Ingrid finished first grade this week. The last day of school was this Wednesday. The entire school gathered in the schoolyard; kids sang and performed; the headmistress held a speech. Then Ingrid and I went to town and celebrated with a sushi lunch, ice cream, and a large Lego Friends set.

Ingrid was not entirely happy to finish first grade. She was perfectly happy about the school year ending and summer vacation beginning. But having to move up to grade 2 was not all positive, because it will involve more change than Ingrid wants. The main problem is that her class will move to a different building. This year classes 1A and FA (year 0) were in the same building, and three of her best friends from preschool are in that FA class. Now they will be further away, so they won’t be in after school care together any more. Luckily they will have the same teachers next year at least.

Ingrid is a novelty-seeker but she also wants things to stay the same. She likes doing and seeing new things, going to new places, etc. But she wants the foundation to be unchanged: home, family, school, friends.

She is open to new things but not if they replace old things. It is difficult for her to let things go, and to choose between alternatives when choosing one thing means giving up the other. When she chooses to have chocolate for dessert instead of, say, a piece of cake, she asks if we can make that cake again some other time. We say yes, of course, and that is enough – she can let it go and never asks for it again.

But choices that are final and for real are hard, like choosing between staying at home and watching a movie with Adrian, or going to the supermarket with me. Or deciding what sports she will want to do this autumn. She vacillates and hesitates and then in the end sticks to the same ones that she did this year.

Her sense of balance has matured and she no longer has her childhood tolerance for swinging and spinning. She now gets nauseous on merry-go-rounds, especially the small fast ones at playgrounds. She can still swing, but cannot read on a swing like she used to. She also cannot read in the car any more.

This meant that car rides became incredibly BOOH-RING! because sitting still and not being entertained by anything is just awfully unbearably boring. Then she remembered the game of “yellow car”, and now this keeps her really busy. And she is good at it! While my brain is busy with other thoughts (such as driving for example), she really focuses and racks up point after point.

In our version of the game we just play for points: the one to first spot a yellow car gets a point. Our rules are that only cars count (not trucks or buses). Parked cars count; however taxis don’t. There is one taxi company in Stockholm that has yellow cars and all the taxis were making the game way too easy.

Adrian occasionally joins in and shouts “blue car” or “white car” and then asks how many points he has. We usually tell him some random number and he’s happy with that.

We reset our point counts after the last rule adjustment (the addition of the taxi rule) and the score is now about 35:10. At first she spotted about two yellow cars for each one of mine, and now she’s pulling ahead at an even faster pace. My only defence is that I am thinking about other things. But really she is both better at noticing details, pays more attention to her immediate surroundings, and has faster reactions.

Her faster reactions are very apparent in Minion Rush, which is her current favourite iPad game. It’s a fun game and I’ve spent some time playing myself. I am nowhere near as fast as her. I watch her play, effortlessly navigating the obstacles at speeds that I usually don’t reach (because I crash before I get that far), and she even has brain capacity left over to talk at the same time!

She is still really polite and I hear lots of please and thank you from her every day. She tells me I am the best mum in the world, because I am so kind. Sometimes she kind of overdoes it a bit and thanks me three times for the same thing but really I don’t mind.

Words she thinks are super funny: Tuberkulos. Chihuahua. Trehundra kvart i sju. (That last one means “three hundred quarter to seven” and is something Adrian said once: he doesn’t yet understand that some measurements cannot be combined with others).

She likes knee socks and likes them pulled really taut so they absolutely do not sag even a millimetre.