I cannot have been particularly diligent when taking notes for this month’s Ingrid update, for as soon as I had posted it, new things came to mind that I wished I had written about.

Such as the fact that Ingrid now likes ice cream. She used to find it too cold – happy to lick a spoon dipped in mostly-melted ice cream, but not actually eat it. Now she’s not exactly wolfing it down, still mostly licking the soft edges, but definitely appreciates it. Ice cream has displaced candy; she hardly ever remembers to ask for sweets now.

Or our continued enjoyment of drawing and writing together. As before, we begin by me writing a short word for some common object. She then spells it out and asks me “Mis see kokku tuleb?” (“What does that make?”). I draw the object, slowly, and as soon as she sees what it is, she shouts out: “Auto!”.

This month she’s actually learned to recognize two of the simplest words, puu (tree) and kuu (moon) – she shouts out the word before I’ve begun to draw it. So I make sure to draw at least one of those every time. I’ve tried suu (mouth) as well but it’s hard to draw a recognizable mouth without a face around it. And I’ve tried uss (snake) but she doesn’t recognize that one yet, and definitely none of the four-letter ones. I’ll have to find more three-letter words somehow.

Oh, and today I saw tooth #18 appear as well. Number 17 was a molar on the lower right, and this one is its left-hand companion.

Current favourite movies: Wallace and Gromit, and Kalles klätterträd. There’s no clear favourite among books, but we read a lot of Villi, Kuula! Kuula!, and Rongisõit, and in Swedish Stora vinterboken and Visst kan Lotta cykla.

I think I am detecting faint stirrings of independence in Ingrid. She has been very attached to me for a long time, almost always choosing me ahead of any alternative. When the choice is between doing something boring with me, and doing something fun with Eric, she chooses me. When the choice is between playing on her own, and waiting for me to finish something I’m doing, she’ll hang by my side and wait. Whether at home or out on a playground, all activities start with “emme tule!” (“mummy come!”).

When I’m not available (when she’s with Eric, or at nursery) she’s perfectly capable of amusing herself. But when I’m there, all independence disappears.

She’s usually more independent just after eating (something to do with blood sugar levels?), and late in the evening. When the choice is between brushing teeth and going to bed with me, or playing on her own, she actually prefers playing!

But in the past few weeks, I’ve seen her play on her own for short stretches of time. Nothing long, maybe 5 minutes at a time, but more frequently than she used to. And out at the playground she’s gone off on her own without dragging me with her. I’m really curious to see whether this is just something I’ve imagined, or if it’s the beginnings of real change.

Ingrid’s also more aware of age and growing up. We’ve been talking a lot about babies and big girls this summer. We talk about how babies come from their mummies’ bellies, how they cannot chew or walk or talk, only sleep and drink milk from their mum’s breasts. We talk about how she used to be a baby, but isn’t any longer.

Sometimes she wants to be carried like a baby (which is hard with a 15 kg kid!). Other times Ingrid says she’s a big girl. She doesn’t know much about what big girls do – I’ve never used “big girls [don’t] do X” to encourage or discourage any behaviour. The only thing she knows about big girls is that they go to school. So she regularly tells me that she’s a big girl and will soon go to school. I try to explain that she’s got several years of nursery ahead of her still, but it’s not registering.

The “I don’t want anything!” episodes from last month are far fewer now. I think it’s Ingrid’s new, more verbal way of expressing general dissatisfaction with life, instead of just crying. By far the strongest trigger for these is hunger / low blood sugar. First thing in the morning before breakfast, her mood is very labile. She desperately needs to eat, but since she’s so anti-everything, it’s hard to get her to eat – she loudly claims she does not want to eat. The same happens if we have too long a gap between meals for some reason, or when she’s overtired.

A stranger would see her act out and think that she’s just trying to get our attention, and then perhaps just ignore her, wait for the mood to pass. But those moods can easily spiral, and if we ignore them, they can go on for a long time. When the cause is hunger, the resolution is usually to soothe her with whatever form of closeness she will accept (cuddle, or let her crowd onto my side of the table, etc) and then coax her to take a bite. Then I can detach myself from the cuddle, and the rest of the meal passes smoothly. When she’s overtired, it’s harder, but we’re quite good at spotting her tired signals so we usually nip it in the bud. There was one evening when she was too tired to want anything, not even sit or lie down, which culminated with her spending a good 15 minutes standing in the bedroom, unable to stop screaming. For all our sakes, we make an effort to avoid a repeat performance.

Speaking of eating, she seems to have learned the concept of portions. It used to be that we’d serve her some amount of food, and she’d eat some of it and leave some. Or she’d eat all and want more, and then leave some of the 2nd serving. Now she’s more likely to stop exactly when her plate is empty, even when she hasn’t decided how much was on the plate to begin with (although she often does). When I offer her more food, she declines. Interesting.

Favourite toys this month: her doctor’s bag, and her play food. We play doctor almost every day. “Emme sina oled haige!” she tells me (mummy you’re ill) and proceeds to listen to my foot with her stethoscope, poke at it, shine her tiny torch on it, take my temperature and give me injections and medicine.

With the toy food we have picnics where she serves me cake and fruit and juice, or cooks soup for me. It’s amazing how many variations on this theme she can perform before she gets bored.

We play word games. We rhyme: Ingrid pingrid! Maja paja! Auto pauto!. And we make up words: Jag tar mina höstskor. Höstskor… grässkor! molnskor! bajsskor! (“I’ll take my autumn shoes. Autumn shoes… grass shoes! cloud shoes! poop shoes!”)

She’s also started making things up.

I: Look mum, I have no hands.
H: Oh, no hands! Where did the hands go?
I: They’re in the cloud.
H: What will the cloud do with your hands?
[etc]
I: I got my hands back now.

While it was still summer, we spent many afternoons at the beach. Ingrid got to splash and jump and carry buckets of water around, and swim with her arm floats. After a few times our beach outings settled into a fixed pattern, and the process itself was as important to Ingrid as the actual swimming. The picnic food, and the stuff we’d pass when cycling to and from the beach, and of course the ice cream.

The ice cream kiosk at the beach sells nice scoop ice cream, not just the cheap-tasting pre-wrapped kind. We ate some every time we were there. Outside of the beach season we’ve had a rule that we only eat ice cream on weekends. This Saturday Ingrid selected an ice cream for herself at the supermarket, but left most of it – I don’t think she liked the taste much, after having tried the good stuff.

PS: This evening while brushing her teeth I spotted tooth #17 making its way out.

Most of this month was happy and contented. But suddenly something changed, and the last few days have been less than fun. For a few hours everything is OK, and then suddenly Ingrid is unhappy about just about everything. I say it’s time to eat. She cries “I don’t want to eat!” I say “OK, you don’t have to eat.” She cries “But I want to eat!” I say, “You can eat or not eat, whichever you want.” She cries “I don’t want anything!” (“Ma ei taha mitte midagi!”) Even things I know she wants and likes get the same response. I’m sure it’s a phase, but I sure do hope it’s a brief one. Or perhaps it’s the heat.

Half of the month was spent in Estonia. And the experience did wonders to Ingrid’s language skills. At first she would mostly speak Swedish, and then be reminded by people around her that they didn’t understand her, after which she would try to repeat herself in Estonian, and I would help her out. After a week she was speaking Estonian almost all the time (only forgetting where she was first thing in the morning) and fluently. She now speaks Estonian more freely, has a bigger vocabulary and better grammar, and overall a more Estonian pattern (word order, sentence structure etc) when she speaks Estonian.

Our vacation in Estonia was also fun because she had playmates almost every day. Two of my childhood friends both have kids who are just a few months older than Ingrid. One of them lives in the building across the street from my father’s place, so we spent a lot of time together. Katariina may be only a few months older, but she’s more than a few months ahead of Ingrid, so it was an inspiring experience for Ingrid. She learned to play doctor, and shopping. She now has a doctor’s bag of her own, and has used it every day I think.

Both children had birthday parties while we were in Estonia, so we’ve also had a lot of pretend birthday parties, with a wooden chocolate cake and lots of fruit. Mostly it’s Ingrid’s birthday but sometimes I get to have one, too. The cake is one of those where the pieces attach to each other with velcro, and you can cut them apart with a little wooden knife. Ingrid’s long been fascinated with cutting (probably because she sees me do it so often) so she’s really enjoyed that. And today we discovered that a ripe watermelon is perfect for cutting practice, with a table knife.

Another favourite game is what I think of as the contrarian game, or the lying game. We might be looking at a page in a children’s book with all the different colours. She then points at each one and says “Black. Black. Black.” about all of them. Or points at red and says “green”, and so on (and if she accidentally says the right colour, such as “red” for a red thing, she stops, thinks, and “corrects” herself). Or perhaps we’re looking at pictures of animals, and all of them are cats. Or we’re eating dinner and she starts asking us: “Is that milk? Is that milk? Is that milk?” about everything but the milk.

Tartu had a lot of good playgrounds, with far more interesting stuff than we find at playgrounds around here, especially many more kinds of structures for climbing and balancing. Ingrid did some climbing but was more interested in balancing and swinging. She found a few swings that were just the right height for her to hang on, so she did that a lot. Plus she stomped a lot of sand cakes.

Ingrid’s interest in story books has declined somewhat. Instead she’s been much more interested in counting, and in learning to read. There was a lovely animal book at my father’s place, which became a counting toy for Ingrid. “Let’s count the antelopes. Now the zebras. Now the gnus. Now the elephants.” And so on. She’s good at counting now, rarely skips objects, even when they’re in an irregular bunch. Only sometimes does her finger move faster than her mouth, so while she touches, say, seven animals she only counts six.

The same book had headings with big bold capital letters, which we would read over and over again. Ingrid knows all the common letters but cannot make a word out of them, so she spells the word and I tell her what word the letters make. It’s good practice; as with counting, she very rarely loses her place and can spell very long words (such as Emajõe ärikeskus) without a single mistake. Sometimes she thinks she knows the word and pretends to read it, slowly dragging her finger along the word and slowly saying the word. Occasionally it’s right and other times it’s something completely wrong.

On the housekeeping side, we have had very few potty accidents (to the tune of one per week, and then mostly due to some special circumstance). The nighttime nappy is still almost always wet (and I think that’s why she gets restless and half-wakes around 6.30 to 7 in the morning, but I’m usually too sleepy myself to remember to ask her whether she wants to go potty). But after daytime naps, it’s almost always dry, so I’ve stopped insisting on it, and just sneak a folded towel underneath her when she’s fallen asleep.

After last month’s lack of attention, I’ve been taking notes. Not only does that help me remember the things I want to write about, it also brings out the recurring, dominant themes: language and social interactions.

Language, then. On the grammar front, she’s got a grip on first- and second-person pronouns now. She figured out du and jag in Swedish first (last month already, but I forgot to mention it then) but kept saying them the other way round in Estonian. Then a month later she got the Estonian pronouns, too. Third person pronouns are tricky – it and they are not a problem, but she mixes up she and he (in Swedish only, because Estonian doesn’t differentiate by gender). Part of the cause is, we think, that she isn’t really able to tell the difference between boys and girls, women and men, which means that our labelling people as he and she must seem pretty random to her. The other day we asked her “is X a boy or a girl” about other children in her nursery group, and the answers were near random. Same with the staff – she deemed Sandra and Malin to be mummies, Åsa to be a daddy but Niclas a mummy.

She manages to correctly use a suprising variety of verb forms in Estonian. In Swedish there are more irregular verbs to be grappled with, and it’s clear that she’s aware of the complexities. Sometimes she starts to use a regular pattern on an irregular verb (“jag sågde”) and then gets stuck because she hears or feels that it’s not quite right. Plural forms of nouns have similar traps: bokar instead of böcker, stenor vs. stenar.

Ingrid still likes word/sound games. The neighbour girls have the whole series of Mitt ABC and Ingrid always wants me to read those when we visit them. (There’s one book for each letter of the alphabet, and each book has stuff with that letter.) The books focus on first letters, but when Ingrid herself gets to decide, the important letter of each word is the strong, stressed sound. It’s not R as in raamat but A as in raamat, and O as in kook, Y as in cykel, and M as in emme.

Sometimes she also plays with songs – takes something like Idas visa (Lille katt, lille katt…) and makes it into Lille mus, or Nyss så träffa’ jag en krokodil might become Nyss så träffa’ jag en elefant. The changes are small, often just switching one animal for another.

The social aspects of language are becoming important to her. She’s picking up polite phrases and formulaic expressions, and using them a lot. “Jag tar gärna lite bröd”, “nej tack”, “jag tänkte titta på film”, “jag tycker att det är varmt idag”, “jag ska visa dig en sak”, “hej då vi ses imorgon”. (“I would like some bread”, “no thanks”, “I thought I’d watch a movie”, “I think it’s warm today”, “let me show you something”, “bye-bye see you tomorrow”.) It’s nice (and novel) to hear her ask politely, but at the same time slightly scary to think about how much our everyday behaviour affects her manners, already at this early age.

A few of these things she says without fully understanding them, but in general she’s good at using social language, asking or telling people things – language as a social tool, rather than just a way to express wants (“more milk!”) or comment on her environment (“there’s a big puddle”). There’s a fair amount of talk about yours, mine, and borrowing: “can I borrow your bucket”, “this is mine, you can’t take it, but you can borrow it”.

Unlike both Eric and myself, Ingrid is an extrovert, a very social creature. (It’s hard to remember but I think I was the same at her age. The introversion came later.) She’s never happier than when there are people around her, and she is bored when there aren’t any. Every day when I go to pick her up from nursery, one of the first things she says is “today we will go play with Julia” (the younger neighbour girl).

I: Jag vill leka med Julia.
H: Peab Julialt küsima, kas ta tahab meiega mängida.
I till J: Julia, vill du leka med mig idag?
J: ja
I till H: Julia vill leka med mig idag!
H: Julia on selle üle rõõmus.
I: Jag är också glad! Jag är jätteglad!

I: I want to play with Julia.
H: We have to ask Julia if she wants to play with us.
I to J: Julia, do you want to play with me today?
J: Yes
H: Julia is happy about this.
I: I am also happy! I am very happy!

A lot of the time she still imitates or plays side by side rather than together with others. Whenever there are other kids at the playground, she trails them, and wants to do whatever they do. If they climb the jungle gym, she wants to do the same. If their mom catches them when they come down the slide, she wants to be caught, too. If they swing on a big kid swing, she will, too. If the other kid is a year and a half older than her and stands up on the bird’s nest swing, she will try that, too, even though she’s kind of scared.

Other popular activities: making sand cakes together with me and then happily stomping on them, one by one. “Now they are ready, now I can stomp?” Balancing on kerbstones, ledges, planks etc. Cycling on her tricycle. (The balance bike was quickly discarded – “It’s difficult! I cannot do it.” Perhaps next summer.)

Drawing, too: now it’s not just me drawing for her all the time. She’s more willing to draw herself, and she now draws actual things, not just scribbles and swirls. Sometimes she tries to copy something that an adult has drawn for her, but other times she comes up with her own ideas. Mostly they are relatively shapeless things, but she says they are balls, clouds, snakes, or hot dogs or cupboards. She’s also bolder in her drawings, more likely to draw huge balls that cover the entire piece of A2-size paper. (We bought a roll of cheap paper from IKEA for the easel, and often cut pieces from it for drawing, too.) When I draw for her, she likes to choose the colour for me. I get to draw a lot of purple and pink stuff. When I’ve finished, she likes to colour in my drawing.

Loose facts:

• Does not like jokes about eating her up. Sometimes she just looks scared/worried, and sometimes she says “No, you cannot eat me!”
• Likes Bendicks Bittermints, dark chocolate, and liquorice.
• Does not like having her hair brushed, but no longer objects to brushing teeth, at all.

This month seems to have passed without me noticing. I’m sure Ingrid has changed and grown, but somehow I haven’t had time to pay much attention to it. (Exactly the sort of thing that these blog posts were supposed to help avoid…)

There were a few hard weeks when Ingrid seemed moody and unhappy. Nothing was fun, for anyone. But that now seems to have passed and we’re back to the normal flow of things.

We also had a few weeks when all her potty skills had disappeared, and she went through three changes of clothing every day. Puddles after puddles after puddles. Some days she didn’t even notice what was going on. Other days I could see her getting restless, ask her if she needed to pee. She’d reply NO, very emphatically, and then 10 seconds later pee all over the floor. After a while we started insisting that she go to the potty when we saw that she needed it, and that worked marginally better. And just as we were giving up hope of improvement, and almost starting to think of nappies again, the tide seems to have turned. Today she managed to get through all day in one pair of trousers (until the very last moment, when we were preparing for the night).

Toys are of less interest than ever. The only thing that she has actually played with is the toy stove, with its pots and pans and plates and plastic food. Some other toys get the occasional 5-10 minutes, but that’s it. I am no longer buying her any new toys; it’s a waste of money and effort. We read books instead, cook food together, or go to playgrounds.

Books and movies. Those are the two things she loves. Weekday evenings she gets about an hour’s worth of movie-watching, sometimes one and a half. I generally don’t limit it much because I can see that she’s tired and wouldn’t do anything more active even if I turned the movie off. Weekends we work harder at finding alternative activities: we try to leave the house so the temptation is completely removed. And when we go to Estonia this summer, I’ll be buying lots and lots of new books for her.

Balancing

She used to be so active as a baby. I wonder where that energy went? In part I think the change appears bigger than it is, because I see a more limited part of her life: tired evenings, and weekends. Still, she has definitely changed. Looking back to last summer, I remember us running in the garden, kicking the big beach ball up and down the slopes. Now when I invite her to kick the ball around together, she is usually not interested. I would like her to be more active, but there’s not much I can do. I can’t exactly force her to enjoy running around.

I do try to find physical activities for weekends – playgrounds, swimming pools, etc. Those still work: last time we went swimming, we spent two hours in the pool and only left because they were about to close. And she was working hard and actually swimming much of the time, with her little red armbands. We’ve spent two Sunday afternoons at the Mulle Meck playground in Järvastaden. (Speaking of playgrounds, Ingrid seems to have mastered the art of swinging when standing up, without me pushing her.) We’ve also bought a little Puky balance bike for her. It remains to be seen whether she enjoys that.

Letters and numbers are fun. She can count to 20 in both Estonian and Swedish (although she tends to lose track somewhere around 16, so we often get fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, done! I think she knows some of the number symbols, too: the other day she pointed at a number two and said “two!” without any hints. She knows all the common letters, and likes to point them out. Recently she’s started to pretend that she reads: drags her finger across a chapter heading in a book and slowly says what it says. Or rather, she says the title she remembers, which is sometimes not the same thing. She goes by memory only, and doesn’t seem to look at any of the letters, even the capital letters at the beginning of names. But she is clearly intrigued by the concept of reading.

Play-do

Favourite books: Sipsik, Mattias ja mamma, Sina ja mina, mu väike karuke, and Kuula, kuula!. With both Sipsik and Mattias ja mamma she can sit through entire chapters that are several pages long, with hardly any pictures. When the pictures are too few and far between, I hold the pages so that she can see one side, where the picture is, and I can read the other side, where the story is.

Favourite movies: Kung Fu Panda, various old Mickey Mouse episodes from the 1930s and 1940s, and A Bug’s Life. All in English, so she cannot understand much, except Mickey, where the story is often very visual and quite straightforward. Karu aabits used to be interesting but gets less love now. Teletubbies are pretty much out.

Teeth: 16; no new teeth for almost a year now, I think.
Clothes size: 98, except for tight-fitting stuff where I buy 104 instead.
Shoe size: 23.

Thirty months, two and a half years. I know I keep saying that Ingrid is growing up, and of course it’s hardly news because that’s what all children do, but really I keep noticing how quickly she matures. The patterns of her movement, her facial expressions, all look more like those of an adult than those of a baby.

Life continues on a generally contented, positive path. No major upsets or mood swings. The only thing causing friction is boredom. It is becoming clearer all the time that Ingrid is a social creature, extroverted unlike both me and Eric, and loves to have people around her. She is happy at nursery, happy when we have guests or are visiting other people or at playgroup – and bored and clingy when it’s just the two of us at home.

When we spent the afternoon with Julia (her friend from nursery who lives across the street) and her sister, they played together with her toy kitchen and her balloons and the doll stroller, ran around, chased each other to the bedroom where they jumped up and down on the bed… full of energy.

On a normal weekday evening, on the other hand, Ingrid spends some time watching a movie, ideally with me keeping her company, then some time in the kitchen watching me prepare dinner or do the dishes, and then we read some. Perhaps we play a bit, together. She is totally not interested in playing with her toys on her own. For a while she enjoyed a computer game for small children, where she could make things happen by moving the mouse, but after a few weeks she lost interest, and the only thing she kept coming back to was a letter-matching game. She’s barely even interested in painting: several times now she’s told me she wants to paint, only to give up after a short while, and then spent more time washing up afterwards than she spent painting.

For doing “real” stuff is fun. Ingrid enjoyed planting bulbs and spreading fresh soil together with me. Now that it is warm outside, we go out to water the flowers, too. She’s getting good at pouring things: not just from the watering can (which doesn’t require much control, after all) but also pouring juice into her glass or cream into the saucepan. If the food is relatively solid, she’s sometimes served her own food, climbed down from the stepstool and carried her plate to the table, all on her own. With some guidance she can pour “one, two, three” measures of water into a pot, or a pinch of salt that I’ve poured onto her hand. And of course she can cut all sorts of bags and packaging, as well as herbs. Too bad all the veggies we eat tend to be crisp and crunchy and hard to cut, otherwise she could start practicing with a knife, too.

When we do play, our games tend to be small, random ones, things that we do on a whim, enjoy, and then occasionally come back to. Me pushing her over while she’s standing on the bed, which then evolves to her falling over when I barely poke her with a finger, and finally when I just point at her. Or word games: I say “ni ni ni… nina!” and she says “to to to… tool!” or “em em em… emme!”. Games with rules, where we are both supposed to do things a certain way, over and over again. But I’ve also noticed pretend play, when she picks up some invisible thing and tells me it’s peas or milk or some other thing I need to eat.

Rules are important. Rules are good, because it is easier for her to understand and accept a rule, than to accept daily negotiation. No shoes outside the hall. Teeth must be brushed every evening. Three small pieces or one large piece of candy in the afternoon when we get home, and then no more.

Speaking of candy, Ingrid has now learned to like ice cream, too. Until recently she’s enjoyed the taste but not the coldness. While we had to have rules about candy, we’ve never had to think about ice cream, because she just wasn’t interested. But now she takes tiny spoonfuls and actually eats them, and wants more. Other foods she likes just now: bell peppers, Kalles Kaviar (both long-time favourites), prunes, dates, peas, boiled eggs, bread dipped in soup.

She has learned about milk moustaches and found the concept so funny that she insists on drinking her yoghurt instead of eating it with a spoon, just so she can then show off her yoghurt moustache. Milk, by the way, becomes “coffee” when there is a spoon in the glass while she’s drinking from it.

Some practical stuff to finish this post off – less interesting to read now, but I think I will find this useful later on. Ingrid can now put on most clothes on her own, although trousers often end up backwards and shoes sometimes go on the wrong foot, and the sleeves on tight tops are difficult. On the other hand, she can manage gloves without any help at all.

Potty accidents still happen, but nowadays we almost always make it to the potty in time to catch the pee. With poo, unfortunately, making it to the potty is still the exception rather than the norm. But on the whole I have enough confidence in her potty skills to leave nappies off even when we’re going out on a longer trip, and just take the potty with us. (She doesn’t like big toilets.)

No change in sleeping habits since I reintroduced a fixed-ish bedtime. We start our evening routine around 8: brush the teeth, get a nappy on, choose a book, go to bed, maybe put the pyjamas on or maybe keep the t-shirt, read the book, fall asleep while I sit by the side of the bed. Asleep by 9, most days. Never wakes at night, now, but starts to get restless around 6 in the morning. At that point she sleepily rolls closer to me and puts a hand or a foot somewhere on my body, and goes back to sleep.

The twenty-ninth month has generally been a positive, contented, stable, routine one. There were a couple of days when everything seemed to upset Ingrid, and every little setback would be met with hysterics. But otherwise Ingrid has been happy and in a good mood most of the time.

She seems to have such a positive view of the world, such confidence that things will go her way. There’s no asking, “Can I take this?” – no, she confidently proclaims “You will have this!” or “You will eat this!” or “We can do it like this!” or whatever it is she intends to do.

She’s also becoming more aware of fun. She jokes and makes fun of things, and tells me “du narras”. She says things she knows are wrong, does things she knows are wrong, makes funny noises or funny faces. She thinks it’s hilarious to offer me her socks to eat, or to blow bubbles while drinking orange juice.

When things don’t go her way, on the other hand, she is heart-broken. I read somewhere at some point that children consistently react to adversity with either anger or sadness. Ingrid goes for sadness: tears, sobs, and then cuddles. She never hits or bites or stomps her feet or yells.

The best fix for sadness is sitting in my lap. The second best is a long hug. Sometimes it takes a while for the sadness to dissipate. She tells me “now you are happy again” and climbs down. Sometimes she then discovers that it was too early, and runs back to me and tells me “you are still sad!”. When she is pulled between wanting a hug, and wanting something else (such as going back to her movie) which is at some distance from me, she can oscillate three or four times before she is ready to let go for real.

We seem to have entered another one of those periods where toys are of no interest. When we’re at home we read books, or watch a movie, or cook dinner together, or jump and run around. Occasionally she might play a little bit with her stove and pots and pans, but not much. The only things that toys are good for is throwing: it turns out that lying on the floor and throwing soft animals at each other, as a mini pillow fight, is very funny.

Toys are important as possessions, though. There are things she almost never plays with, but when it’s time to go to bed (or time to run to the potty) she suddenly decides that she MUST have one with her. Or two, or four. She doesn’t have them for cuddling or holding (and sometimes she picks very un-cuddly things, such as a book). She just wants them to be in the bed next to her. At night it’s not too bad, but it can get irritating when she suddenly realises she needs to pee, and then decides that she cannot do it without some totally random object that she decides on because it’s closest. If that object happens to be something unwieldy, like her Wheely Bug, the trip to the bathroom can take so much time and attention that sometimes we get there too late.

Instead of playing with toys, she engages in various sorts of physical play. Jumping up and down is also a lot of fun, since we saw Jänku-Juta jump a rope. This is often accompanied by shouts of “keks! keks! keks!”. Climbing snowdrifts is fun, as well as running up and down ramps and stairs.

I get the impression that she’s become slightly more cautious in her physical activities. Sometimes she tells me “otherwise you can fall down” about something that to me seems totally safe, and wants to hold my hand. I wonder if it’s something she’s learned at nursery. Disappointing, if that’s the case.

We’ve started going swimming again, after a few months’ break. We did it a couple of times during autumn, but then Ingrid seemed to lose interest, and would ask to go home after just 20 minutes. And since the trip to the swimming pool is at least 40 minutes (and even longer if the weather is bad and we have to take the bus instead of cycling) I gave up. But a couple of weeks ago we had another go, and she enjoyed it a lot. We bought a pair of little red floaters to have around her upper arms (just like in one of the books we read), and while she didn’t use them for any floating, she was so enamoured with them that she took them to bed that night. She’s even OK with water splashing on her face again: we tried the big slides, with her sitting on my lap, and she was shouting more, more! all the time. It was even fun to watch Eric came down after us, drenching her in spray.

As usual, she is very interested in doing anything that we adults do. We go grocery shopping every afternoon after nursery, and she takes it very seriously: pushes her trolley, picks up the milk, helps me put things on the converyor belt and pack the bag. She loves pressing the buttons to call the lift or to cross the street, not so much because it’s a button to press (although that’s a part of it) but because helps us get somewhere. She almost always helps me cook dinner, and loves to help set the table. This month she’s started learning to pour her own drink (with me holding the glass, so the bottle doesn’t upset it), and to serve food. I get the impression that she’s particularly proud of setting the table and serving food, because that way she’s not just taking care of herself (which is very satisfying in itself) but also taking care of us.

The flip side is that she’s very aware of her inabilities, and very sensitive to being reminded of them. (These quotes from John Holt’s How Children Learn really resonated with me.) For example, she generally enjoys painting (well, not so much this month) but not drawing – because she knows that I can draw things that look like things, but she can’t. I haven’t shown her that I can do the same with a paintbrush. When we get out pens and paper, I draw and she watches, and guesses what I’m drawing. When I ask her to try, she says “but you cannot!” and refuses.

Language remains in focus here. Ingrid’s definitely picking up a lot of grammar now. She’s got the hang of both tense and person for verbs: mina söön, sina sööd, meie sõime, tahan süüa. She can do singular and plural forms of nouns in both Swedish and Estonian (as long as they’re not irregular) and knows that adjectives should change in accordance with the noun. In Estonian she’s learning noun cases: siin on emme, otsid emmet, annad emmele, emmega koos.

One thing she has not figured out yet is pronouns. Or rather, she can say “you” and “I” in both Swedish and Estonian – but she doesn’t understand how they work. She always says “you” about herself, and “I” about whoever she’s talking to. She seems to treat pronouns as names: “mina” is another word for “emme” and “jag” is another word for “pappa”, and “sina” and “du” is her name in Estonian and Swedish. I found it quite confusing initially, until I got used to switching viewpoints all the time.

H: Do you want to put on your boots yourself, or shall I help you?
I: You will do it.

Meaning: I can do it myself.

She comments a lot on what she’s doing, what she’s about to do, what she sees us do, how things ought to be done (“nii tehakse”, “så gör man” – “this is how it’s done”), and what she wants to do. She even comments on things she’s saying: “Du sa ’emme’” – “You said ’Mummy’”.

She expresses her wishes quite articulately now, if not particularly politely: instead of “nej inte” (“no will not”) she now says “ei taha” (“don’t want to”), and instead of “mera läsa!” (“read more”) she now tells me “üks lugu veel, ja siis aitab” (“one more story, and then it’s enough”). It’s like hearing an echo, because that’s what I tell her every evening when bedtime is approaching. Some other expressions definitely don’t come from us: “Nej, sa jag!” (“I said, no!”) must be something she’s picked up from nursery.

When there’s something she doesn’t want to do, or doesn’t want us to do, she tells us it can’t be done. I ask her to put her boots on, and she says “Du kan inte!” (“You can’t do it!”). Or, when she wants me to help her put on her leggings in the morning, and I suggest that she ask Eric instead, she tells me “Men pappa kan inte!” (“But daddy cannot do it!”). I guess she’s echoing what she’s being told all the time. When there’s something we adults don’t want her to do, we tell her she can’t do it. I try (when I remember) to say it as it is – “I don’t want you to play with this” – but I guess we still say “you cannot play with this” often enough for her to mimic it.

We count quite a lot, which is both fun and practical. I can now tell her that she gets three pieces of candy, and then we count them out together, and there’s no argument about getting more. I find that predictable, easy-to-explain rules like that work quite well with her. “I cannot carry you home because you’re too heavy. You can sit on my lap when we get home.” or “You cannot put that juice bottle in your bag. We need to go to the till first and pay for it, then you can put it in the bag.” She accepts rules.

As planned, I’ve started demanding more Estonian from her. When she talks to me in Swedish, I either say nothing, or just “hmm”, or ask her “what’s that in Estonian?”, or repeat whatever she said but in Estonian. (The choice depends on the situation, her mood, my mood, etc.) It’s worked quite well: she understands what I’m after and doesn’t mind repeating herself in Estonian. I have the impression that she is speaking more Estonian to me now spontaneously, and today at playgroup one of the mums commented on how much Estonian Ingrid is speaking.

Speaking of language, Teletubbies and Miffy have now been joined by Naksitrallid. She liked the look of the DVD box, and the sound of the word “naksitrallid”, I believe. In any case one day she wanted to see the movie. I didn’t expect her to like it at all. It’s kind of avantgarde for a children’s movie, and there’s almost no music, and some scenes should be kind of scary. But she really liked it. There’s no accounting for taste!

More physical activities include painting and play-do, and messing around with glue. I bought a pair of kids’ scissors and she’s learned to use those, better than I had expected. (And now she shouts out “You will fetch your own scissors!” whenever she sees I’m about to cut open some packaging.) She’s started practising using a butter knife and a table knife, too, but those are hard, because the butter is hard, and the food is often slippery. The dishbrush and the toilet brush are also very popular tools.

As for eating, her appetite still comes and goes in huge waves. Last week she was hardly eating anything (her breakfast might consist of three grapes and a square inch of bread). Then last Saturday she wolfed down two large pancakes for lunch and asked for more, and her appetite hasn’t waned since then.

Potty accidents keep happening at an average rate of one per day, especially in the evening. Often she can manage an entire day in nursery (or even at playgroup, including a train trip there and back) but then create a puddle or two in the evening. Frustrating, but I’m getting resigned to it and it bothers me less than it used to, even though it’s now been going on for months.

The end of breastfeeding led to an increased need for cuddling and touching. She became very fond of putting a hand on my chest, as close to my boobs as possible (meaning, as close as I would let her). Mostly it doesn’t bother me (I just remove her hand when it starts to wander too far). There was a period when she wanted to keep her hand on my chest all the time while falling asleep (and occasionally at night too), which got to be too much for me, so now my neckline is off the limits at night.

This month’s big news is that we’ve finished breastfeeding. We took it slow and easy (almost 6 weeks from decision to completion) so it wasn’t much of a struggle but Ingrid still misses it occasionally. Early December I cut out breastfeeding from the afternoon we’re-home-from-nursery cuddle session. Then a week later I told her that she would not get to nurse in the evening when she goes to bed. Then in mid-December she was sick with a high fever, and so miserable that I relented and let her nurse in the evenings again. Around Christmas I took that away again. Once that happened, she also became less interested in nursing in the morning. Partly because nursing once a day was not enough to keep the supply up – and partly because she was happy and rested each morning because she wasn’t woken by an alarm.

Food goes in the mouth!

One day I told her that there was no more milk, and she accepted it pretty well. “Ingrid eaten it! In the mouth! And then the tummy!” she told me. She still talks about milk and boobs almost every day, though. Some days she asks to nurse and I remind her that there’s no more milk. She confirms: “Piim sai otsa. I Ingrids magen!” (“Milk all gone. In Ingrid’s tummy!”) Other days she just tells us, randomly in the middle of some totally unrelated conversation: “Pappa ingen tiss. Ingrid ingen tiss. Bara emme tiss, bara emmel on piim!” (“Daddy no boobs. Ingrid no boobs. Only mummy boobs, only mummy has milk!”)

That last quote is pretty representative of her liberal mixing of Swedish and Estonian. When talking to me, she almost always uses both languages in one sentence, even when she knows all the necessary words in one of the languages. Some words have always tended to always come out in Swedish, even when she’s generally speaking Estonian, and vice versa. But in general Swedish now dominates. She always speaks Swedish to herself, and often to me, too. I prompt her – “What’s that in Estonian?” – and generally she’s able to find the words, but in the next sentence she’s back to Swedish.

Now that she’s generally speaking well and confidently, I’m starting to sometimes ignore her when she speaks Swedish to me, waiting for her to repeat in Estonian. When she was younger I was happy when she spoke any language, but now I think she’s got a solid enough foundation, and I can be a bit more demanding.

It doesn’t help that she’s still very fond of TV (Teletubbies has now been complemented by Miffy) and spends about an hour in front of the screen every evening. That’s all in Swedish, which means we spend much less time reading Estonian books or singing Estonian songs. We’ve also lost our bedtime stories: she now prefers to lie quietly in her bed, next to me. Every evening I ask if she wants a story, but no, she wants me to lie down. Which means even less Estonian exposure.

And the books affect her language a lot. She’s often quoting Miffy or Alfons or something. Miffy is actually quite good for this, because unlike Teletubbies this movie uses proper grownup language. I think that (plus the novelty value) is why she now prefers it to Teletubbies.

When she isn’t quoting movies or books, a lot of her conversation has been small stories about sequences: of things that have happened, or things that tend to happen, or things that she intends to do.

Du ramla i sängen. Och så gjorde ont och du var ledsen. Och så hüüad Emme! ja emme tuleb. Siis emme sülle ja on parem.
You fell down in the bed. And it hurt and you were sad. And then you shout Mummy! and mummy comes. Then sit in mummy’s lap and it’s better.

or

Emme gå till jobbet. Pappa och Ingrid gå till dagis, och sen pappa gå till jobbet. Emme [???] eftermiddag [???] dagis och sen emme och Ingrid hem.
Mummy go to work. Daddy and Ingrid go to nursery, and then daddy go to work. Mummy [???] afternoon [???] nursery and then mummy and Ingrid home.

Ingrid’s current favourite activities apart from TV are jigsaws (still going strong), hide-and-seek, and cooking. She got a toy stove for Christmas, together with an assortment of pots, pans, spoons, and toy food. Apart from jigsaws, that’s the toy she uses most, by far. The toy food is a set of sandwich parts – bread, slices of egg, cheese, ham, tomatoes etc – all with small pieces of velcro so she can assemble a sandwich and play with it without it falling apart. And the sandwiches are just large enough to fit nicely in the pots and pans.

Food not done yet

She potters around with her stove, making hot sandwiches: assembles several sandwiches, puts them in pots, then into the oven. Closes the oven, tells us that the food is not ready yet, and then reports that it’s time to check if the food is hot, and finally serves it to us or to her doll.

There seems to be no end to Ingrid’s interest in jigsaw puzzles, so we keep adding to her collection. Occasionally she still plays with her cube puzzles, too, but one’s almost too easy and the other one’s a bit too hard. She’s more interested in the jigsaws, anyway – and becoming really proficient, because she gets lots of practice.

She likes re-doing the same puzzles, unlike adults who generally do a puzzle once and then put it away and go on to the next one. With Ingrid it’s the opposite: the first time is less fun, and she needs a lot of support. Then she learns what the picture looks like, and how to look at each piece, and plays with it much more independently. After a while she knows the puzzle by heart, but that doesn’t diminish her enjoyment. She still likes assembling the farmyard picture, which was her first larger jigsaw (20 pieces), and she’s had it for almost two months. Some evenings she can assemble it four or five times, turning it over to begin again as soon as she’s finished. I think it takes her no more than a few minutes now.

Surrounded by puzzles

But she does more than just memorise the puzzles. She has now learned the difference between edge pieces, corner pieces and middle pieces. She’s learned how to try different orientations when a piece should fit but doesn’t. And she’s learned to actually think about what she’s doing. It used to be that she grabbed a rather random piece and tried to put it somewhere random. If it didn’t fit, she tried something else. Now she looks at the puzzle, sees that she needs a piece of a flag, and looks for it – or takes a piece, checks if it’s something she recognises, and then tries to find a place for it. Great cognitive training! Plus it’s patience training, too: “Det är svårt! Den passar inte! Prova en annan bit.” she says to herself. (“It’s hard! It won’t fit! Try another piece.”) Her newest, largest puzzle has 48 pieces and last time it took her three or four evenings to finish it.

When she’s in the mood for something slightly more actively social, we play hide-and-seek (and it’s real hide-and-seek now, not like last month). It seems to be a favourite game at nursery, too: several days now when I’ve asked her what they’ve done, she tells me they’ve played hide-and-seek. At home at least, it’s almost always her counting and me hiding. She very much likes counting to ten, and she likes finding me, but she hasn’t quite understood how to hide, and mostly looks a bit confused when we try and switch roles.

Hide-and-seek actually has three roles, not two: in addition to the hider and the seeker, there’s the hinter. Ingrid’s patience and especially her imagination are still quite limited, so if she doesn’t find me within a minute or two, she gets confused and gives up. She hasn’t figured out the concept of looking again, more carefully: if she doesn’t see me at first glance, she concludes I can’t be there. That’s where the hinter comes in. “Could emme be in the bathroom? Go look in the bathroom again. Not there? Go look in the bedroom,” Eric says. That way I can find a slightly more interesting hiding place than just round the corner, and the game lasts a bit longer. When it’s just the two of us playing, it’s almost enough for me to go to another room, and some part of me needs to be immediately visible (like a foot sticking out from behind the sofa). When we have Eric as a hinter (or vice versa) I can hide under a sheet in the laundry room, etc.

Speaking of counting, she’s now also understood for real how to use numbers to count things. For quite a number of months she’s been able to tell me when there are two of something, but not beyond that, even though she could name the numbers beyond two. I think it’s because she could see “two” at a glance, without needing to count. Now she actually counts things, pointing at them with a finger. Occasionally the finger goes too fast and she touches two items for one count, and sometimes she loses track and skips an item, so quite often she reports having four fingers on a hand, but she’s definitely grasped the general principle. (For a short while the fingers were often six: she’d count them – one, two, three, four, five – and then loudly announce, SIX!)

It may sound like we spend all our time with pedagogical exercises and educational activities. We don’t. It’s just that Ingrid enjoys learning. One of us thinks “wouldn’t it be interesting to see what she thinks of X”, and we discover that she really enjoys X, and in the process of playing with X she learns stuff. One day Eric thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to see if she can understand the difference between left and right. It turns out that she could, so now she knows that as well. Other times we discover that she doesn’t enjoy X at all, so we forget about it and do something else.

When we need something more energetic, we wrestle and tumble and twirl. She’s too heavy for me to swing her by holding onto her hands, but I can still twirl her around that way. Or she runs in circles around me while holding my hands. Her goal seems to be to make herself as dizzy as possible, without falling down, which is why she wants to hold on to me: otherwise she reaches the falling-down stage much faster. My tolerance for twirling has improved massively over the last half-year. Still, she could keep going far longer than me, and then collapse in a heap of giggles.

She’s developing a giggly sort of sense of humour. I’m sure she’s had a sense of humour for a while, but it has been quiet and understated. Now there’s a lot of bubbly laughter, cheeky faces, and general monkeying around. She enjoys tickling, and making funny noises and faces, and silly games like me pretending to eat her toes and fingers.

I don’t think we’ve done anything majorly new or interesting this month. Just the same old stuff. So this month I’ll focus a bit more on life’s basic parts – the kinds of things that I haven’t written much about for a while, and won’t be able to remember when I look back at this time 5 years from now.

Slouching in front of Teletubbies

Eating. Ingrid eats surprisingly well and with surprising skill. I’m pleased to say that she eats almost all kinds of food: starchy stuff, dairy and eggs, pulses and vegetables, and since I’ve heard no comments from nursery, probably meat too. She is fond of sweet stuff of course: she picks the raisins out of her buns, loves to drink juice with her breakfast, and wants a lot of jam on her pancakes. She licks the butter of the bread, and eats sour cream with a spoon.

Food tastes especially good when we’re preparing it. She’d much rather eat the ingredients while I’m cooking than the finished meal. Canned beans in particular – often she eats so much from the jar that she’s full by the time I’m done cooking.

I think she’s also started to pay attention to the shape of food. She sees shapes in her half-eaten pieces of bread, likes to eat “butterfly pasta” (farfalle), and prefers heart-shaped gingerbread cookies to round ones. Just a matter of time until she starts building porridge mountains and milk lakes.

The amount she eats varies a lot. Sometimes I wonder how she can possibly subsist on the tiny amounts she eats. But just now she’s come out of a major eating phase when she ate twice her normal portions, with no more than 3 hours between meals. Nevertheless she is much slimmer now than ever before (except as newborn). Not a skinny girl by any means, but not the little sumo wrestler she used to be.

Sleeping. Back in June it looked like she might be giving up naps but that reversed and she now naps every day again. Sometimes she objects, but when I go to the bedroom she’d rather join me than play on her own. Once we’re there she’s happy to lie down with me, and soon after that she falls asleep. The evening bedtime routine takes longer. I tell her a story and then give her a cuddle, and then wait about 15 minutes for her to actually fall asleep. Not too bad, all things considered: it takes a while but there’s no struggle.

Once she’s gone to sleep she sleeps well and soundly. Occasionally she kicks off her covers and I need to pull them over her again. Around 5:30 or 6:00 she shifts into lighter sleep, and any movement in the room will wake her. She sort of goes back to sleep when I lay a hand on her, but neither of us gets much proper sleep after that. I imagine she would sleep longer in the morning if she slept in a room of her own, but there’s no such room to be had right now.

Potty. Ingrid’s nappy-free most of her awake time now, but still wears a nappy for naps, and when we’re out on town and cannot always get to a potty fast (e.g. on the train). Sometimes she tells me she needs to go potty, and sometimes I ask her and she says yes. The occasional accidents happen when I suspect she needs to go, but she says no for some reason – probably because she has more interesting stuff to do. And she almost always ends up pooping in her panties. I know she knows when it’s about to happen, but for some reason she doesn’t want to do it on the potty.

Helping me pin a curtain hem

Skills. She picks her own clothes every morning and generally puts them on herself. She now likes dresses and skirts – but unfortunately only has one of each. She used to have no interest in clothes and would wear whatever I dressed her in, and I haven’t quite caught up with this new interest in clothes. (I tried to find more skirts but couldn’t find anything in the shops that looked good and seemed comfortable.)

She knows how the microwave oven works and how we cook food. She hands me stuff while I’m cooking, measures and pours water for me (with quite a lot of guidance from me). Her favourite task, apart from eating the ingredients, is to put veggies in the saucepan for cooking. She knows that the stove and the saucepan are hot, and that the water must be boiling (must have “big bubbles”) before we put the food in. And then we wait until the knob on the timer reaches the little O and makes “rrring”, and then the food is done.

Language. Swedish is definitely gaining the upper hand. Whenever Ingrid talks to herself, it’s almost always in Swedish. I still always speak Estonian to her, and she mostly responds in Estonian, too, although Swedish words sneak in quite often. A losing battle.

She can mostly keep apart the words, but grammar is harder. She often mixes the two: “en hobune” – one (Swedish) horse (Estonian), and “juurde emme saapad” – next to mummy’s boots, Estonian words but Swedish word order, and even “på laua peal” – on (Swedish) table on (Estonian).

I think she’s close to figuring out pronouns now. She talks of herself in 2nd person (du springer – you are running, sa tahad juua – you want to drink) because that’s what she hears from the adults around her. Sometimes even in 3rd person – I guess she hears how the nursery teachers talk about other children. But I get the feeling that she knows it’s not quite right, and I’ve started to say things like “Ingrid says ’I am hungry’” rather than saying “you are hungry” to make the distinction clear.

She understands simple questions (what, who, where) but she doesn’t ask any herself. She can ask “Kus on Ingrid?” (where is Ingrid?) when she wants me to play hide and seek with her, but she’s repeating a phrase she’s heard me use, rather than asking the question herself. Likewise she can say “Mis see on?” when she wants me to guess what sort of shape she sees in her biscuit, but when she really wants to know the name of some thing, she says “Den!” (“that!”) in a demanding voice instead.

Recently I’ve started asking her what she did at nursery and sometimes I actually got coherent answers from her. She’s told me that they’ve sung Happy Birthday for Elin, another girl at nursery, and that they’ve played, and that she didn’t like Ahmed because he hurt her. Quite often the most important thing for her is to tell me who was there and who wasn’t.

We still read and sing quite a lot, even though an hour of each evening is consumed by Teletubbies. We go to an Estonian playgroup every other week, and spend about 40 minutes singing, and they spend some time singing every morning at nursery too. She may sit and stare mutely while she’s there, but she often sings the songs later at home. Now her singing clearly has a melody, and she can sing several simpler songs from beginning to end. Some that she hasn’t heard for a while get abbreviated to the most important parts: “Lilla bocken Bruse… Alla bockar Bruse… i skogen!”

Last month I mentioned puzzles, and Triin told me that her son, who’s a few months older than Ingrid, can manage a real jigsaw puzzle with help. Eric got a 16-piece wooden jigsaw (with farm animals) for Ingrid, and we both guessed that it would probably be suitable in a few months time. It turns out that we severely underestimated both her interest and ability. She’s played with it every single day I think, often putting it together several times in a row. Initially she needed a lot of guidance but now she can do it all on her own. It’s got a frame to guide her, which helps a lot, but mostly she does it by memory. “Horse piece… here. Sheep. Cow piece… here.”

Following the leader

She’s actually played with both the jigsaw and her Duplo set all on her own a few times, but generally she still spends very little time on her own. She remembers and likes to re-play the same games with me. When we build with Duplo, we don’t just build: we build a “snake” or a “wall” or a “house for Bu and Bä” (two of her soft toys). And whenever we build a house for Bu and Bä, it’s always for those two toys and no others.

We’ve played hide-and-seek, which means that she crawls in under the table and tells me “Where is Ingrid?” and I’m then supposed to go looking for her while loudly commenting – “Is Ingrid in the oven? No! Is Ingrid on the step stool? No!”. Sometimes we play follow-the-leader where we both lie on the floor and kick, or stretch one leg towards the ceiling, or “cycle” with our legs, etc. She also likes running, jumping up and down, twirling until she’s so dizzy she cannot stand straight, and tumbling around on the floor with me. She’s not a climber though: I never find her climbing on the sofa or even the low table.