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.