The kids and I are halfway through our summer holidays. Mostly we’re on our own because Eric has had work to do still. Being with Ingrid all day, every day, has let me see her from some new angles – or rather, reminded me of angles that have been there all the time but that I haven’t noticed as much during the school year.

She really, really hates waiting and is totally unable to amuse herself without external help. After a very late supper I tell the kids it’s time to go to bed. Ingrid brushes her teeth and gets out of her clothes. And then, do you think she goes to her bedroom? No – she sits in the sofa and reads, because she sees that I’m still brushing Adrian’s teeth, and she cannot imagine sitting in the bedroom and doing nothing for those two minutes it will take us.

Her two go-to solution is reading. As long as we’re at home, there are always Kalle Anka pocket issues lying around and she will grab one as soon as there is even a minute of waiting. If the waiting time is longer, she likes to add snacking to the reading.

I’m all for reading. I like reading, and I like that she likes reading. But it’s definitely becoming a crutch for her. It would feel totally wrong to forbid reading but somehow at some point she needs to exercise her atrophied imagination…

She is loves entertainment, activity and especially social activity of all kinds. Belonging to a group and being with other kids is very important to her.

Some of her friends at school had started playing “Winx Club”, after the animated series, and Ingrid then started watching the series so she could better join in at the game. Now I think she’s trying to work her way through all the seasons. She’s been watching Winx Club a lot.

She’s particularly interested in the costumes: she browsed through a Winx Club wiki to look at all the characters’ outfits, and wants me to make a Tecna costume for her.

Her other favourite entertainment right now is Dragon City, an iPad game where you feed and breed dragons. It’s become a social family activity: almost every morning we sit together for a while and feed our dragons, and ooh and aah over each other’s eggs, and watch the dragons combat.

She got a pair of inline skates at the beginning of the summer. She’s been practicing but finding it hard. The streets around our home are hilly and the surface is often uneven – not so easy for a novice skater.

For her own money she generally buys plush animals. The most recent one was an owl. Before that we ordered a large plush horse for her from an online store. From a car boot sale she bought a plush dog with accessories, and a rainbow-coloured large plush snake. She likes taking one or two of them with her when we travel somewhere, and often has one of them in her bed at night. But after a short while she becomes bored with them, puts them away and buys a new one. I don’t know how many dozens of animals she has now.

Her favourite summer activity (after camping) is swimming. She’s one of those kids who can dive into cold lake water and tell me that it’s not cold at all! Come in! It’s great!

The snorkel and mask and goggles are the best things we ever bought for her. She’s a strong swimmer as long as she doesn’t have to think about breathing, so the mask and snorkel allow her to swim around without having to worry much about that.

At swim school they mostly focus on front crawl and backstroke, both of which make it hard for her to see where she’s going. So when we go in deep water together, she ends up doing an awkward dog paddle/breaststroke combo.

She chose a very colourful bikini for this summer, in line with her usual fashion choices (the more colours, the better) but felt too naked in it. She doesn’t think twice about lolling around in her underwear at home, but didn’t feel good in the bikini at the local pool. So we bought another turquoise tankini, like last year.

Favourite part of travelling to Estonia: just about everything. She enjoyed the ferry trip, the dinner buffet on the ferry, the flat we’re staying in (same as last year), the planning, even the packing. She pretty much did her own packing this year, with the help of my all-purpose packing list and just a few hints, although I did help her fold her clothes so they’d fit in the suitcase.

Favourite ice cream flavours: melon, mint (polka), pear, elderflower.

Ingrid finished first grade this week. The last day of school was this Wednesday. The entire school gathered in the schoolyard; kids sang and performed; the headmistress held a speech. Then Ingrid and I went to town and celebrated with a sushi lunch, ice cream, and a large Lego Friends set.

Ingrid was not entirely happy to finish first grade. She was perfectly happy about the school year ending and summer vacation beginning. But having to move up to grade 2 was not all positive, because it will involve more change than Ingrid wants. The main problem is that her class will move to a different building. This year classes 1A and FA (year 0) were in the same building, and three of her best friends from preschool are in that FA class. Now they will be further away, so they won’t be in after school care together any more. Luckily they will have the same teachers next year at least.

Ingrid is a novelty-seeker but she also wants things to stay the same. She likes doing and seeing new things, going to new places, etc. But she wants the foundation to be unchanged: home, family, school, friends.

She is open to new things but not if they replace old things. It is difficult for her to let things go, and to choose between alternatives when choosing one thing means giving up the other. When she chooses to have chocolate for dessert instead of, say, a piece of cake, she asks if we can make that cake again some other time. We say yes, of course, and that is enough – she can let it go and never asks for it again.

But choices that are final and for real are hard, like choosing between staying at home and watching a movie with Adrian, or going to the supermarket with me. Or deciding what sports she will want to do this autumn. She vacillates and hesitates and then in the end sticks to the same ones that she did this year.

Her sense of balance has matured and she no longer has her childhood tolerance for swinging and spinning. She now gets nauseous on merry-go-rounds, especially the small fast ones at playgrounds. She can still swing, but cannot read on a swing like she used to. She also cannot read in the car any more.

This meant that car rides became incredibly BOOH-RING! because sitting still and not being entertained by anything is just awfully unbearably boring. Then she remembered the game of “yellow car”, and now this keeps her really busy. And she is good at it! While my brain is busy with other thoughts (such as driving for example), she really focuses and racks up point after point.

In our version of the game we just play for points: the one to first spot a yellow car gets a point. Our rules are that only cars count (not trucks or buses). Parked cars count; however taxis don’t. There is one taxi company in Stockholm that has yellow cars and all the taxis were making the game way too easy.

Adrian occasionally joins in and shouts “blue car” or “white car” and then asks how many points he has. We usually tell him some random number and he’s happy with that.

We reset our point counts after the last rule adjustment (the addition of the taxi rule) and the score is now about 35:10. At first she spotted about two yellow cars for each one of mine, and now she’s pulling ahead at an even faster pace. My only defence is that I am thinking about other things. But really she is both better at noticing details, pays more attention to her immediate surroundings, and has faster reactions.

Her faster reactions are very apparent in Minion Rush, which is her current favourite iPad game. It’s a fun game and I’ve spent some time playing myself. I am nowhere near as fast as her. I watch her play, effortlessly navigating the obstacles at speeds that I usually don’t reach (because I crash before I get that far), and she even has brain capacity left over to talk at the same time!

She is still really polite and I hear lots of please and thank you from her every day. She tells me I am the best mum in the world, because I am so kind. Sometimes she kind of overdoes it a bit and thanks me three times for the same thing but really I don’t mind.

Words she thinks are super funny: Tuberkulos. Chihuahua. Trehundra kvart i sju. (That last one means “three hundred quarter to seven” and is something Adrian said once: he doesn’t yet understand that some measurements cannot be combined with others).

She likes knee socks and likes them pulled really taut so they absolutely do not sag even a millimetre.

Ingrid has matured a lot recently. Life with Ingrid is surprisingly smooth now. She is content and co-operative. She listens and understands. Ingrid has even become polite – really polite. I am hearing “please” and “could you” and “thank you” all day long.

This is quite a change, and I think it is incredibly nice. I believe she notices and appreciates this.

One day I asked her to start helping out more at home. We talked about what chores she could do, and she chose to help with setting the table. Every day before dinner she now sets out plates and cups and cutlery, and brings out drinks etc from the fridge. On weekends she does it for breakfast and lunch as well. This has worked incredibly well; we’ve had no arguments about it at all. I hope she notices that I really appreciate it, and I believe it also helps her feel more grown.

Often she leaves it until the last minute. That’s her general tendency with all kinds of chores: unless she sees an obvious immediate payoff, she will choose to do it “later”. Clean laundry lies in a pile on her floor for days, despite gentle reminders, until we decide that enough is enough and make her do it then and there. When she runs out of clean clothes she fishes for a pair of leggings in the pile and then leaves the rest, rather than put it away.

But if there is a clear benefit, she will get things done fast and efficiently. Our mornings run like a pretty well-oiled machine now. She gets up with the alarm on her phone. She gets dressed, comes and helps wake Adrian, brushes her teeth, packs her bag, eats breakfast – and often even has a bit of time for some reading before it’s time to go.

It probably helps that she goes to bed a bit earlier now. (Most days she and Adrian go to bed at the same time, shortly before nine.) She wouldn’t wake this early on her own, but neither is she too tired in the mornings.

Ingrid is more interested in society and the wider world. Not hugely interested but at least some. Perhaps this is spillover from social studies at school.

She has been especially curious about money-related questions. She is interested in what different things cost. We talk about bank accounts, salaries, taxes, and saving. We talk about ways of paying for things. Do we pay the lady who cleans our house every other week? Do we give her cash? Why do we use money and not apples to pay for things? We talk about vacations costing a lot of money, and about saving some money every month. What are taxes for? What does it mean to be retired, and how can you live without a salary?

Another area of interest is… well, I don’t know how to summarise it. Crime and warfare? Danger, perhaps? When she builds Lego doll’s houses, there are both fire alarms and burglar alarms, and every room has an alarm button.

When we’re out in the garden, Ingrid and Adrian have been playing war recently. Luckily they have very non-violent wars. There is a fair amount of chasing each other and some waving of the sticks that Adrian has collected over time. But there is even more talking: about who is who (Ingrid is Estonia, and Adrian is a spanjol or maybe from Arablandet), and where their headquarters are, and which stick is the shooter and which stick is the fixer (that you fix a broken shooter with) or the carver (that you use to carve your name in the shooter). Ingrid brags about her shooter, which shoots laser and bullets and arrows and cannonballs and slime and glue as well – and it has a password, too. And the headquarters have an anti-alarm-system. Adrian’s does everything that Ingrid’s does.

She has learned her own phone number by heart, as well as mine. Very practical.

She has grown physically. All sorts of clothes have become too short, and we had to raise her bicycle seat recently.

She is actually choosing to walk quite often, rather than cycling everywhere.

As before, she likes to have things to look forward to. Currently she is looking forward to our trip to Estonia. She drew a countdown calendar with a square for every day, after some counting of weeks in our wall calendar. (It started out at 9 weeks and 3 days.) She is already talking about what clothes she will pack and in what bag, and what other things she will want to bring, and which of her favourite things we will be doing again this summer.

Favourite:

• Movies: Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. She has discovered Barnkanalen, the Children’s Channel, which you can watch live on an iPad. News and sports are dull. Room makeovers are fun.
• Food: nectarines and apricots. Brämhults blueberry and blackcurrant juice. Cheese buns (ostfralla).
• Books: the Lou! series.
• Music: a tune called Hypnotize on her phone. It used to be her ringtone, but she liked it so much that when the phone rang she’d go “oh, listen, the phone is making music!” and totally forget about answering the phone. So now she has a new, less musical ringtone, and just listens to Hypnotize when she feels like it.

It’s Easter this weekend. Ingrid has been talking about Easter for three weeks already. She wants to know what we’ll do and where we’ll be. She talks about the egg hunt she wants us to have, and in what kind of places we should hide the eggs, and how she might help Adrian, or how we could mark which eggs are hers and then she could leave the ones that aren’t so Adrian can find them. She makes plans for her Easter witch outfit, where she will go, which basket she will have for her Easter cards and which one for the candy. And so on.

It’s not just Easter, of course. She spends a lot of time time planning and thinking about what she will be doing tomorrow, or next weekend, or two weeks from now; how things might turn out, what she might do. Some of it is anticipation, the pleasure of looking forward to something nice coming up soon. Some of it seems to be a real anxiety to know.

It is very unlike how I function and frankly I find it pretty annoying at times. Talking about something that might happen in the future, instead of enjoying what we are doing now; trying to plan things in way too much detail, way too far in advance. I’m trying to find a balance, letting her keep the anticipation but reducing the excessive planning – or at least ensuring that it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the now.

And yet at the same time she likes surprises and to be surprised, and is immensely disappointed if someone (read: Adrian) ruins a surprise.

She has difficulty making choices and committing herself. She makes such an effort to get it right and is worried about missing out. She changes her mind, second guesses herself.

Before a weekend she mentally makes long lists of all the things she wants to do and then usually ends up disappointed because she cannot be in two places at the same time, and cannot fit all her plans into the hours that a day has.

Ingrid wants to be, and is, competent. She wants to accomplish things on her own, without anybody helping. It really annoys her when someone decides that she needs help with her horse during a riding lesson. Usually she is pretty good at judging what she can and cannot manage.

We got her a phone a few months ago. She feels proud about having it and especially enjoys receiving text messages. She also likes reading the ones I get for me.

Her phone also doubles as an alarm clock and this is working out really really well. I don’t know if this is because it’s actually easier for her to wake up this way, or because she feels like a big girl this way.

She also likes helping Adrian (most of the time), for example helping him put on his clothes in the morning. She enjoys playing with him, but also gets really angry at him at times. They have a lot of ups and downs.

Ingrid has been ill twice this month, which is quite unusual for her. She is usually very healthy but this winter she’s clocked up 7 sick days. I don’t think she’s had this many ever before. Admittedly this is the first year for which we have official records (since all absence has to be reported to the school) so my recollections may be faulty for previous years.

The sick days also included her first ever ear infection.

Normally Ingrid’s most common health complaint is stomach ache. She complains about stomach aches in all sorts of situations, and for all sorts of causes, and she can generally not differentiate between them. It can be anything from feeling nervous, eating too much too fast, hunger, needing to go to the toilet, tiredness etc. Physical causes and psychosomatic causes all get lumped together.

I’ve long suspected that sometimes what she feels is not even a stomach ache, not even a psychosomatic one. For example, after she once complained about stomach aches after going on a merry-go-round, we figured out that she reports nausea as “stomach ache”. She truly doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference.

Now I’ve started a project to try and train her to recognise the different kinds of stomach aches. Whenever we manage to identify the cause, she will try to remember what that kind of stomach ache feels like.

The other day she had a “stomach ache” after dinner. Where, I asked, and Ingrid pointed to the upper part of her chest. That’s not your stomach, I said, that’s your chest. Oh, I call everything “stomach” that’s not my arms or legs or head or back, she replied.

I tried to explain the benefits of using words within their generally accepted meanings rather than making up definitions of her own.

New interest: marbles. The kids at school were playing marbles this Friday. (It was “take a toy to school” day, which they have occasionally.) Ingrid loved the game but was still very sure that she would not bring any marbles to school to play, because she could lose some to the other kids in the game. This despite having about a hundred marbles, none of which she normally plays with.

She continues to enjoy the riding lessons and does pretty well at them. It’s just enough of a challenge for her. It is a good way of learning that others will not always do what she wants, and that some ways of trying to communicate with them will work better than others.

Favourite movie: a kids’ game show named Labyrint which involves green slime, puzzles, and robot-like monsters. Also Horseland and Frozen.

Favourite books: LasseMaja. Last time we visited the library we were lucky; someone must have just returned a pile of LasseMaja books. We borrowed six. Usually they’re all out, or maybe you can get one or two. Ingrid has been reading them back to back since we got home.

Favourite collection: bottles of Danonino strawberry yogurt, shaped like a little blue creature in various professions (doctor, firefighter, farmer etc).

Horses. This month’s big thing is definitely horses. In Ingrid’s own words, she has become “hästtokig”, horse obsessed.

She tried horseback riding once last summer and loved it. She’s been talking about riding since then, and now this spring term she finally got a chance to do it again, with riding lessons every Thursday.

I sort of thought it might have been just a one-off, a passing fancy. But she absolutely loves it. Even on the one occasion when the riding lesson turned out to be a theory lesson (the basics of saddling and bridling and grooming) with no actual riding, she came away happy.

Ingrid has had 4 actual riding lessons now I think. For the first few lessons the kids all had someone holding a lead rope but now they’re mostly managing things themselves, at least most of the time. They’re working on the basics: halting and steering, and some trotting.

Ingrid has also discovered that the horse won’t always listen to her or do what she wants.

She feels reasonably confident when she’s sitting in the saddle, but on the ground she’s not yet very comfortable near horses. Well, they’re ponies, really, but still quite a lot larger than her. She’s afraid that she’ll be stepped on, or crushed against the wall when the pony steps sideways. Or bitten; there’s one pony there at the stables who seems to enjoy nipping people’s arms, or at least threatening to.

And she’s not very fond of the messy side of it. When a horse nuzzles her chest her first instinct is to go and clean it off. Horse manure on the ground is “eugh!”, and rinsing horse saliva from the bit is yucky.

It’s not just the riding. She borrows horse-themed books at the school library. She buys horse-themed magazines instead of Bamse. She took down all her Bamse posters from the wall above her bed and put up three horse posters instead. She’s been looking at stuffed plush horses on the internet and is thinking of saving up to buy a big one. And she’s told me she’d like to decorate her whole room with a horse theme, curtains and rug and bed sheets and everything.

Apart from horses, the main theme in Ingrid’s life is independence. When she is bored at home, she now sometimes goes for a walk on her own, or maybe goes to the supermarket.

Twice she went skating on her own. The sports field is about 2 km from here, so she took the bus. (We practiced this together a few times first.) When she got there she got some random parent to help her put on her skates. She’s pretty good at asking for help from adults, doesn’t really feel shy about it or anything. And she found other kids to play and skate around with.

Once she got a lift home with some kid who lived roughly in this direction. (I guess the parent didn’t feel comfortable about Ingrid alone on the bus.) The other time she took the bus home afterwards, and that was really the only part of the whole experience that went less well. She just barely missed one bus, waited 10 minutes, and then the next bus went right past and didn’t stop for her. But she got home on the next bus.

For those trips she borrowed my bus card and my mobile phone (and phoned home several times, for help or advice or just to check in). But now we’ve bought her both a bus card of her own and a mobile phone as well. They might not get much use yet but there’ll be more and more of this kind of thing.

Favourite movie: Bamse och tjuvstaden. Also, Lou!. And Melodifestivalen, the song contest.

Favourite books: Daisy Meadows’ fairy books, still. She’s outgrowing Bamse and mostly reading Kalle Anka now.

Favourite things: YooHoo plush toys, which Ingrid has started collecting. She has five. I’m glad she has her pocket money for this kind of stuff.

New skill she’s learning: writing in cursive.

Ingrid’s photo of all her YooHoos

Lots of things are happening in Ingrid’s head right now.

And lots of things are wanting to come out of Ingrid’s head. She talks SO MUCH. At times I would even say she prattles incessantly.

Mostly her talk is centered around herself, especially things she has done and (even more) things she will do. She spends a lot of time living in the future, anticipating fun things to come. Sometimes annoyingly so: while we are doing something fun in the now, her attention is already elsewhere, thinking ahead to the next activity – and talking about it, and distracting everyone else.

The world around her doesn’t seem to interest her much. She’s never really wondered much about how the world is, why things are the way they are, how things work.

The other day she mentioned they were learning about the US at school. That to her seemed to mean memorizing some random, mostly meaningless facts about it that she read in a book or fact sheet of some sort. She knows that the US is the third largest country in the world, that it has 50 states (“like New York and such”), and that they have a president named Obama – and that it is one of the permanent members of the UN security council. It doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t understand what this means.

When she does wonder about something, she makes up some answer in her head. It doesn’t seem to be important to her to find out what reality is like. She just seems to need some sort of image in her head. For example, she’s about to start riding lessons, so she’s been wondering recently about how big the horses and ponies will be. Instead of wanting to find out for real, she just makes it up: “I think that the foals may be about as tall as I am, and the smaller horses might be as tall as you, and the larger ones might be as tall as pappa.” And she’s satisfied with that.

When she talks about her day, she rarely mentions things that happened at school. She doesn’t seem to find them particularly noteworthy. I don’t really know what they do all day.

I do know that her homework is trivial. Maths homework this week was addition in the 0 to 5 range. And that’s after half a year at school!

Meanwhile she keeps learning maths naturally as part of life. She adds up pocket money; multiplies the number of meatballs by 5 seconds each so she can heat them up in the microwave oven; tries to divide 20 things by 7 days of the week and realizes that there will be one less for one of the days.

She is also learning Swedish spelling (and has a pretty good memory for it) and working on her handwriting. Less than a month ago I was pointing out to her that a t is taller than an i. Now her writing is very tidy and legible. For special projects such Christmas cards she likes to draw the letters “double”, i.e. draws their outlines.

Ingrid talks fast, and she mumbles when she talks. Often I have to ask her to repeat herself, not to make a point but because I really can’t understand what she’s saying.

But she is paying more attention to the people around her. When her blather cuts me off and I go quiet, she notices, and asks me what I was going to say.

She has begun to offer her help to others. It began with routine situations that she effectively learned one by one, e.g. helping Adrian get out of his snowsuit, or helping me carry our bags from the garage to the house. But now she actually also notices when others might need help in novel situations. She grabs a piece of paper towel during dinner, and asks if Eric needs one.

She is often most helpful towards Adrian. Really she is often very sweet and kind towards him. But naturally, sometimes she gets frustrated with him as well, especially when Adrian bothers her when she wants some time on her own, or when Adrian intrudes on some activity that she really wanted to do with me, without him.

The first time it happened was when we went to town one day for shopping. Ingrid was just upset for a long time and refused to tell me why. Maybe she thought she wasn’t allowed to want to have me for herself. Finally I got her to explain, and now she knows to tell me in advance when she wants it to be just me and her. Depending on the activity, sometimes she gets that, but other times I insist that everybody in the family is allowed to join. I think she accepts that.

Favourite expressions:

• jag är superdålig på det här
• a men gud
• så vadå…, as in “Jag kunde ju inte veta att han ville ha den just nu, så vadå…”

Favourite movies:

• The smurfs
• LasseMajas detektivbyrå
• This year’s Barnen Hedenhös Christmas calendar on TV

Favourite books:

• LasseMaja
• Daisy Meadows’ fairy books

Favourite things:

• An atrociously annoying Tinkerbell-themed wand-like thing that flashes, whirls and makes noise. She bought it at a Disney on Ice show for 160 kr of her own money and actually seems to think that it was money well spent.
• A photo album. I bought the album over a month ago. Then she picked 40 photos on my computer, and last week the prints arrived. It’s an eclectic collection, containing photos of her and Adrian as babies, of important moments in her life, of her friends, but also photos that she simply thinks are pretty (such as my current desktop wallpaper with a snowy winter scene that I downloaded from the Internet).

Favourite activities:

• Baking and making Christmas candy
• Photography. When I bring out the tripod, she often wants to join me. Either she borrows my DSLR, or my or Eric’s compact camera. She also likes recording video, especially of Adrian doing something silly, or of herself singing or dancing. One afternoon during the holidays she and I went out for a photo walk together and were out for an hour and a half.
• Briefly but intensely: Eric’s labelmaker. She labelled our toy boxes and printed important messages like “Adrian my little brother is sometimes annoying”.

A month of growing up and maturing.

Ingrid has been more responsible, self-managing and independent than I’ve seen her before. In the mornings, she used to need prompting and reminding for every step, and otherwise just absentmindedly dawdled or, more likely, started to read something. Now she remembers what she’s supposed to do and actually remembers to do it as well. Get dressed, have breakfast, brush her hair, brush her teeth, pack her bag. Now she is more likely than me to remember her gym bag – I don’t even pay any attention except on the days when she is exceptionally tired in the morning.

She used to want me to brush her hair and teeth, but now does it herself. She can’t get all the tangles out, so I do her hair over again every few days.

She’s tried walking to school on her own, as well as coming home on her own in the afternoon. It worked out well but was frustrating for Ingrid. The big deal for her was to be in charge. But the teachers at school intruded and sent her home when they thought the time was appropriate, instead of letting her decide. Tomorrow, when Ingrid will walk home on her own again, she will have a letter from me where I make it as clear as possible to whoever needs to know that she can go when she wants.

But she does the same thing herself: she intrudes on discussions and decisions that are simply none of her business. When I ask Adrian something, she answers for him. She tries to decide for Adrian what book I should read for him, or what sweet he should choose after dinner.

Some days she’s helpful and co-operative, helps me prepare dinner, etc. Other days she’s touchy, grumpy, whiny. On those days, when I ask her to do something, she can flare up in tears or anger, måste du tjata på mig hela tiden, du bara skyller på mig hela tiden (although based on her intonation I suspect she means skäller and not skyller). She goes off into her room to sulk, or walks well behind me if we’re out.

When she’s upset, she doesn’t want others to get involved. If something happens when we’re about to go home to bring her to or near tears, often one of her friends will notice, stop by and ask why Ingrid is crying. She always refuses to talk to them and absolutely doesn’t want me to explain either, so I say something generic that satisfies the friend and yet doesn’t reveal anything.

She herself is still struggling a bit with the whole empathy thing. She notices when others are physically hurt, and if she accidentally hurts someone in the middle of playing, she always apologizes, and it comes from her heart. But that understanding doesn’t reach beyond the physical. She is often intentionally slightly cruel towards Adrian: taunts him, grabs the toy that she sees him reaching for.

She is restless and impatient. She is physically unable to sit still unless she has something to concentrate on, such as a movie or a book. After dinner when she’s waiting for us to finish (so we can all have dessert) she fidgets, climbs, see-saws on the chair, fiddles with her cutlery, makes noise with her plate… anything to not be still. In fact even while she’s reading, she’s constantly shifting around, moving her legs, poking at stuff with her feet.

Reading, with restless legs

Possibly related is her habit of speaking as soon as she has something to say. That thought just has to get out, right now! She interrupts in the middle of a word while Eric and I are talking, or while I’m reading for her, or singing for Adrian. She doesn’t even seem to notice it, even though it annoys the heck out of us and we always tell her so.

With only a week left until Christmas eve, her thoughts are full of Christmas. She isn’t as obsessed as she was with her birthday, but she talks about it almost every day. She and Adrian share the felt Advent calendar I made a few years ago. There’s also an advent calendar to follow on TV and another one on the radio, but those don’t seem to be very important to her – often she skips them and then catches up a few days later.

Ingrid has learned to play “Nu tändas tusen juleljus” on the piano. I took her through it a few times and that was all it took. After that she practiced on her own, and when she forgot some note, she figured it out by trial and error. She’s not the most musical of kids, and her whistling and singing are tuneless even to my tone-deaf ears. (My own is probably equally bad but I don’t hear it myself.) But she hears enough to notice when she hits a wrong note.

She has also learned both finger knitting and knitting. She was very enthusiastic about both at first but hasn’t done recently.

She got a mild concussion one day at school and stayed at home the day after. With iPad games and movies off-limits, she was quite bored, until she came up with the idea of making Christmas cards for her friends. Her favourite crafts projects are often of this kind: decorating rather than making from scratch, and usually paper-based. She also enjoys origami and scrapbooking.

Apart from the trip to Tenerife, this has been a most ordinary month.

Ingrid goes to school, does well and loves it, and stays for as long as she can. She doesn’t want to go home in the afternoon until most of her friends are gone.

At home she reads. She got a bunch of Daisy Meadows fairy books for her birthday and was overjoyed, and now reads them a lot. Bamse and Kalle Anka make up the rest. Sometimes she reads out loud for Adrian; some of the library books are fun for both of them (at least for one reading).

She has become addicted to the iPad again, not even trying to come up with any other activity in the evenings. I have announced an iPad detox of unspecified duration.

Within a few weeks she lost three of her front teeth. One on the day of her birthday party (the “birthday tooth”), one on top of Mount Teide (the “volcano tooth”) and one last Sunday evening. That last one was really really loose all day and then finally got kicked out in the evening while she was roughhousing with Adrian.

She loves Adrian but now sometimes also loves to annoy him in a passive-aggressive way. When Adrian wants to be first to somewhere, she just casually runs ahead of him – not necessarily because she wants to be first but because she doesn’t want him to have that joy. Or because she wants that feeling of being better, faster, stronger than him? When Adrian wants to sit on one side of the sofa, she lays herself in his way to block him.

Both of them really, really like being first.

What Ingrid wants most of all, if a fairy could grant her any wish: (1) to get to decide everything (because adults get to decide way too much she thinks), and (2) to have a mini car or a self-driving chair on wheels, so she wouldn’t have to walk anywhere. (And ideally it would have wings, too.)

No, what she would really want to wish for is that the fairy would grant her ALL her wishes, but she guesses that the fairy wouldn’t agree to that. (She’s seen Aladdin, after all, and knows how genies think.) She’s kind of disappointed that fairies don’t exist.

She’s pretty sure that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist and that it’s me putting coins under her pillow. Regardless, she did not want to put her 3 latest teeth under her pillow for the tooth fairy for 10 kr apiece – she’d rather keep them, she said.

Ingrid may not like walking but she cycles well. Today we cycled to Vällingby together to go to the cinema, about 3 km each way, without a problem.

She also swims well, and this Friday she participated in her first swimming “competition”. She normally has a swimming lesson every Friday, and twice a term the ordinary lessons are replaced by a competition. This doesn’t apply to the very youngest kids, but Ingrid has advanced far enough that she’s in the deep pool and doing real swimming, so her group is included. The swimmers don’t compete against each other, only against themselves and against a set of target times. Ingrid swam 25m backstroke.

After last month’s changes, this has been a stable month, almost eventless. Well, except for all the birthday celebrations of course. Ingrid has been thinking about them almost all the time, I think.

The best things with birthdays are presents and sweets: the more, the better. Those are the things she talks about most. She finally settled on waffles for her actual birthday, and for her party a Swiss roll – with ice cream or whipped cream, so the kids can put sprinkles on top.

As for gifts, she has been talking a lot about stuff that the other girls in her class have: My Little Pony, Littlest Pet Shop, Lego Friends. We got her some Lego Friends; she’s thinking of buying some My Little Pony toys for her pocket money.

Ingrid gets pocket money every week, and my expectation is that she should pay for her own toys. Otherwise she will be insatiable and never consider the cost. Now she is hyper-aware of the cost. When she realizes that buying this advent calendar would cost half her money, and that pony castle set would cost ALL her money, she really doesn’t want to part with her money. Not because she has her sights set on something else, but because she doesn’t like handing over the money.

On the other hand, not getting pocket money doesn’t bother her too much: she bought a Bamse subscription and paid for it in instalments, i.e. she did not get any pocket money until it was paid off. That was no big deal. The endowment effect in action…

Other kids’ opinions matter not only for toys. She is discovering self-consciousness and embarrassment. Not that she hasn’t felt these things in the past, but now she knows what she’s feeling and has the words for it.

She wanted to buy a onesie (the thing that looks like loose zip-up pyjamas). We found one that was in a pretty fabric, but tight rather than loose, more like a dance suit. Ingrid thought about it and then said she wouldn’t want to wear that to school, it would be too embarrassing. But a few other kids have loose onesies, so she felt more comfortable with that.

Otherwise her taste in clothing is refreshingly individualistic. No blue jeans for her, no frilly skirts and tights, no t-shirts with kittens or glittery hearts. No – Ingrid wears dresses and tunics, and tights or leggings. There was one week when she wore skirts for some reason, skirts that I’ve bought for her at some point and that normally lie unused in her dresser. That week in the afternoons I could hardly find her at school – I almost didn’t recognise her at a distance.

All her clothes should be soft and stretchy and preferably tight. Especially when it comes to trousers she really doesn’t want any loose jeansy ones, only leggings. And everything should be colourful and patterned, preferably in floral patterns. Molo’s crazy flowers-and-rabbits-and-clouds style patterns are her particular favourites. She happily combines different strongly patterned items that almost make my eyes water. But she also has definite colour preferences, so the end result may be eye-catching but usually isn’t totally uncoordinated.

She has asked me to braid her hair several times now. It’s shortish, especially at the front, so a plain braid would leave much of it still loose. Therefore I’ve tried my hand at French braids and Dutch braids, with the help of YouTube. (The trick is to moisten the hair first, with a spray bottle.) She’s been surprisingly patient, and liked the results – and also liked the wavy hair she gets when we unbraid the hair.

Ingrid has been interested in telling time again. She learned it this spring but then kind of forgot about it, and has now relearned it again. When we’re near a clock she often just tells me the time, because she can.

The quarter hours are particularly tricky because they work differently in Estonian and Swedish. In Swedish it’s the same as in English: quarter to, quarter past. In Estonian, as soon as you’re past the hour, you start thinking about the next one: a quarter past six becomes “quarter [of] seven” and then a quarter to seven is “three quarters [of] seven”.

(And while we’re at it, half-hours work the same in Swedish and Estonian: both are forward-looking, unlike English. So the English “half past six” becomes “half seven” in both Estonian and Swedish.)

Last week we were invited to the school for the parent-teacher meeting for the autumn term. The English name is misleading, really: it’s a “development discussion” in Swedish, and it’s definitely not just for the parents and the teacher: the student is present and an important part of the discussion. Also the meeting is both backward- and forward-looking, and results in a plan for the student’s learning for the rest of the term.

Ingrid is still well ahead of the school’s expectations in reading, writing, maths and English. Her learning plan included practising block letters (as opposed to the all-uppercase they all started out with), and beginning to read in English.

At home she mostly plays with Adrian, or plays on the iPad, or reads the usual stuff: Bamse, Kalle Anka, Daisy Meadows’ fairy books. She borrows new Daisy Meadows books at the school library every week, never anything else, and will probably keep this up until she’s read all they have.