Ingrid leading her pony from the stables to the riding hall. Muddy and icy.

I used some of my too-many overtime hours to stay at home today, and spent much of the day sewing. The bed curtains are nearly done except for decorations, and I also made good progress on a turquoise tulle skirt that Ingrid asked for.

I have cut down on browsing Facebook. I never did spend much time there but now days can pass without a single visit.

And poor Facebook immediately felt so desperately lonely. I get SOOO many emails from it now. Come back! Talk to me! Your friend posted a photo! Someone said something! And now they said something again! Please please please come back!

I am tempted to quit just to get rid of that annoying pleading.

Adrian is still doing perler beads. Beading is often what he says he was busy with, or just about to start, when I pick him up at preschool. Last weekend he did a fair bit of beading at home and I watched. He was impressively good at it. He reads patterns like a pro. “Three blue ones in this row, and then in the next row there is one extra on each side. And I will need five pink ones and then four more.”

Often he wants to his beading projects to be surprises. We’re not allowed to see them, and then he gives them to one of us as a gift. Sometimes he starts off by saying that it’s a gift for me, then changes his mind and says it’s for Eric instead, or vice versa. The main thing is that it must be a surprise and a gift.

Just like Ingrid at that age, he is picking up simple maths in his daily life, for fun, with no real effort. We count things when an obvious opportunity arises, and add them up when that makes sense. First three grapes and then another twig with three more, that’s six grapes. And so on.

Adrian can count to twenty but doesn’t know how to go on from there – but he can also count from one hundred to one hundred and twenty. He can count backwards from ten to zero, but only in Swedish.

I often find him browsing Bamse comics. He can’t read them yet but that doesn’t seem to bother him. Sometimes he asks me, What does it say here? when there is a sign or a letter or some other written object in Bamse – but not being able to read the speech bubbles don’t seem to bother him.

He loves it when someone reads to him. His taste in books is surprisingly mature, as long as the book doesn’t use any complicated words. We can read chapter books for him, with few pictures (but more pictures is better). Currently, for example, Eric is reading Brandkårsmysteriet (a LasseMaja mystery) for him at bedtime.

He gets bedtime stories, like most kids, but in our house we also have a morning story. I began doing it this autumn because he was always so angry about being woken on weekday mornings. It was an instant hit, and by now it is a strong tradition that both kids enjoy. Because he can listen to chapter books, and Ingrid still enjoys books with lots of pictures, usually it isn’t hard to find books that suit both of them.

Bottoms are still incredibly funny. We have a page-a-day art calendar in the kitchen, and one day’s image was Titian’s Venus and Adonis. The ONLY thing that Adrian noticed with lots of giggles, from the other side of the kitchen, was rumpa!

In my notes for this month I had noted down “anger” again but by now that has subsided again. The periods of barely-controlled anger come and go: times when he reacts to any opposition and any obstacle by yelling.

Right now he is more likely to express himself with words – such as calling me dummaste mamman, “stupidest mom”. When his anger subsides, he comes and looks at me with sorry eyes and says I am the kindest mom, the best mom, and we hug.

Random things:

• He hated tagging along for Ingrid’s riding lessons so badly that we rearranged things. He now stays really late at preschool instead. Ingrid and I pick him up after riding school at about 17:15. We’ve done it this way twice. The first time he was the only kid left; the second time it was him and one other boy whose mum arrived at the same time as us. I thought this might bother him but he’s been fine with it. Much more content than at the stables.
• Adrian loves music. But the kids’ cheap CD player has become more and more unreliable, so they have started to use our Sonos wireless hifi system. It is a lot more complicated than the CD player, so Adrian cannot really navigate it yet, but he is learning bits and pieces. Mostly he listens to the soundtrack from Frost, and the Barnkammarböckerna (which are easy to find).

Likes:

• Bamse. Frozen.
• Fixa rummet, a “fixer upper” kind of TV show where they redo kids’ rooms.
• Rice cakes. Raspberry jam.
• Thick ski mitts and fur-lined winter hat.

Dislikes:

• Baths (despite the impression you might get from the photo below) and washing his hands.

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While I was sewing bed curtains for Ingrid, Adrian played with my pins. He likes their colourful heads.

Note the beautiful vintage Bernina sewing machine, inherited from Eric’s grandmother. I hope it has many productive years ahead of it still.

We had semlor.

A la carte semlor: Eric likes his as hetvägg (with hot milk); Adrian and Ingrid eat theirs without any whipped cream; I eat what I consider a “normal” semla but with less whipped cream than you get in most store-bought versions.

Back to “am and am not”. I’ve already mentioned patience/impatience. Another trait that I keep struggling with (even more than with impatience) is rebellion.

Social rules and conventions. I dislike them. And yet I question myself whenever I deviate from them. (And that makes me dislike the conventions even more, because if they didn’t exist, if everybody wasn’t so same, then I wouldn’t have to think about this.)

When I follow conventions, do I do so because I think they make sense, or because I simply feel that I should?

When I break them, do I do so just because I can, or out of habit, or because it has become “my thing”, or because I really think my way is better?

Perhaps it starts out as one and then becomes the other?

I want to be neither a mindless follower nor a childish rebel. And I especially don’t want to do things a certain way only because I always have done it like that. I want to do what I do for a good reason.

When I buy a dress for Adrian, I ask myself: am I encouraging him to wear a dress because I want to be the kind of mother who lets her son wear dresses, or am I simply letting him make his own choices?

When I buy organic food even though it’s twice the price, when I refuse to wear blue jeans, when I am the only one under 50 to buy a dumbphone: am I being a hipster, or doing it for real?

We went bowling today, together with one of Eric’s sisters and her son. Here we have Ingrid and her cousin watching the scoreboard.

Adrian didn’t care a whit about scores and only focused on his immediate results. “Only one left!”

Whenever it wasn’t his turn, he spent all his time climbing on the ramp.

Ingrid has been preoccupied with thinking about our upcoming trip. During the February school holidays (during last week of February) she and I will take a brief skiing holiday. She has wanted to try out skiing for some while now, so now we’re going to do it. And she gets to travel, which she enjoys; and she gets to spend a few days with just me, which she also enjoys.

As soon as we booked the trip she started to plan and make lists. For a while she could hardly think about anything else. Anything she saw or heard, somehow led to thinking about the trip. Snow? Skiing trip! Car? Driving to the airport! Me? Go on holiday with me! Now it has sort of settled down a bit, but she is still very excited about it.

But apart from exciting events such as vacations, and weekend activities, Ingrid likes life to be comfortably routine. She doesn’t like surprise changes to our daily activities. On one or two occasions I have picked her up from school before picking Adrian up from pre-school, instead of the opposite, and that change was enough to disrupt everything for hours. Changed routines plus afternoon tiredness is a particularly bad combo, so now I know better than try and change our afternoon plans on the spot – even if the change would seem to somehow make life easier for us, it’s not worth the emotional mess.

So everyday life continues. Ingrid spends more and more time with her friend M, whom (I believe) she doesn’t think of as her best friend, but enjoys being with. They both have strong wills and can be pretty stubborn, and M even more than Ingrid. So they fight a lot, and it’s not uncommon for them to leave school and go home without resolving their quarrel. Ingrid wants to talk about it; M stubbornly refuses. Those fights affect Ingrid pretty strongly and she can be upset about it all evening. Luckily neither bears a grudge and the next day they’re playing together again.

On her own, Ingrid almost never plays. I can’t recall when she last did it. She doesn’t do anything else either, really. She reads. Possibly, when she is left to her own devices for several hours, she might draw or paint something. When she tires of those activities, she complains about having nothing to do. She can literally spend an hour complaining of boredom, rather than come up with something to do. Everything bores her – to the point where I am beginning to worry about her. How can a child be so bored?

She has even realised and told me that she does not need any more things (for birthdays or Christmas or such) – “only magazine subscriptions”. All our toys, crafts materials etc, lie unused.

The only time she is not bored is when she needs to NOT do something. For example, ideas and games magically appear in her head when it is time to go to bed, or when she has finished dinner and is sitting and waiting while the rest of us finish.

Her greatest wish, the kind she would wish if a fairy offered to fulfil one, used to be a pair of wings. Now she wishes for a clone of herself. A whole cloning machine, in fact, so she can make clones whenever she needs one. The clone will do whatever she asks, such as her homework. And when the job is done, Ingrid will take the clone’s memories if she wants, and the clone will disappear.

Random stuff:

• She has taken to wearing skirts and tops instead of her colourful dresses. Peer pressure at work?
• She likes to do the “wheelbarrow” walk with me. Especially from the living room to the kitchen, on weekday mornings when it’s time for breakfast.
• Melodifestivalen occupies every Saturday evening.

Ingrid watching mello

I went to an antiques fair today, to see if we could find an armchair there. Didn’t find any.

On the other hand, I found a sewing fair in the next hall, chock full of beautiful, colourful, soft things. Incredibly inspiring!

With all kinds of fairs and conferences (whether they are about sewing, gardening or software development) I find that even though I don’t normally come home with a lot of goods or new knowledge or immediate projects, I do come home with a lot of inspiration and new energy. I feel so full of crafty enthusiasm! I will knit and crochet and embroider!