Some time during the past month, a subtle line has been crossed. Ingrid’s gone from being a baby to being a little child.

I cannot really put my finger on any one thing that’s changed – it’s her whole manner of interacting with the world around her. She just seems a lot more aware and engaged with it, and exploring it a lot more aimfully. She tries to pick things up, look at them from all directions, bang them against other things. Some things bang well, others don’t. She tries to pick up my hair, the stream of water coming from the tap, and the puddles of water on the table (which, despite great improvements in her pincer grip, has never succeeded yet). And she experiments: she’s discovered that milk comes from my breasts but not from my navel, that she can hold two wooden blocks in the same hand but not three.

There is also no doubt that she has now mastered the concept of object persistence, and understood that things continue to exist when she cannot see them. She knows that when she cannot see me, the first place to look is at my desk, and the next one is the bathroom. If the bathroom light is on and the shower curtain drawn (or maybe she goes by the sound of the shower?) she has no difficulty figuring out that I’m behind the curtain, and she will pull at it until she finds me. However I have been able hide from her by lying down on the sofa, because she doesn’t think to look for me there. I so rarely have time to lie on the sofa.

She is still a creature of chaos, and likes nothing better than to destroy order. Her favourite occupation is to pull things out of shelves, drawers, boxes and bags, to knock down ordered piles. She doesn’t stack her stacking cups – she knocks them down, or if they’re nested, takes them out. It is as if order offends her. Sometimes it looks as if she doesn’t even enjoy disordering things, just tries to get it done as quickly as she can, and as soon as she’s torn them down, she loses interest – she doesn’t even play with them until I line them up again.

But it seems like she is now discovering the opposite concept as well. She has sometimes placed wooden blocks inside the box we store them in, and today she was putting a little ball inside a cup, instead of just taking it out.

She has discovered drawers and realised that new and interesting things can be found inside them. We’re vaguely considering some sort of locking mechanism, but for now it seems enough to move some things about, and keep an eye on her in the bathroom where the drawers contain household chemicals. She never goes there on her own so I’m not worried about safety yet. She’s also discovered doors and realised that they can be pushed one way and the other.

Another popular game is the thank-you game, where Ingrid gives me something and I take great care to thank her, and then I give it back and she says thank you (Estonian: aitäh). To my ears it clearly sounds like aitäh, especially because she also says it in appropriate situations outside of our game. So her two clearest words are now mme for emme (“mummy”) and aitäh (“thank you”). The third sound I think I’ve heard her use intentionally is nänn which I believe is her word for food.

In all this playing it’s been interesting to see how strongly she prefers to use her right hand. If I hand her something, she never reaches for it with her left hand.

She continues to walk with support – along the sofa or a low table, or pushing a chair in front of me. She prefers furniture to holding on to my hands. But she won’t let go, even for a moment. When she’s holding on to a chair and tries to reach the table, and it’s just a centimetre out of reach, she won’t take that leap. She’d rather sit down, move across, and stand up again. I don’t think she knows that it is possible to stand without support.

In Stockholm we also discovered that she can climb up stairs, as long as the steps are not too high. But she obviously has no understanding of danger, or of gravity, so she would happily try to sit down halfway up the stairs when there was nothing behind her. We have no stairs at home so further practice will have to wait. She does, however, practice climbing on me.

Random fact: she hates being held fast. Toothbrushing is a one- to two-second affair, and then she starts screaming. She rarely lets me hold her hand to show her how to operate a toy, or press a button. And there is no way she would sit on my lap to look at a picture book together, although she will explore them on her own.

PS: It’s getting harder and harder to get good pictures of her, because she doesn’t stay still long enough!

Ingrid has been unwell and unhappy all day, even crying while we walk with her in a sling. I’m not sure what is wrong, but I feel really sorry for her.

I cooked dinner for the first time in yonks, and it came out very nice. A mushroom / aubergine / spinach thingy with coconut cream, served with thai noodles.

Eric and Ingrid went to the baby swimming class this morning, which totally knocked her out so she slept for 1½ hours when they got back, so I got lots of work done.

In the afternoon we went out for Open House weekend. We saw St George’s German church (mostly because it was so close to home), and walked from there to the old Turkish baths that now houses a restaurant. We finished our tour with Guildhall and Guildhall Art Gallery. This was actually the first time I visited Guildhall, despite having lived in London for over 6 years. The art gallery was also a pleasant surprise, with some fine Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Ingrid wanted to be with me all the time, and only had one nap, so I hardly got any work done at all.

I managed to cut all of her fingernails with no screaming or fighting at all. The trick was to make funny noises, and change them every few seconds, and let her poke my mouth (where the funny noises were coming from) with the other hand’s fingers.

1.

Ingrid has been practising holding a spoon for a while now. In fact she’s been doing that since before she was eating solids. She wanted to sit with us at the table, so in order to keep her occupied I used to give her a spoon to play with. So she can hold a spoon, and she knows that the spoon occasionally holds food. She knows which end of the spoon is the business end. In the last few days she has even learned to take hold of the spoon when I offer it to her, and put it in her mouth.

But she hasn’t understood that the spoon gets its goodness from the bowl, even though she sees me put the spoon in the bowl again and again. Every time she takes the spoon out of her mouth, she puts it down on the table, without even trying to point it towards the bowl. I have to refill the spoon and give it back to her. Today I started leaving the filled spoon in the bowl for her to grab – maybe that will bring the point across.

I’d demonstrate it for her with a piece of food (take spoon, put food on spoon, give spoon to her) if it wasn’t for her habit to turn the spoon upside down before putting it in her mouth. Instead of taking the food off the spoon with her lips (which is what we do) she licks it off with her tongue, and that of course is much easier if the spoon is upside down.

2.

Whenever we go grocery shopping, I give her something to hold and play with, so she doesn’t get bored. She does get bored rather quickly otherwise. A packet of cheese works well, or a bag of carrots, or other not-too-big unbreakable items with interesting shapes. She turns them around in her hands, tries with her mouth, occasionally throws them on the floor. Bags are especially good because I can put the bag in the trolley and “accidentally” leave it within her reach, so she can pick them up herself. She likes that.

Except that today I discovered that a bag of carrots will, in fact, not work so well any more. When I took the bag from her to put it on the checkout conveyor, I noticed it was rather stickier than usual. They’re almost always a bit wet from the chewing, but this time I discovered small carrot flakes on the outside of the bag… and lots of little indentations in the carrots. Oops… forgot about the teeth! I guess she knows how to use them.

3.

Plums are in season, so I’ve been giving her some almost every day, and she likes them. They’re slippery, so I give the pieces to her from my hand rather than putting them on the table. She’s quite good at getting them to her mouth and rarely drops them. I cut the plums into segments so the pieces are long and narrow and easy to grip. (I also peel the pieces for her, because she cannot really chew fruit skins yet, and they tend to get stuck at the back of her mouth and make her gag. So I’ve been eating lots of plum skins recently.) The plum strips are quite big for her, bigger than one of her fingers, but she rarely bites off a piece – no, it all has to go in her mouth in one piece. Which means that she gets one end in and then sucks the rest in with a wet slurping sound.

4.

Sometimes she shows no interest in the food on the spoon, because she doesn’t know what I’m offering her – for example when I switch from veggies to yogurt. But when I touch her lips with the food she realises that it’s good stuff and does her little bird impersonation.

On the other hand, she always knows when she’s really had enough, and shows it clearly by turning her head away. I wonder if the head-shaking for “no” originates in babies shaking their head to avoid a spoonful of unwanted food?

Ingrid has learned a new skill: climbing over the pillows that separate her cot from our bed. This morning I was woken by someone butting against my legs.

We have a cot, but we’ve been sort of co-sleeping since the very beginning. I like her sleeping next to me. It’s cosy. During weekends and on my days off, I often join her for her morning nap, and then we sleep side by side in the big bed. I actually fall asleep more easily next to her than on my own, so I can imagine it’s the same for her. And I wouldn’t like bars separating me from my family when I sleep, so why would she?

But our bed is a little bit too narrow for all three of us together, so I compromise. Most of the time Ingrid spends part of the night in her cot, and part in the family bed. The cot stands right next to our bed, with the side removed, so it’s sort of an extension of the bed. She usually goes to sleep in the big bed (but sometimes not). Before I go to bed, she nurses, and then I usually lift her over into the cot just before she falls asleep.

I get the impression that she wakes more frequently when she sleeps closer to me, and I guess it might be because she smells the milk. So when she (inevitably) wants to nurse in the middle of the night she comes to the big bed for a snack, and then generally moves back. Other times she seems to sleep a lot more peacefully and wake less when she’s cuddled up next to me. So when she’s ill or otherwise upset for some reason, or when she has difficulty going to sleep and I’m too tired to bother, she gets to stay all night. (Basically I just do whatever feels right, or feels good, at the time.)

Unfortunately co-sleeping often means less sleep or stiff backs for Eric and myself. She sleeps a bit more deeply now than she used to, and kicks less, which is good, and I am less worried about accidentally crushing her during the night, which is also good, but on the other hand she is bigger and shifts around more and takes up more space. I think the solution might simply be to get a bigger bed.

Ingrid – and therefore I – slept until Eric’s alarm woke us at 7:30, which felt utterly decadent and luxurious, but also made me 15 minutes late for work, even though I didn’t spend time on anything more than getting dressed and brushing my teeth. If this happens again, I may have to consider setting an alarm! I haven’t needed one for over a year (except for those awful morning flights with Easyjet when I have to take the 5 o’clock train to Stansted).

Had to really struggle to express milk this morning. I think my boobs got a bit lazy during the vacation and didn’t want to co-operate with the bottle, only with a sucking baby. It worked a bit better during the afternoon. Hopefully they will soon remember how this is supposed to work.

The top two incisors have arrived, and the time of purées is nearing its end, to be replaced by the time of messes.

A month ago Ingrid was still mostly eating mashed and puréed veggies and pulses, plus porridge. (And milk, of course.) For a long while she wasn’t particularly interested in feeding herself – she wasn’t trying to grab my food and put it in her mouth, as I hear other babies do. No, if she got hold of food, she would play with it. She particularly liked hitting any spilled food on the table with the flat of her palm (SPLAT!) and sending food flying everywhere – or smearing it around with big arm movements. Another favourite was taking a piece of food in her hand and then squeezing it hard, until it all oozed out between her fingers. Despite her habit of putting all her toys in the mouth, and despite her skill at picking up and correctly using the sippy cup, the idea of using hands to actually feed herself just didn’t seem to click.

So some time after she got her first teeth, I started feeding her small pieces of soft-boiled vegetables. I had to pop them in her mouth myself – she would open her mouth wide like a little bird, but not pick up the food herself. But after a while she got the point, and started trying for herself. Her little chubby fingers weren’t exactly adept at picking up slippery lumps of veggies, but she persisted, and developed a rather messy, but quite effective eating technique – the Full Hand Mash. Pick up the piece of food with her thumb and first two fingers. On the way to the mouth, the food will slip into her hand, and the more she tries, the more the food slips, until it ends up in her palm. She chases it with her mouth, until the hand is open and the food cannot flee any further, and is caught by the mouth. At this point the hand covers half her face, and food is everywhere. Here’s what it can look like. (An optional follow-on is to then scratch her ear with the same hand, to make sure that all her face is evenly covered with food.)

Since those early efforts (just a few weeks ago), Ingrid has practiced a lot and improved her eating technique a lot. She can now eat even such slippery things as banana and juicy plums and nectarines. And she is now much less likely to hoard and later spit out any lumps in her food, although some pieces go back and forth between her hands and mouth a few times before she actually swallows them.

In fact her taste is becoming quite mature. She prefers complex flavours to bland purées: any quick meal that I make from our frozen mashed veggies is generally rejected unless I add a bit of spices or tomato sauce or creme fraiche etc. Her favourite is, of course, whatever we eat: even things that I had thought would be too strong for her (such as a moroccan tahine roast) have gone down well (but she was really thirsty afterwards!). But she will also happily eat the basic good stuff: fruit, bread, yogurt (I buy Little Rachel’s organic yogurts because they have no added sugar), cheese, porridge.

And just like us, she likes variety. If I offer her only one thing for lunch – a veggie mix, for example – she will get tired and start shaking her head at the spoon after a while. But if she then gets some bread, and maybe a bit of fruit, she gets her appetite back, and we can go back to the veggies again, and then go another round.

Unlike us, though, she is not vegetarian. She gets chicken and fish at the nursery, and whenever we feed her jar food (which is only when we’re travelling) we make sure to choose the meatiest ones. And unlike us, she doesn’t get any of the sugary stuff. Luckily for us she doesn’t yet know what she is missing.

I’ve only noticed one thing that she doesn’t like, and that’s peas. Although I’ve only tried puréed peas (not yucky boiled mashed ones, but a coarse purée of fresh green peas) – maybe she’ll like whole peas better.

Back home from Sweden. All went well, all had fun, and Ingrid charmed everyone. Plus, we managed to spread the word about babywearing to at least two mums.