Ingrid has been preoccupied with thinking about our upcoming trip. During the February school holidays (during last week of February) she and I will take a brief skiing holiday. She has wanted to try out skiing for some while now, so now we’re going to do it. And she gets to travel, which she enjoys; and she gets to spend a few days with just me, which she also enjoys.
As soon as we booked the trip she started to plan and make lists. For a while she could hardly think about anything else. Anything she saw or heard, somehow led to thinking about the trip. Snow? Skiing trip! Car? Driving to the airport! Me? Go on holiday with me! Now it has sort of settled down a bit, but she is still very excited about it.
But apart from exciting events such as vacations, and weekend activities, Ingrid likes life to be comfortably routine. She doesn’t like surprise changes to our daily activities. On one or two occasions I have picked her up from school before picking Adrian up from pre-school, instead of the opposite, and that change was enough to disrupt everything for hours. Changed routines plus afternoon tiredness is a particularly bad combo, so now I know better than try and change our afternoon plans on the spot – even if the change would seem to somehow make life easier for us, it’s not worth the emotional mess.
So everyday life continues. Ingrid spends more and more time with her friend M, whom (I believe) she doesn’t think of as her best friend, but enjoys being with. They both have strong wills and can be pretty stubborn, and M even more than Ingrid. So they fight a lot, and it’s not uncommon for them to leave school and go home without resolving their quarrel. Ingrid wants to talk about it; M stubbornly refuses. Those fights affect Ingrid pretty strongly and she can be upset about it all evening. Luckily neither bears a grudge and the next day they’re playing together again.
On her own, Ingrid almost never plays. I can’t recall when she last did it. She doesn’t do anything else either, really. She reads. Possibly, when she is left to her own devices for several hours, she might draw or paint something. When she tires of those activities, she complains about having nothing to do. She can literally spend an hour complaining of boredom, rather than come up with something to do. Everything bores her – to the point where I am beginning to worry about her. How can a child be so bored?
She has even realised and told me that she does not need any more things (for birthdays or Christmas or such) – “only magazine subscriptions”. All our toys, crafts materials etc, lie unused.
The only time she is not bored is when she needs to NOT do something. For example, ideas and games magically appear in her head when it is time to go to bed, or when she has finished dinner and is sitting and waiting while the rest of us finish.
Her greatest wish, the kind she would wish if a fairy offered to fulfil one, used to be a pair of wings. Now she wishes for a clone of herself. A whole cloning machine, in fact, so she can make clones whenever she needs one. The clone will do whatever she asks, such as her homework. And when the job is done, Ingrid will take the clone’s memories if she wants, and the clone will disappear.
Random stuff:
- She has taken to wearing skirts and tops instead of her colourful dresses. Peer pressure at work?
- She likes to do the “wheelbarrow” walk with me. Especially from the living room to the kitchen, on weekday mornings when it’s time for breakfast.
- Melodifestivalen occupies every Saturday evening.
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