Ingrid spends a lot of time with friends. She stays at school (or after school care, rather) as long as possible, getting home at five. Then she somehow fills that endless hour until dinner with Kalle Anka and Adrian’s company. After dinner she goes straight to her room for Minecraft and Skype with her friends.

She loves her new room. Just around Christmas her new loft bed arrived. We added a desk chair and a few lamps from IKEA, and she is very happy with the result. And of course her new laptop added the final touch.

Now that she spends more time there, Adrian sometimes feels lonely in the living room and goes upstairs to hang out with her. So while the room barely got used when it was the kids’ room, now that it is Ingrid’s room, both kids spend more time there.

All this Minecrafting means that Ingrid spends a lot of time sitting in the sofa or behind her desk. She is getting way too little exercise in my opinion. They only get one hour per week of gym class at school which is definitely not enough for a kid her age. She couldn’t really come up with any sports she wanted to do, but dance seemed at least kind of fun, so she’s now signed up for a weekly dance class. I’m thinking of taking her along to Friskis & Svettis on weekends as well.

Those sessions might not be super exciting in and of themselves, but the fact that she would be attending adult workout sessions might tip the scale. She likes that grown-up feeling and has been talking quite a lot about feeling “older” recently. She’s picking clothes and hairdos that look “less childish”, for example.

Ingrid got a chance to feel quite grown-up when she cooked dinner the other day. She’s helped me with dinner on a few occasions before. Those potato gratins for example… Both kids love potato gratin but I’m often not so excited when they ask for it on a weekday night, because of all the time-consuming peeling and chopping. Ingrid helps out so she can get one of her favourite foods. She also likes flipping pancakes.

This time is different. We redistributed some chores here at home and one of her new duties is to cook dinner once a week, on Thursdays. This Thursday’s meal was corn fritters. It’s not just for fun any more. It’s a responsibility, which makes her feel grown and important.

She hasn’t made anything like corn fritters before and the recipe was in an English-language cookbook as well, so she needed a fair bit of guiding and hand-holding, but she did all the actual work.

A totally unrelated sign of growing up: she no longer chooses animate movies ahead of “real” ones. That used to be a strong criterion for her; non-animated movies just weren’t any fun. When it was her turn to pick a movie for Friday night, she chose Night at the museum (with Diary of a wimpy kid as the runner-up).

And a third one: she has started to read a newspaper. Dagens Nyheter, the leading Swedish daily paper, publishes a weekly newspaper for kids, DN Junior. Ingrid found one somewhere and immediately said it was a lot more interesting than Kamratposten (a kids’ lifestyle magazine) because it had actual news in it.

The best and most important thing that happened this month was this weekend’s laser tag game. Ingrid had a very small birthday party, a sleepover with just a few friends. She wanted a big one as well where she could invite all the girls in her class, but we said that one party was enough. So we agreed on a compromise – she wouldn’t have a second party, but she would get to invite all the girls for a game of laser tag. Christmas messed up our planning so the event didn’t happen until now.

Favourite book: Harry Potter. No, she hasn’t suddenly started reading real books – she still only reads comic books. But Eric reads it for her at night and she loves it.