A new kind of independence is developing in Ingrid: she has started experimenting with being completely on her own. It began with an afternoon at the playground, after school. Adrian wanted to stay; Ingrid wanted to go home. I handed my keys to Ingrid and she went on home on her own.

This took me by surprise, because when she last tried being home alone, she didn’t hold out many minutes. Now she was totally cool with it.

So we did it a couple more times. Sometimes she’s gone home from the playground to pick up some stuff. Once I did the opposite and left her at the playground with Adrian while I went back home to pick up something. Sometimes she’s gone to a friend’s place to ask if they can play. A few times she has just gone out to ride her kickbike or skateboard on her own for a while.

She likes staying up late, usually reading. She can usually still get up the next morning, but by the afternoon the lack of sleep catches up with her and she is tired and whiny. So now I try to send her off to bed by 9 at the latest. But sometimes no arguments work, not even the threat of missing the bedtime story (because after 9 we are usually both so tired that I don’t want to tell a story).

When we do have time for a story, she often asks for something that has things (inanimate objects) that come to life and can talk: toys, or the inhabitants of the kitchen, or the numbers one to nine. And preferrably their talking should be arguments about which one of them is the best. A reflection of her daily reality at school perhaps.

Sleeping is just so utterly boring, it seems. “Who came up with the idea of sleeping, anyway?” she asked today. “And why do we have to eat? And poop?” Not really wondering, but just expressing her frustration with these stupid wastes of time.

At mealtimes, too, it is clear that she would rather not have to eat. Whenever she is snacking, she will bring some Bamse magazines to read. At the dinner table she often forgets that she is supposed to be eating, and plays or talks instead, and we remind her to eat. Sometimes she gets bored with eating and leaves the table before she is full, and then realizes an hour later that she is actually still hungry.

At home this isn’t much of an issue, but at school it causes more problems. Their lunch break is short, and she is basically so distracted at mealtimes that she doesn’t have time to eat. And then the break ends and she wolfs down the food that is still on her plate.

For a long time Ingrid had been complaining of stomach aches, off and on, especially after school lunches. But she wasn’t very consistent in reporting them, so it took months for us to figure out the pattern. Finally we realized that the aches usually came when she had had to eat too fast. Now she moved to another table at school, closer to the teachers who can remind her to actually eat. And I don’t think she’s had any stomach aches since then.

Miscellaneous:

• She is letting her hair grow long and it is now often in her face. This seems to bother her more than me. She doesn’t like hair clips, but will accept soft hair bands.
• She likes playing with words, especially names, and turning them backwards.
• Favourite game: vändtia (which seems to correspond to the English Shithead – I’m glad it’s not called that in Swedish!)

This month, after a long time of increasing frustration (on my part) and increasing obsession (on Ingrid’s part), I started an iPad fast. For just over a week, the iPads have been hidden and out of reach of the kids. Movie time is strictly limited, too, but movies haven’t been a problem in the same way as the iPads have.

YouTube was really the worst. It was just like having a TV in the house: mindlessly skipping from one channel to another, always finding something that is better than nothing, watching whatever happened to be on. And then at about 8 o’clock when iPad time ended, she realized she wanted to play a game, or to for me to read a book for her – except that by then it was too late. So effectively the iPad got the priority slot, and all other activities got whatever dribs and drabs were left over.

Ingrid’s first reaction was as expected, with both tears and whining. But then she adjusted, and now I don’t think she’s even mentioned it for several days.

I was aiming for an iPad-free week, but now I won’t reintroduce it unless the kids ask for it. And when that happens, it will be without YouTube.

Ingrid reads as much as ever. She still likes best the books that she can read from beginning to end in one sitting, and isn’t that fond of chapter books. She likes the feeling of completion, of achievement, I think: when she is reading a longer book, she often comes to me and proudly reports “look how far I’ve read already!”

When I read for her, she listens very attentively. Often she comments on the contents, and especially when she notices parallels to other things we’ve read or seen or experienced. She also asks about words she doesn’t understand.

Bedtime stories are an important part of our daily routine. After she’s brushed her teeth and gotten into her nightie, she gets into a bed, and I tell a story.

At first I used to read a story for her. Then we got to a point where Ingrid and Adrian would go to bed at the same time, and reading no longer worked: Adrian wouldn’t stay still if there was any light in the room, and nobody would get any closer to sleep. So then I’d retell old fairy tales instead. But I ran out of stories after a while, and started making them up.

Now we do that every night. Ingrid gets to pick a starting point, the thing she wants a story about. Often she wants an animal: a story about a cat, or a horse, or a dog and a wolf. And if her chosen starting point is not enough to get my imagination going, I ask for more starter ideas. So we’ve had stories about “a horse who gets stolen”, a “scary story about a dragon”, about a detective, “two squirrels who fall in love” (after watching Ice Age), “a ball who is alive and can talk, and all the other toys as well” and so on.

Sometimes we do the story with Adrian still awake, next to me, and then he often drifts off halfway through the story. Sometimes Ingrid comes upstairs just after Adrian has fallen asleep, and then I half-whisper while Adrian sleeps. When Adrian tires early, we may do the story in Ingrid’s bedroom.

By the end of it, anyway, Adrian is asleep and the story is over. After the story I lie next to Ingrid for a while, and she talks to me about whatever is on her mind – usually things that happened to her during the day.

Then we hug. She touches her nose to mine. We wish each other good night. As I go downstairs, she rolls over to Adrian’s side, and falls asleep while holding his hand.

The good night wishes get more and more elaborate. At first it was just “good night”. Now it’s “good night, sweet dreams, sleep well, have beautiful dreams” and “no, you have an even better night” and “twice as beautiful dreams for you” and so on.

Only this week she suddenly realized that the Estonian head ööd was made up of two actual words, “good” and “night”, not a meaningless sound of hedööd (“g’night”). head… ööd… ja head… und… she wonderingly said, “it’s ’good’ and ’night’!” Yes it is.

New skills:

• Crocheting (chain stitch), nice and even. She crotcheted a pink and magenta bookmark for me.
• Robber language.

This month’s big news: Ingrid’s first baby tooth fell out. It was loose, and then it was looser, and Ingrid was constantly asking us to look at her loose tooth and to feel it wiggle. And then it was gone. Ingrid was in the middle of boisterous play at the time, so she probably swallowed the tooth without noticing it.

She had a dentist’s appointment (which I’d booked quite independently of the loose tooth) where we also found out that several of her six-year molars are appearing. They were visible for the dentist but not quite yet for us.

Ingrid has been looking forward to losing her baby teeth. It is a bit of a rite of passage, and many of her friends at school had lost theirs. But of course most of her classmates are older than her.

Her peers at school are affecting her a lot, more than I ever noticed at pre-school. Is it because she feels she has to act like the big kids now? And is that, in turn, because everybody else is trying to act like a big kid? I sense that she is looking for others’ approval, trying to fit in and to impress, and to be better than others – not always in a good way.

Talk like “you don’t get anything, do you” (du fattar ju ingenting) and snooty frustrated sighs of ah men! may be an unavoidable side effect of going to school but it’s not the kind of treatment I am used to.

I think that she is generally sweeter and more innocent than the average 6-year-old. Or perhaps she is simply more innocent than all the 6-year-olds with older brothers and sisters. She is still figuring out how to deal with some of the pushier kids. When we talk about her day (on our way home from school, or during our afternoon snack, or at bedtime) she often talks about others trying to tell her what to do. Not kids trying to push her around, but just kids who think they know better than others.

This month’s major new skill is telling time. Ingrid knew the hours already last summer, and has since then been grappling with quarters and minutes and such stuff. Until now, whenever she asked what time it was, she was never quite able to make sense of the answer. “Quarter to four” – is that before or after four? A minute or a second, which is the shorter one? Is “five minutes past” more than “quarter past”? She asked again and again, and I explained again and again, but it never stuck. And now one day it suddenly clicked, and that was that. Now she can tell the time exactly, by the minute, from both an analog and a digital clock.

She also knows all the months of the year, but that’s not really new. I don’t know exactly when she learned them but I think she’s known them for a couple of months now.

Also just at the beginning of the month, at the very end of the skating season, she learned to skate backwards.

Favourite toy: a slinky that she bought with her own pocket money. But afterwards she realized that Adrian has been playing with it more than her. I don’t think she’ll be buying many toys going forward. When we went to the toy shop she spent a long time looking around, but there wasn’t really much there that she liked. She’s fond of stuffed animals, and was thinking of buying one of them, but when she saw the prices, she changed her mind. Now with the slinky she’s understood what I noticed a long time ago: she doesn’t really play with toys.

She still loves reading, and Bamse is still the best. Maybe because we have so many of them, so she can always find one she hasn’t read in a while. She happily devours all the books I bring home from the library, but rarely wants to read any of them twice. Like an adult, but very unlike younger kids, once she’s read the book, she is not interested in reading it again for a while. Except if I read it for her: she likes to listen to me read, and with my reading makes the book feel fresh and new again.

Favourite movie: Alice in Wonderland.
Favourite iPad app: Pettson’s inventions. Also, watching me play Devil’s Advocate. In fact she likes that game more than I do; she likes the shopping part.
Miscellaneous favourites: nail polish, braids and ponytails.

Another month with smooth sailing all the way. This still feels like a bit of a luxury, not to be taken for granted – I still have strong memories of the time when Ingrid was surly and negative and complained and argued about everything.

Ingrid has matured a lot when it comes to reelationships with other people. She thinks and talks about them quite a lot. Just like she likes to recite her catalogue of physical “hurts” for the day (“I slipped and fell and hit my hands and didn’t even have my thick gloves on” or “I got poked in the eye while we were playing”) she also often tells me about psychological “hurts”: which friend tried to force Ingrid to do something she didn’t want, which friends started to quarrel while they were playing.

There is apparently a lot of “love” at school as well. (And for some reason she/they refer to it as “love”, in English, not in Swedish. Perhaps it is more romantic this way.) Often she tells me about all the boys who are in love with her and try to kiss her all the time, and how she has to run away from them. She seems to enjoy the attention but she is not fond of kissing, regardless of who is doing it. She doesn’t want me to kiss her either – she doesn’t like the wet feeling. She’d much rather get a hug.

School really is a social activity for her. The educational part is limited in scope and ambition, and not the least bit challenging for her. One week their weekly newsletter to parents said they had been listening for the first sound in words – the B in book and so on. We were doing that with Ingrid when she was three years old. Of course, I understand that they have to begin with the basics and can’t assume that the kids have done anything before school.

She has also been more curious about relationship and social issues in books that she reads. What does “bullying” mean? What does “torment” mean? We talk about it, and I reflect on how innocent she is.

She seems to have a strong need just now to feel successful. She often asks me to confirm that she is good at skating / drawing / reading etc. (Which I almost always do.) I don’t like that way of thinking much – I believe in praising effort, not achievement – and I wonder how she’s come to think in those terms. Probably school; I get the impression that teachers say that kind of thing an awful lot.

The one activity about which I couldn’t agree with her was skating. When she asked if she was good at it, she could shakily move ahead but not much more. I told her that to be good at something, it shouldn’t feel difficult. She should be able to skate without having to think hard about it all the time – like she cycles, effortlessly.

Since the beginning of this term, the kids have been going skating every week at school, and Ingrid’s skating skills have improved enormously. Now she actually glides with (relative) speed and confidence. She can turn, and skate on one leg for short stretches. She has even tried skating backwards a little bit. A month ago we used to chase each other on ice: me skating semi-slowly backwards in front of her, her trying to catch me. The last time we went skating together, I definitely was NOT going to escape her if I skated backwards, and even skating face-forward I had to exert myself to not get caught. On a long straight stretch I can outskate her easily, but when I have to maneuver and turn because we’re about to reach the edge of the rink (and she can turn and intercept me when I am forced to turn) we’re now almost evenly matched.

Ingrid plays a lot with Adrian and they really enjoy each other’s company. Their play is still simple and physical and usually quite incomprehensible to me. If they play WITH anything, it’s things like pillows, blankets, balloons, maybe a large cardboard box or a bag they can climb into. The toy food doesn’t get much use just now. Instead they play a lot with a set of doctor’s equipment. It also mostly seems to be about poking and tickling each other.

For some reason she generally speaks to him in baby language. In fact sometimes his sentences have better grammar than hers. She skips prepositions and doesn’t decline her verbs: “Adrian try” instead of “now you try it”, “play blanket” instead of “let’s play with the blanket”.

Small stuff:

• Weekend fixture: watching Melodifestivalen.
• Favourite fruit: kiwi and pineapple.
• Favourite on YouTube: Pink Panther (the animated one, not inspector Clouseau)
• Fashion: having her hair in braids.

Kids are, of course, always learning things, but it feels like this month Ingrid has picked up more new skills than usual.

She has learned to do up buttons, which she has sort of managed before but only with much struggle. And shoelaces, too. During the Christmas break we went shopping for shoes that she can wear for gym class at school, and her absolute favourites were a pair of pink Converses. She has never had lace-up shoes before, but was determined to learn that art if that’s what it took to get those Converses. I showed her once and she got it immediately. After a few days of practice (during which she wore the Converses all the time at home) she had it down pat.

Another manual skill is eating with chopsticks. She had a kid’s version before, in plastic, with a flexible join between the two chopsticks. But during one dinner when she couldn’t stop playing with them she bent them too far, and they broke. I haven’t had time to buy new ones so she made do with the adult version. And she actually manages to eat some food with them. We don’t use them often at home, but at restaurants she encounters chopsticks fairly regularly. Sushi is her favourite restaurant food (and now also dumplings, especially the kind with a thick layer of white gluey dough).

At school she has learned to sew blanket stitch and used it to make a bunny rabbit. In the evenings she has learned how to search on YouTube. During the Christmas break she learned to play Battleship.

At weekends we’ve been practising ice skating. Twice we’ve had the good luck to run into her friends at the ice rink, which made skating more fun for her but also provided a welcome challenge, since both those girls were more expert skaters than her. Last time we skated for over two hours: the kids chased each other, did a slalom track, tried swizzles, “the meatball” (crouching down into a ball) and so on.

Quite spontaneously and naturally she is learning multiplication and division. A few days ago when we were heating up meatballs in the microwave oven, she noticed that I heated them for 20 seconds on one side and 20 on the other, and commented that with four meatballs, that makes 10 second per meatball. Today we were talking about Bamse magazines (because I ordered a subscription and we’ve been waiting for the first issue to turn up in the mail) and how much I paid for the subscription (99 kr for 5 issues), and she calculated that the same 5 issues would cost 150 kr if we bought them in the store.

She is unlearning things, too – or rather, I am trying to make her unlearn things that she has learned the wrong way. She writes her Gs quite weirdly (without the top part, sort of like backwards a J with a curlier finish at the bottom) and always writes her Js the wrong way round. When she was just learning to write I didn’t bother to correct such details, judging it more important to learn the letters than to get their shapes exactly right. With all the other letters she has gradually ended up drawing the right shapes, but with those two she’s gotten firmly stuck in the wrong place, and getting unstuck is harder than I thought. I’m also trying to get her to draw her letters and numbers in the right direction: starting them at the top etc.

I am also making her learn falling asleep on her own, since I got tired of spending so much time every evening putting kids to bed. I can’t say that she’s happy about this change but she’s OK with it. At first did it completely on her own, but then her bedtime and Adrian’s drifted closer to each other, so now both go to bed at the same time, in the big bed. I tell them a story and stay there until Adrian is asleep, and then maybe talk quietly to Ingrid for a while before going downstairs. Ingrid stays there and falls asleep with Adrian as quiet but comforting company. Having him next to her makes a big difference for her.

This month we also had Christmas of course. Ingrid has a minor obsession with presents and opening them. The contents are not that important; she doesn’t even remember to say thank you; it is the opening and the surprise that matters.

The best present in my opinion was a LasseMaja book. At first she was a bit underwhelmed (too few pictures) but when she started reading she could hardly put it down. Since then we’ve borrowed two more from the library and she devoured those equally fast. Another successful gift was a picture-based English dictionary.

She still has her minor obsession with physical hurts. One day after school she told me to guess how many times she’d hurt herself that day. In my head I guessed four, but told her eleven to make it more fun. The correct answer was 17. The next day she must have counted every single bump and poke, because when I got there she was ready and presented me with a paper on which she had written, with very large digits, the number 129. Adrian bumped into her while she was getting dressed and she corrected it to 130.

Another time she asked me why I only cuddle and console Adrian when he hurts himself, but not her. I explained to her that I didn’t think she needed that any more, that she was big enough to console herself. She didn’t agree, and we agreed that I’d hug and console her as well. I guess I’ve been expecting too much maturity and independence from her.

Likewise she once wondered why I praised Adrian for [whatever it was] and not her. I explained that I praise him when he does something that is hard for him, but since those things are easy for her, I don’t mention them. She’s been giving this some thought, and the overall idea of treating different people differently not based on what they “deserve” but based on some more advanced criteria of “appropriateness”. Until now she has, I think, been thinking in terms of deserving, of being nice to nice people and not to bad people.

When we talk in bed late at night, she often brings up some situation when someone has been “not nice” towards her. She can take that quite hard, reacting sometimes with hurt and sometimes with righteous anger. We talk about what can make people act that way, and how she can think about those situations.

Small stuff:

• She is trying to teach Adrian to play hide-and-seek.
• She has moved from the adjustable Stokke chair to a normal adult kitchen chair, on her own initiative.
• She has decided that she wants long her and no bangs, so we’re letting the bangs grow out. But she does not like hair clips so her hair hangs in front of her eyes almost all the time.
• She has discovered that she likes peanut butter on toast.
• Favourite iPad game: Lost Circus, a hidden objects game.

Reading, reading, reading…

Sometimes she seems like such a big girl, and at other times she is still so young and innocent. Her top idea of “fun” right now is the shallalooba game, which means getting naked and then wiggling her bottom at me (or whoever else is there) while shouting “shallalooba!”, accompanied by uncontrollable giggling.

Otherwise much of the past month has been focused on waiting for Christmas: the advent calendar, and the Christmas show they had at school, and of course Christmas itself. For at least two weeks up until the 1st of December she was talking about the advent calendar, worrying whether I would get it ready in time, asking if I could wrap the presents already, then inspecting the calendar and looking at the shapes of the different gifts.

I think the calendar (and Christmas Eve as well) are so important to her because she loves surprises. The important thing is not the gift, nor the act of giving and receiving, but the surprise. Anything gets better when wrapped in a surprise – and there is nothing that makes her as sad as a surprise revealed. This goes for dinner , for everyday things that I buy for her, goodnight stories, etc. Nowadays I never tell her in advance what I’m cooking, and instead let her lift the lid and uncover the surprise. And when I buy new socks for her, I do not say to her, “I bought some socks for you, here they are”. Instead I say that I bought her something today, or let her see the bag. Then we wait until we get home, and then she gets to open the bag.

The Christmas show was sort of the opposite – a surprise that she wanted to prepare for us. We knew about the show itself, of course, but she would not sing any of the songs for me in advance, even though they practiced them a lot at school. When she happened to hum a snatch of a Christmas song, she sometimes tried to cover it up and pretend she didn’t. Then she made sure to tell me that this was not all of it, and they will sing more of it during the show. In the end I got her to understand that the actual songs didn’t need to be surprises: it is OK to know what songs will be sung, it is the performance that matters. I think it was a bit of a relief for her when the show was over.

She actually had to stay home from school the day before the show, because she was knocked out by a fever. The day of the show she was still at home but feeling well enough that we went to school for the show itself, which was at 3pm. There was lots of singing and a bit of reciting of poems. Ingrid is, frankly, not much of a singer – she either doesn’t pay attention to or cannot really hear the details of the melody. She gets the lyrics right but sometimes sings them to some random tune. But her reciting stood out (to me at least) because unlike most kids her age, she speaks loudly and clearly and doesn’t rush, even when she is a bit nervous.

At home life is mostly unexciting. She plays with Adrian, watches movies and YouTube clips (quite a lot of Pingu recently), reads books and Bamse comics. She doesn’t ever play on her own.

Most of the time she is really patient with Adrian. She holds his hand when walking down slippery icy stairs; sings to him when he is upset; helps him get his clothes off when we get home. Other times she seems to enjoy winding him up and goading him with small things: repeatedly putting her foot on his chair even when he pushes it away again and again, etc.

Ingrid is a fast reader now and doesn’t even move her mouth while reading. She easily reads books of 30-40 pages, as long as each page is no more than a few paragraphs and has pictures. She does not like books without pictures. Even with books that she can and does read herself, she likes me to read them for her afterwards. Usually she reads each book once and then loses interest – she wants the surprise, again. I try to make a trip to the library every week or two.

On a few occasions I borrowed books for beginner readers, “Lätt att läsa”, but those were aimed at older readers and often dealt with topics she was less interested in (school, kids falling out and becoming friends again, etc). Now I choose kids’ books, with more fanciful stories and more adventure in them. These are really meant to be read aloud so they are longer and have more text on each page, but that’s not much of an obstacle for her, and she enjoys them much more.

I don’t think she’s been playing many iPad games recently. Perhaps because she has tired of the games we have – maybe it’s time to find some new ones. She did try Drop 7 one day when she saw me play it, and actually understood the game mechanics. When I last showed it to her, maybe a year ago, she didn’t get it at all.

Another game that she has learned is Yatzy. Yatzy and War (the card game) are her favourite games right now. War is totally luck-based but she still seems to enjoy it (and while this puzzles my adult self, I remember doing it myself when I was a kid). Yatzy is great maths practice, at just the right level for her: adding up numbers 1 to 6, up to 30. She has understood the concept and the purpose of grouping the points by fives and tens, to make the adding up easier.

An ordinary month with mostly smooth sailing.

School fills most of Ingrid’s day, and still I don’t really know what they do all day. I know that in “language play” they have advanced from rhymes and rhyming to sentences, and in math play they now work with shapes.

In her Estonian lessons I know she is working on vocabulary (because I notice it improving), and writing and spelling. She gets actual homework from those lessons so I get to be a part of the process. We work especially on long and short sounds (which work differently in Estonian and Swedish) and on the O, U, Ü sounds where the spelling differs most from Swedish – those same three sounds would be spelt Å, O, U in Swedish. Her handwriting is also improving a lot, with the letters much more even in size.

After school she rarely wants to go home. School has friends. Home is boring. I pick her up at around 4:30 not because that’s the earliest I can get there, but because that’s the earliest I have a chance of getting her to come home with me. At home after school she often defaults to watching a movie or playing on the iPad, but recently I have asked her to wait with those activities after dinner so we get at least some time together. And once she starts playing, she happily goes on doing it, even after dinner – it’s just a matter of not taking the easy option when we first get home.

Before dinner she mostly plays with Adrian, which usually means some sort of general fooling around, often repeating old games, or trying to teach Adrian some silliness (silly noises, silly faces, crawling under my skirt, etc).

Ingrid enjoys Adrian’s company and told me that she’d like to marry him – “but I won’t because then we would have children who are not healthy”. She tells me she is in love with three people now: Anton who she will marry, Elin who is her best friend, and Adrian. She helps him with his clothes when we get home; she sings for him when he is upset; she keeps him company.

After dinner she likes to play games with me or Eric. Reversi, a simple version of war, Chinese checkers etc.

She also reads. Now it’s not only Bamse but also more and more actual books. While she prefers to listen to me read, she will read herself when I am busy with other things. I’ve been bringing home books from the library for her – Helena Bross’s books in the “easy to read” series seem to work quite well. Bamse might be losing some of its charm: she no longer spends all of her weekly allowance on old Bamse issues, within hours of getting the money.

She’s also played quite a lot with the Brio train set that she and Adrian got for her birthday. She builds long snaking tracks and usually wants to include all the special features: the bridge, the tunnel, the station, the ferry, the branchings and so on. She loves the battery-powered train engines, and especially the ambulance train. She also likes making the trains collide both heads-on and where two branches of the track come together.

She sings nonsense songs that she and her friends at school make up and then make more and more elaborate, with clapping, movements, variations etc. The songs usually consist of catchy-sounding snippets of other songs: “a rikki tikki taa taa” and then some “bom chicka bom chicka bom bom bom”, and then perhaps a snatch of “I’m singing in the rain”.

At the end of last month she stopped sucking her thumb at bedtime. And that was that. She still sleeps with a glove on her right hand, out of habit I think. In the middle of the night (when we take her to the toilet) I occasionally notice the thumb starting to move towards the mouth but it stops before it gets there.

She likes me to rub her back or her tummy at bedtime, because it helps her calm down and go to sleep.

Her favourite colours nowadays are pink and turquoise, not fuchsia (“lilarosa”) or purple.

She now sometimes wears skirts and tops again, after a long period of only wearing dresses almost all the time.

This was the month of waiting for the birtday. Really Ingrid has been looking forward to the birthday for way more than just one month – already during summer she was telling me how she was looking forward to autumn because that’s when her birthday is. But now the longing was intense, and so was the planning.

Many weeks in advance she was already planning what games she would play with her friends, and what activity they would do to get the goodie bags, and whom she would invite, and where they would sit, and so on. Some of the plans were quite fixed early on, while others kept changing.

She wrote party invitations for her friends and decorated them with foam stamps. We walked and cycled to the friends’ homes to put the invites in their letter boxes. For two of them we had to send the invites by post (because they live in apartments and the front doors are locked), and for these she wrote out the addresses herself, and then put the letters in the post.

Interestingly (to me) the focus was all on the friends and activities, and not at all on the presents. This was not the case last year, when she had a long wish list of presents. (Or maybe that was for Christmas? Same same.)

Friends are important to her. Or rather, her peer group is important to her. It used to be that she cared about a small number of friends that she played with. Now she seems to be more aware of being part of a group, and looking up to older kids, I guess.

In particular, she is picking up new speech patterns from school: things that others say, that sound cool, that she uses without quite understanding them. There’s lots of “gud va”: gud va bra, gud va kallt det är, gud va gott, and I’ve even heard some occasional “shit va” as well as one “fett bra”. (After that one she stopped and wondered out loud, What does that actually mean?) Things, objects, are often den här dumma x, “this stupid x” (bag, bicycle, …)

When she talks about her day at school, she usually tells me what they ate, what special Friday activities they did, and (when applicable) what body part she hurt or who hit whom. Otherwise they just “did stuff”. I am glad for the weekly newsletters from school – this way I have at least some idea about what they do all day long.

The class seems to have a “self” theme/project at school, which they’ve used across subjects: they’ve done several kinds of self-portraits, had a homework assignment where they answered questions about their favourites (colour, food, activity), measured themselves and compared their current height to their height when they were born (hanging paper tapes of the right length side by side on the wall) etc.

We the parents got to see some of the results of these projects during a parent/teacher meeting some weeks ago. Looking at the paper tapes I saw that Ingrid was the 2nd shortest in her class. Looking at her self-portrait I saw that she can be quite observant in her drawing, not depicting herself as a cookie cutter girl with a triangular dress and long eyelashes. She had drawn her actual clothes that day, and a proper body-shaped body, and the face too. But then within a week of this she also drew her family, with stick-shaped men and triangle-shaped women. Easier that way, I guess, especially when she cannot actually look at as and has to draw from memory.

Ingrid herself was not too happy with the result – the nose looked wrong, she said. This is pretty representative of how she judges her own achievements right now: if it isn’t perfect, she is unhappy. Never mind that the self-portrait is otherwise really carefully done – the nose isn’t just right so she’s “no good at this”. Never mind that she is the only one in her class to read and write fluently – she struggles with her spelling in Estonian (her 2nd language) so she is “no good at this”. I keep telling her that she is doing great, that school is for learning, so it is all about doing things you can’t quite do yet.

Yes, she is now also getting Estonian lessons at school. Every Friday afternoon she has a one-hour lesson together with two Estonian boys. Their tasks are adapted to their skill levels; Ingrid has been writing – once it was the names of body parts, once parts of a house. So it’s both vocabulary and spelling practice. Estonian spelling is simple but the letter sounds are not the same as in Swedish – Ingrid;s first attempt at spelling “juuksed” came out as “joksed”.

Speaking of languages, I suspect that she knows way more English than we get to hear. On one occasion she quoted The Great Mouse Detective at us: “Guards! Seize this despicable creature!” But she can also construct grammatically correct sentences of her own: one morning she said something, and unfortunately I forget what it was, but roughly like “I was just drinking some milk”, with the correct word order and tense and everything.

In the afternoon, after school, she still usually watches a movie or plays with the iPad. She has learned to play Reversi and can actually manage Field Runners, a “tower defense” type of game, too. She’s also had enough persistence to learn Tiny Wings, which is a game that takes some practice before you can really play it.

The evening ends with a fixed bed time. It is semi-fixed, or perhaps you can call it blackmailing: if she is in bed by the time we’ve set, we will read a story for her; she can stay up later if she really is not tired but then there will be no story. In practice she stays up until the bedtime we set, on the minute: she really doesn’t want to go to bed but she really wants a story, too. Recently she’s had trouble getting up in the morning so we moved bedtime forward by 30 minutes: now screen time ends at 8 and she goes to bed at 8:30.

She has been sucking her thumb when falling asleep until now. I told her she was too old for that, and she stopped doing it on the day of her birthday, so two nights ago. These two nights she’s been sleeping with a glove on her sucking hand. It seems to be pretty easy for her, which neither she nor I had expected.

On the nights when she has trouble calming down and going to sleep, she likes me to rub her back or her tummy. When she really cannot calm down, I take her through a relaxation exercise, going through all the parts of her body, relaxing them, making them heavy and warm and limp and dark.

Ingrid is still quite rule-oriented in her thinking, and wants things to happen the same way they happened before. She wants to play the same game in the same situations: the “letter game” (I Spy) on car and train journeys; the “humming game” (where we take turns humming a song and the other has to guess which song it is) while cycling home from school.

Likewise she tries to recreate happy situations from the past by repeating important-seeming elements of them. She wanted the goodie bags at her birthday to be handed out by a pirate “like at Elin’s party”. She wanted to have dinner at a local restaurant on her birthday, because her preschool class went there for their “graduation” lunch. (We did both, and I think she was happy with the outcomes.)

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