events.
The general tone has been somewhat negative: Ingrid is quick to say no to everything, to voice negative opinions, to say that whatever we propose is boring. When the food is good she says nothing; when there is some minor part of it she doesn’t like she is quick to tell us “I don’t like these ones”. I keep telling her that I am tired of hearing it, just leave whatever parts you don’t want, but it doesn’t seem to register.
She whines and complains; she orders me around; she huffs and groans; she answers my questions in a very exasperated tone. “What would you like to drink?” – “But MUUUMMM I don’t WAANT anything to drink!!!” A mini preview of her teenage years, I guess. All drama.
She’s learned or discovered sneaking. A fresh realization that mothers are not omniscient? She might ask me if it’s OK for her to taste whatever dinner ingredient I’m preparing. I tell her it’s OK to take a few pieces but that’s enough. When I leave the kitchen and then look back, I see her stealing another piece. She never used to do anything like that before. Once I saw her take a piece and sneak off to the bathroom to eat it.
Likewise she has started peeking at me when something goes wrong – when she spills her drink, or drops her sandwich in the glass while playing around with it. (I’ve mostly noticed it at mealtimes.) To check my reaction? To see if I noticed? Not sure.
She’s at preschool all days of the week again. Shopping and running errands together with me and Adrian has lost its charm. She’d rather be with her friends.
When I drop her off att preschool or leave her for some other reason, she almost invariably tells me “Emme ma teen kõike” – “Mamma jag gör allting” – literally, “Mummy I will do everything”. I hear this daily, often several times (first at preschool in the morning, then when I leave her on her own so I can put Adrian to bed) and I have no idea what she means by this. I have asked her to explain but she cannot.
Speaking of bedtime, she is often going to bed earlier than she used to, as early as 7 o’clock. At first it was because she didn’t want to be on her own while I put Adrian to bed. Now she sometimes does it even when Eric is at home. (She is generally more OK with being with Eric nowadays, I’m no longer the one and only.) And it’s good for her – she’s more rested in the morning. So she isn’t going to bed too early just to avoid being on her own, it’s the other way round: she used to go to bed too late so as to not miss out on anything exciting.
She’s also getting better at falling asleep on her own. When I need to put both kids to bed I first prep both of them (brush teeth, go to the loo / put on a night nappy, etc). Then we go up to Ingrid’s room where I read for here while Adrian plays with her stuff. Then I tuck her in and go to our bedroom to put Adrian to bed, promising to come back when he’s asleep. She is never happy about it but at the same time she’s no longer really upset about it either. Quite often she’s asleep by the time I’m back. Some time during the night she always comes to our bedroom, which now has a mattress on the floor for her, asks to hold my hand, and goes back to sleep.
Continuing steady progress in reading and writing. She writes longer sentences without losing track of where she is, and can usually read what she just wrote. Usually she writes scriptio continua, with no spaces between words. Sometimes she puts vertical bars between them. She writes small notes, probably copying my GTD-style note-taking: whenever I think of something I need to do, or she tells me something we ought to do, I tell her I will write it down. A sample note: “PÅUNSTASKAJAGÅTILMAJKEN” – “på onsdag ska jag gå till Majken”.
She can read single-syllable words of up to four or five letters, and some simple two-syllable words. The other day she read “Det var en gång en prins som hade”, for example. It goes well as long as there aren’t any weird letters, like G that sounds like J and so on. I wish she could learn to read in Estonian rather than Swedish, because the spelling is a lot more regular. But for that we’d need more Estonian books to read, and better Estonian books, too. But with the library here it’s inevitable that we read a lot more in Swedish. Still, it could be worse – she could be growing up in London and trying to learn to read in English.
The upper picture of Ingrid is a perfect copy-paste of Helen in this age.
[…] month Ingrid learned to read. She’s known all the letters for, like, years; been able to read single words for at least six months, and been able to write something that I can more or less read for even […]