Back to school. Ingrid chose the location. First she posed, then she did a song and dance number.

This month has been packed with news and newness.

First and foremost, this was “back to school” month. Ingrid went from grade 0 to grade 1, from Kindergarten to “real school”. She was very excited about this, and still is. New school building, new teacher, new classroom, new routines, new just about everything.

In grade 0 the kids had no fixed places; now Ingrid has her own seat and desk. In grade 0 there were communal boxes with pencils and crafts materials; now she has her own pencils and crayons and glue stick, as well as writing books and a reading book.

Her schedule is mostly filled with Swedish, i.e. reading and writing. There’s also maths, as well as “social studies” and “nature studies”, and even a bit of English. The class teacher is in charge of all of this.

The kids also have a music lesson once a week, and gym class twice a week, with specialist teachers. Twice a week they go to the school library where they can borrow books to read in the afternoons.

School work ends at one o’clock and after that it’s after school care: playing with her friends, reading, doing crafts projects etc.

This year the grade 0 kids are in the same building as grade 1, so several of Ingrid’s friends from preschool (about half a year younger than her) have “caught up” with her, including her very best friend Elin.

Ingrid has rediscovered beading and regularly brings home beaded circles and hearts decorated in geometrical patterns. Then she hides them somewhere in the house and prepares a treasure hunt for me, with drawn clues leading me to the final treasure. Her sketches of the hiding places are often really carefully observed. Last time, for example, four of the hiding places were in different lamps, and each one was clearly distinguishable: my desk lamp, a reading lamp by the sofa, the lamp over the kitchen table, and the ceiling lamp in the hallway.

Also new for this month is a new bicycle for Ingrid. She could still use the old one, but because it was relatively small, she couldn’t go particularly fast on it, and not particularly far either. When we were going somewhere together by bike, I sometimes had trouble keeping my balance because I had to cycle so very slowly.

On her new bike she can keep up much better, so the bikes are our main mode of daily transportation. We cycle to and from school, to friends’ birthday parties, to playgrounds…

Every other Sunday we cycle to a beaver scout meeting. Eric was a boy scout when he was a kid, and scouting seemed like the kind of thing that Ingrid might enjoy as well, so we’re giving it a try. She’s enjoyed the first two meetings and is looking forward to the hike next weekend.

The one activity to which Ingrid has not tried cycling is swim school. It’s on Friday evenings, quite late, and I suspect she might not have any strength left for the trip back home afterwards.

Favourite books: Bamse and Kalle Anka, and the Daisy Meadows’ fairy books.

Favourite on-screen entertainment: kids’ programmes on SVT Play, especially Världens bästa fritids but also Vampyrskolan, Max och Ruby etc.

Favourite toys: Lego. Yes, Ingrid has actually been playing with toys recently! She has been making little cars and houses, and then playing with them. Sometimes she ties the cars together with pieces of string and makes a train out of them. Often the cars are flying cars. Sometimes the cars live in the house. I bought a box full of doors and windows for her, and I think we also need more wheels, and more figures who can live in those houses and fly around in the cars.

Ingrid has had an activity-filled month.

She still loves swimming and playing in water. I got her a new two-piece swimsuit in June, to make it easier for her to get it on and off, and it already looks like it’s been through some serious abuse. The snorkel and mask we bought have also been in constant use.

Other favourite physical activities include driving (go-carts, electric cars, and pretty much anything else you can imagine) and horseback riding, but also climbing (like those indoor climbing walls, or adventure trails, or just large playground climbing structures) and jumping, such as bouncy castles and trampolines.

All this moving around, much of it outdoors, has made her strong. It’s been a long time since she complained about her legs being tired, which used to be a never-ending complaint in this house.

She’s also quite fearless. Speed, heights, water, you name it: she dares more than many others at her age. At the beach she goes deeper and deeper until the water reaches her chin and she is almost on the tips of her toes, and still she tries to go further. At any playground climbing structure she never stops until she’s at the top. At the adventure park in Tartu she never even seemed to notice the height, or consider being cautious about it. At driving tracks etc she always looks for the fast cars and tries to overtake any other kids.

Meanwhile her helpful, friendly mood continues. She has helped me cook dinner on several occasions. And not just joined me for a few moments and then disappeared when the novelty wore off, but actually helped me cook entire meals.

One evening she decided she wanted mashed potatoes, and it was way past dinnertime. (I can’t remember what happened to her actual dinner.) So she proceeded to make mashed potatoes for herself from scratch, with me only guiding her but not doing any actual work. Well, I did the mashing, because she didn’t have the arm strength. But she took care of all the peeling, boiling, mixing, seasoning, etc.

Then she proceeded to pour ketchup on top of it and mixing it together until the lovely freshly-made mashed potatoes were a red mess… but she loved them nevertheless.

Miscellaneous:
We have given up on letting her go to bed when she is tired, because she just won’t. Instead we now have set a 21:30 deadline for her for getting into bed. In practice she often goes to bed earlier than that, so she can fall asleep together with Adrian. Often she is already asleep shortly after nine o’clock.

She continues to devour Bamse magazines and Kalle Anka Pockets. (Kalle Anka is Donald Duck’s Swedish name.)

She has discovered air hockey.

She still does not see any point in keeping her hair out of her face, and I have to keep reminding her to at least put a headband on while she is eating.

This has been a month of summer. School’s out, so Ingrid has been in fritids (after-school care) for two weeks and at home for two more.

Whenever the weather is good, she spends her day outside playing in water, as much as possible. She’s brown as a cookie (just have a look)! We have a small inflatable pool at home, and she also hangs out at a nearby playground with a nice large paddling pool. There she finds not just water but often also kids to play with as well.

Since that is much more fun for her than for anybody else in our family, she now often goes there on her own, or we go together and then I go home again with Adrian when he gets bored while Ingrid stays on. It’s a great independence exercise for her. Not just the being on her own, but also having to manage her things, packing them up and carrying them home afterwards, and so on.

She likes to bring a lot of stuff to the pool. Swimsuit, beach towel, bath robe, mask and snorkel, swim ring, maybe some water squirters, snacks, Bamse… We bought a snorkel and a mask for her for this summer and she loves them. Mostly when she is in the water she’s swimming with the snorkel and often the swim ring, too. I suppose she likes the sensation of just floating, without any effort or struggle to keep afloat, or keep the water out of her nose and mouth. She stays on the surface, with the snorkel clear all the time, and does not dive at all, but she will probably love snorkeling for real in a few years or so.

Because Ingrid loves playing in the water we’ve also been to local lakeside beaches several times this summer. A trip to the beach is a great combination of bathing (for Ingrid), a picnic (for both kids), and a cycle trip (fun exercise for me). Maltesholmsbadet is the beach we visit most often because it’s closest to us and never crowded. Last time we tried out Ängbybadet instead. The water turned out to be too cold even for Ingrid so we played miniature golf instead.

Most of her friends are out of town for the summer (although we’ve managed to organize some play dates for her) so she has been a bit lonely and bored. She’s made a new friend, a boy about a year younger than her, who recently moved in to a house across the street from us. I suspect his main appeal to Ingrid is his availability… but they also share an interested in things with wheels. Most of the time they’ve spent together, they’ve just been cycling around in the street. That’s usually how we notice that L and his family are at home: L is out cycling in the street.

Ingrid likes stuff with wheels. She saw a note about Lådbilslandet in a book and immediately asked if we could go there. It’s a small amusement park with mostly driving-oriented activities: three-wheel go-karts (severely limited in speed, which Ingrid found a bit frustrating), a traffic area with mini cars and trucks, a train track etc., but also rafts, a bouncy castle, an adventure trail etc. Ingrid drove for what felt like hours.

We’ve also been to Tom Tits Experiment, a hands-on science centre with all sorts of experiments and activities for kids and adults to try: everything from blowing giant soap bubbles to heat-sensitive cameras. During summer they also have lots of activities in their park: a labyrinth, various kinds of water play, a storm simulator, a “free fall” simulator/ride (which Ingrid did 9 times) etc. More than enough for a whole day, and had they not closed at 6pm, Ingrid would have stayed all night, too.

Another fun summer activity has been picking strawberries. She likes to pick and eat them, but also to pick for the rest of us, and then share them equally among us. We have quite a lot of strawberries, both wild ones in various places in the garden and cultivated ones. Often she invites Adrian along on her “strawberry hunts”, as she calls them. She is not very thorough in her picking, so once every few days I go through the raised beds and usually find a bunch of berries that are bordering on over-ripe that she has missed.

Summer and no school also means no early mornings. She often stays up past 10 o’clock, reading. I wake her in the morning at about 8:30 to keep her day roughly in sync with the rest of the family.

She now has 2 adult teeth halfway out at the bottom and 4 loose teeth at the top. The loose ones have been loose for what feels like forever but are not even close to coming out, but they are loose enough to make it hard for Ingrid to bite into an apple for example.

Ingrid has been much more agreeable to be around than last month. She doesn’t purposefully try to annoy us, and doesn’t whine or complain all the time. She tries to be polite when asking for things. She has decided that she wants to be helpful, too. Not generally helpful – she just wants to help me (and sometimes Adrian). She often asks me if there is anything she can help me with, and I try to think of activities that we can do together. That helpfulness appeared overnight, not gradually, and I’ve been trying in vain to recall what discussion or event caused it. Regardless of what triggered it, it’s pretty nice, although somewhat forced at times. It will become more natural with practice, I expect.

This has been a frustrating month. Ingrid is in one of her moody, irritable phases: there seems to be a lot of anger in her, sulks and contrariness. She responds with irritation to all our polite requests and friendly questions, and deliberately does things that she knows will annoy us.

Dinner time. We ask her to come and eat. She is busy reading. We ask again. She comes, with a sulky face. I ask if I shall pour some juice for her. She stares but does not say a word. I wait. She waits. I start doing something else (serving food to Adrian). She mumbles something. I tell her I didn’t catch that, could she repeat herself? She shouts “I already told you I wanted juice, how many times do I have to say that!” I tell her that I will do it in a moment, when I’m done with what I’m doing right now. Etc.

She takes and takes and asks for more, but will not give. She asks for my help, my company, my attention, but whenever I ask her to do things she ignores me, or refuses, or complies with much complaining and huffing.

I find myself saying no to her more and more often, because otherwise she will take everything I have and I will have neither time nor energy for anything else in my life. Perhaps this is turning into a negative spiral, with her annoyed by my no’s and therefore demanding even more? I wish I knew.

This mostly seems to surface when she is with us. With others she is all sunshine. Whenever she’s been playing at a friend’s home and we arrive to pick her up, the mums always comment on how sweet and friendly and happy she is. I wish she would choose to show that side of herself to us a bit more often.

But it’s not all anger and spite. She has also shown unusual persistence this month. She has decided that she wants to learn something, and then practised and practised every day until she can do it.

First she taught herself to whistle. Now she is learning to vary the pitch so she can whistle melodies.

Then she learned to skip rope. Already several months ago she learned to skip a long rope with others turning the rope (or with one turner and one end of the rope tied to a stationary object). This she learned at school, and it was accompanied by a rhyme in two parts. First she counts a letter of the alphabet with every jump. When she misses, that letter is used for the second part. If the letter is G, for example, she would first think of a thing beginning with G – a giraffe for example – and then chant: “Mamma mamma får jag en giraff, svara ärligt, ja eller nej? Ja – nej – ja – nej…”

Now she has progressed to skipping on her own. Interestingly she first learned to skip backwards: she had trouble with her arm technique when turning the rope forwards. But soon after she figured out the forwards movement as well. That day, when she first mastered it, she skipped for at least an hour, and the next day her muscles were so sore she could barely walk. Now she does it every day. Her technique is still a bit weird, with her arms stretched out shoulder-high, but I guess she’ll figure out more effective arm movements later.

Her hair is growing quite long and I now insist on some sort of containment for it at least when she is eating. We bought a bunch of new hair clips (with a Tinkerbell theme) and hair bands and elastics. It was fun for me to see a girl emerge from behind the blond mane: I realized that for a month or so I had rarely seen her entire face.

This month Ingrid also celebrated the end of her first school year. School is over now and starts again on August 20th. But Eric and I don’t get two months of vacation so Ingrid is in after-school care for another few weeks, until early July.

Miscellaneous:

• Favourite summer activities: Bathing. Blowing dandelions. Eating strawberries. Blowing soap bubbles.
• Bamse magazines have been joined by Kalle Anka pocket, Donald Duck.
• Favourite craft: beading bracelets.
• When she wants to say something that she is ashamed of, or suspects that I might not be happy about, she writes me a note instead.
• She has been interested in temperatures and thermometres. She doesn’t quite understand the scale yet but is sort of getting it now.
• Turquoise is by far her favourite colour.

A new kind of independence is developing in Ingrid: she has started experimenting with being completely on her own. It began with an afternoon at the playground, after school. Adrian wanted to stay; Ingrid wanted to go home. I handed my keys to Ingrid and she went on home on her own.

This took me by surprise, because when she last tried being home alone, she didn’t hold out many minutes. Now she was totally cool with it.

So we did it a couple more times. Sometimes she’s gone home from the playground to pick up some stuff. Once I did the opposite and left her at the playground with Adrian while I went back home to pick up something. Sometimes she’s gone to a friend’s place to ask if they can play. A few times she has just gone out to ride her kickbike or skateboard on her own for a while.

She likes staying up late, usually reading. She can usually still get up the next morning, but by the afternoon the lack of sleep catches up with her and she is tired and whiny. So now I try to send her off to bed by 9 at the latest. But sometimes no arguments work, not even the threat of missing the bedtime story (because after 9 we are usually both so tired that I don’t want to tell a story).

When we do have time for a story, she often asks for something that has things (inanimate objects) that come to life and can talk: toys, or the inhabitants of the kitchen, or the numbers one to nine. And preferrably their talking should be arguments about which one of them is the best. A reflection of her daily reality at school perhaps.

Sleeping is just so utterly boring, it seems. “Who came up with the idea of sleeping, anyway?” she asked today. “And why do we have to eat? And poop?” Not really wondering, but just expressing her frustration with these stupid wastes of time.

At mealtimes, too, it is clear that she would rather not have to eat. Whenever she is snacking, she will bring some Bamse magazines to read. At the dinner table she often forgets that she is supposed to be eating, and plays or talks instead, and we remind her to eat. Sometimes she gets bored with eating and leaves the table before she is full, and then realizes an hour later that she is actually still hungry.

At home this isn’t much of an issue, but at school it causes more problems. Their lunch break is short, and she is basically so distracted at mealtimes that she doesn’t have time to eat. And then the break ends and she wolfs down the food that is still on her plate.

For a long time Ingrid had been complaining of stomach aches, off and on, especially after school lunches. But she wasn’t very consistent in reporting them, so it took months for us to figure out the pattern. Finally we realized that the aches usually came when she had had to eat too fast. Now she moved to another table at school, closer to the teachers who can remind her to actually eat. And I don’t think she’s had any stomach aches since then.

Miscellaneous:

• She is letting her hair grow long and it is now often in her face. This seems to bother her more than me. She doesn’t like hair clips, but will accept soft hair bands.
• She likes playing with words, especially names, and turning them backwards.
• Favourite game: vändtia (which seems to correspond to the English Shithead – I’m glad it’s not called that in Swedish!)

This month, after a long time of increasing frustration (on my part) and increasing obsession (on Ingrid’s part), I started an iPad fast. For just over a week, the iPads have been hidden and out of reach of the kids. Movie time is strictly limited, too, but movies haven’t been a problem in the same way as the iPads have.

YouTube was really the worst. It was just like having a TV in the house: mindlessly skipping from one channel to another, always finding something that is better than nothing, watching whatever happened to be on. And then at about 8 o’clock when iPad time ended, she realized she wanted to play a game, or to for me to read a book for her – except that by then it was too late. So effectively the iPad got the priority slot, and all other activities got whatever dribs and drabs were left over.

Ingrid’s first reaction was as expected, with both tears and whining. But then she adjusted, and now I don’t think she’s even mentioned it for several days.

I was aiming for an iPad-free week, but now I won’t reintroduce it unless the kids ask for it. And when that happens, it will be without YouTube.

Ingrid reads as much as ever. She still likes best the books that she can read from beginning to end in one sitting, and isn’t that fond of chapter books. She likes the feeling of completion, of achievement, I think: when she is reading a longer book, she often comes to me and proudly reports “look how far I’ve read already!”

When I read for her, she listens very attentively. Often she comments on the contents, and especially when she notices parallels to other things we’ve read or seen or experienced. She also asks about words she doesn’t understand.

Bedtime stories are an important part of our daily routine. After she’s brushed her teeth and gotten into her nightie, she gets into a bed, and I tell a story.

At first I used to read a story for her. Then we got to a point where Ingrid and Adrian would go to bed at the same time, and reading no longer worked: Adrian wouldn’t stay still if there was any light in the room, and nobody would get any closer to sleep. So then I’d retell old fairy tales instead. But I ran out of stories after a while, and started making them up.

Now we do that every night. Ingrid gets to pick a starting point, the thing she wants a story about. Often she wants an animal: a story about a cat, or a horse, or a dog and a wolf. And if her chosen starting point is not enough to get my imagination going, I ask for more starter ideas. So we’ve had stories about “a horse who gets stolen”, a “scary story about a dragon”, about a detective, “two squirrels who fall in love” (after watching Ice Age), “a ball who is alive and can talk, and all the other toys as well” and so on.

Sometimes we do the story with Adrian still awake, next to me, and then he often drifts off halfway through the story. Sometimes Ingrid comes upstairs just after Adrian has fallen asleep, and then I half-whisper while Adrian sleeps. When Adrian tires early, we may do the story in Ingrid’s bedroom.

By the end of it, anyway, Adrian is asleep and the story is over. After the story I lie next to Ingrid for a while, and she talks to me about whatever is on her mind – usually things that happened to her during the day.

Then we hug. She touches her nose to mine. We wish each other good night. As I go downstairs, she rolls over to Adrian’s side, and falls asleep while holding his hand.

The good night wishes get more and more elaborate. At first it was just “good night”. Now it’s “good night, sweet dreams, sleep well, have beautiful dreams” and “no, you have an even better night” and “twice as beautiful dreams for you” and so on.

Only this week she suddenly realized that the Estonian head ööd was made up of two actual words, “good” and “night”, not a meaningless sound of hedööd (“g’night”). head… ööd… ja head… und… she wonderingly said, “it’s ’good’ and ’night’!” Yes it is.

New skills:

• Crocheting (chain stitch), nice and even. She crotcheted a pink and magenta bookmark for me.
• Robber language.

This month’s big news: Ingrid’s first baby tooth fell out. It was loose, and then it was looser, and Ingrid was constantly asking us to look at her loose tooth and to feel it wiggle. And then it was gone. Ingrid was in the middle of boisterous play at the time, so she probably swallowed the tooth without noticing it.

She had a dentist’s appointment (which I’d booked quite independently of the loose tooth) where we also found out that several of her six-year molars are appearing. They were visible for the dentist but not quite yet for us.

Ingrid has been looking forward to losing her baby teeth. It is a bit of a rite of passage, and many of her friends at school had lost theirs. But of course most of her classmates are older than her.

Her peers at school are affecting her a lot, more than I ever noticed at pre-school. Is it because she feels she has to act like the big kids now? And is that, in turn, because everybody else is trying to act like a big kid? I sense that she is looking for others’ approval, trying to fit in and to impress, and to be better than others – not always in a good way.

Talk like “you don’t get anything, do you” (du fattar ju ingenting) and snooty frustrated sighs of ah men! may be an unavoidable side effect of going to school but it’s not the kind of treatment I am used to.

I think that she is generally sweeter and more innocent than the average 6-year-old. Or perhaps she is simply more innocent than all the 6-year-olds with older brothers and sisters. She is still figuring out how to deal with some of the pushier kids. When we talk about her day (on our way home from school, or during our afternoon snack, or at bedtime) she often talks about others trying to tell her what to do. Not kids trying to push her around, but just kids who think they know better than others.

This month’s major new skill is telling time. Ingrid knew the hours already last summer, and has since then been grappling with quarters and minutes and such stuff. Until now, whenever she asked what time it was, she was never quite able to make sense of the answer. “Quarter to four” – is that before or after four? A minute or a second, which is the shorter one? Is “five minutes past” more than “quarter past”? She asked again and again, and I explained again and again, but it never stuck. And now one day it suddenly clicked, and that was that. Now she can tell the time exactly, by the minute, from both an analog and a digital clock.

She also knows all the months of the year, but that’s not really new. I don’t know exactly when she learned them but I think she’s known them for a couple of months now.

Also just at the beginning of the month, at the very end of the skating season, she learned to skate backwards.

Favourite toy: a slinky that she bought with her own pocket money. But afterwards she realized that Adrian has been playing with it more than her. I don’t think she’ll be buying many toys going forward. When we went to the toy shop she spent a long time looking around, but there wasn’t really much there that she liked. She’s fond of stuffed animals, and was thinking of buying one of them, but when she saw the prices, she changed her mind. Now with the slinky she’s understood what I noticed a long time ago: she doesn’t really play with toys.

She still loves reading, and Bamse is still the best. Maybe because we have so many of them, so she can always find one she hasn’t read in a while. She happily devours all the books I bring home from the library, but rarely wants to read any of them twice. Like an adult, but very unlike younger kids, once she’s read the book, she is not interested in reading it again for a while. Except if I read it for her: she likes to listen to me read, and with my reading makes the book feel fresh and new again.

Favourite movie: Alice in Wonderland.
Favourite iPad app: Pettson’s inventions. Also, watching me play Devil’s Advocate. In fact she likes that game more than I do; she likes the shopping part.
Miscellaneous favourites: nail polish, braids and ponytails.

Another month with smooth sailing all the way. This still feels like a bit of a luxury, not to be taken for granted – I still have strong memories of the time when Ingrid was surly and negative and complained and argued about everything.

Ingrid has matured a lot when it comes to relationships with other people. She thinks and talks about them quite a lot. Just like she likes to recite her catalogue of physical “hurts” for the day (“I slipped and fell and hit my hands and didn’t even have my thick gloves on” or “I got poked in the eye while we were playing”) she also often tells me about psychological “hurts”: which friend tried to force Ingrid to do something she didn’t want, which friends started to quarrel while they were playing.

There is apparently a lot of “love” at school as well. (And for some reason she/they refer to it as “love”, in English, not in Swedish. Perhaps it is more romantic this way.) Often she tells me about all the boys who are in love with her and try to kiss her all the time, and how she has to run away from them. She seems to enjoy the attention but she is not fond of kissing, regardless of who is doing it. She doesn’t want me to kiss her either – she doesn’t like the wet feeling. She’d much rather get a hug.

School really is a social activity for her. The educational part is limited in scope and ambition, and not the least bit challenging for her. One week their weekly newsletter to parents said they had been listening for the first sound in words – the B in book and so on. We were doing that with Ingrid when she was three years old. Of course, I understand that they have to begin with the basics and can’t assume that the kids have done anything before school.

She has also been more curious about relationship and social issues in books that she reads. What does “bullying” mean? What does “torment” mean? We talk about it, and I reflect on how innocent she is.

She seems to have a strong need just now to feel successful. She often asks me to confirm that she is good at skating / drawing / reading etc. (Which I almost always do.) I don’t like that way of thinking much – I believe in praising effort, not achievement – and I wonder how she’s come to think in those terms. Probably school; I get the impression that teachers say that kind of thing an awful lot.

The one activity about which I couldn’t agree with her was skating. When she asked if she was good at it, she could shakily move ahead but not much more. I told her that to be good at something, it shouldn’t feel difficult. She should be able to skate without having to think hard about it all the time – like she cycles, effortlessly.

Since the beginning of this term, the kids have been going skating every week at school, and Ingrid’s skating skills have improved enormously. Now she actually glides with (relative) speed and confidence. She can turn, and skate on one leg for short stretches. She has even tried skating backwards a little bit. A month ago we used to chase each other on ice: me skating semi-slowly backwards in front of her, her trying to catch me. The last time we went skating together, I definitely was NOT going to escape her if I skated backwards, and even skating face-forward I had to exert myself to not get caught. On a long straight stretch I can outskate her easily, but when I have to maneuver and turn because we’re about to reach the edge of the rink (and she can turn and intercept me when I am forced to turn) we’re now almost evenly matched.

Ingrid plays a lot with Adrian and they really enjoy each other’s company. Their play is still simple and physical and usually quite incomprehensible to me. If they play WITH anything, it’s things like pillows, blankets, balloons, maybe a large cardboard box or a bag they can climb into. The toy food doesn’t get much use just now. Instead they play a lot with a set of doctor’s equipment. It also mostly seems to be about poking and tickling each other.

For some reason she generally speaks to him in baby language. In fact sometimes his sentences have better grammar than hers. She skips prepositions and doesn’t decline her verbs: “Adrian try” instead of “now you try it”, “play blanket” instead of “let’s play with the blanket”.

Small stuff:

• Weekend fixture: watching Melodifestivalen.
• Favourite fruit: kiwi and pineapple.
• Favourite on YouTube: Pink Panther (the animated one, not inspector Clouseau)
• Fashion: having her hair in braids.

Kids are, of course, always learning things, but it feels like this month Ingrid has picked up more new skills than usual.

She has learned to do up buttons, which she has sort of managed before but only with much struggle. And shoelaces, too. During the Christmas break we went shopping for shoes that she can wear for gym class at school, and her absolute favourites were a pair of pink Converses. She has never had lace-up shoes before, but was determined to learn that art if that’s what it took to get those Converses. I showed her once and she got it immediately. After a few days of practice (during which she wore the Converses all the time at home) she had it down pat.

Another manual skill is eating with chopsticks. She had a kid’s version before, in plastic, with a flexible join between the two chopsticks. But during one dinner when she couldn’t stop playing with them she bent them too far, and they broke. I haven’t had time to buy new ones so she made do with the adult version. And she actually manages to eat some food with them. We don’t use them often at home, but at restaurants she encounters chopsticks fairly regularly. Sushi is her favourite restaurant food (and now also dumplings, especially the kind with a thick layer of white gluey dough).

At school she has learned to sew blanket stitch and used it to make a bunny rabbit. In the evenings she has learned how to search on YouTube. During the Christmas break she learned to play Battleship.

At weekends we’ve been practising ice skating. Twice we’ve had the good luck to run into her friends at the ice rink, which made skating more fun for her but also provided a welcome challenge, since both those girls were more expert skaters than her. Last time we skated for over two hours: the kids chased each other, did a slalom track, tried swizzles, “the meatball” (crouching down into a ball) and so on.

Quite spontaneously and naturally she is learning multiplication and division. A few days ago when we were heating up meatballs in the microwave oven, she noticed that I heated them for 20 seconds on one side and 20 on the other, and commented that with four meatballs, that makes 10 second per meatball. Today we were talking about Bamse magazines (because I ordered a subscription and we’ve been waiting for the first issue to turn up in the mail) and how much I paid for the subscription (99 kr for 5 issues), and she calculated that the same 5 issues would cost 150 kr if we bought them in the store.

She is unlearning things, too – or rather, I am trying to make her unlearn things that she has learned the wrong way. She writes her Gs quite weirdly (without the top part, sort of like backwards a J with a curlier finish at the bottom) and always writes her Js the wrong way round. When she was just learning to write I didn’t bother to correct such details, judging it more important to learn the letters than to get their shapes exactly right. With all the other letters she has gradually ended up drawing the right shapes, but with those two she’s gotten firmly stuck in the wrong place, and getting unstuck is harder than I thought. I’m also trying to get her to draw her letters and numbers in the right direction: starting them at the top etc.

I am also making her learn falling asleep on her own, since I got tired of spending so much time every evening putting kids to bed. I can’t say that she’s happy about this change but she’s OK with it. At first did it completely on her own, but then her bedtime and Adrian’s drifted closer to each other, so now both go to bed at the same time, in the big bed. I tell them a story and stay there until Adrian is asleep, and then maybe talk quietly to Ingrid for a while before going downstairs. Ingrid stays there and falls asleep with Adrian as quiet but comforting company. Having him next to her makes a big difference for her.

This month we also had Christmas of course. Ingrid has a minor obsession with presents and opening them. The contents are not that important; she doesn’t even remember to say thank you; it is the opening and the surprise that matters.

The best present in my opinion was a LasseMaja book. At first she was a bit underwhelmed (too few pictures) but when she started reading she could hardly put it down. Since then we’ve borrowed two more from the library and she devoured those equally fast. Another successful gift was a picture-based English dictionary.

She still has her minor obsession with physical hurts. One day after school she told me to guess how many times she’d hurt herself that day. In my head I guessed four, but told her eleven to make it more fun. The correct answer was 17. The next day she must have counted every single bump and poke, because when I got there she was ready and presented me with a paper on which she had written, with very large digits, the number 129. Adrian bumped into her while she was getting dressed and she corrected it to 130.

Another time she asked me why I only cuddle and console Adrian when he hurts himself, but not her. I explained to her that I didn’t think she needed that any more, that she was big enough to console herself. She didn’t agree, and we agreed that I’d hug and console her as well. I guess I’ve been expecting too much maturity and independence from her.

Likewise she once wondered why I praised Adrian for [whatever it was] and not her. I explained that I praise him when he does something that is hard for him, but since those things are easy for her, I don’t mention them. She’s been giving this some thought, and the overall idea of treating different people differently not based on what they “deserve” but based on some more advanced criteria of “appropriateness”. Until now she has, I think, been thinking in terms of deserving, of being nice to nice people and not to bad people.

When we talk in bed late at night, she often brings up some situation when someone has been “not nice” towards her. She can take that quite hard, reacting sometimes with hurt and sometimes with righteous anger. We talk about what can make people act that way, and how she can think about those situations.

Small stuff:

• She is trying to teach Adrian to play hide-and-seek.
• She has moved from the adjustable Stokke chair to a normal adult kitchen chair, on her own initiative.
• She has decided that she wants long her and no bangs, so we’re letting the bangs grow out. But she does not like hair clips so her hair hangs in front of her eyes almost all the time.
• She has discovered that she likes peanut butter on toast.
• Favourite iPad game: Lost Circus, a hidden objects game.

Reading, reading, reading…

Sometimes she seems like such a big girl, and at other times she is still so young and innocent. Her top idea of “fun” right now is the shallalooba game, which means getting naked and then wiggling her bottom at me (or whoever else is there) while shouting “shallalooba!”, accompanied by uncontrollable giggling.

Otherwise much of the past month has been focused on waiting for Christmas: the advent calendar, and the Christmas show they had at school, and of course Christmas itself. For at least two weeks up until the 1st of December she was talking about the advent calendar, worrying whether I would get it ready in time, asking if I could wrap the presents already, then inspecting the calendar and looking at the shapes of the different gifts.

I think the calendar (and Christmas Eve as well) are so important to her because she loves surprises. The important thing is not the gift, nor the act of giving and receiving, but the surprise. Anything gets better when wrapped in a surprise – and there is nothing that makes her as sad as a surprise revealed. This goes for dinner , for everyday things that I buy for her, goodnight stories, etc. Nowadays I never tell her in advance what I’m cooking, and instead let her lift the lid and uncover the surprise. And when I buy new socks for her, I do not say to her, “I bought some socks for you, here they are”. Instead I say that I bought her something today, or let her see the bag. Then we wait until we get home, and then she gets to open the bag.

The Christmas show was sort of the opposite – a surprise that she wanted to prepare for us. We knew about the show itself, of course, but she would not sing any of the songs for me in advance, even though they practiced them a lot at school. When she happened to hum a snatch of a Christmas song, she sometimes tried to cover it up and pretend she didn’t. Then she made sure to tell me that this was not all of it, and they will sing more of it during the show. In the end I got her to understand that the actual songs didn’t need to be surprises: it is OK to know what songs will be sung, it is the performance that matters. I think it was a bit of a relief for her when the show was over.

She actually had to stay home from school the day before the show, because she was knocked out by a fever. The day of the show she was still at home but feeling well enough that we went to school for the show itself, which was at 3pm. There was lots of singing and a bit of reciting of poems. Ingrid is, frankly, not much of a singer – she either doesn’t pay attention to or cannot really hear the details of the melody. She gets the lyrics right but sometimes sings them to some random tune. But her reciting stood out (to me at least) because unlike most kids her age, she speaks loudly and clearly and doesn’t rush, even when she is a bit nervous.

At home life is mostly unexciting. She plays with Adrian, watches movies and YouTube clips (quite a lot of Pingu recently), reads books and Bamse comics. She doesn’t ever play on her own.

Most of the time she is really patient with Adrian. She holds his hand when walking down slippery icy stairs; sings to him when he is upset; helps him get his clothes off when we get home. Other times she seems to enjoy winding him up and goading him with small things: repeatedly putting her foot on his chair even when he pushes it away again and again, etc.

Ingrid is a fast reader now and doesn’t even move her mouth while reading. She easily reads books of 30-40 pages, as long as each page is no more than a few paragraphs and has pictures. She does not like books without pictures. Even with books that she can and does read herself, she likes me to read them for her afterwards. Usually she reads each book once and then loses interest – she wants the surprise, again. I try to make a trip to the library every week or two.

On a few occasions I borrowed books for beginner readers, “Lätt att läsa”, but those were aimed at older readers and often dealt with topics she was less interested in (school, kids falling out and becoming friends again, etc). Now I choose kids’ books, with more fanciful stories and more adventure in them. These are really meant to be read aloud so they are longer and have more text on each page, but that’s not much of an obstacle for her, and she enjoys them much more.

I don’t think she’s been playing many iPad games recently. Perhaps because she has tired of the games we have – maybe it’s time to find some new ones. She did try Drop 7 one day when she saw me play it, and actually understood the game mechanics. When I last showed it to her, maybe a year ago, she didn’t get it at all.

Another game that she has learned is Yatzy. Yatzy and War (the card game) are her favourite games right now. War is totally luck-based but she still seems to enjoy it (and while this puzzles my adult self, I remember doing it myself when I was a kid). Yatzy is great maths practice, at just the right level for her: adding up numbers 1 to 6, up to 30. She has understood the concept and the purpose of grouping the points by fives and tens, to make the adding up easier.