This has been a frustrating month. Ingrid is in one of her moody, irritable phases: there seems to be a lot of anger in her, sulks and contrariness. She responds with irritation to all our polite requests and friendly questions, and deliberately does things that she knows will annoy us.

Dinner time. We ask her to come and eat. She is busy reading. We ask again. She comes, with a sulky face. I ask if I shall pour some juice for her. She stares but does not say a word. I wait. She waits. I start doing something else (serving food to Adrian). She mumbles something. I tell her I didn’t catch that, could she repeat herself? She shouts “I already told you I wanted juice, how many times do I have to say that!” I tell her that I will do it in a moment, when I’m done with what I’m doing right now. Etc.

She takes and takes and asks for more, but will not give. She asks for my help, my company, my attention, but whenever I ask her to do things she ignores me, or refuses, or complies with much complaining and huffing.

I find myself saying no to her more and more often, because otherwise she will take everything I have and I will have neither time nor energy for anything else in my life. Perhaps this is turning into a negative spiral, with her annoyed by my no’s and therefore demanding even more? I wish I knew.

This mostly seems to surface when she is with us. With others she is all sunshine. Whenever she’s been playing at a friend’s home and we arrive to pick her up, the mums always comment on how sweet and friendly and happy she is. I wish she would choose to show that side of herself to us a bit more often.

But it’s not all anger and spite. She has also shown unusual persistence this month. She has decided that she wants to learn something, and then practised and practised every day until she can do it.

First she taught herself to whistle. Now she is learning to vary the pitch so she can whistle melodies.

Then she learned to skip rope. Already several months ago she learned to skip a long rope with others turning the rope (or with one turner and one end of the rope tied to a stationary object). This she learned at school, and it was accompanied by a rhyme in two parts. First she counts a letter of the alphabet with every jump. When she misses, that letter is used for the second part. If the letter is G, for example, she would first think of a thing beginning with G – a giraffe for example – and then chant: “Mamma mamma får jag en giraff, svara ärligt, ja eller nej? Ja – nej – ja – nej…”

Now she has progressed to skipping on her own. Interestingly she first learned to skip backwards: she had trouble with her arm technique when turning the rope forwards. But soon after she figured out the forwards movement as well. That day, when she first mastered it, she skipped for at least an hour, and the next day her muscles were so sore she could barely walk. Now she does it every day. Her technique is still a bit weird, with her arms stretched out shoulder-high, but I guess she’ll figure out more effective arm movements later.

Her hair is growing quite long and I now insist on some sort of containment for it at least when she is eating. We bought a bunch of new hair clips (with a Tinkerbell theme) and hair bands and elastics. It was fun for me to see a girl emerge from behind the blond mane: I realized that for a month or so I had rarely seen her entire face.

This month Ingrid also celebrated the end of her first school year. School is over now and starts again on August 20th. But Eric and I don’t get two months of vacation so Ingrid is in after-school care for another few weeks, until early July.

Miscellaneous:

• Favourite summer activities: Bathing. Blowing dandelions. Eating strawberries. Blowing soap bubbles.
• Bamse magazines have been joined by Kalle Anka pocket, Donald Duck.
• Favourite craft: beading bracelets.
• When she wants to say something that she is ashamed of, or suspects that I might not be happy about, she writes me a note instead.
• She has been interested in temperatures and thermometres. She doesn’t quite understand the scale yet but is sort of getting it now.
• Turquoise is by far her favourite colour.