For half a day or so we had weather that actually felt like winter.

By the afternoon it was all slush again.


Ingrid continues to cook dinner once a week and enjoys it. She likes both the cooking itself, and the responsibility of it. Plus she gets to choose what she gets to eat for dinner. As usual, she enjoys experiencing new things – she has cooked a different meal each time rather than repeating any favourites.

She says she wants more responsibilities, so she has less free time, because she doesn’t know what to do with it. (That’s my interpretation of it at least.) She fills every spare minute with Minecraft or Youtube, and when her computer time is up, drawing and reading. Not a single moment of doing nothing.

And then when it’s bedtime she discovers she wants to plan her dress-up costume for the upcoming disco, needs to cut her toenails, etc. She keeps her brain so full of other stuff, so anxious to avoid any boredom, that she never has time to remember these things during the day.

Drawing might be emerging as a new hobby. She often draws Minecraft-themed stuff. Sometimes it’s pencils on paper; sometimes digitally on the iPad. Somehow she found ibisPaint, an app that allows you not only to draw things, but to see what others have drawn using the app, and how they did it. So it builds in a social aspect (which Ingrid loves of course) and makes it easy and fun for her to learn to draw better.

With all these sedentary activities and no more sports after she quit riding, I thought she was getting too little exercise and asked her to pick a new activity. Now she’s started doing disco dancing once a week. She seemed to feel unsure while she was there, but afterwards said she loved it. We’ll see.

I try to get her out and moving on weekends too. We did Friskis & Svettis together twice, which was sort of OK but didn’t exactly get standing ovations. This weekend we went swimming instead: while Adrian is at swim school the main pool is closed for the general public but the swim school staff told us it was OK for us to use it during the lesson. That’s an excellent solution for Ingrid: she quite likes swimming, diving etc but gets stressed when the swim lanes are crowded and others swim into her, or she veers off course and swims into someone else’s path.

Least favourite activity: homework.


Paperwork for opening a bank account for Ingrid.

Last time she went to the movies with a friend, she couldn’t pay for her lunch at the sushi place because they wouldn’t accept cash. Luckily her friend had a debit card so they got their lunch after all. I guess it’s time to get a debit card for Ingrid as well so she doesn’t have to go hungry in the future!


Optimal bedroom temperature: somewhere between 14 and 16°C. Our house is old and not very well insulated, so this is roughly the temperature we get in the rooms on the 2nd floor if we don’t turn on the heating, as long as the temperature outdoors stays above freezing.

For me, this kind of temperature is great at night, when I’m under a nice thick duvet, but during the day it’s too cold. My feet get cold and my fingers stiff. But Ingrid likes it cold in her room even when she’s awake and playing Minecraft etc, so she manages without any heating at all.


Early morning cirkelfys. Not the best time of day for a workout, for me… even though I had been up for an hour, my body was not fully awake. I felt slow and sluggish, and got dizzy as soon as I did anything that got my pulse up.


Pasta bake.

Learning point for me: give Ingrid a proper recipe to follow. An ingredient list with rough notes is not enough, and just means that she has to ask me about every single step, probably multiple times.