Kids are, of course, always learning things, but it feels like this month Ingrid has picked up more new skills than usual.

She has learned to do up buttons, which she has sort of managed before but only with much struggle. And shoelaces, too. During the Christmas break we went shopping for shoes that she can wear for gym class at school, and her absolute favourites were a pair of pink Converses. She has never had lace-up shoes before, but was determined to learn that art if that’s what it took to get those Converses. I showed her once and she got it immediately. After a few days of practice (during which she wore the Converses all the time at home) she had it down pat.

Another manual skill is eating with chopsticks. She had a kid’s version before, in plastic, with a flexible join between the two chopsticks. But during one dinner when she couldn’t stop playing with them she bent them too far, and they broke. I haven’t had time to buy new ones so she made do with the adult version. And she actually manages to eat some food with them. We don’t use them often at home, but at restaurants she encounters chopsticks fairly regularly. Sushi is her favourite restaurant food (and now also dumplings, especially the kind with a thick layer of white gluey dough).

At school she has learned to sew blanket stitch and used it to make a bunny rabbit. In the evenings she has learned how to search on YouTube. During the Christmas break she learned to play Battleship.

At weekends we’ve been practising ice skating. Twice we’ve had the good luck to run into her friends at the ice rink, which made skating more fun for her but also provided a welcome challenge, since both those girls were more expert skaters than her. Last time we skated for over two hours: the kids chased each other, did a slalom track, tried swizzles, “the meatball” (crouching down into a ball) and so on.

Quite spontaneously and naturally she is learning multiplication and division. A few days ago when we were heating up meatballs in the microwave oven, she noticed that I heated them for 20 seconds on one side and 20 on the other, and commented that with four meatballs, that makes 10 second per meatball. Today we were talking about Bamse magazines (because I ordered a subscription and we’ve been waiting for the first issue to turn up in the mail) and how much I paid for the subscription (99 kr for 5 issues), and she calculated that the same 5 issues would cost 150 kr if we bought them in the store.

She is unlearning things, too – or rather, I am trying to make her unlearn things that she has learned the wrong way. She writes her Gs quite weirdly (without the top part, sort of like backwards a J with a curlier finish at the bottom) and always writes her Js the wrong way round. When she was just learning to write I didn’t bother to correct such details, judging it more important to learn the letters than to get their shapes exactly right. With all the other letters she has gradually ended up drawing the right shapes, but with those two she’s gotten firmly stuck in the wrong place, and getting unstuck is harder than I thought. I’m also trying to get her to draw her letters and numbers in the right direction: starting them at the top etc.

I am also making her learn falling asleep on her own, since I got tired of spending so much time every evening putting kids to bed. I can’t say that she’s happy about this change but she’s OK with it. At first did it completely on her own, but then her bedtime and Adrian’s drifted closer to each other, so now both go to bed at the same time, in the big bed. I tell them a story and stay there until Adrian is asleep, and then maybe talk quietly to Ingrid for a while before going downstairs. Ingrid stays there and falls asleep with Adrian as quiet but comforting company. Having him next to her makes a big difference for her.

This month we also had Christmas of course. Ingrid has a minor obsession with presents and opening them. The contents are not that important; she doesn’t even remember to say thank you; it is the opening and the surprise that matters.

The best present in my opinion was a LasseMaja book. At first she was a bit underwhelmed (too few pictures) but when she started reading she could hardly put it down. Since then we’ve borrowed two more from the library and she devoured those equally fast. Another successful gift was a picture-based English dictionary.

She still has her minor obsession with physical hurts. One day after school she told me to guess how many times she’d hurt herself that day. In my head I guessed four, but told her eleven to make it more fun. The correct answer was 17. The next day she must have counted every single bump and poke, because when I got there she was ready and presented me with a paper on which she had written, with very large digits, the number 129. Adrian bumped into her while she was getting dressed and she corrected it to 130.

Another time she asked me why I only cuddle and console Adrian when he hurts himself, but not her. I explained to her that I didn’t think she needed that any more, that she was big enough to console herself. She didn’t agree, and we agreed that I’d hug and console her as well. I guess I’ve been expecting too much maturity and independence from her.

Likewise she once wondered why I praised Adrian for [whatever it was] and not her. I explained that I praise him when he does something that is hard for him, but since those things are easy for her, I don’t mention them. She’s been giving this some thought, and the overall idea of treating different people differently not based on what they “deserve” but based on some more advanced criteria of “appropriateness”. Until now she has, I think, been thinking in terms of deserving, of being nice to nice people and not to bad people.

When we talk in bed late at night, she often brings up some situation when someone has been “not nice” towards her. She can take that quite hard, reacting sometimes with hurt and sometimes with righteous anger. We talk about what can make people act that way, and how she can think about those situations.

Small stuff:

• She is trying to teach Adrian to play hide-and-seek.
• She has moved from the adjustable Stokke chair to a normal adult kitchen chair, on her own initiative.
• She has decided that she wants long her and no bangs, so we’re letting the bangs grow out. But she does not like hair clips so her hair hangs in front of her eyes almost all the time.
• She has discovered that she likes peanut butter on toast.
• Favourite iPad game: Lost Circus, a hidden objects game.

Reading, reading, reading…