In the beginning of this month, Ingrid was moved up to the next group at nursery. Normally the whole group of children move through nursery together, but now the oldest children in one group were shifted to the next group, in order to make space for more young children. (For economic reasons the nursery needed to either let go of staff or take in more children. They chose the latter, and all the children queueing for places at this nursery were young ones. Hence the reshuffle.)

It wasn’t a huge change, really. The groups have already spent time together, especially while they’re outside, and towards the end of each day when the groups shrink as kids are picked up. So she was familiar with the staff and some of the kids too. Still, it meant a lot of new experiences for Ingrid. From being near oldest in her group, she’s now among the youngest ones. The new group is larger. And of course they do other things that the younger kids haven’t tried yet, and do things differently.

Possibly as a result of this, or possibly for some completely different reason, Ingrid has been really tired. The kid who was staying awake until 9:30 in the evening, is now telling me she wants to go to sleep sometimes before 8 o’clock. And she means it: sometimes she asks me to tell her a fairy tale instead of reading a book, so she can lie down and not have to look at the pictures. And after the story she is asleep within 5 minutes, instead of the 40 it could take as recently as early autumn.

Also perhaps contributing to the tiredness, Ingrid had a serious growth spurt early this month, with a LOT of eating. She was eating huge portions, and for a few days she asked for meals at two-hour intervals. That’s mostly past us now, but one thing that’s become part of our daily routine is having a banana on the way home from nursery.

Hair clips and sparkly flowers

Earlier this autumn Ingrid brought home her soft doll from nursery. During the schooling in period, back in 2008 when she started there, each parent was given the materials to make a soft doll for their child. They used those dolls daily in some activities (singing I think). Now they’re no longer using them that way, so the dolls were free to go home. Ingrid has become really attached to hers, and for several weeks she’d take the doll with her to nursery every day (and also take it with her wherever we went during weekends). It’s the closest she’s had to a comfort blanket, but now it seems to be waning in importance.

After nursery we often go to the library. They’re only open two evenings in the week, and most weeks Ingrid’s more than happy to utilize both. Mostly we read books there, but when it’s time to go Ingrid often says she wants to borrow a book, and then picks one more or less randomly. Often she loses interest in it by the time we get home. It’s the routine itself that’s important. When at the library, one borrows books, so that’s what we do.

At home there’s a lot of movie watching going on. So much so that I’ve started keeping an eye on the clock and putting an end to the fun after about an hour. Eric ripped several DVDs worth of old Disney shorts to MP3, and Ingrid’s learned how to play them all on her own. There’s a shortcut to the right folder on her desktop, and Eric set up her profile for single-click to open stuff. She turns on the computer, chooses her profile, opens the folder, clicks on a random movie in the list, and then “makes it big” with Alt+Enter. Pausing and unpausing with space bar is old hat. She even knows that when an unwanted “label” comes up (like a warning from the firewall) you click the red X to get rid of it. She still likes to type letters on my laptop, too. (Hmm… perhaps we should just set up Notepad on her profile?)

We recycle

Last month’s game of bears continues almost every day. The two of us are both bears, and we have to hide ourselves under the duvet because it is winter and we need to go to sleep. Then she gets up, just like Alfie in When Will It Be Spring?, and wakes me and tells me it’s summer already! Sometimes I’m allowed to do like Alfie’s mom and tell her that she’s wrong, it’s still winter, and we go back to “sleep”, but other days she tells me “but let’s PRETEND it’s summer”, as if I wasn’t aware that’s what we were doing. During “summer” she picks nuts and berries and honey for me, and then it’s autumn and we start all over again.

There’s less counting going on now, and we can actually pass houses without reading out all their numbers.

Language-wise Ingrid’s doing great. I no longer have any worries whatsoever about her ability or willingness to learn Estonian in parallel with Swedish. She still often switches to Swedish when telling me about stuff that happened during the day at nursery, but in general she is fluent in Estonian and almost always uses it when speaking to me. Of course there’s lots more to learn – all the grammatical irregularities and more advanced sentence structures and so on. But even if she stops here, even if her underlying Estonian skills never get better than this (apart from gradually growing her vocabulary) she will get by. If she were dropped in Estonia without anyone to help translate what she says, she would manage. Most importantly, she knows to ask “what does xxx look like” when there’s a word she doesn’t understand.

Last month’s trend towards polite language continues. There’s quite a lot of “can I have some more milk please” and “could you help me with this”. We’re also hearing more and more expressions and phrases she is obviously picking up from nursery: “look at what I am doing!” and “you can take it if you want” and “we can pretend that it’s [something]” and so on.

Other such phrases confirm my impression that she’s (unusually?) sensible and willing to follow rules. This afternoon when a boy asked her about some toy at nursery, “is this yours?” she replied “no, it belongs to the nursery, everyone can play with it”. Quite often she tells me “you have to share the toys”. Indeed she’s sometimes so sensible that I worry she has no chance to make her own mistakes and messes and learn things herself. She tells me “you have to be careful when climbing here, otherwise you can fall down” and reminds me to keep to the side of the road when we’re walking home, so we don’t get hit by a car. If an adult gently suggests something, she often takes it pretty much as an order, so I try to suggest as little as possible.

Favourite foods: anything starchy (pasta, cereal, rice, bread); anything with ketchup. Bell peppers, sweetcorn, peas and beans of all kinds.

Foods she absolutely refuses: mushrooms and aubergine, both for their squishy texture I think.

Favourite movie: old Disney shorts.

Favourite book: none in particular; our reading is pretty evenly spread over most of our books.

The big news of this month is that Ingrid has stopped sucking her thumb during the daytime. Some days before Christmas I mentioned a couple of times that around Christmas she should stop sucking it, because it’s no good for her teeth. (She knows that’s true because the dentist said so.) She remembered it and took it more seriously than I had hoped, and reminded me on Christmas Eve that she would stop sucking her thumb.

And she did. That was pretty much it. The first few days I had to remind her at times, and sometimes she really wanted to, but managed to do without. I was really proud of her, and she was very proud when she told everybody at nursery. Since then, no problems whatsoever. She still needs/wants the thumb when falling asleep, and I’m willing to let that be for now. An unexpected but very welcome side effect is that she rarely wants to touch my cleavage any more. I guess the two activities together were some sort of effort to recreate the feeling of breastfeeding.

The first half of this month was dominated by Christmas: waiting for it, and then getting presents. The second half was, in turn, dominated by one of the above-mentioned presents: a board game. This was the first board game in our house, and Ingrid absolutely loves it. We have played it almost every day, sometimes several times.

It’s one of those games where you follow a path, rolling a die to decide how many steps to take, and special events happen at various places on the board. (Wikipedia tells me these are called “roll-and-move games”.) This particular game is called Drakguldet (The Dragon’s Gold), and the aim is to gather pieces of gold. On some squares you get a marker for a piece of gold, on some you lose one, on some you double your hoard, on some you have to run forward or fall back, etc. Ingrid is actually not that interested in getting the most gold, but would rather be the first one to reach the finish.

Ingrid loved the game from the moment she saw it. And it seems to be just right for her. During the first few evenings the challenge was to get her to follow the rules. She’s well aware of the concept of taking turns, so that wasn’t a problem. But there are also rules such as “you have to move forward all the time, not backwards” and “no, you cannot skip squares you don’t like” – not to mention “when counting steps, you don’t count the square you’re standing on”.

Naturally there is a lot of counting going on here: of pips on the die, of steps, and of pieces of gold. This has exposed some interesting things about her maths skills.

• She doesn’t subitize any amounts larger than about 3 – she almost always counts them.
• She cannot reliably tell the difference between the 4 and the 5 on a die, and either guesses or counts the pips (but always recognizes the 6).
• She cannot translate numbers greater than 3 between languages. When she counts to 10 pieces of gold (in Estonian) and I ask her what that is in Swedish, she is totally lost. Four? Five? I guess it’s like being asked to translate 1001011 from binary to decimal. I can do it but not off the top of my head.
• She doesn’t miscount when she physically moves objects, but she can easily miscount when just pointing at them, whenever the finger moves faster than the mouth.

Ingrid has also discovered that houses have numbers. She knows the number of our house (and the street name, although if a stranger asked her for it I’m not sure if theyd’ be able to decipher her pronounciation). On our way home in the afternoon, once we’ve made our way from the big road to the small streets, we stop briefly at almost every gate to look for the house number. She’s learned that the numbers can be found on the post box, or the gate post, or sometimes the house itself. However the number on the garbage can is not the house number. She cannot always tell which number is which (so I help) but she’s got 1, 2, 3, 5 and 0 down pat. And she knows that 2 and 2 side by side means twenty-two, and 1 and 2 is twelve (although 2 and 1 sometimes also make twelve) etc.

Continuing further on the topic of numbers, the number after twenty is “done!” because that’s what we used to say when counting was the only way to get her to allow us to brush her teeth. In fact it is “fourteen, eighteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty, done!”.

Another game she played and liked was Memory, also known as Pairs. She’s encountered cardboard versions of it before, but this was an electronic one (at IKEA) which was more interesting and got her to pay more attention. She played it quite systematically: turn over a card, and then try all other cards against it until she finds a match. A, B, A, C, A, D, A, E etc.

Sometimes she likes typing on my laptop. I put Caps Lock on and turn up the font size to 48, and she types. She likes letters, sometimes numbers, but not punctuation marks or other weird wiggles. She knows the Backspace and Enter keys, and sort of kind of understands the arrow keys, too.

There’s more and more pretend play going on, now. All kinds of things are suddenly alive. Soft toys, of course, but also game pieces that must go to sleep, and pieces of potato that want to run away from the dragon and hide in Ingrid’s mouth. She likes to be a bear, herself (and I must be mother bear and we must go to sleep underneath the duvet because it is winter, and then it is spring and she wakes me).

Like last month, she likes to pretend she’s a baby, and her dolls are often babies, too. Babies want to be with mummy, and babies cannot do anything themselves, and they say “ääh” when they want something because they cannot talk.

There was a brief period when she was keeping a running commentary on everything she did – “now I will go and sit on the chair and have some milk” but that passed. There was also a period when she’d tell sing random stories, with a random melody – “when the bear was in the woods and picked berries there was another bear that came and he wanted to join” but that also passed. There were also several periods when Ingrid had a runny nose and would, at unpredictable points, insert the word “snor!” or “nohu!” in her speech (meaning “snot”, meaning “please wipe my nose”) without even changing the tone of her voice – “I took a book and now I want to read it snot!” and those also passed.

On the social side, Ingrid’s developed a clear understanding of the fact that others have moods and wants, and also of social expectations. When I sound curt or impatient, she asks me if I’m happy (“Kas sa oled rõõmus?). She asks about the moods of cartoon characters, and I explain that Donald Duck is looking sad / scared / anxious / angry / excited / impatient, as well as why. Her vocabulary in that area is clearly expanding.

She knows what “please” and “thank you” are for, and is willing to use them at times. She’s also wise enough to know that these words make me happy, so when she knows I am annoyed with her behaviour, she suddenly becomes extra polite.

And yet that understanding only goes so far and no further. A new and frequent feature in her conversations is a categorical “but you must!”. I tell her I cannot play just now / don’t want to sit by her side while she’s on the potty / will not read for her until I’ve finished cooking dinner. Her response is always “but you must!”, and she doesn’t really listen to any of my replies.

Favourite foodstuffs: julmust and, still, liver pâté. And cookies. Liver pâté is by far her favourite sandwich spread, and almost every dinner is concluded by a dessert of one or two cookies

Favourite colour: green. She appears to have decided, one day, that she likes green. Now almost every day she tells me that she likes green things. I think she ate broccoli today only because it was green.

Favourite movie: all kinds of Disney classics.

Favourite books: varied; the ones I can recall now include Nicke Nyfiken på sjukhuset (Curious George Goes to the Hospital), Mattias ja mamma, Mamma Mu, När Findus var liten och försvann.

Not favourite activity: sledding. I thought all children loved sledding, but Ingrid is not particularly interested. She does it at nursery, but when we’ve suggested it during the Christmas holidays, she’s declined.

Random observation: she moves like a child and not a toddler now. I remember noticing half a year ago, back in July when we were in Estonia, how she ran like a toddler, with her hips and legs moving sort of stiffly, with a bit of a waddle. That’s all gone now.

PS: The solution to our afternoon nursery pickup problems was to make it into a game. I would suggest or try to put her clothes on wrong – socks on her head, mittens on feet, fleecy trousers around her neck – and she would squeal with laughter and correct me. The fun is slowly going out of this game, there’s no squealing any more, but she still reminds every day that I should put her clothes on wrong.

This has been a difficult month. Ingrid has become immensely sensitive to time pressure (as in, strongly resistant to it) and at the same time discovered passive aggression. Any time I ask her to hurry up, I do so with trepidation, steeling myself for the resistance, and then the explosion. But sometimes I feel I have to. There are limits to how long I am willing to wait for her.

She wants me to wait for her to do stuff. She goes to the loo, and then to wash her hands. I make to leave the bathroom. She says “You will wait while I wash my hands”. I say OK, and wait.

Then she stops and does nothing.

I wait a while. I get bored and turn towards the door again. “No you must wait!” “OK, I can wait, but in that case you have to wash your hands. I have to go back and continue making dinner.”

She does nothing.

I wait. I leave the bathroom and go to the kitchen. She explodes in screaming and crying.

In the supermarket she wants to be the one to pick a loaf of bread. Sure, come here, I’ll lift you up. I lift her up, she stops.

On our way home from the supermarket, she runs too close to the road. I grab her hand to stop her. She is angry. I let go of her hand. She then refuses to move. Various (kind, then less kind, then kind of annoyed) ways of asking her to either walk or climb into the pushchair have no effect. She then sits down on the pavement in front of the pushchair so I can’t walk either.

I once tried waiting it out, but gave up after close to 10 minutes. (Literally. I timed it to over 8 minutes, and then waited some more.) So now I give her a couple of chances, then tell her that I will not ask her again. And then I walk away – or bundle her under my arm and carry her if she’s blocking my way. Both lead to screaming, and a negative spiral with angry scenes about the next thing that needs to be done, and the next.

As always, I’m sure it’s just a phase. And it will pass.

Gingerbread cookies

In the meantime, on a more positive note, there’s been a lot of talk about Christmas. We read Christmas-themed books in the library. Ingrid points out every new Christmas decoration she sees in the street – “för det är jul snart!”. We made gingerbread cookies and eat a few after dinner every day, and she opens a piece of her Advent calendar/puzzle every day. She talks often about how it will soon be Christmas, and then there will be presents. She got a Christmas card (addressed to herself!) today and was very happy about that.

She has become suddenly obsessed by drinking straws. She will not drink without one, and sometimes takes two or three. First she used up all the green ones (for green is her favourite colour, she’s told me), then the blue ones. Yesterday she got a fancy reusable straw as a gift from her friend Elin, and I’m sure she will be using it constantly from now on.

It’s interesting how some things become essential, cannot-live-without-it important. Her silver spoon that my father gave her at birth (an Estonian tradition) is one. For several months now she’s hardly used any other. We have a little bowl with a fish design that she’s loved, but we don’t usually serve food to her in it, because it has a very narrow base and is wont to topple. A few weeks ago I bought a different “fish bowl”, and she’s adopted it as her own now, and asks for it at every mealtime.

Glueing stuff

There was a month or two when Ingrid was slightly less insistent on visiting friends every afternoon. Now she’s in a social phase again, and would happily go play with someone almost every day. Which is hard, because she only has two best friends she wants to play with, and both families have more stuff scheduled in their life than we do. Since she doesn’t exactly lack company during the day, I haven’t gone out of my way to try to find other playmates for her.

Last month (and I now realize I forgot to write about it then) Ingrid had a period when words would get stuck, and she’d have difficulty getting them out. Not stuttering, but repeating an entire word or even two, before she got the rest of the sentence out. Sometimes she’d rephrase in order to get unstuck again: “jag vill… jag vill… jag vill… vi ska läsa bok nu”. Apparently a common phenomenon at her age, supposed to pass on its own, and indeed it did already.

Now she’s come up with new language games. The favourite by far is to give all words the same initial sound, preferably K or some combination of K and another sound. “Palun veel piima” becomes “kalun keel kiima”, “nummer ett, nummer två, nummer tre” becomes “klummer klett, klummer klå, klummer kle”.

Favourite movies: Wall-E, Kalles Klätterträd and Kung Fu Panda, among others.

Favourite books: various Petsson & Findus books, as well as various Mamma Mu books.

Favourite food: liver pâté.

Since Ingrid had her birthday parties a month ago, there has been a lot of talk about birthdays, parties, presents etc. We’ve had numerous play birthday parties (mostly for me, and sometimes for her, and sometimes for Eric). Mostly I get to be three years old. Of course I get presents, and there has to be cake or candy, and sometimes she serves us a fruit drink, too.

The most popular present, especially during the first two weeks, was the harmonica. The next most popular one was the box that her ukulele came in. It is mostly used as a play present at my play birthdays. The ukulele itself is rarely used, once the novelty value evaporated. The third most popular present was the rolled-up picture that came with a big jigsaw puzzle: it can be rolled, unrolled, used as a telescope, and the rubber band around it can be put on and taken off. We’ve also had fun with all the balloons we blew up for the birthday party – we stuffed them all in the corner behind the sofa, so it became a balloon pit. The presents (apart from a book) have mostly been forgotten already.

Other popular toys include horse chestnuts, marbles, bags and boxes: putting small things in bigger things and carrying them around. Wooden sticks and chestnuts are important possessions and have to be carefully kept account of.

She uses her toy food and doctor’s equipment reasonably often, and we play shop, too. And she’s now started to carry around dolls and/or stuffed animals and telling me that they’re her babies. The babies need to be put to bed at night, and quite often they want to come with us wherever we’re going. Oh, and of course they want to sit on my lap.

She’s been fascinated with police, ambulances and firefighters. She points out every single police car and ambulance we pass, and I think they have books and pictures of these things at nursery.

Shortly after Halloween they had a dress-up day at nursery. They had one last year, too, and Ingrid went as a tiger. This year I asked her what she wanted to be. First she wanted to be a tiger again, but I suggested that maybe she could be something new this time. A cow? A cat? A zebra, I suggested? No, she said, a fly! Well, maybe a bee? or a butterfly, or a ladybug? No, I want to be a fly. Or a police car! Hmm, how about a policeman instead of a police car? (The Estonian and Swedish words are gender-neutral.) Yes, yes, a policeman! I want to be a policeman! So that’s what she was.

Slowly slowly she’s spending more time playing on her own. (Bear in mind that “more” is a very relative term here.) When she plays, she’s commenting on her own play all the time: “this is a boat, now I’m going to take the boat to Estonia” or “This is my baby. The baby wants to be with mummy.”

Occasionally she wants to be a baby herself: “I am a baby, you have to feed me!” But those are exceptions. Most of the time Ingrid wants to do things herself, of course. She’s quite proficient at pouring milk and cutting up her potatoes. (She is, by the way, clearly right-handed now and switches much less between hands than she used to.)

When dressing herself she knows that there’s a right way round and a wrong way round, and that the tags need to end up behind her. She can manage gloves and snowsuit on her own, although finding the thumb can be tricky, and she definitely needs help getting the zipper in place. Boots and shoes, for some reason, she can put on perfectly well, but doesn’t like taking off. An aversion to getting her hands muddy, perhaps? On the other hand she likes to help us with our clothes – in the mornings she often wants to run and fetch clean underwear for both Eric and myself, as well as my dressing gown. She likes pressing the lift buttons in the train station, and knows well that U (upp) means up, N (ned) means down and D (dörr) means door.

At times helpfulness devolves into bossiness. She wants to walk ahead of me (and then sometimes stop and block my way, when she suddenly feels contrarian). She wants to decide what I will wear, which towel I will dry my hands with, and what book I will read while waiting for her to fall asleep. “But you must wear these!” “You must read this book!” It is a struggle for her to understand why I don’t accept her orders, and why I don’t like the tone she uses. We don’t require much in the way of formal manners (trying mostly to teach by setting a good example) but we do demand a polite tone of voice.

Speaking of speaking, her Estonian is coming along almost as well as Swedish, even though she speaks Swedish all day, and I read to her in Swedish when she picks a Swedish book. I’m impressed by her command of Estonian grammar, with all the tenses and declinations and so on. She switches liberally between the two languages – sometimes every other sentence is in Estonian and every other in Swedish – but rarely mixes them up. She really only does that when she starts a sentence in one language (for example, telling Eric in Swedish about something we’ve done during the afternoon) and then midway through comes to a crucial word she doesn’t know in that language.

Wheelybyg, bedded down for the night

She has fun with language and words. Quite often she sings to herself: sometimes real songs, sometimes just nonsense words to a random melody. We play a game where she makes up nonsense words, preferably really long ones, and then I try to repeat them back at her. The word can be anything from “kveya” to “gananga-nanga-nii”, and sometimes I find them rather unpronounceable.

Favourite movie: Coraline (“koyoyine”). I think she’s actually starting to distinguish some words in the English-language movies she watches. One day she was shuffling some papers around and intoning, “Bobinsky, Bobinsky, Bobinsky…” just like Coraline does when sorting letters. Today she picked up “fist!” from Kung Fu Panda (“Maybe you should chew… on my fist!”) It would be cool if she learned to speak English before she started school.

Favourite books: nothing in particular, or rather, many of them. We’ve been to the library a few times, so we’ve had some new books to read (and of course when we first read them we have to read the same book at least three times in a row, more likely five) but we’ve re-read many of the old ones.

Random fact of the month: she has decided she now wants to sit on a grown-up kitchen chair like us, not her highchair. However when we go to a restaurant she always asks for a highchair. Go figure.

Thirty-six months; three years. This morning we had a cupcake with candles, and a present, and the Swedish “happy birthday” song. There was more hoopla about her birthday at nursery (the birthday song again, plus wearing a gold crown during their morning music session, plus her photo on the door, plus balloons). Then in the evening various sets of friends and relatives phoned us to wish her happy birthday. And we have two birthday parties planned for this weekend – one for family, one for her friends.

Ingrid’s number one focus this month has been her friends. She loves playing with Julia and Elin, more than any other activity, and would happily spend every single afternoon at their houses. For a month now I’ve been wanting to take her to the library, but the days when the library is open longer in the evening always happen to be the same ones when we run into Julia when leaving the nursery, and inevitably she chooses playing with Julia over visiting the library. So we still haven’t been to the library.

Sometimes she just wants to be with them, not necessarily to do anything together with them. It’s enough to be in the same room and listen to me read the same book. Or perhaps it’s just fun to play with someone else’s toys, and read someone else’s books.

She likes Julia best, but she plays better with Elin. Last time we visited Elin, they ran off together for long enough to make me wish I had brought a book. They went outside on their own, and then came back and played with their toy china and food, and then something else.

Clearly she is becoming more independent – the first inklings I noticed two months ago were not a false dawn. When I cook dinner (and she isn’t in the mood for helping me) she doesn’t just hang around next to me but goes off and plays on her own. And she won’t always follow me when I tell her I’m off to do something or other in another part of the house.

But quite often she is interested in helping me cook. Tasting the ingredients, handing me things, turning on the kettle, putting chopped veggies in the pot, stirring. Pouring things where the quantity doesn’t have to be precise, and the liquid is thick: cream, oil, vegetable broth. Serving food when it’s done – she especially enjoys ladling up soups and sauces. She’s even started to learn how to use a real sharp knife, with relatively soft stuff like cheese, tomatoes, leeks etc, under close supervision, and with my hands over hers. At dinnertime she really enjoys taking out a match for me to light the candle. I can see that she longs to be allowed to strike the match herself, but she makes no attempts to actually do it. That’s one of the advantages of her not being very independent: I can let her practice with knives and matches without having to worry that she will get a chance to try them on her own.

There’s a lot of make believe going on when she’s playing on her own, or by my side while I do something else. “We’ll pretend that I am a mouse” or “it’s your birthday, and you will get a present” and so on. A common theme is reversing our roles: she pretends that she is my mummy, and tells me what she will help me do. She also pretend sings: makes loud nonsense noises in something that is supposed to resemble a melody. (She can sing for real, too – this is different.)

Little Miss Medicine Man

When we play together, it is almost always one of two things: doctor, or shop. I don’t think there’s been a single evening without these two. The doctor game still follows a stable template, but the template has been mutating. Now it’s her foot that’s ill, more often than the stomach. And the patient (whether it’s me or her) needs to get a cuddly animal to hug, and a piece of toy candy when the doctor is done.

A few weeks ago I bought some toy money for her, and since then, playing shop has been another huge favourite. This game is slightly more varied than the doctor game. We have toy shops, and food shops, and cuddly animal shops. We even have shops that sell doctor’s equipment. We take turns being shopkeeper and customer, and we make up prices for the stuff we sell. We have a stool as counter, and a bowl for the shopkeeper to put money in, and a little purse for the customer. When the customer runs out of money she just grabs some more from the shopkeeper’s bowl.

When Ingrid is shopkeeper, most things tend to cost one, two, or maybe rarely three kronor. Sometimes she cannot come up with a price and I can pretty much name my own price. “Does this cost 5 kronor, perhaps?” She’s noticed that the coins have numbers on them, and I’ve been suggesting prices that are either 1, 5 or 10 kronor (one coin) or a few 1-krona coins, to hint that there is some logic behind the whole thing.

Speaking of counting, we still talk about weekdays and time of day, but not at all as much as last month.

Fine dining: meatballs at IKEA

I don’t think we’ve done any drawing at all this month, and barely any painting or crafts. We hardly sing at all, although she has played with her triangle a few times. We do still read and watch movies. Favourite books: Pettson får julbesök, Apan Nicke och Raffi Giraff and Vem ska trösta knyttet?. Favourite movie for the last two weeks: Mickey’s birthday party.

A few days ago, Ingrid visited the dentist for the first time in her life. The dentist confirmed that all twenty milk teeth were present (the last two appeared during this past month) and spent the rest of the time telling me about all the things we shouldn’t do. I think ideally dentists would like people to live on water only.

Quite independently of the dentist we (or rather, me) are making an effort to cut down on the amount of sweet stuff she eats. Her afternoon snacks used to be pretty healthy but then somehow she got into the habit of eating her fill of biscuits every afternoon. I thought it would be a temporary thing, as with most her preferences, but it’s gone on for longer than I like, so I’ve put an end to it.

She no longer takes any daytime naps at home at all. I’ve been trying to convince the nursery staff to not let her nap there, either, but without much luck. As a result she usually won’t fall asleep until 9 or 9:30 in the evening, which leaves her tired most mornings. Weekends, she is very fond of lying in the bed for a long time after waking, cuddling up close to me.

The weather is chilly now, but the first half of this past month was still summery, and we spent a fair amount of time outside. Picking damsons was a favourite: Ingrid especially liked shaking the bush to make the damsons fall. It was particularly great if they fell on me or her. But picking the fallen fruit was also good fun.

We’ve also played in the play house that Eric built. Ingrid’s favourite use for it is a throwing platform. She climbs up, I stay outside, and then we throw a big inflatable ball between us. The play house makes it very easy: since she’s standing above me, she is throwing slightly downwards and has a good view of me, the target. And when I throw the ball back at her, the walls make sure the ball doesn’t roll past her.

She also likes riding her tricycle (to and from the playground, or Julia’s house). Practice makes perfect: she’s gotten quite good at controlling her speed. She used to need help braking when going downhill, but now she can ride it down good-sized hills at considerable speed, and push back against the pedals to brake when it goes too fast.

In general she’s gained physical control and confidence recently. She used to always want to hold my hands when jumping down (from a ledge, or a stone, etc) but the other day she jumped down from a knee-high step (my knee, not hers) without any help at all. The same goes for stepping across wide gaps: between the balance beams at the playground, or the big flat stones in the pond in our park. I think she’s running better, too: it looks slightly more balanced and less toddlerish.

Running, of course, means chasing. Our latest chasing game is the troll game. Usually she’s a troll and I am to run away from her. Sometimes she wants to be an angry troll, which means that I should run fast enough so she cannot catch me. Other times she says she’s a friendly troll, meaning I should let myself be caught. But in either case, and regardless of which of us is the troll, the most important part of of the game is that the chasee should frequently look over her shoulder to see how close the troll is. This leads to a fair few falls: I think Ingrid has entered the age of ever-present scabs on knees and elbows.

Ingrid remains intensely social. Yesterday she told me, “I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be alone. I want my friends, too!” So I try to find her a playmate for at least a few afternoons each week. Julia is her best friend (and lives closest to us) but Ingrid’s found another favourite at nursery whom we’ve also visited a few times. I’ve asked if there are others she’d like to play with, but she says no, she only likes Julia and Elin.

They are definitely playing together, but it’s mostly limited to simple, physical activities. They might run to the trampoline and jump together, and then run to the see-saw together, and from there on to somewhere else. I haven’t seen any playing with toys together. I think it might be because both Julia and Elin are younger than her, and less used to playing together with others.

Sometimes “let’s go play with Julia” just means “let’s go to Julia’s house” and ends with us reading Julia’s books. I think we might start going to the library with her. Her Estonian feels solid enough that I’m happy reading to her in Swedish now.

At home, the doctor’s equipment set remains Ingrid’s favourite toy, by far. Other toys get occasional brief use, but not very much. She wants to play doctor every single evening. It’s become a set piece, almost. First I’m ill and she’s doctor, then we switch, and she’s always got a stomach ache. And when we take her temperature, it’s always fifty-one.

She’s quite interested in how numbers are used: temperatures, measuring, telling the time. She often asks me what time it is, and most mornings she asks me what day it is. Then she wants to know what that means: what do we do when it’s Tuesday, what do we do when it’s seven o’clock? Is it a weekday (“nursery day”) or weekend (“home day”)? Do we have anything special planned for today – is this the day when we go play with Elin, or the day when I need to work late? Sometimes we go on to hypothetical cases: she tells me “no, it’s half past eight! What’s it time for now?”

Turns out she’s learned to recognize numbers, too, even though we haven’t spent much time looking at them. This Sunday at the Estonian nursery she found a wooden number puzzle, with one piece for each number from zero to nine, and each number’s place was indicated by that number of things: there was one snake in the slot for number 1, two rabbits in the slot for 2, and so on. She got almost all of them right at first try (but 6, 8 and 9 were a bit tricky).

Another subject of fascination is buttons – the kind you press, not the ones on clothes. She likes pressing the buttons to make the traffic light go green, and doorbell buttons, too. But she also finds pretend buttons in all sorts of places: on lamp posts (to make the light go on), on her bike (to make it go), on playground equipment (to make the light go green, so she can go on and play).

And phones: she makes many phone calls on the toy phone they have at nursery, and on mine. She can repeat my side of the most important conversations (the ones where I call Julia’s mum to ask if Ingrid can come play with Julia) almost verbatim.

When she’s done that, she seems to believe that she really has called Julia’s mum, and insists that I don’t need to call, she’s done it already, and Julia’s mum has said yes. The border between truth and fantasy is fluid. When we play doctor, she is well aware that it’s make-believe sickness and make-believe medicine. But when she talks about things that aren’t physically present, she makes no difference between things that really happened, and things she has made up because she wishes they were true.

Somewhat related, I think, is her interest in what other people are thinking. When we pass someone in the street, who’s doing something noteworthy, she will ask me: where is he hurrying? why is she running? what are they talking about? I tell her I don’t know, but he might be hurrying to the train station, or to the market; and she adds her own guesses.

In general she’s asking more complex questions now. It’s not just “what is this”, “where is the spoon” and “can I play with this” but also “which station do we get off at”, “what did you just ask daddy”, “what is a folding rule” etc.

Speaking of questions, she’s already learned that when a stranger talks to her, they will inevitably ask for her name and age. So when someone asks a question that she doesn’t quite hear or understand, she will attempt to answer one of those known questions, and tell them her age or her full name. (And she knows her full name, with all four parts in the right order, too!)

There’s a fair amount of focus on her being a big girl and helping me. And the reverse, too: sometimes she tells me she is a small baby and needs help. Sometimes when we’re eating fruit (such as raspberries) she wants to feed me, or vice versa ask me to feed her. Sometimes she tells me that when she was a baby she drank milk from my breasts – and other times she tells me that she’s my mum and I used to be small and drink milk from her breasts.

She understands that children grow bigger, and then they go to school, and then they grow into adults. When asked, she can tell me that girls grow into mummies and boys grow into daddies. But I don’t think she’s quite understood it yet:

Kui mina suureks saan, siis saab minust emme. Ja kui ma veel suuremaks saan, siis saab minust pappa.

When I grow up, I will be a mummy. And when I grow even bigger, I will be a daddy.

Favourite books: Alfons, and Kringel (one of Eric’s old books), and Palle üksi maailmas. Favourite movie: Leiutajateküla Lotte.

I cannot have been particularly diligent when taking notes for this month’s Ingrid update, for as soon as I had posted it, new things came to mind that I wished I had written about.

Such as the fact that Ingrid now likes ice cream. She used to find it too cold – happy to lick a spoon dipped in mostly-melted ice cream, but not actually eat it. Now she’s not exactly wolfing it down, still mostly licking the soft edges, but definitely appreciates it. Ice cream has displaced candy; she hardly ever remembers to ask for sweets now.

Or our continued enjoyment of drawing and writing together. As before, we begin by me writing a short word for some common object. She then spells it out and asks me “Mis see kokku tuleb?” (“What does that make?”). I draw the object, slowly, and as soon as she sees what it is, she shouts out: “Auto!”.

This month she’s actually learned to recognize two of the simplest words, puu (tree) and kuu (moon) – she shouts out the word before I’ve begun to draw it. So I make sure to draw at least one of those every time. I’ve tried suu (mouth) as well but it’s hard to draw a recognizable mouth without a face around it. And I’ve tried uss (snake) but she doesn’t recognize that one yet, and definitely none of the four-letter ones. I’ll have to find more three-letter words somehow.

Oh, and today I saw tooth #18 appear as well. Number 17 was a molar on the lower right, and this one is its left-hand companion.

Current favourite movies: Wallace and Gromit, and Kalles klätterträd. There’s no clear favourite among books, but we read a lot of Villi, Kuula! Kuula!, and Rongisõit, and in Swedish Stora vinterboken and Visst kan Lotta cykla.

I think I am detecting faint stirrings of independence in Ingrid. She has been very attached to me for a long time, almost always choosing me ahead of any alternative. When the choice is between doing something boring with me, and doing something fun with Eric, she chooses me. When the choice is between playing on her own, and waiting for me to finish something I’m doing, she’ll hang by my side and wait. Whether at home or out on a playground, all activities start with “emme tule!” (“mummy come!”).

When I’m not available (when she’s with Eric, or at nursery) she’s perfectly capable of amusing herself. But when I’m there, all independence disappears.

She’s usually more independent just after eating (something to do with blood sugar levels?), and late in the evening. When the choice is between brushing teeth and going to bed with me, or playing on her own, she actually prefers playing!

But in the past few weeks, I’ve seen her play on her own for short stretches of time. Nothing long, maybe 5 minutes at a time, but more frequently than she used to. And out at the playground she’s gone off on her own without dragging me with her. I’m really curious to see whether this is just something I’ve imagined, or if it’s the beginnings of real change.

Ingrid’s also more aware of age and growing up. We’ve been talking a lot about babies and big girls this summer. We talk about how babies come from their mummies’ bellies, how they cannot chew or walk or talk, only sleep and drink milk from their mum’s breasts. We talk about how she used to be a baby, but isn’t any longer.

Sometimes she wants to be carried like a baby (which is hard with a 15 kg kid!). Other times Ingrid says she’s a big girl. She doesn’t know much about what big girls do – I’ve never used “big girls [don’t] do X” to encourage or discourage any behaviour. The only thing she knows about big girls is that they go to school. So she regularly tells me that she’s a big girl and will soon go to school. I try to explain that she’s got several years of nursery ahead of her still, but it’s not registering.

The “I don’t want anything!” episodes from last month are far fewer now. I think it’s Ingrid’s new, more verbal way of expressing general dissatisfaction with life, instead of just crying. By far the strongest trigger for these is hunger / low blood sugar. First thing in the morning before breakfast, her mood is very labile. She desperately needs to eat, but since she’s so anti-everything, it’s hard to get her to eat – she loudly claims she does not want to eat. The same happens if we have too long a gap between meals for some reason, or when she’s overtired.

A stranger would see her act out and think that she’s just trying to get our attention, and then perhaps just ignore her, wait for the mood to pass. But those moods can easily spiral, and if we ignore them, they can go on for a long time. When the cause is hunger, the resolution is usually to soothe her with whatever form of closeness she will accept (cuddle, or let her crowd onto my side of the table, etc) and then coax her to take a bite. Then I can detach myself from the cuddle, and the rest of the meal passes smoothly. When she’s overtired, it’s harder, but we’re quite good at spotting her tired signals so we usually nip it in the bud. There was one evening when she was too tired to want anything, not even sit or lie down, which culminated with her spending a good 15 minutes standing in the bedroom, unable to stop screaming. For all our sakes, we make an effort to avoid a repeat performance.

Speaking of eating, she seems to have learned the concept of portions. It used to be that we’d serve her some amount of food, and she’d eat some of it and leave some. Or she’d eat all and want more, and then leave some of the 2nd serving. Now she’s more likely to stop exactly when her plate is empty, even when she hasn’t decided how much was on the plate to begin with (although she often does). When I offer her more food, she declines. Interesting.

Favourite toys this month: her doctor’s bag, and her play food. We play doctor almost every day. “Emme sina oled haige!” she tells me (mummy you’re ill) and proceeds to listen to my foot with her stethoscope, poke at it, shine her tiny torch on it, take my temperature and give me injections and medicine.

With the toy food we have picnics where she serves me cake and fruit and juice, or cooks soup for me. It’s amazing how many variations on this theme she can perform before she gets bored.

We play word games. We rhyme: Ingrid pingrid! Maja paja! Auto pauto!. And we make up words: Jag tar mina höstskor. Höstskor… grässkor! molnskor! bajsskor! (“I’ll take my autumn shoes. Autumn shoes… grass shoes! cloud shoes! poop shoes!”)

She’s also started making things up.

I: Look mum, I have no hands.
H: Oh, no hands! Where did the hands go?
I: They’re in the cloud.
H: What will the cloud do with your hands?
[etc]
I: I got my hands back now.

While it was still summer, we spent many afternoons at the beach. Ingrid got to splash and jump and carry buckets of water around, and swim with her arm floats. After a few times our beach outings settled into a fixed pattern, and the process itself was as important to Ingrid as the actual swimming. The picnic food, and the stuff we’d pass when cycling to and from the beach, and of course the ice cream.

The ice cream kiosk at the beach sells nice scoop ice cream, not just the cheap-tasting pre-wrapped kind. We ate some every time we were there. Outside of the beach season we’ve had a rule that we only eat ice cream on weekends. This Saturday Ingrid selected an ice cream for herself at the supermarket, but left most of it – I don’t think she liked the taste much, after having tried the good stuff.

PS: This evening while brushing her teeth I spotted tooth #17 making its way out.

Most of this month was happy and contented. But suddenly something changed, and the last few days have been less than fun. For a few hours everything is OK, and then suddenly Ingrid is unhappy about just about everything. I say it’s time to eat. She cries “I don’t want to eat!” I say “OK, you don’t have to eat.” She cries “But I want to eat!” I say, “You can eat or not eat, whichever you want.” She cries “I don’t want anything!” (“Ma ei taha mitte midagi!”) Even things I know she wants and likes get the same response. I’m sure it’s a phase, but I sure do hope it’s a brief one. Or perhaps it’s the heat.

Half of the month was spent in Estonia. And the experience did wonders to Ingrid’s language skills. At first she would mostly speak Swedish, and then be reminded by people around her that they didn’t understand her, after which she would try to repeat herself in Estonian, and I would help her out. After a week she was speaking Estonian almost all the time (only forgetting where she was first thing in the morning) and fluently. She now speaks Estonian more freely, has a bigger vocabulary and better grammar, and overall a more Estonian pattern (word order, sentence structure etc) when she speaks Estonian.

Our vacation in Estonia was also fun because she had playmates almost every day. Two of my childhood friends both have kids who are just a few months older than Ingrid. One of them lives in the building across the street from my father’s place, so we spent a lot of time together. Katariina may be only a few months older, but she’s more than a few months ahead of Ingrid, so it was an inspiring experience for Ingrid. She learned to play doctor, and shopping. She now has a doctor’s bag of her own, and has used it every day I think.

Both children had birthday parties while we were in Estonia, so we’ve also had a lot of pretend birthday parties, with a wooden chocolate cake and lots of fruit. Mostly it’s Ingrid’s birthday but sometimes I get to have one, too. The cake is one of those where the pieces attach to each other with velcro, and you can cut them apart with a little wooden knife. Ingrid’s long been fascinated with cutting (probably because she sees me do it so often) so she’s really enjoyed that. And today we discovered that a ripe watermelon is perfect for cutting practice, with a table knife.

Another favourite game is what I think of as the contrarian game, or the lying game. We might be looking at a page in a children’s book with all the different colours. She then points at each one and says “Black. Black. Black.” about all of them. Or points at red and says “green”, and so on (and if she accidentally says the right colour, such as “red” for a red thing, she stops, thinks, and “corrects” herself). Or perhaps we’re looking at pictures of animals, and all of them are cats. Or we’re eating dinner and she starts asking us: “Is that milk? Is that milk? Is that milk?” about everything but the milk.

Tartu had a lot of good playgrounds, with far more interesting stuff than we find at playgrounds around here, especially many more kinds of structures for climbing and balancing. Ingrid did some climbing but was more interested in balancing and swinging. She found a few swings that were just the right height for her to hang on, so she did that a lot. Plus she stomped a lot of sand cakes.

Ingrid’s interest in story books has declined somewhat. Instead she’s been much more interested in counting, and in learning to read. There was a lovely animal book at my father’s place, which became a counting toy for Ingrid. “Let’s count the antelopes. Now the zebras. Now the gnus. Now the elephants.” And so on. She’s good at counting now, rarely skips objects, even when they’re in an irregular bunch. Only sometimes does her finger move faster than her mouth, so while she touches, say, seven animals she only counts six.

The same book had headings with big bold capital letters, which we would read over and over again. Ingrid knows all the common letters but cannot make a word out of them, so she spells the word and I tell her what word the letters make. It’s good practice; as with counting, she very rarely loses her place and can spell very long words (such as Emajõe ärikeskus) without a single mistake. Sometimes she thinks she knows the word and pretends to read it, slowly dragging her finger along the word and slowly saying the word. Occasionally it’s right and other times it’s something completely wrong.

On the housekeeping side, we have had very few potty accidents (to the tune of one per week, and then mostly due to some special circumstance). The nighttime nappy is still almost always wet (and I think that’s why she gets restless and half-wakes around 6.30 to 7 in the morning, but I’m usually too sleepy myself to remember to ask her whether she wants to go potty). But after daytime naps, it’s almost always dry, so I’ve stopped insisting on it, and just sneak a folded towel underneath her when she’s fallen asleep.

After last month’s lack of attention, I’ve been taking notes. Not only does that help me remember the things I want to write about, it also brings out the recurring, dominant themes: language and social interactions.

Language, then. On the grammar front, she’s got a grip on first- and second-person pronouns now. She figured out du and jag in Swedish first (last month already, but I forgot to mention it then) but kept saying them the other way round in Estonian. Then a month later she got the Estonian pronouns, too. Third person pronouns are tricky – it and they are not a problem, but she mixes up she and he (in Swedish only, because Estonian doesn’t differentiate by gender). Part of the cause is, we think, that she isn’t really able to tell the difference between boys and girls, women and men, which means that our labelling people as he and she must seem pretty random to her. The other day we asked her “is X a boy or a girl” about other children in her nursery group, and the answers were near random. Same with the staff – she deemed Sandra and Malin to be mummies, Åsa to be a daddy but Niclas a mummy.

She manages to correctly use a suprising variety of verb forms in Estonian. In Swedish there are more irregular verbs to be grappled with, and it’s clear that she’s aware of the complexities. Sometimes she starts to use a regular pattern on an irregular verb (“jag sågde”) and then gets stuck because she hears or feels that it’s not quite right. Plural forms of nouns have similar traps: bokar instead of böcker, stenor vs. stenar.

Ingrid still likes word/sound games. The neighbour girls have the whole series of Mitt ABC and Ingrid always wants me to read those when we visit them. (There’s one book for each letter of the alphabet, and each book has stuff with that letter.) The books focus on first letters, but when Ingrid herself gets to decide, the important letter of each word is the strong, stressed sound. It’s not R as in raamat but A as in raamat, and O as in kook, Y as in cykel, and M as in emme.

Sometimes she also plays with songs – takes something like Idas visa (Lille katt, lille katt…) and makes it into Lille mus, or Nyss så träffa’ jag en krokodil might become Nyss så träffa’ jag en elefant. The changes are small, often just switching one animal for another.

The social aspects of language are becoming important to her. She’s picking up polite phrases and formulaic expressions, and using them a lot. “Jag tar gärna lite bröd”, “nej tack”, “jag tänkte titta på film”, “jag tycker att det är varmt idag”, “jag ska visa dig en sak”, “hej då vi ses imorgon”. (“I would like some bread”, “no thanks”, “I thought I’d watch a movie”, “I think it’s warm today”, “let me show you something”, “bye-bye see you tomorrow”.) It’s nice (and novel) to hear her ask politely, but at the same time slightly scary to think about how much our everyday behaviour affects her manners, already at this early age.

A few of these things she says without fully understanding them, but in general she’s good at using social language, asking or telling people things – language as a social tool, rather than just a way to express wants (“more milk!”) or comment on her environment (“there’s a big puddle”). There’s a fair amount of talk about yours, mine, and borrowing: “can I borrow your bucket”, “this is mine, you can’t take it, but you can borrow it”.

Unlike both Eric and myself, Ingrid is an extrovert, a very social creature. (It’s hard to remember but I think I was the same at her age. The introversion came later.) She’s never happier than when there are people around her, and she is bored when there aren’t any. Every day when I go to pick her up from nursery, one of the first things she says is “today we will go play with Julia” (the younger neighbour girl).

I: Jag vill leka med Julia.
H: Peab Julialt küsima, kas ta tahab meiega mängida.
I till J: Julia, vill du leka med mig idag?
J: ja
I till H: Julia vill leka med mig idag!
H: Julia on selle üle rõõmus.
I: Jag är också glad! Jag är jätteglad!

I: I want to play with Julia.
H: We have to ask Julia if she wants to play with us.
I to J: Julia, do you want to play with me today?
J: Yes
H: Julia is happy about this.
I: I am also happy! I am very happy!

A lot of the time she still imitates or plays side by side rather than together with others. Whenever there are other kids at the playground, she trails them, and wants to do whatever they do. If they climb the jungle gym, she wants to do the same. If their mom catches them when they come down the slide, she wants to be caught, too. If they swing on a big kid swing, she will, too. If the other kid is a year and a half older than her and stands up on the bird’s nest swing, she will try that, too, even though she’s kind of scared.

Other popular activities: making sand cakes together with me and then happily stomping on them, one by one. “Now they are ready, now I can stomp?” Balancing on kerbstones, ledges, planks etc. Cycling on her tricycle. (The balance bike was quickly discarded – “It’s difficult! I cannot do it.” Perhaps next summer.)

Drawing, too: now it’s not just me drawing for her all the time. She’s more willing to draw herself, and she now draws actual things, not just scribbles and swirls. Sometimes she tries to copy something that an adult has drawn for her, but other times she comes up with her own ideas. Mostly they are relatively shapeless things, but she says they are balls, clouds, snakes, or hot dogs or cupboards. She’s also bolder in her drawings, more likely to draw huge balls that cover the entire piece of A2-size paper. (We bought a roll of cheap paper from IKEA for the easel, and often cut pieces from it for drawing, too.) When I draw for her, she likes to choose the colour for me. I get to draw a lot of purple and pink stuff. When I’ve finished, she likes to colour in my drawing.

Loose facts:

• Does not like jokes about eating her up. Sometimes she just looks scared/worried, and sometimes she says “No, you cannot eat me!”
• Likes Bendicks Bittermints, dark chocolate, and liquorice.
• Does not like having her hair brushed, but no longer objects to brushing teeth, at all.