This was the month of waiting for the birtday. Really Ingrid has been looking forward to the birthday for way more than just one month – already during summer she was telling me how she was looking forward to autumn because that’s when her birthday is. But now the longing was intense, and so was the planning.

Many weeks in advance she was already planning what games she would play with her friends, and what activity they would do to get the goodie bags, and whom she would invite, and where they would sit, and so on. Some of the plans were quite fixed early on, while others kept changing.

She wrote party invitations for her friends and decorated them with foam stamps. We walked and cycled to the friends’ homes to put the invites in their letter boxes. For two of them we had to send the invites by post (because they live in apartments and the front doors are locked), and for these she wrote out the addresses herself, and then put the letters in the post.

Interestingly (to me) the focus was all on the friends and activities, and not at all on the presents. This was not the case last year, when she had a long wish list of presents. (Or maybe that was for Christmas? Same same.)

Friends are important to her. Or rather, her peer group is important to her. It used to be that she cared about a small number of friends that she played with. Now she seems to be more aware of being part of a group, and looking up to older kids, I guess.

In particular, she is picking up new speech patterns from school: things that others say, that sound cool, that she uses without quite understanding them. There’s lots of “gud va”: gud va bra, gud va kallt det är, gud va gott, and I’ve even heard some occasional “shit va” as well as one “fett bra”. (After that one she stopped and wondered out loud, What does that actually mean?) Things, objects, are often den här dumma x, “this stupid x” (bag, bicycle, …)

When she talks about her day at school, she usually tells me what they ate, what special Friday activities they did, and (when applicable) what body part she hurt or who hit whom. Otherwise they just “did stuff”. I am glad for the weekly newsletters from school – this way I have at least some idea about what they do all day long.

The class seems to have a “self” theme/project at school, which they’ve used across subjects: they’ve done several kinds of self-portraits, had a homework assignment where they answered questions about their favourites (colour, food, activity), measured themselves and compared their current height to their height when they were born (hanging paper tapes of the right length side by side on the wall) etc.

We the parents got to see some of the results of these projects during a parent/teacher meeting some weeks ago. Looking at the paper tapes I saw that Ingrid was the 2nd shortest in her class. Looking at her self-portrait I saw that she can be quite observant in her drawing, not depicting herself as a cookie cutter girl with a triangular dress and long eyelashes. She had drawn her actual clothes that day, and a proper body-shaped body, and the face too. But then within a week of this she also drew her family, with stick-shaped men and triangle-shaped women. Easier that way, I guess, especially when she cannot actually look at as and has to draw from memory.

Ingrid herself was not too happy with the result – the nose looked wrong, she said. This is pretty representative of how she judges her own achievements right now: if it isn’t perfect, she is unhappy. Never mind that the self-portrait is otherwise really carefully done – the nose isn’t just right so she’s “no good at this”. Never mind that she is the only one in her class to read and write fluently – she struggles with her spelling in Estonian (her 2nd language) so she is “no good at this”. I keep telling her that she is doing great, that school is for learning, so it is all about doing things you can’t quite do yet.

Yes, she is now also getting Estonian lessons at school. Every Friday afternoon she has a one-hour lesson together with two Estonian boys. Their tasks are adapted to their skill levels; Ingrid has been writing – once it was the names of body parts, once parts of a house. So it’s both vocabulary and spelling practice. Estonian spelling is simple but the letter sounds are not the same as in Swedish – Ingrid;s first attempt at spelling “juuksed” came out as “joksed”.

Speaking of languages, I suspect that she knows way more English than we get to hear. On one occasion she quoted The Great Mouse Detective at us: “Guards! Seize this despicable creature!” But she can also construct grammatically correct sentences of her own: one morning she said something, and unfortunately I forget what it was, but roughly like “I was just drinking some milk”, with the correct word order and tense and everything.

In the afternoon, after school, she still usually watches a movie or plays with the iPad. She has learned to play Reversi and can actually manage Field Runners, a “tower defense” type of game, too. She’s also had enough persistence to learn Tiny Wings, which is a game that takes some practice before you can really play it.

The evening ends with a fixed bed time. It is semi-fixed, or perhaps you can call it blackmailing: if she is in bed by the time we’ve set, we will read a story for her; she can stay up later if she really is not tired but then there will be no story. In practice she stays up until the bedtime we set, on the minute: she really doesn’t want to go to bed but she really wants a story, too. Recently she’s had trouble getting up in the morning so we moved bedtime forward by 30 minutes: now screen time ends at 8 and she goes to bed at 8:30.

She has been sucking her thumb when falling asleep until now. I told her she was too old for that, and she stopped doing it on the day of her birthday, so two nights ago. These two nights she’s been sleeping with a glove on her sucking hand. It seems to be pretty easy for her, which neither she nor I had expected.

On the nights when she has trouble calming down and going to sleep, she likes me to rub her back or her tummy. When she really cannot calm down, I take her through a relaxation exercise, going through all the parts of her body, relaxing them, making them heavy and warm and limp and dark.

Ingrid is still quite rule-oriented in her thinking, and wants things to happen the same way they happened before. She wants to play the same game in the same situations: the “letter game” (I Spy) on car and train journeys; the “humming game” (where we take turns humming a song and the other has to guess which song it is) while cycling home from school.

Likewise she tries to recreate happy situations from the past by repeating important-seeming elements of them. She wanted the goodie bags at her birthday to be handed out by a pirate “like at Elin’s party”. She wanted to have dinner at a local restaurant on her birthday, because her preschool class went there for their “graduation” lunch. (We did both, and I think she was happy with the outcomes.)