We’ve been so busy with our vacation – travelling and meeting people – that there haven’t been many days of ordinary life to observe. Almost half of this past month was spent in Estonia. Ingrid loved playing with her friends there and coming home to no friends (all her preschool friends were still away) was a rude shock. There has been much complaining about “nothing to doooo…”

One tool against boredom is the so-called “loppa”, or “loppis” as Ingrid calls hers, a paper fortune teller. (English instructions, Swedish instructions.) It looks like English kids use this toy for telling fortunes. Swedish kids use it as a fun way to give each other tasks. The flaps hide tasks such as “jump 10 times on one foot”, “run 5 circles around the house”, “hug a friend”, “find a pine cone” etc. Making the “loppis” is at least half the fun, especially the colouring and idea-generating and writing. Ingrid has trouble fitting her writing into the small space so most of the time we’ve had to do the writing part, but she has no trouble reading the tasks later. Sometimes she dictates the items to be written, sometimes we do it for her and let her discover them one at a time.

Another boredom alleviator is a CD with Br’er Rabbit tales in Estonian (Onu Remuse jutud). I had these records when I was a child and remember listening to them over and over again, and knowing large chunks of the text by heart. “Kirbud, kirbud, hundionu!”

From this CD and from books she’s started picking up unusual and bookish expressions and asking about their meaning, and trying them out in her own speech. There’s been a lot of kuid and ning and plaan läks luhta recently. On the flip side she is also learning words like puupea (“bonehead”, literally “wooden head”).

She doesn’t use the latter with us but she likes sneaking up to Adrian and whispering “puupea” or “bajskorv” into his ears. Her way of expressing her frustration with having a sibling in the house who takes up our time and attention, I guess.

Most of the time she’s pretty happy to have Adrian around. She likes giving him food at mealtimes, and pushing him on his swing. She’s even discovered that she can carry him, if she takes hold around his chest from behind.

We continue to read, sometimes more, sometimes less. I bought a bunch of new books just before we went to Estonia, and a bunch of Estonian books while we were there. I’ve been bringing them out one at a time to make them last longer.

Her favourite book is Scary Godmother, which she loves but I find a nightmare to translate on the fly, so we only read it when there’s peace and quiet and we don’t have Adrian tugging at my skirt. The princess theme is also going strong, so we read Prinsessor och drakar, Oskar och den utsvultna draken, the så gör prinsessor books etc.

In the past few weeks she’s also rediscovered her interest for crafts, after a slump of many weeks, if not months. She’s made those paper fortune tellers, and we’ve painted a little cardboard chest, and done marble painting, and she’s made a paper house, and pimped her swing with fabric ribbons, etc.

The most watched movies at the moment are Shrek and Pippi Långstrump, I believe.

A final observation… For some reason Ingrid has a strong aversion to asking for things. When she wants something she will state the problem, sometimes in a whining tone, other times more matter-of-fact. But she will not ask for what she wants, even when I encourage or even push her. I tell her it is more pleasant for me to hear a positive sentence, something she would like, rather than negative complaining about things she doesn’t like. But she doesn’t want to do that.

She may say “I cannot reach the milk” or “The milk is too high! EEEHH!” but she will not say “Mummy can you please give me the milk.” Yesterday she wanted me to carry her upstairs to put her to bed (since I had done it the day before) but instead of just saying so she said it in about three or four roundabout ways. “My legs are so tired I cannot walk. I don’t know how I will get up the stairs. I am so tired I will just collapse. I wish I didn’t have to walk.” But not “mummy could you carry me upstairs today again?”

This month things have been going unusually smoothly. Case in point: yesterday she walked all the way to the train station without a single complaint, and then from the train to the bus, and from the bus to Junibacken. And after a full day of playing she repeated all that on the way home, still with no whining about “my legs are tired”. She even hurried when I asked her to, so we could catch a train and avoid a 15-minute wait.

Ingrid loves our swimming pool. It is deep and wide enough for her to do some serious splashing. She even wants her swim floaties when she’s in there. But in order for her to use it, the starting cost needs to be near zero. If the pool is covered or the door is closed, she won’t ask to bathe. So in warm weather we leave the cover off (and to hell with the stuff that falls in) and she often bathes several times a day. She insists on using her swimsuit, “it feels better around my tummy this way” she says. It’s good practice – I no longer hear any complaints about getting water in her eyes, and she often jumps up and down so her whole head ends up under water.

By the way, now that I see her running around more or less naked so often, I see that she has become noticeably slimmer. She’s always been sort of on the chubby side. She isn’t stick-thin like the average 5-year-old usually is but she has now finally lost most of her baby fat, and is actually slimmer than a couple of her friends. Since her three-year checkup we’ve done our best to encourage physical activity and had firm rules about the amount of sweet stuff she can eat. It is good to see that our approach has worked. (Or perhaps it would have happened anyway, who knows?)

We have started using Youtube for entertainment. One evening she wanted to “do something together with you, mummy” and I was all out of energy so I went to Youtube and we watched Popular by Eric Saade, which she’d been humming since they sang it at preschool. I’m struggling to find good child-friendly entertainment there but recently realized that I can just start with her Hits for Kids set, pick a song and look for a video for that song. I have now experienced the horror that is Jag är en gummibjörn.

She likes tracing swirls in books. When she encounters swirls or curlicues in a book illustration, she asks me to wait while she traces them with her finger. Several of the books by Carin & Stina Wirsén, especially the books about liten skär, have lots of those. Ingrid’s current favourite is En liten skär och alla ruskigt rysliga brokiga. (CDON.com has a preview of the book.)

Her taste in books and movies is unchanged. She loves watching all the old Donald Duck short films, and Disney princesses (The little mermaid in particular). Sometimes I think her choice of movie is mostly guided by convenience. She prefers my laptop and the iPad to Eric’s computer which needs to be turned on. She will watch whatever is already there rather than get a DVD or ask Eric to rip a new movie for her.

She is learning a lot of English from those movies but probably doesn’t quite understand what she is learning. “Steak! Steak! Steak! Come on steak! I won!” she repeated today, with near-perfect pronunciation, after watching Donald’s Dinner Date. But I doubt that she knows what a steak is. Sometimes she learns more consciously and asks us about words. She brings out the picture ABC we bought for her when she was tiny and we lived in London, and we go through some words there together. Or she points at something and asks me what it is called in English. Today, for example, she pointed at various colours and asked for their names.

(She also loves to speak fake English by saying Swedish words and phrases with an English pronounciation. I don’t quite know how to reproduce these utterings here without resorting to the phonetic alphabet… “Den här”, meaning “this one”, becomes “den here” and “så här”, meaning “like this”, becomes “so here”, and so on.)

In Swedish she can now write impressively long words. With enough context (or with words that she herself has written on a previous day) she can also read quite long words, such as solglasögon or leksaker. With unknown words she hits her limit at about 6 or 7 letters. She is learning about weird Swedish spelling rules, and figured out on her own that körsbär begins with a K.

She asks more questions in general. She’s never had a “why” period but now she’s more likely to ask what words mean, why we do things the way we do them, and so on. The other day she asked us “how did the first human come to Earth?” and we gave her a 1-minute summary of evolution. She doesn’t have the patience for long explanations.

Teaching Adrian to crawl

She loves playing with Adrian. He loves her attention. But empathy isn’t her strong suit, and she doesn’t really understand how small and weak he is compared to her. She also has zero understanding for the concept of private space and personal integrity. She teases him by holding out a toy and then snatching it away time and time again, or blocks his way again and again when he’s crawling. She pokes him in the face with her foot, or tickles him too hard. She doesn’t intend to hurt him as far as I can see, and does all this with lots of laughter, but she also seems completely oblivious to his expression of discomfort and doesn’t notice that he isn’t sharing her fun. I don’t want him to get used to being a toy, I want him to keep his sense of integrity, so I often have to point these things out for her and ask her to stop. She complies but I don’t think she understands, because an hour later she does the same thing again.

More and more often she is spending the whole night in her room. When she doesn’t, she often comes into ours without anyone else waking and noticing. She had long asked for an alarm clock for her room, but we told her that there’s no point if she isn’t there when it goes off. We agreed that we’d get one after she spends 7 whole nights in her bed. She did that, and we bought one. Of course she chose a Disney princess one. (Perhaps I should have just bought a more tasteful one for her – there are other princess clocks out there – but on the other hand, why should I impose my taste on her? It’s her room after all.) She wanted us to set the alarm, too, but it turned out that the alarm won’t wake her but will wake me in the room next door, so now it’s off again.

Small stuff: She likes twirling and spinning around, on her own two feet (holding on to my finger), or on a merry-go-round, or in our swivel armchair. It was a happy moment when we brought it up from the basement after the building works were finished here.

She likes abbreviating words. Compound words to their first part, simple words to their first syllables, entire sentences to a key word. Körs for körsbär, tramp för trampcykel (as opposed to sparkcykel), lägg for jag vill lägga mig.

She likes to play that she’s a baby. Sometimes she is a newborn and can’t do anything but wave her arms and legs and mewl. Other times she’s a one-year-old and talks baby talk and crawls on all fours.

A month of ups and downs. For a week or two Ingrid was sunny and happy; then she became moody and whiny again like she was last month. There is a lot of complaining about “why do I have to do everything”.

I wrote the above about Ingrid last month, but it applies equally well to this month. There is an awful lot of complaining. Especially any time we ask her to do something. “Do I have to? Why do I always have to… It’s unfair!” even when all she needs to do is pick up her sock from the floor and walk three steps with it to the laundry hamper.

Mealtimes bring out the worst in her: the food is wrong, the plate and the cup we’ve set on the table for her are wrong. If we don’t set the table for her she complains about that. She complains even before she knows what she is complaining about: “I don’t like this food. What is it?” She complains about having to get her own yogurt from the fridge and about having to take her plate off the table after the meal. Even the most basic requests are delivered in a whine. Basically she’d just like to sit there and order us around, and have us satisfy each of her wishes immediately.

Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to understand how her whining and complaining affects us. We do ask her to please speak nicely to us, we tell her that we don’t like it when she whines and orders us around. After enough whining I tell her she has to either stop whining or leave the kitchen so the rest of us can eat in peace. She has on occasions whined until both Eric and I are so fed up that we physically lift her up and carry her away from the kitchen – or tell her to just leave me alone because I do not want to be with her when she’s like that. And then she suddenly realizes we mean it, we’re annoyed for real, and gets all upset because I’m annoyed with her and don’t want to hug her.

For a while, earlier this month, she would end each mealtime with “Tack för maten den var god, mitt i maten stod en ko. Kon heter Kajsa, hon stod o bajsa’.” And every time she joked, she’s finish with “Jag skojar, jag skojar, du är en papegoja!”. Now that’s passed.

She likes the playhouse in its new pink incarnation (and new location) and uses much more than she used to. She especially likes sitting there with her friends and eating her afternoon snack.

Ingrid is still very fond of the iPad and wants to watch movies or play games on it every day. Her favourite game is Plants vs. Zombies. I had already played through the whole game so she can pick and choose between all the levels, and the mini games. She especially likes to play it together with me or Eric. I wouldn’t have expected her to like this game because in the past she’s avoided games where she can fail or lose, but I guess she is getting used to it.

She continues to practice reading, slowly and steadily getting more comfortable with it. It used to take all her concentration, dragging a finger along each letter. Now she has no trouble reading/recognizing familiar short words, especially words that she herself has written. Sometimes I hear her mutter words that she’s reading off the page that I am reading for her, so she can do it while she’s doing other stuff with part of her brain.

She has acquired a tendency to pose, in a stiff and silly way, when she notices me taking photos of her.

The current favourite movie is Tangled. Favourite food is, I think, soft tunnbröd with liver pâté and sliced apples. She seems to be going through a growth spurt just now – she’s much hungrier than normally.

A month of ups and downs. For a week or two Ingrid was sunny and happy; then she became moody and whiny again like she was last month. There is a lot of complaining about “why do I have to do everything”.

The one thing she is consistently happy about is going to preschool and being with her friends. She is almost aggressively social. With Adrian she gets up close, is loud and very much “in his face”. She dances and waves her arms and sings loudly and tickles him. She isn’t aggressive but not gentle either. Overwhelming, I guess.

With her friends she’s always the one to say “now let’s do this” and “come, we’ll do that”. She tends to boss them around. And the others are generally happy to follow as far as I can see. Whenever we bring one of them home with us, the others will gather around and say that “me too, I want to go to Ingrid’s house, too!”

Perhaps this is why I’ve been experiencing friction between the two of us: I will not have her ordering me around. She has not learned to ask politely, or does not want to ask politely. Being the one who decides is sometimes more important to her than the actual subject of her request. Setting a good example has obviously not made any difference whatsoever; reminding her to ask politely leads to huffing and demonstrative exaggerated phrases of rote politeness (“dear mummy could I please have the …”); ignoring impolite requests leads to a battle of wills. Giving in and doing what she asks even though the request is impolite and patently ridiculous (asking me to help her cycle by pushing her even though she’s on a downhill stretch) is sometimes an OK short-term fix when everyone’s good mood matters most, but it is not a general solution. I have not yet been able to find one.

She writes more and draws less. Whenever we bring stuff home from preschool it is usually short written notes. These can contain anything from a friend’s name (when Ingrid and a friend switch names and hang name tags with each other’s name around their necks) to “Happy Easter to the whole family”.

Her drawing is very much still the formulaic, symbolic kind. When she does draw, it’s still mostly girls of various sorts. One day she and two friends wanted to draw some fish so they could play fishing, and they were unsure how to draw a fish. The oldest girl drew one and since then that is how fish have to be drawn. A few days later Ingrid asked me to draw a fish and it absolutely had to be done the same way. My kind of fish were not right. She tried herself but couldn’t quite get it right so instead she instructed me exactly as to what should be done how.

She continues to learn to read. Short words she sometimes manages straight away but often she needs to try and pronounce the word a couple of times before she can figure out how to put the parts together. Especially in Swedish where one letter can stand for different sounds (like in English but not as bad) and, the length of each sound is not obvious, and neither is the stress. “Toomater, tåmateer, tåmaater!” when reading “tomater” (tomatoes). And the Swedish letter sounds infect her Estonian reading, too. When she’s trying to read an unknown word and it happens to be in Estonian, I often have to tell her that it is in Estonian before she can make any sense of it. Swedish is her default assumption.

Often she will try to guess the word before she’s properly read it. She reads the first few letters and then makes wild random guesses that are nowhere close the real thing.

She has really learned to judge whether she is tired or not and will go to bed voluntarily and without any fuss in the evenings.

She has been falling down more than usual when running and cycling – or perhaps we just notice it more now that it’s warm outside and falls actually result in scraped knees.

An ordinary month with no major developments or events.

The general tone has been somewhat negative: Ingrid is quick to say no to everything, to voice negative opinions, to say that whatever we propose is boring. When the food is good she says nothing; when there is some minor part of it she doesn’t like she is quick to tell us “I don’t like these ones”. I keep telling her that I am tired of hearing it, just leave whatever parts you don’t want, but it doesn’t seem to register.

She whines and complains; she orders me around; she huffs and groans; she answers my questions in a very exasperated tone. “What would you like to drink?” – “But MUUUMMM I don’t WAANT anything to drink!!!” A mini preview of her teenage years, I guess. All drama.

She’s learned or discovered sneaking. A fresh realization that mothers are not omniscient? She might ask me if it’s OK for her to taste whatever dinner ingredient I’m preparing. I tell her it’s OK to take a few pieces but that’s enough. When I leave the kitchen and then look back, I see her stealing another piece. She never used to do anything like that before. Once I saw her take a piece and sneak off to the bathroom to eat it.

Likewise she has started peeking at me when something goes wrong – when she spills her drink, or drops her sandwich in the glass while playing around with it. (I’ve mostly noticed it at mealtimes.) To check my reaction? To see if I noticed? Not sure.

She’s at preschool all days of the week again. Shopping and running errands together with me and Adrian has lost its charm. She’d rather be with her friends.

When I drop her off att preschool or leave her for some other reason, she almost invariably tells me “Emme ma teen kõike” – “Mamma jag gör allting” – literally, “Mummy I will do everything”. I hear this daily, often several times (first at preschool in the morning, then when I leave her on her own so I can put Adrian to bed) and I have no idea what she means by this. I have asked her to explain but she cannot.

Speaking of bedtime, she is often going to bed earlier than she used to, as early as 7 o’clock. At first it was because she didn’t want to be on her own while I put Adrian to bed. Now she sometimes does it even when Eric is at home. (She is generally more OK with being with Eric nowadays, I’m no longer the one and only.) And it’s good for her – she’s more rested in the morning. So she isn’t going to bed too early just to avoid being on her own, it’s the other way round: she used to go to bed too late so as to not miss out on anything exciting.

She’s also getting better at falling asleep on her own. When I need to put both kids to bed I first prep both of them (brush teeth, go to the loo / put on a night nappy, etc). Then we go up to Ingrid’s room where I read for here while Adrian plays with her stuff. Then I tuck her in and go to our bedroom to put Adrian to bed, promising to come back when he’s asleep. She is never happy about it but at the same time she’s no longer really upset about it either. Quite often she’s asleep by the time I’m back. Some time during the night she always comes to our bedroom, which now has a mattress on the floor for her, asks to hold my hand, and goes back to sleep.

Continuing steady progress in reading and writing. She writes longer sentences without losing track of where she is, and can usually read what she just wrote. Usually she writes scriptio continua, with no spaces between words. Sometimes she puts vertical bars between them. She writes small notes, probably copying my GTD-style note-taking: whenever I think of something I need to do, or she tells me something we ought to do, I tell her I will write it down. A sample note: “PÅUNSTASKAJAGÅTILMAJKEN” – “på onsdag ska jag gå till Majken”.

She can read single-syllable words of up to four or five letters, and some simple two-syllable words. The other day she read “Det var en gång en prins som hade”, for example. It goes well as long as there aren’t any weird letters, like G that sounds like J and so on. I wish she could learn to read in Estonian rather than Swedish, because the spelling is a lot more regular. But for that we’d need more Estonian books to read, and better Estonian books, too. But with the library here it’s inevitable that we read a lot more in Swedish. Still, it could be worse – she could be growing up in London and trying to learn to read in English.

This will be a very brief monthly post for Ingrid, since (a) I have hardly taken any notes, and (b) I didn’t get this done before the vacation.

Ingrid got bored of staying at home with me and asked to go back to preschool on Thursdays. For now she will still be at home on Mondays, sort of as an extended weekend. The clinginess I saw during last month is now gone. Indeed she is experimenting with distance from me: when we’re out and about, she will regularly ask if she can take a different route. For some reason this happens most often in train stations: she will take the stairs while I take the elevator with Adrian’s pushchair, and we meet at the other end.

The first time we did that she underestimated how much slower the elevator would be, so she got a bit worried when she had to wait for me. Now the only thing I worry (slightly) about is bystanders’ reactions – that they will try to help her find me (even though we’ve agreed specifically that she will wait for me at the top of the stairs) and then I will have to go looking for them.

She still longs for spring to arrive and happily points out every puny little green speck, even if it’s last year’s grass in someone’s lawn. The moment it was above-freezing she started walking home from preschool in just a long-sleeved top, or perhaps a t-shirt and light sweater.

Happy with her new bathing suit

She likes to jump over things while walking. It makes walking slightly less boring (because otherwise walking is just about the worst thing she knows, topped only by getting a shot or taking bitter medicine). She jumps across puddles, manhole covers, and cracks in the street. She jumps across spaces marked by whatever happens to be in the street: from one crack to another, or from the edge of a shadow to the edge of a darker section of asphalt.

As always, the jumping is a social activity. She tells me to watch her jump, and asks me to guess beforehand: “do you think I can jump this one? what about from here?”.

Her new favourite toy is a small pink glittery plush unicorn, about the size of my fist, which I found at Myrorna (a chain of charity shops). The unicorn also plays the jumping game, just like a little plastic horse of hers used to. “Do you think it can jump over this table? Over the table AND the chair AND this highchair?” “No, surely it cannot manage THAT!” is the right answer, and then enormous surprise when indeed Ingrid “jumps” the unicorn over the chosen obstacle.

Ingrid has been sort of sensitive this month, worried about loss, about being alone, about not being able to hold on to things forever. She has difficulty letting go of things, in case she can’t get them back, just in case she needs them later.

For about a week we had tearful good-byes in the morning when I dropped her off at preschool. Then she told me she didn’t want to go there at all. She wanted to be with me all the time – or, she suggested, a preschool where parents are welcome, too. Now we have a compromise where she is there for 3 days a week and stays at home with me the other days. Every morning she tells me she’d rather be with me. At home she tells me she doesn’t want to be alone, not even in another room.

Yet when she is forced to be on her own (e.g. when I put Adrian to bed on nights when Eric is away) she handles it very well. But even then her activities are social by their nature: often she will draw a picture or write a letter for me.

Most recently she’s drawn puzzles for me: the kind where there are, say, 3 kids and one apple and tangled lines from each kid, and you have to follow the lines to see which one gets the apple. Her versions have a castle as the “prize”, and various people/animals around it: for example a girl or two, a baby, and two squirrels with pine cones. When she draws, it’s still almost always girls or princesses.

She mentions (occasionally but not daily) that we will die before her, but that it is a long time till then. We’ve discussed that we probably won’t live to be a thousand years old, but might well reach a hundred, which, luckily, feels like an eternity for one who’s four.

She has started collecting things again. It used to be sticks and stones; now she also wants to keep empty egg cartons, the foil lids from yogurt pots, empty chewing gum bags, and most other empty jars and boxes. She wants me to save the shopping list after we’re done shopping. When she borrows my camera and happens to take a blurry photo, she tells me I mustn’t delete it. She got very upset the other day when I deleted some RSS messages with pretty photos from my inbox. Today when she saw me surf the web, she worriedly asked me if I would be throwing any pictures away.

Ingrid is, in general, not so good at handling adversity. She doesn’t like iPad games where she can fail (except if it is easy to try again, such as Angry Birds). She’d rather not try at all than try and fail. She skips the boring parts of movies; she has a tendency to walk away from conflicts with friends.

Writing remains a favourite activity. She likes writing lists, messages, letters etc. It’s becoming a normal and everyday thing for her. In terms of skill she’s at about the same level as last month. Sometimes what she writes is legible, other times she skips half the letters so I have to ask her to read it for me. Sometimes when she runs out of space she squeezes in letters wherever she can, so the letters of the second half of the word is interspersed between those of the first half.

She’s not so interested in reading, although she does try occasionally. Some words she knows by sight. When she tries to spell out an unknown word, she often gets tripped up by the names of letters. When she sees “KUU” she reads “KA, U, U” – “KAUU?”.

With numbers also she’s about where she used to be. She does simple sums with small numbers without a problem. But it’s interesting for me to see that she really has no feel for numbers, no intuition. We have a card game where you’re supposed to find numbers/cards that together make up 10. She has, say, 5, 7 and 8. She tries 5 and 7 – twelve, too much. She then tries 5 and 8, without even thinking that since 8 is more than 7, there’s no way that would get her closer to 10. But if given 1, 3, 8, she tries the combinations and then realizes that what she needs is between 1 and 3, that she needs a 2.

The cards in that game have both a number and the corresponding amount of some thing. (One hedgehog, two bikes, something like that.) When she adds, say, 2 and 8, she will always count the things on both cards. She knows that the card says 8, but she won’t count 8, 9, 10 only – she starts at 1 and counts every item. No shortcuts.

She likes composing things out of other things: decorating things with stickers, playing Fablescapes on the iPad. While I cook she often creates sculptures out of stuff in the kitchen. It started with matchbox towers; then she added spoons and tea sieves to that; the latest sculpture covered half the free space on the kitchen counter and was made up of about 15 things: tea jars, wooden spoons, etc etc.

Recently there have been fewer complaints about walking but she is not a fan, by far. At some point I suggested to her that what we really need is a pair of wings, and she adopted that idea completely. Now she often brings up wings whenever she tires of walking. Ideally she’d like wings that fly on their own, that you don’t need to flap – perhaps with hooks or handles where you can hang your bags too – and perhaps some sort of place for a baby, because they’re too young to have their own. Or perhaps a flying house (and then we discussed how many rooms it should have, and she told me that it absolutely needs windows so we can see where we’re going, and doors so we don’t fall out) or perhaps a flying armchair, with two seats like twin strollers, and a canopy for rain, and someplace to put our bags, and a tray table too. Unless she’s really really tired, these ideas take up enough of her attention to get us home without too much fuss.

She enjoys amusing Adrian. It makes her glad to see him look at her, or smile at her. She will put toys in front of him (or on top of him), wave them in front of him, etc. He mostly watches with bafflement.

She does not like wearing socks. I think her feet get too hot, and that she’d happily wear socks if she had thinner winter boots.

She likes nightgowns better than pyjamas.

She has discovered chewing gum, and loves it. Wrigley’s Extra with blueberry and pomegranate, or with strawberry flavour. In fact she likes berries in just about any form: blueberry jam is better than apple; raspberry juice is better than orange; ice cream, yogurt, etc.

She’s also discovered the concept of wish lists, and has a long one that contains everything from “a Swedish flag” and “a music box” to “plastic duck with wheels” and “pretend flowers”.

Half of this month was filled with Christmas holidays, so we haven’t had many normal, ordinary days recently. I think we were all happy when Ingrid went back to preschool: towards the end she was spending several hours per day with either iPad games or movies. Neither Eric nor I could muster the energy to play with her, read to her, or otherwise activate her all the time.

We’ve somehow slid into a pattern where she asks for a movie or the iPad as soon as we get home. Then, when the hour runs out (which I think is an appropriate length of time for her to spend staring at a screen) it’s just about time for me to start preparing dinner, which means that she is bored then. I think we will try to turn that around, so I can do something meaningful together with her when I have time.

Almost always when I nurse Adrian, I read for Ingrid, so we read at least a book or two every day. Always, with every single book and movie, she will stop at some random point and ask me, “Mummy do you know which one I am? I am this one. [Names or points at some figure.] Which one are you?” This can be pretty annoying: here I am, giving her my best reading, and all she thinks about is which animal she is.

We play a bit of games. Her games have passed some magical threshold and now some of them are actually fun for me, not just because I’m spending time with her but intrinsically. We’re on a more equal level. We’ve played several kinds of guessing games. The simplest one is one where I guess which of her hands is holding the coin.

Sometimes we guess words (“I see something that begins with a K, in Swedish”) – on the bus, in a picture spread in a book, in the living room. For added spice I’ve got Ingrid’s ideas of spelling to take into account. “Giraff” begins with an H in her mind, and “kära” with an S. When the guesser gives up, the other player gives hints, or sometimes the guesser asks yes/no questions, 20 questions style. A couple of times we’ve also played something approaching 20 questions, with animals.

A variation on the guessing theme is the hiding game. One of us picks a random object and puts it somewhere in the house, and then gives a hint or two: “It’s something pink and it is inside a large orange thing”, or “something gray is behind something gray”. Again, if it is too hard, we ask for extra hints.

Ingrid still also likes the role reversal game from last month, and the gift-giving game, where I get a random container with some random thing inside. Also the magic game, where she is a fairy and does magic for me – magically makes Adrian stop crying (pretend only), or cleans the sofa table (for real), etc. Also the “prohibition game” (as I think about it) continues: “you must not step on the yellow tiles or you will become a dragon”, etc.

Meal times in particular are filled with games. It can take her 20 minutes (and that’s no exaggeration) to eat a small 100g yoghurt. She twirls her knife on the table and pretends it’s the hands of a clock, pretends her spoon is an ice cream, dips her spoon in yoghurt and then in juice, ladles juice onto her yoghurt, plays with whatever toy I’ve put in front of Adrian, etc.

Basically, she manages to entertain herself pretty well as long as there is (1) someone to keep her company, and (2) something that she ought to be doing but can drag out. Eating is one such activity. Walking is another: she climbs on the mounds of snow along the road, races me, walks backwards or sideways, etc. (On the plus side, she rarely complains about tired legs any more.) More annoyingly, brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed is another such activity.

She is interacting more and more with Adrian. I’m hoping to find time soon for a separate post about that. But basically she now sees him as a fellow human, and takes an interest in him. She pops in the dummy, puts toys in front of him, etc.

She is very very close to being able to read, but not quite. I think the only block is a mental one: she thinks that she cannot read, therefore she cannot. She can more or less write, but since she cannot read what she’s written, she loses track of where she is at. Short words, no more than 3 letters, work best. She wrote us a Christmas card, “GOD JUL MA Å PA FLÅ INGRID”. I’m saving that one.

She still likes numbers and basic addition. Sometimes she now does sums like 4+2 without holding up fingers, but I can see that she is counting fingers mentally.

She has developed an interest for learning some English. Counting in English came last month; now she notices them in movies (“sixteen” in Sleeping Beauty) and asks me to translate other words that she hears in them. We’ve read some Dr. Seuss books a few times: much of Fox in Socks can be understood just with me pointing at the pictures, while The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham need some more translating.

She says she longs for spring to come. She doesn’t like the bulky winter clothing, and misses cycling. And she is already talking about how much she looks forward to her birthday.

Phew. Back to normal. Ingrid is her usual self again: occasionally volatile, sometimes whingy, but generally a happy girl. Life is much much more pleasant.

Ingrid’s latest “thing” is singing. We used to sing a lot, but then lost that habit somehow. Now it’s back again. A lot of Christmas songs, naturally: they’ve been practising for the Lucia celebrations at preschool for several weeks. A lot of Santa Lucia of course, but I also get to hear En sockerbagare, Tre gubbar and Tipp tapp frequently. Other non-Christmas favourites include Jungfru, jungfru skär, Tingelingelinge tåget far and the eternal Blinka lilla stjärna.

She particularly likes to sing while sitting in the sledge on our way to or from preschool. Today, when one of her friends accompanied us home for the afternoon, the two of them kept looping Jungfru, jungfru skär almost all the way home. Very uplifting!

She also likes to experiment with singing. Take a snatch of lyrics of an existing song and then sing and speak them over and over again, while varying everything that can possibly be varied: melody, pitch, speed, rhythm, stress, tone of voice etc. Or she mangles the lyrics, and twists each word into something vaguely similar-sounding but not quite: “Bjällerklang, bjällerklang” becomes “Pelikan, pelikan” and so on. Or she picks a random phrase and then sings that. Yesterday’s phrase was “tvätta mina tår” – “wash my toes”; this Monday she was singing “så såg jag smutsig ut i hopbyggnaden” – “so I looked dirty in the construction”. Go figure. This can often go on for a good while in the background while she is half-busy doing something.

She still plays with words, too, with rhymes and alliteration. “Jag vill ha mjölk” becomes “Na nill na nölk” etc. Me she now calls “mammis” – the Swedish mamma has replaced the Estonian emme, and then acquired the -is suffix (which is a very common and productive one in Swedish). She’s started picking words apart: she’s noted that both Barkarby and Vällingby (place names near where we live) have “by” in them, and Vällingby is made up of välling (“gruel”) and by.

In Swedish and Estonian, she’s started asking me what words mean. Usually she’s just picked them up and used them. But now with more abstract concepts, it’s not so obvious what people mean when they say a word or a phrase. For example, nära ögat (“near escape”, literally “near the eye”) and umbes (“approximately, roughly”) and typ (“sort of”). “Nära ögat” in particular seems to resonate with her: once I’d explained it for her, she started using it several times every day.

She’s learned to count in English. Up to 12 she gets them right every time; after that she usually needs a bit of prompting. She also picks up snatches of English from movies occasionally: everything from “You’ll never catch me” (from Disney’s The tortoise and the hare) to the Happy Birthday song (again from Disney, Pluto’s Party).

A few days ago, she got a simple calculator together with the fifteenth and last of her 1-2-3 books. It only has the digits 0 to 9, plus, minus and equals. She likes it a lot and has played with it daily. It’s not rare for her to mistype some number or press the wrong key somewhere and then tell me that 3 plus 4 equals 38, or something like that. I try to teach her the habit of first thinking for herself what the answer should be and then check with the calculator, rather than just blindly trust it. We’ll see if that catches on.

At preschool they have a maths project. They’ve split the large group into three smaller ones, each with a different theme. Ingrid’s group focuses on “short and long”. (The others have “light and heavy” and “time” as their themes.) They measure stuff in various ways, draw long things and short things etc. It’s made some sort of impression on Ingrid: several times she’s spontaneously reflected on the different sizes of things, said which one is shorter than the other etc.

She’s also interested in what things are made of, in materials, mostly in the context of which things will break and which won’t. “This cup is made of china. It is rather fragile.” “The fork is made of metal. It is hard. Look, I can do like this [tries to bend fork] but it won’t break. But if it fell from the roof all the way to the street, then it would break?” Glass, china, metal, wood, paper, fabric, clay – those are the materials that have come up at some point.

For a while we did a lot of crafts – cutting, glueing, painting – but then I think she tired and we haven’t done much in the past week or so.

For a while she was very interested in names, and still is to some extent. She picks or makes up pretty names for me / herself / her dolls: her favourites include Evelisa, Evelina, Rosetta and Josefin. Always girls’ names. Sometimes when she thinks of a particularly pretty name, she tells me that when I have another baby, if it is a girl baby, we should give her that name.

We also still play the role reversal game, where she is the mummy and I get to be big sister. Mostly it means that I should talk a lot and ask her questions about stuff, the way she does – “Mummy why does that man not have a hat”, “Mummy are we there yet”, and so on. And that is hard! I cannot blather like a 4-year-old. I get tired of that game pretty quickly.

She has begun to play a lot with her food and utensils, to the point where I often have to remind her to eat. “Just det, jag glömde det!” she says. The spoon is a playground slide, or a bridge, or the hands of a clock. The plate is a sea, or a sandbox. The piece of cookie is a shoe, or a sheep.

She is, still, most unwilling to play on her own. She’d rather complain that she has nothing to do than walk up the stairs to her room to get a toy. But when it’s time to do something – get dressed, brush her teeth, go to bed – she’s all play and silliness.

One thing I forgot to mention last month: we stopped using night nappies around her birthday, and this time it’s worked. But it requires one of us (Eric, or sometimes me) to take her to the loo a few hours after she falls asleep.

This has been a month full of whining, complaining, yelling, and general contrariness. Ingrid finds fault with everything we say or do. It’s like having a teenager in the house, I imagine.

It appears that she has, for some reason, decided to be unpleasant and unfriendly towards us. She can be perfectly polite to others, but when she addresses me, it’s often by shouting or screaming. When she wants me to pour milk, it’s no longer “Can I have some milk please” but “MIIILLK!”. Once she even started with “Can I…” but then interrupted herself and shouted “MIIILLK!” instead.

When she wants me to help her get her boots on, she refuses to come stand where I am sitting. (I refuse to crouch on the floor when I’ve got Adrian in the sling, because it is very uncomfortable for both of us.) Sometimes she even yells when she wants me to play with her or read to her. “Du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig!” (“You must read for me”) she screams, and of course I must do nothing of the sort, I must leave the room instead in order to keep my temper.

Anything I suggest is rejected. Anything I mention in a positive tone, she decides to dislike. “Look, there’s one piece of apple left!” she gladly says. “Yes, I thought you might want one more so I left it for you” I say. “I don’t want it” she responds sulkily.

And she wants help with everything. She can even ask for help moving a plate to the side of the table, and complain that she doesn’t have the strength to move it, and demonstrate by poking at it with a limp hand and an exhausted face. When Eric and I can’t help but laugh out loud at that, she gets very upset and cries that we mustn’t laugh at her.

My guess is that this is a reaction to Adrian’s arrival. A bit delayed, you might think, but then again Adrian was much easier to take care of during his first month. Now he requires more of our time and attention, and even though I do my best to spend time with Ingrid, she cannot have all the attention she wants. Is she testing us, perhaps? “Do they really love me? Do they love me if I do this, this and this?” Or perhaps she is simply mentally tired and stressed by the change and by the new order.

Tellingly she really only behaves that way with me and Eric. When, for example, another parent at preschool notices that we are having trouble (read: Ingrid is yelling at me without pause and asking for help while refusing my way of helping her) and asks if s/he can help, Ingrid explains reasonably politely what she needs help with and gladly accepts it.

During all of this I try to remind myself that:

• I cannot control her behaviour but I can control how I react to it (and that covers both my internal and external reactions).
• If we are to break the spiral of negative emotions and negative behaviour, it’s up to me to do it.
• I can choose to treat her the way she “deserves” to be treated, or the way that is likely to break the spiral.

When she yells for help doing something ridiculously easy, I may think that that kind of request really deserves to be ignored until she addresses me in a more polite manner, or refused because she can do it herself perfectly well. But all that achieves is an escalation of the spiral. Instead I can interpret her shouting as a way of saying “I feel ignored and tired and unloved and I hate it and I want company”, gently remind her that I would prefer if she asked me kindly instead of shouting, and help her.

But there are times when she has decided to not cooperate at all, and then it can be physically difficult for me to help her. I cannot lift her when I am carrying Adrian; I cannot put her mitten on if she keeps her hand all limp. And there are times when my patience runs out and I just cannot take her yelling any more, and I walk away from the room or the situation.

It is bloody exhausting to have two cranky kids. I don’t tolerate loud noise well, and when two children are screaming right next to me, it leaves me tired and with frazzled nerves, even less willing to indulge in Ingrid’s whims or to get engaged in her activities.

Another reaction to having Adrian in the house: Ingrid has started telling us that she has a stomach ache, when she clearly has no such thing (and forgets it as soon as she gets distracted), most likely because we have explained to her that Adrian cries so much because his stomach hurts. If it works for him, and gets him lots of attention, why not for her, too?

Ingrid’s favourite “toy” is our iPad. She watches movies on it, plays games, draws, plays dress-up and so on – together with me or Eric if possible. We also read (a good activity to combine with breastfeeding Adrian), do crafts, and play games (board games, card games and such).

She likes to pretend she’s a wizard or a fairy or an angel, and do magic. (Fairies and angels seem pretty much the same to her – pretty girls with wings – and since I don’t see much actual difference myself, I haven’t bothered trying to explain the very different cultural backgrounds of the two.) There have been magicians and fairies in many of the movies we’ve seen recently, as well as in fairy tales, ranging from the story of Sleeping Beauty, via Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to Shrek and Aladdin.

She will ask me what magic she should do, wave her wand and say some magic words, and present me with the result. Sometimes she clarifies that “it’s just pretend”, that I shouldn’t expect real wings or that she cannot really magically bring daddy home early. I’ve begun using magic as a distraction when she’s in a bad mood: “wouldn’t it be nice if we could magically grow wings, then you wouldn’t have to walk home on your tired legs”. It sometimes works.

Often she or one of her soft toys is a kitten, walks on all fours and miaows pitifully. The kitten has lost its parents while picking berries in the forest, is sad and wants company. (We’ve read an Estonian fairy tale about a girl who gets lost in the forest while picking berries.) Now most recently the kitten has actually been abandoned in the forest by its father (since we’ve read about Hansel and Gretel).

Whenever I ask what she did with her friends at preschool, she tells me they played mummy daddy baby. She usually gets to be the baby, being among the smallest and youngest kids in their huge group. At home she plays she’s the mummy, and various toys and dolls get to be babies. She breastfeeds them, picks them up when they cry, and puts them to sleep. Sometimes she wants to be a mom for me, and I get to be big sister. She asks me how my day was, what I learned at school, and I am supposed to act the way she usually does. When she borrows my camera, for example, I am supposed to badger her “let me see, let me see [the photos]”.

There is also a fair amount of talk about being in love, and marrying. Contagion from all the older girls at preschool. She is in love with me and with Elin (a friend) she says, and will marry us both. Being in love means you like someone a lot, she says, and getting married means you live together.

When she draws or paints, it is only girls and princesses. Just plain girls more often than princesses, nowadays. They all follow the same template: head like this, dress like that, long hair on both sides. Very boring for me.

She has effectively learnt to write. Often she still wants one of us to tell her the letters, but when I instead say the word again, or just ask her what letter she thinks should come next, she gets it right 9 times out of 10. The most common mistake she makes is skipping a letter in the word. For example when she wante to write PIRN (for “pear” in Estonian) and had done P and I, she said that N should come next. But when I said that that would make PIN, she thought a bit and figured out on her own that R should be there too.

It’s like when she learned to stand and walk: she wouldn’t actually let go and do it until she was 100% able to do it. Back then it was some sort of subconscious or instinctive behaviour, but now it’s more conscious. She simply has a strong aversion to failure.

Speaking of walking, Ingrid is still not fond of walking so she cycles to preschool every day, if at all feasible, and most other places too. We had to walk when the streets were full of snowy slush. But when there are just some icy patches here and there, we take the bike. Slipping and falling a few times causes less fuss and complaining than having to walk all the way, especially on the way home in the afternoon. Even better than cycling is having a cycle race, meaning that she sets a goal (“first one to that brick house wins”) and races ahead on her bike, and I walk after her as fast as I can (cannot run with Adrian in the sling, he either throws up or wakes up) while shouting “this time I will surely win” or “now it really is my turn to win” and she laughs at me.

She can now hop on one foot (her right one) for a good 12 to 15 jumps, all the way across the kitchen. On her left she manages just a few.

Likes: painting my face (they do face painting at preschool on Fridays). Making silly faces and waving her arms around when I try to take a photo of her. Winning. Ice cream. Sundays, because then she gets ice cream. (Sometimes she starts counting down to Sunday already on a Tuesday.) Selecting clothes for Adrian. Torches. Balancing on pavement edges, ledges, and power cords on the floor. Playing rock paper scissors during train rides. Also during train rides, playing shop and selling me the houses, cars, boats and towers on the seat fabric. (Can’t find any official pictures; a slightly fuzzy photo can be seen here.) Plates, cups and cutlery with pictures or patterns.

Does not like: our tasteful green china. The colour black, or brown or grey. Waiting. Missing a train – even when I tell her the next one will be there in 2 minutes, she is upset.