Sports is taking up more space in Ingrid’s life again. After she quit riding in autumn, she wasn’t getting much exercise apart from sports class at school. Now she does disco dancing on Wednesdays and swims with me on Sundays, and tells me she wants to add another sport.

Perhaps it is a virtuous spiral – doing sports again reminds her how good it can feel, gives her more energy, etc. Or perhaps it’s partly due to me setting a good example by exercising regularly again.

She really enjoys the dancing. It suits her so well: there’s pop music, there’s dancing, there is a group of other kids – and there’s no competitive pressure. She practices at home between classes and talks excitedly about the end of term show they are already planning.

Swimming with me is not quite as much fun as disco but still good. She is taking it more and more seriously, setting goals for herself to swim this many lengths in the time we have.

Sports is one of her favourite subjects at school as well. Really she enjoys them all, but the best ones are sports, arts and woodworking. Theatre or film-making would come out tops if it was a subject.

She talks about making Youtube videos, mostly inspired by the Minecraft videos she watches, and is experimenting a bit with making movies on the Ipad.

Favourite reading materials: Kalle Anka of course; Svenska Dagbladet Junior (a newspaper for kids); Diary of a wimpy kid, fantasy-themed books.

Random stuff:
She doesn’t think she will have any kids, because they take too much time.
She forgets to brush her hair and is careless when she does brush, so every few days I grab her and brush out big tangles. She cares about what she wears but not so much about how she looks.
She organized the apps on her Ipad in colour order; then reorganized them alphabetically.
She has been fasting from sugary snacks during Lent. It’s not so difficult day-to-day but temptations such as cafés (or waffle houses on the ski slopes) make it hard, and she is counting down days to the end of the fast.

Ingrid continues to cook dinner once a week and enjoys it. She likes both the cooking itself, and the responsibility of it. Plus she gets to choose what she gets to eat for dinner. As usual, she enjoys experiencing new things – she has cooked a different meal each time rather than repeating any favourites.

She says she wants more responsibilities, so she has less free time, because she doesn’t know what to do with it. (That’s my interpretation of it at least.) She fills every spare minute with Minecraft or Youtube, and when her computer time is up, drawing and reading. Not a single moment of doing nothing.

And then when it’s bedtime she discovers she wants to plan her dress-up costume for the upcoming disco, needs to cut her toenails, etc. She keeps her brain so full of other stuff, so anxious to avoid any boredom, that she never has time to remember these things during the day.

Drawing might be emerging as a new hobby. She often draws Minecraft-themed stuff. Sometimes it’s pencils on paper; sometimes digitally on the iPad. Somehow she found ibisPaint, an app that allows you not only to draw things, but to see what others have drawn using the app, and how they did it. So it builds in a social aspect (which Ingrid loves of course) and makes it easy and fun for her to learn to draw better.

With all these sedentary activities and no more sports after she quit riding, I thought she was getting too little exercise and asked her to pick a new activity. Now she’s started doing disco dancing once a week. She seemed to feel unsure while she was there, but afterwards said she loved it. We’ll see.

I try to get her out and moving on weekends too. We did Friskis & Svettis together twice, which was sort of OK but didn’t exactly get standing ovations. This weekend we went swimming instead: while Adrian is at swim school the main pool is closed for the general public but the swim school staff told us it was OK for us to use it during the lesson. That’s an excellent solution for Ingrid: she quite likes swimming, diving etc but gets stressed when the swim lanes are crowded and others swim into her, or she veers off course and swims into someone else’s path.

Least favourite activity: homework.

Ingrid spends a lot of time with friends. She stays at school (or after school care, rather) as long as possible, getting home at five. Then she somehow fills that endless hour until dinner with Kalle Anka and Adrian’s company. After dinner she goes straight to her room for Minecraft and Skype with her friends.

She loves her new room. Just around Christmas her new loft bed arrived. We added a desk chair and a few lamps from IKEA, and she is very happy with the result. And of course her new laptop added the final touch.

Now that she spends more time there, Adrian sometimes feels lonely in the living room and goes upstairs to hang out with her. So while the room barely got used when it was the kids’ room, now that it is Ingrid’s room, both kids spend more time there.

All this Minecrafting means that Ingrid spends a lot of time sitting in the sofa or behind her desk. She is getting way too little exercise in my opinion. They only get one hour per week of gym class at school which is definitely not enough for a kid her age. She couldn’t really come up with any sports she wanted to do, but dance seemed at least kind of fun, so she’s now signed up for a weekly dance class. I’m thinking of taking her along to Friskis & Svettis on weekends as well.

Those sessions might not be super exciting in and of themselves, but the fact that she would be attending adult workout sessions might tip the scale. She likes that grown-up feeling and has been talking quite a lot about feeling “older” recently. She’s picking clothes and hairdos that look “less childish”, for example.

Ingrid got a chance to feel quite grown-up when she cooked dinner the other day. She’s helped me with dinner on a few occasions before. Those potato gratins for example… Both kids love potato gratin but I’m often not so excited when they ask for it on a weekday night, because of all the time-consuming peeling and chopping. Ingrid helps out so she can get one of her favourite foods. She also likes flipping pancakes.

This time is different. We redistributed some chores here at home and one of her new duties is to cook dinner once a week, on Thursdays. This Thursday’s meal was corn fritters. It’s not just for fun any more. It’s a responsibility, which makes her feel grown and important.

She hasn’t made anything like corn fritters before and the recipe was in an English-language cookbook as well, so she needed a fair bit of guiding and hand-holding, but she did all the actual work.

A totally unrelated sign of growing up: she no longer chooses animate movies ahead of “real” ones. That used to be a strong criterion for her; non-animated movies just weren’t any fun. When it was her turn to pick a movie for Friday night, she chose Night at the museum (with Diary of a wimpy kid as the runner-up).

And a third one: she has started to read a newspaper. Dagens Nyheter, the leading Swedish daily paper, publishes a weekly newspaper for kids, DN Junior. Ingrid found one somewhere and immediately said it was a lot more interesting than Kamratposten (a kids’ lifestyle magazine) because it had actual news in it.

The best and most important thing that happened this month was this weekend’s laser tag game. Ingrid had a very small birthday party, a sleepover with just a few friends. She wanted a big one as well where she could invite all the girls in her class, but we said that one party was enough. So we agreed on a compromise – she wouldn’t have a second party, but she would get to invite all the girls for a game of laser tag. Christmas messed up our planning so the event didn’t happen until now.

Favourite book: Harry Potter. No, she hasn’t suddenly started reading real books – she still only reads comic books. But Eric reads it for her at night and she loves it.

Just a few photos this month.

At nine years old, Ingrid has clearly outgrown the “child” stage and is now a pre-teen. She does not play with toys; she plays Minecraft.

Minecraft and Skype are her favourite “toys”. The center point of her evening is the time from after dinner to just after eight that she spends playing Minecraft with her friends while talking to them on Skype. Mini-games and parkour runs and servers and collaborative building and whatnot.

She’d been Skyping with her best friend M for a while, but recently she got in touch on Skype with other friends and now they’re a whole gang who hang out together most evenings, and a big chunk of each weekend as well.

A number of those friends are boys (but not all of them). It seems the kids are in a sweet spot now. They’re past the age when boys don’t play with girls because girls have girl games and boys have boy games – now they have shared interests again. (Or perhaps it’s the all-uniting gender-crossing power of Minecraft, who knows.) But they’re still in that innocent age when they can just play together with no embarrassment. Ingrid just asked today if she could have a sleepover at a boy’s home this weekend.

When she’s not playing Minecraft, she reads Kalle Anka and plays with friends, or hangs out with them. Several times now she has gone to the movies together with a friend, with no adult company. They’ve even had restaurant lunch on their own. It makes her feel grown up and competent.

I like the fact that she now uses the computer to do something, especially something that is both creative and social, rather than just watching Youtube videos. I count “screen hours” much less strictly when I know she’s Minecrafting. (That one Saturday when she was online with her friends from when she got up until 1 o’clock in the afternoon was the best weekend ever, she said.)

Still, she needs a set cutoff time, because she cannot stop otherwise. When she plays, she doesn’t notice the time, nor any signals from her body. In the evening we make her quit early enough that she has time to get the game out of her brain before bedtime – and also time enough to discover that she is actually hungry and needs an evening snack.

That deafness to her own body can reach astounding proportions. At a sleepover party last weekend she slept about 6 hours, which is about 3 hours short of what she needs. Then she went to the movies with a friend. When she got home in the afternoon, it was obvious that she was ready to collapse – emotionally fragile, close to tears about just about everything, no energy for anything. And yet she insisted that she was not tired, and she would never fall asleep even if she tried! And she seemed to fully believe it herself. Five minutes after she lay down on the sofa just to rest a bit, she was fast asleep.

She is surprisingly good at managing other parts of her life – parts that require planning and foresight, rather than listening to her body. She packs her own stuff for school every day, plans her homework for the week and actually remembers to do it. More than I did at 9 years of age, I’m pretty sure.

I have a nine-year-old. A pre-teen, I guess. Soon she will be a teenager and before you know it she’ll be eighteen and moving out!

She and two of her friends had a birthday party together, with a sleepover. Pizza, disco, movie, sleepover, ice cream and candy… And a lot of discussions. The girls created the invitation together in Wordpad, and it took them forever at least an hour. Not because they had difficulty with Wordpad but because every detail had to be discussed and every choice made together. Which is very democratic but also very inefficient. The same happened on the morning of their sleepover: they spent so much time discussing what to play, that they ended up having barely any time to actually play together.

Peers and their opinions matter quite a lot to Ingrid. She’s concerned about sticking out too much, especially in ways that would lead to questions. Questions are uncomfortable. I’ve noticed on a few occasions that when she’s upset, she tries to hide it from others. And if a classmate notices and comes by to ask what’s up, Ingrid says nothing and leaves instead.

She compares herself to others. She is very aware that she is the shortest one in her class, and shorter than some kids who are one or even two years below her. She is tougher and less girly than some of the others.

She is aware of interactions between her peers – not just who plays with whom, but who is difficult to get along with. She knows who doesn’t get along with whom, and took that into account when planning the invitations for the birthday party: one of her best friends can be somewhat abrasive and stubborn so Ingrid didn’t invite her, because she didn’t want to have any disagreements and fights during the party.

She is not quite as aware of her own behaviour towards other… She likes/needs/wants to prove Adrian wrong when she catches him echoing something we say, without really knowing what he’s talking about. Ingrid may say that she really hates X, and Adrian says he also hates X. “Do you even know what X is? Well then tell me!”

Ingrid mostly accepts rules and musts now, without more than token grumbling – from iPad time limits to twice-weekly hair washing. But at the same time I notice small secrets and lies: telling me she has washed her hands when she clearly hasn’t, or sneaking her iPad into her room when she’s not supposed to. I’ve been mostly letting these pass because they’ve been rare, as far as I know, and about minor things – small acts of rebellion and independence. Hopefully they’re not the beginning of a bigger issue. When confronted, she either pretends like nothing – “I did wash my hands but if you want I can wash them again” or stomps off in a sulk.

She drowns her sorrows in Minecraft and YouTube, anaesthetises unpleasant feelings and situations by distracting herself with watching YouTube clips. In Minecraft she’s started exploring public servers and their minigames, e.g. Mineplex and Hypixel.

Favourite word: YOLO, still – used in all sorts of suitable and unsuitable contexts, and as a general interjection of joy and happiness, sort of like “yeah!!!” Also she generally likes to experiment with an American teenager voice, all drawl and “yeah man”.

After a long while of declining interest, she quit riding this month. Scouting is now her only after-school activity.

The new school year has begun in earnest. Ingrid has two new subjects this year: arts and woodworking. The latter is a split-class subject: half the class does woodworking and the other half does textile crafts, and they will swap after half term. Their first project is to make a mascot (in wood). Ingrid told me she is making a sun.

Otherwise school continues as before. Same school, same room, same kids, same teacher (except for specialist subjects like sports, music, arts and woodworking). One big difference compared to last year is that Ingrid goes there on her own and comes home on her own every day, so I really don’t have much insight into what goes on at school.

This year her Estonian lessons are at her own school, whereas until this spring she had to go to the neighbouring school. (There’s one kid taking Estonian in each school so they get shared lessons.) It was quite a bit for her to walk and she is not yet allowed to cycle in the street on her own, so I used to go with her. We often talked about her school day on our way. Now even that is gone.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that they are doing lots of sports. There’s sports class on Monday morning, but in addition they have been training extra on Thursday afternoons for a relay race. The race is called Lidingöloppet (Skolstafetten) so I guess it takes place in Lidingö. I have no idea why kids from Spånga would run a race in Lidingö but whatever.

This week they also had a sports day on Tuesday when the kids could try out all sorts of different sports (from table tennis to boxing), plus a charity run on Wednesday. I’ve barely seen Ingrid out of sports clothes this week.

The Thursday running training means that Ingrid is too tired for riding lessons, so we haven’t been to riding school more than once during this past month.

Currently of course the big thing occupying Ingrid’s mind is her upcoming birthday. This year she and two friends of hers are planning to have a sleepover party together, with pizza and a movie at night, and then cake in the morning.

Meanwhile she has her usual interests: watches Minecraft videos, plays Minecraft, reads Kalle Anka, occasionally practices magic tricks.

After much talk about how she would love to have a pet, we borrowed a hamster from her cousin for a couple of weeks. She was diligent in taking care of it, but it turned out to be less sociable and less fun than she had imagined. It would probably have become more sociable if she had taken the time and effort to make friends with it, but she didn’t. There were no tears when we returned it and I haven’t heard a word about getting a pet since then.

Ingrid still sleeps in the tent in our back yard each night. She cannot quite articulate what she likes about it, but she sleeps well there and most definitely does not want to move back into her bedroom.

The last month of summer vacation. All full of activity with our Estonia trip, Kolmården, scout camp and swim camp. This is the kind of life that suits Ingrid best so it’s been a happy month for her.

Looking forward to each trip or camp is almost as enjoyable as the event itself. Packing is also great fun, and she loves to do it thoroughly and slowly and together with me. Unpacking though is no fun at all – we have to keep reminding her, and still I find her dirty rain jacket in the corner a week later, stuffed in a little bag, or maybe some week-old leftover snacks in a smelly box.

She’s been extending camp life by sleeping in the tent we put up in the garden for her. A sleeping bag, a flashlight, and a pile of Kalle Anka Pocket issues is all she needs to enjoy herself. She has also started talking about wanting a room of her own – part of the charm of the tent may be that nobody else is ever there.

She has become fond of giving gifts. It was very important for her to buy birthday presents for me – and to keep them secret so she could surprise me. I got a photo album and a plant (a Saintpaulia). She’s also spent pocket money on gifts for Adrian. His reactions have been mixed, from “I want more! Now!” to “meh”.

Favourite expression: YOLO! – pronounced either in English, yoh-loh, or in Swedish, jållå. The tough/hip combo of hip hop style is starting to interest her (although not hip hop music).

Quirky habit: Pre-emptively saying “what?” with a shrug when she is doing something that she thinks we might question, even though I have no intention of questioning it.
Quirky habit #2: calling everything grejsimojs (“thingamajig”).
Random fact: avatars are important. When we play Just Dance on the Wii or some other game, she must have a nice-looking avatar. It needs to look like a girl, and it must have stylish colours. Silly animals, bearded faces etc are not OK. Same with usernames. Her top choices currently are mostly pretty girl’s names, and sweet names like “cupcake” and “candy”.
Fashion choices: she’s transitioning from child to tween. She always used to choose dresses with strong floral patterns in a lot of bold colours (especially purple and violet). Now for the first time ever she has asked for blue jeans, which she has always dismissed as way too boring and colourless.
Bedtime stories: Narnia with Eric; Doctor Dolittle with me.

Favourite new thing: an activity-tracking wristband.
Favourite food/drink: carbonated water with a bit of apple juice.
Favourite entertainment: Minecraft videos. She especially loves iHasCupquake and her videos about the Enchanted Oasis mod.
Favourite entertainment #2: radio! Until now we’ve only ever listened to the radio while driving. It’s perfect for her. She likes pop music, she likes to have a lot of sensory input, she likes variety. She even enjoys the advertising. Now we happened to find a radio in the basement and it was an instant hit.

I realize more and more clearly that Ingrid has more than a dash of hyperactivity in her. Not in a way that really causes problems at school or at home – but enough to occasionally be annoying and above all totally alien to me. I have a really hard time imagining what it might feel like to be her.

Any list of symptoms of hyperactivity reads like a catalogue of Ingrid’s quirks.

Inability to recognize other people’s needs and desires, emotional immaturity, interrupting other people when they’re talking. Talks excessively. Impulsive, does not think before talking, no inhibitory control. Intrudes on other people’s conversations or games. Fidgets and squirms, has difficulty sitting still. Tedium, waiting and doing nothing, even for a short while, is torture. Always on the go, cannot just “be”, cannot play quietly. Cannot handle idle time, needs to be kept busy. Cannot pay attention to a repetitive or boring activity. Starts projects but has difficulty finishing them, let alone cleaning up.

A typical slice of life that summarizes Ingrid is her afternoons after school. I used to meet her, together with Adrian, so we could walk home together. I occasionally suggested that she could walk home on her own, but she didn’t like that idea at all because walking on her own was so incredibly boring. (The walk home is all of 500 metres or just over 5 minutes.)

After a while she agreed to try it. But nowadays quite often what happens instead is that she calls me from school and asks if she can go home with a friend instead. Even after 8 hours of school and after-school care, she still hasn’t had enough, still wants more activity, company and stimulation.

She wants and needs constant activity. Often one activity is not enough. Both the body and the mind need to be occupied. While brushing her teeth she fidgets, or jumps, or fiddles with things, or looks over my shoulder at whatever I’m doing. While reading she often snacks, not because she is hungry but because she needs to chew on something – fruit, chewing gum, rice crackers, anything.

Favourite colour: blue.
Favourite food: sushi, “even better than waffles or pancakes”.
Favourite activities: playing Wii games or board games with me. Going to the movies.
Favourite words: makalös, fantastisk.