Not much to say this month.

Sometimes she is so much a child, and other times I almost get tween vibes from her.
Sometimes she is so girly, and other times so tough.

She doesn’t play with toys much, of any kind. But sometimes she still plays with her old doll, changes it into a different outfit, brings it with her when we go out. For her pocket money she bought two Ever After High dolls (Apple White and Briar Beauty). The EAH dolls first talked fashion in very girly voices: “yellow doesn’t suit me at all, I will only wear pink and black”. And then the dolls got more assertive: “assume position 95, kung fu!”. That juxtaposition is very “her”.

Favourite skills: Recognising songs. Blowing bubbles with gum.
Favourite activities: Listening to ads on the radio. Being with friends.
Favourite games: Just Dance on Wii, and Machinarium that we play together.
Favourite expressions: “I’m allergic to” (…going to bed, Mondays etc). “You’re kidding!”

Ingrid is fascinated with words and expressions right now. She likes using big, complicated words and idioms. Things are not bad, they’re “katastrof!”. Things are not good, they are “fabulous” (yes, in English).

Du har min eviga tacksamhet (“you have my eternal gratitude”), o grymma värld (“oh cruel world”), ingen är den andre lik (“not one like the other”) etc.

Sometimes she gets them wrong, especially with words that sound similar or seem interchangeable. Kan du beslagta den här (instead of ta); godta utmaningen (instead of anta).

She pays attention to idiomatic expressions when we read, and proverbs too – and uses them when she can. Övning ger färdighet. Var sak på sin plats. She doesn’t really live by them, though!

She likes speaking English with a strong fake Swedish accent. She is shockingly good at English.

Picking out a splinter

Speaking of speaking, we’re working on her habit of being negative and contrarian. In conversation she often finds something to disagree with, almost automatically, out of habit. If someone says something that is not 100% factually correct, she feels like she must correct it. And if she disagrees with someone’s opinion, she must express it. It gets really tiresome.

But now she’s working on thinking before talking, which does not come easily to her, and especially thinking about whether it’s worth saying what she’s about to say. What she’s about to say may be correct, but does it actually benefit anybody?

She has discovered and understood the concept of bets. It took her a bit of time to understand what works and what doesn’t, to understand that a bet needs to be balanced and be acceptable to both parties. Now we have a bet going on: she bet me 30 kronor that she can be without sweets for two weeks. She’s on her way to win.

The highlight of Ingrid’s life right now is this weekend’s upcoming scout hike, and then the “spring hike” at the end of May, and then summer camp in August. They’re all overnight hikes/camps and she is excited by them all. Scouting is the perfect activity for her. There are activities, there are other kids, and there are exciting weekend events.

She likes receiving mail, and Kalle Anka day is the best day of the week. And Saturday is best because it’s weekend, and Friday is good as well. But she’s not so fond of Sundays because that means the weekend is almost over. She’s always living in the future, worrying about it or looking forward to it…

In the evenings, she plays Minecraft with her friend M while talking to her on Skype. And at night, after Adrian has gone to bed, she and I have been playing The Room together. We just finished part two, so maybe we’ll find some other game to take its place.

This month’s big event was of course our ski trip. It was a real gamble – Ingrid had never tried skiing before. She does like sports and snow and winter, and lots of activity in general, but three days of skiing could well have turned out to be too hard, too tiring, too boring, etc. But in the end we both enjoyed it. She did need a bit of pushing to get onto the bigger, slightly scary lifts, but once she was up, she was in her element, and flew down faster than I did.

It was a nice chance for me to spend time with Ingrid without having to share my attention between her and Adrian, which is normally the case when we are at home. Both of us appreciated that. And the same applies to this weekend’s walk around Judarn. Ingrid repeatedly noted that we couldn’t have done these things with Adrian: he would have tired and started complaining and wanted to be carried. So it’s also a chance for her to really feel like a big girl, doing big girl things.

Another big girl thing is that she now walks home on her own from school two or three days a week, on days when she doesn’t have any activities after school. It’s no challenge really, but she find does find it very boring. As usual, she wants company – having to do anything on her own is “almost as boring as just waiting” she said.

She says she likes to talk about her day on our way home, and misses that when I’m not there. By the time she gets home I’m already doing other things and then so does she, and somehow the right time for talking never happens. Our chat and cuddle time at night when she is going to bed is very important to her.

At school they currently study geometry in maths (basic shapes, measuring circumference) and the human body in science. Ingrid particularly likes the metaphor of having the body of a stone age human, with its cravings for sugar and fat.

Marbles season has begun at school. From one day to the next, suddenly every kid was bringing marbles to school. Ingrid is possessive and loss-averse about the marbles she has, and is most satisfied when she has won many and lost none. Then she proudly shows off all the marbles she has won.

She is discovering pop music. Melodifestivalen has been a fixture for the past six Saturday evenings. Favourites: Hello hi by Dolly Style, which is a sugary lolita-style tune; Groupie, which is not about what it sounds like but about taking a groupie instead of a selfie; and Make me la la la, performed by woman who is my age but dressed and styled to look more like a teenager.

Outside of Mello she likes Katy Perry (Roar, Dark Horse, Firework, Hot N Cold) and Ariana Grande (Break free).

I notice her taste in clothing moving towards mainstream tween fashion: tops and skirts more than dresses; plain colours (turquoise, violet, pink) instead of crazy patterns.

Favourite books: comics, Kalle Anka Pocket and Bamse. Wimpy Kid. I am coming to realize that even though she reads with great ease, she is not actually into books. This is totally alien to me and I have a hard time relating. If she wasn’t reading as fluently as she is, I’d have to make her read; now there is luckily no need. She enjoys listening to me or Eric read; I imagine she’ll be consuming audiobooks in her iPhone when she grows up.

Trending expressions: “ace!” (in English), possibly extended to “ace, man!”. Also, detta kan inte vara sant!, “this can’t be true”, for expressing mild disappointment, and vem bryr sig, “who cares”, by which she means “that’s OK, not a problem”.

She recently lost her eighth (I believe) baby tooth that had been loose for what felt like forever: several months I think. The new one doesn’t quite have enough space so it’s growing in a little crooked; I foresee braces in her future.

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

After noticing last month that I know Ingrid less and less well, I’ve made an effort to connect again. Not by doing anything special, really… mostly by listening more – and better.

I make sure to not brush her off when she appears to be complaining about trivial things, or when I really would rather be doing something else. I am super cautious about objections, and very careful with questions so she doesn’t feel interrogated. I refrain from offering advice and solutions. I am re-reading the excellent How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

Surprisingly often a conversation starts with a complaint about something trivial, but when she gets that out of the way, it turns out that there was a bigger issue behind it, and maybe something even larger behind that one.

Ingrid may start by complaining about a hurt toe (or something of that magnitude), then grumble that it feels like everything has been going wrong today, then go on to describe a quarrel she had with a friend at school, and end up telling me about how kids mock others at school for not being like everybody else.

She is very sensitive to others’ opinion about her, and especially to being mocked or made fun of – far more than I had realised. For example, I now know that she stopped borrowing Daisy Meadows books from the school library because one (one!) boy once (once!) told her they were “wimpish” (töntiga). That was in spring. And she hasn’t tried again since then.

When something bad happens during the day (like a quarrel with a friend) and doesn’t get resolved, the bad feeling can remain with her all day. It’s difficult for her to let go of worries and negative feelings. It’s most noticeable at night when it’s time for her to go to sleep: when the world is quiet around her and there is nothing to distract her, all the day’s worries come back. That’s also the time when she is most likely to talk about things that are on her mind. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why she always wants to be so busy: so she won’t have to think about her feelings.

Recently I’ve also noticed her being unusually sensitive to criticism, especially if it makes her feel stupid. Sometimes she is even hurt by what she interprets as criticism from Adrian – who is half her age, often gives very little thought to what he says to her, and whose opinion Ingrid normally doesn’t care much about at all. But all she notices in that case is that someone thinks that she is no good.

Sometimes it’s OK that criticism makes her feel bad – sometimes I really am angry with her and criticise something she’s done because it was a stupid thing to do. But other times all I want is to suggest a different way of doing something, or remind her about something she’s forgotten to do, and in that case I have to be really careful about how I express myself.

She feels insecure and vulnerable (which makes it extra hard, but also extra important, for her to talk about her “bad feelings”). She says she likes falling asleep in our bedroom because she feels more secure there. Not that she’s afraid of the dark – but she doesn’t get as many “bad thoughts” there.

She says she doesn’t like going to town, or taking the train. I tried to winkle out the cause, and it seemed to be that she doesn’t like the feeling of so many people around her, looking at her.

She says she wants things to be “the way they usually are”, som det brukar vara. And at the same time she appears bored with things always being the same. Some novelty is good, but the foundation needs to stay secure.

I wonder how much of all this vulnerability and insecurity is a recent thing, and how much of it has been there for a while and only just become more visible now that I am making an effort to listen and see. There’s definitely some of both.

Random facts:

• Ingrid is discovering the social side of the Internet. Favourite game: Animal Jam, an online game with the usual pets-homes-and-accessories theme. Her best friend M introduced her to it and (because this is an online game) they have been playing it together, while talking on Skype.
• She was interested in ballet for a short while. We looked up some beginner tutorials on YouTube, she tried a few positions and steps, and talked about ballet lessons. But the interest passed, and ballet lessons were not interesting enough to drop any of her current activities.
• Same with playing the guitar.
• Latest favourite purchase: a large plush horse. It is not just a toy but has also served as book support, iPad support, and a helper for maths homework where she had to estimate and then measure the length of things.

So much of Ingrid’s life happens away from me, outside of my view, that I know her less and less well. I no longer feel like I really know what she does, what she thinks about, what is important to her. She’s growing up and growing away from me.

Ingrid likes to be busy. She loves all her after-school activities. She’s got scouting on Tuesdays, riding on Thursdays, and now during winter also bandy on Fridays. She also wanted to add dancing to this, but enough is enough. Even now with three busy evenings it feels like too much, but Ingrid loves skating so much that I gave in.

On her free afternoons she often wants to play with a friend. And when she’s at home, she has her eyes in a book all the time. There’s rarely a chance to just be with her, just talk. Mostly when she’s too tired to do anything else…

Other people talk during dinner, but any kind of attempt at mealtime conversation in this family derails pretty fast – too much noise and interruptions to allow meaningful conversation. I guess I need to find some way to sneak some “talk time” into our life. I wonder what kind of activity I might use as a cover – something that is enough of an activity so Ingrid feels occupied, but not so much that she will be all busy. Walks to the supermarket, perhaps?

She is often too busy to even notice the signals from her body. When I interrupt some activity, or pick her up at a friend’s place, she’s almost invariably annoyed – why do I have to stop the fun? And then three minutes later she tells me she is really, really, really tired, or hungry, or has a headache, or whatever.

Favourite fruit: clementines. When it’s late evening and she realizes she is hungry, she can eat seven or eight of them in one go.

Favourite activities together with me: the Christmas calendars on TV and radio. Both are really well done this year so I also enjoy watching them with us. Also, crafts, especially Christmasy ones. Also, in fact, anything that means that it’s just her and me, without Adrian.

Favourite activity on her own: drawing. She has become more ambitious in her drawing and doesn’t just want to replicate the usual subjects in the usual way. She has borrowed several books about how to draw, everything from “easy manga” to “funny animals”.

Not at all favourite activity: picking up after her. She just never remembers, so she leaves a trail of small objects behind her – pens and drawing pads, hair bands, Kalle Anka issues, books etc.

Random fact: on weekends, Ingrid loves lounging around undressed. She sleeps naked, and when she wakes (early) and walks downstairs, she usually doesn’t bother getting dressed. She lies on the sofa under a blanket and watches a movie. A blanket is impractical at the breakfast table, so then she puts on her bathrobe, and keeps it unless and until there is a compelling reason to get dressed.

More and more often, when I sit down to write my monthly post about Ingrid, I realize how different she is from me. At times it almost feels like looking at an alien in a human body.

She is very extroverted. She exists for interactions with other people, especially other kids. Being on her own, having to do things on her own, is a real hardship and drains her of energy.

At the same time, she is rather tone deaf when it comes to human interactions, at least when it comes to interacting with us (myself, Eric and Adrian). She talks without listening and seems mostly uninterested in what we have to say, or what we think and feel. Perhaps it’s because we are as alien to her as she is to us. Or perhaps this is just how 8-year-olds are: I’ve never lived with one before.

She will try to dominate any interaction. With us, it’s just annoying; with Adrian it’s worrying. I think her interactions with her friends probably work better. They are on a more similar wavelength, compared to us – and they can push back more effectively than Adrian.

Whenever Adrian is doing something and Ingrid is not otherwise occupied, she walks in and, without really being aware of it, take over Adrian’s activity. She tries to steer his play, tells Adrian what pen to use when he’s drawing, etc.

She sometimes treats him as a servant: asks him to fetch and carry for her, or take messages to me. He often does as she asks. I spend quite a lot of time telling her off for that – even though they both think it’s OK, I don’t want Ingrid to treat others that way, and I don’t want Adrian to get used to being treated that way.

She is often annoyed and irritated by him, for example when he mimics her and echoes her words, or when he sings some nonsense song over and over again. And she cannot help snapping at him when she gets annoyed.

And yet at the same time she really enjoys playing with him, and truly cares about making him feel good. Or maybe she cares about making him not feel bad? She hates it when he is sad or angry (unless he’s angry because she’s been snapping at him) and makes sincere efforts to make him happy again. And the other day when we were buying Christmas gifts, her top priority was finding good gifts for Adrian.

She is incredibly utilitarian. Activities without an immediately visible utility are pointless. There are few activities that she does for the sake of doing them. Reading is the one big exception.

Take drawing, for example. As she says herself, she knows that the end result will be a finished drawing that she has nothing to do with, so she will throw away, so what is the point? Unless she is drawing at school with her friends, in which case it becomes a social activity.

She is totally incurious. She is not at all interested in finding out about how the world works. She never asks how or why about anything that isn’t in her immediate here and now. When she encounters an unfamiliar word in a book, she asks what it means, but will not listen beyond the first sentence in my answer.

Favourite books:
She reads the same series of books that she read a year ago – LasseMaja and Kalle Anka. She rarely looks for new books to read. The books she likes are those that have a fast pace, and lots of action and suspense. Alternatively, the book should have lots of pictures, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. She also likes jokes – especially what would be called anekdoodid in Estonian, and roliga historier (such as bellmanhistorier) in Swedish.

Favourite game:
The robot game, which means that I am a robot and carry her on my back or shoulders, and she gives me instructions: “forward”, “stop”, “turn”. We play this when it’s time to go to the kitchen for dinner, or to the bedroom at night.

Favourite iPad games:
Various animal-raising games, where you breed and feed animals and collect money from them to get more animals, like Dragon City etc.

Favourite foods:
Brämhults strawberry and lime juice, with their raspberry juice as a runner-up. Cheese buns. Clementines.

I don’t know where this month has gone. It’s all been so busy I feel like I’ve hardly had any time together with Ingrid.

During weekends we’ve had birthday parties. The best thing and the worst thing about parties is waiting for them. Ingrid spends a lot of time looking forward to the next big thing.

Another important part of birthday parties is getting presents. Here again anticipation is an important part of it, and the opening of presents. But the happiness about the actual things usually dissipates fast. It’s like when she buys toys for herself: she often has more fun choosing and buying a toy than actually playing with it.

This year’s top present was a radio controlled car. She’s been asking for one for a long time and was really happy to get one. After previous presents, I don’t really have high expectations when it comes to actual usage.

One weekend she also had a scout hike – her first one with an overnight stay. She was very excited and just a teeny bit anxious, but in the end managed it without a hitch.

Weekdays are full of school and after-school activities. Estonian lesson and scouts on Tuesdays; riding on Thursdays; fredagsmys on Fridays. Of the remaining two afternoons/evenings Ingrid usually spends one with a friend, either here or at the friend’s home.

Friend E, whom Ingrid thinks of as her best friend, likes Ingrid well enough but not best, so they don’t play as often as Ingrid would like. Instead she’s reconnected with her friend M, also one of the “original four” whom Ingrid got to know at nursery. M spent two years abroad and came back this summer, kind of out of touch with the others. So now M and Ingrid found each other again. They are kind of similar in character: both a bit bossy, a bit tougher than the average girl. Both like reading and are good at English. They play with their stuffed animals and Littlest Pet Shop figures, and they’ve been swapping iPad app tips with each other.

Ingrid has several pet-raising games now: the kind where you buy pets, feed them, care for them, and breed them to get more pets. And the pets generate in-game money of some sort so you can buy more stuff and more pets. One thing this type of games have in common is waiting. It takes time to grow food, to breed the pets, etc., and in between there’s not much you can do. So Ingrid sometimes switches between several such games, feeding the pets in one while waiting for the others to become hungry, etc.

She’s also discovered Minecraft. She uses Minecraft like she uses Lego: for building houses. The key features of a house are doors, windows, a bed – and bookcases.

Today we had this term’s parent-teacher meeting for Ingrid. She is, not surprisingly, way ahead of the goals in maths, reading, writing and English.

One evening when she was bored she started doubling numbers, in her head. Two, four, eight, … all the way to 8192. Then it got hard to keep the numbers in her head.

Ingrid is so busy thinking about all the birthdays. First there’s Adrian’s actual birthday, which she has taken really seriously. She made a plush little monster for him, and saved up pocket money for many weeks to buy him presents. (A toy mobile phone, like the one she has, and a Lego set.) And it was really important for her to help plan the day: waking Adrian with a birthday song in the morning, having presents for him, being extra nice to him etc.

Then there’s Adrian’s birthday party with his friends, for which she helped craft invitations.

Then there’s her own birthday party which we need to plan. She’s hesitating between a small party at home with her best friends, and a larger party somewhere else so she can invite all the girls in her class. It will have a Halloween theme because we’ll be away during the actual Halloween trick-and-treating, and she’s already got her costume chosen.

And then finally both kids’ combined birthday party with all our extended family, where the main deal is all the presents she hopes to get.

Ordinary life, by comparison, is rather boring. Ingrid is easily bored, wants lots of activity and has a hard time coming up with activity for herself. And most activities are only fun if someone joins her. Drawing, painting, crafts etc; building with Lego; playing with her doll and stuffed animals – all fun together with someone but not at all if she’s on her own.

On her own she reads. She still likes books to have pictures so she devours comics of all kinds. We have a subscription for Kalle Anka and she also gets one second-hand issue of Bamse and one of Kalle Anka pocket every week. She borrows comics books from the school library as well as Spånga library: Lou, Kalle Anka (again), Bamse (again) etc. But also Diary of a wimpy kid for example: it’s got enough drawings in it to keep Ingrid’s attention.

As for actual books, Lasse Maja is still her favourite by far. She has read other mysteries as well but those are the ones she returns to.

She likes to order Adrian around. She tells him to go get stuff for her when she can’t be bothered to walk there. Usually Adrian is happy to help. Win-win. Sometimes he can’t find the thing she wants and needs more instructions and then the whole thing takes longer than it would have taken for her to do it herself, but of course that is not the point.

Likewise she uses him as her mouthpiece when she wants my help but I’m in a different room. Adrian, gå hämta emme. I dislike being “remote controlled” like that and tend to refuse as a matter of principle.

Ingrid has started cycling to school in the morning together with her friend Majken and her parents. Again a win-win situation for all of us: the girls get company; Ingrid has a strong incentive to be ready on time (which she almost always is anyway); Adrian and Eric can get ready in peace at their own pace.

She’s also started to walk to and from swim school and scout meetings on her own. (This term her swimming lessons are at Spångabadet, very close to our home.)

She likes having long hair but doesn’t see the point of brushing it properly, or of keeping it out of her face. I keep nagging her to get her hair out of her food, and put it up instead.

This month was the last month of real summer – the summer break is almost at its end and school starts on Wednesday.

Swimming is by far Ingrid’s favourite summer activity. We’ve been to numerous beaches: the Trepimäe and Saadjärve beaches in Estonia, the small bathing spots at the seaside near Ljusterö, several beaches near lake Mälaren relatively close to home.

A new addition to our repertoire this summer was Kyrksjön (“the church lake”) near Bromma church. It has no actual beach – the banks are muddy and the only way in is from a pier straight into deep water. But it’s small and thus warm, and it’s the one closest to our home so we can go for a quick swim even quite late in the evening.

The last week of summer Ingrid went to swim camp. Not “proper” camp really I guess, just during the day at the local swimming pool. They had two hour-long swimming sessions (morning and afternoon) and games and other activities during the rest of the day.

Ingrid was most proud that she learned to dive in head first from the starting blocks. She’d been trying to learn diving during the summer but not really succeeding. Eric and I demonstrated but couldn’t really teach her, and she sort of half jumped, half dived, landing chest first. And now during camp she got it – she says diving didn’t hurt her chest any more.

One of the non-swimming activities was dodgeball/scatterball. (They’ve played them in gym class at school as well.) Just like me, Ingrid doesn’t have very good ball sense. And just like me as a kid, she reacts to this not by practising catching and throwing but by playing an entirely defensive game – optimising her strategy to fit her skill level. She can be among the last few kids standing even though she can rarely catch a ball.

Speaking of optimising, one day she complained about having to carry her laundry up to her room and put it away. I pointed out to her that she gets a lot of laundry to put away because she goes through a lot of clothes, and that I get less because I wear most dresses several times before I wash them. She gave this some thought and then completely changed her habits. She used to throw all her clothes in the laundry hamper at the end of each day – now her clothes almost always last several days before they need washing.

Another kind of optimising she does is leaving the best until last, in all kinds of situation. Eating pizza with ham and pineapple: pick out all the pineapple, eat the rest, and then the pineapple pieces, from smallest to largest. She’s also realised that Adrian does NOT think this way and in fact almost does the opposite. So when they both want X (for any value of X) Ingrid lets Adrian go first and both are happy.

Summer is over and our ordinary activities are starting up again. First out was riding where the autumn term started this week already. The horses need their exercise I guess. Now that we know that Ingrid intends to continue riding we invested in some gear, instead of making do with any old trousers and borrowing a helmet at the stable. She now has a helmet, riding pants and gloves, and a fleecy jacket. Everything except the helmet follows a lilac and purple colour theme.

With summer and especially our Estonia trip behind us, Ingrid apparently needed something else to look forward to and plan for. The next thing coming up is Adrian’s birthday so Ingrid took that up as a project. She’s saving up money and they’ve been browsing old toy store catalogues together, because Ingrid wants to buy him a present.

She’s also sewing a little plush monster for him. That project is actually quite challenging because it needs to be kept secret from Adrian. She can only work on it late at night when she’s often quite tired. But with a month to go, I think she’ll get it done.

Despite our two weeks in Estonia, it’s a struggle for Ingrid to speak Estonian now that we’re back home. She can’t find the words she wants and can’t express herself as well as she does in Swedish. I’ve started pushing Estonian more and she is starting to push back because it’s too much work and she cannot see the point. “Why can’t I speak Estonian in Estonia only?” she asks, and she doesn’t believe me when I tell her that without practising she won’t be able to speak it at all soon.

Favourite book: Viktiga kartor för äventyrare och dagdrömmare, “Important maps for adventurers and daydreamers”. Each spread has a theme, such as “volcanoes and earthquakes”, “mysterious places”, “gold and jewels”, etc. We’ve been reading it at bedtime. She is totally absorbed and makes sure I read every little sidebar and fact box. The Bermuda triangle is her particular favourite.