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?”

Milk protein allergy experience of the day: apparently IKEA’s chips (French fries) contain milk. Or perhaps their bread does. I knew McDonald’s has gotten into trouble for having both milk and wheat in their chips but didn’t think that IKEA would do stuff like that. In any case Adrian threw up his entire lunch an hour after eating there. The only things he ate from their menu were bread, carrots, and a few chips.

Counter-intuitive allergy experience of the day: it is safer for me to eat butter than to eat margarine, even though butter is 100% made from milk (OK, water and salt, too). Butter is milk fat only and does not appear to have any significant amounts of milk protein left in it. Not enough to trigger allergic symptoms in Adrian, at least. Margarine on the other hand is an unpredictable mixture of stuff, often including skimmed milk powder or whey powder, both of which do contain milk protein. So when a restaurant serves margarine with their bread, I skip it; when they serve butter, I eat it.

Forest wallpaper

One unexpected consequence of the remodelling is a naming confusion. Rooms have changed names as they changed roles, and functions have moved around the house. (You can see the floor plans here.) With each change there was a transition period when we had to clarify each reference to a room, especially when talking to Ingrid. “It’s in the hall. No, not the old hall, in the new hall where the new front door is.”

Before the whole building project began we had a Bedroom, a Living Room, a Bathroom, a Kitchen, a Hall, a Corridor, and a Pantry. The upstairs effectively didn’t figure in our daily lives, but when we needed to refer to the rooms upstairs they were usually named the Library, the Room with Boxes and the Toilet.

To prepare for the builders, we had to evacuate some of the downstairs rooms and move into the upstairs ones. The Library became the Bedroom (with the bookshelves draped in cheap IKEA bedsheets, both to keep the dust away from the books and to keep the bedroom reasonably calm for sleeping). The Room with Boxes became Ingrid’s Room. The Bedroom became the Old Bedroom, and once the remodelling was finished and we had moved into that room, it became the Office.

We also had and have multiple halls. The entrance to the house was moved, so you now enter the house in one place but the stairs to the first floor are in a different part of the house. Thus the old Hall became the Stair Hall, and we acquired a new Entry Hall. While work was underway the Pantry (which is now the Laundry Room) was sometimes also called the Hall, since that was where our temporary entrance was.

As we discussed tearing down walls and moving rooms around, the Corridor widened and became a new room. The architect imagined that new room as the Dining Room, keeping the Living Room where it was. We on the other hand imagined the Dining Room to be the one closer to the Kitchen, and the new room as the Living Room. To minimize confusion I ended up referring to them as the Old Room and the New Room when speaking to the builders.

Those names now no longer feel appropriate but the rooms still don’t have new names, mostly because their roles are not yet apparent. (The Old Room is effectively unfurnished.) I suspect the names will become clear when we finish furnishing the rooms.

In the meantime, when precision is needed, the New Room is sometimes called the Sun Room because of its glass wall, while the Old Room is called the Forest because of its wallpaper.

(Neither the cabinet on the floor nor the tree
will be here in the long term.)

A good thing about buying a house for the long term is that we can make odd choices. I intend to live here for the next 20 years or so at least, circumstances allowing. We don’t need to think about what the real estate market likes, what sells and what doesn’t. We can do our own thing.

Item one: colour on walls. White interiors are definitely the in thing. It’s almost a joke – any time a newspaper runs a story about someone’s home, the photos are all white. Any time a house is up for sale, the interior is white. (I wonder how many of them have painted the walls white just before the sale.)

We chose to go against that current. The two living rooms have colourful wallpaper: one in cream and red, one in green tones. The entry hall and the office have deep green walls. Now whenever I walk upstairs, where the walls all still have their original white colour, my spontaneous reaction is that the space feels raws and unfinished.

The bathroom has a spacious shower corner but no bathtub. The old bathroom had ample space, but we moved the bathroom to a new location to make space for other changes, and the new room is much smaller, perhaps about half the old one. We traded a bathtub for more living space.

For us this was no real loss. We never take baths; I think I may have taken a single bath since we moved here three years ago, and Eric may have taken a couple of baths as well. Ingrid likes to soak and play in a tub occasionally but we have a small portable tub for her.

Less controversially, we chose untreated pine floors. No hardwoods, no oak parquet, no varnish and no oil. We will be treating the floors with linseed oil soap.

We’re home again. The house is a mess with half-unpacked bags and suitcases, mounds of dirty laundry, piles of unopened letters, etc etc. But it is good to be home again, to sleep in my own bed.

Saturday: The planetarium at Ahhaa, somewhat disappointing. A lecture rather than a show, dry-ish and uninspiring. Presented by a guy picked for his knowledge rather than his presentation skills. Since he only gives a scripted talk his knowledge of astronomy is no use; I would have preferred someone with better diction and more charisma, or even a recording by a professional actor.

Sunday: drove to Tallinn. Got stuck in a massive traffic jam at Ülemiste due to some bicycle race that we didn’t know about. We could have taken an alternative route but the traffic authorities didn’t have the sense to inform drivers of the road blocks in advance. After half an hour we finally got to a place where we could escape the jam and zig-zag through Lasnamäe to Pirita where my friend V lives. Spent a most relaxing afternoon with V and family – the kids entertained each other, Adrian picked through their toy box, and we adults just lounged on the deck and ate and talked.

Monday: in Tallinn’s Old Town. The town was overrun with large guided tourist groups; they were everywhere. Both kids were in a bad mood, tired, didn’t want to eat at mealtimes and then complained of hunger a short while later, and generally complained about stuff all day long. We hardly enjoyed any of the stuff we saw.

Tallinn Flower Festival: small scale, low-key, pretty and fun.

Finally saw the much-discussed Victory Column with my own eyes.

Lunch at Olde Hansa: menu unchanged over the past 10 years, food still good, portions smaller than they used to be.

Climbed to the top of the tower of the old City Hall: good views but very windy; had to go down almost as soon as we got up because Ingrid wouldn’t keep still and got in everyone’s way, while Adrian squirmed all the time.

NUKU muuseum, the museum of Tallinn’s puppet theatre: far larger and more interesting than I had expected. But it was a total labyrinth, a tangle of rooms with confusing signs.

Kultuurikilomeeter, a kilometer of culture: “a lot of kilometer and not a lot of culture”. Instead of one kilometer the path is 2.2 km long but the culture along it is very, very sparse. From its name I had expected it to be lined with sculptures, installations, outdoor art… all we found was an “eco-island” (a cheap-looking café on some sort of floating island), a stage and some graffiti and another café in the old Patarei prison, a construction site which will at some point become a museum for sea planes, and a couple of historic ships. A lot of urban decay – hip and edgy, I know, I know, and quite nice-looking in places, but depressing in others – but very little of what I would actually term “culture”. We gave up about halfway through since Ingrid and Adrian were both bored as there was nothing at all to hold their attention.