Decorating the gingerbread houses that the were assembled yesterday.

Ingrid and Adrian decorated the Christmas tree today. This year’s tree is a fir again, which goes counter to tradition and instinct but looks better and sheds less.

In the evening, the kids made gingerbread houses with Eric’s help. There are ready-made kits you can buy, but this year they’re making them almost from scratch. (But using store-bought dough, because by the time we eat them they will be dry and dusty and using home-made dough would feel like a bit of a waste.) This way we can make much smaller houses, so it’s conceivable that we might actually eat them.

The supermarket had something called “baking glue” which I haven’t seen before. We’ve tried using melted sugar to assemble the houses, and icing, but neither has worked very well. This baking glue was much easier to use than sugar, and stronger than icing.

It’s the day of the annual Christmas market in Spånga. It’s mostly filled with school classes and sports clubs selling homemade sweets and cakes, and some stands with crafts. The Spånga scout group is out in force with their traditional chocolate wheel of fortune, and their gingerbread house lottery. Ingrid’s group is manning the chocolate wheel again.

The end-of-term show for Ingrid’s dance studio. Ingrid is in two groups so we actually watched two shows: one yesterday, one today. She did show & jazz dance rather than disco this term, which I personally found more interesting to watch. Competitive disco dancing is frenetic and seems to consist mostly of lots of straddle jumps and furious windmilling of arms. Show dance has less sweat and more emotion.

In between the various kids’ groups, there are numbers by the studio’s elite and competitive groups. To keep the audience interested, I guess: they’d be bored to death if they had to watch other people’s kids do their amateur numbers for an hour. Rather clever. As long as you’re not one of the parents watching more than one show, because then even the elite performances become much of a muchness.

Hoodies are Ingrid’s favourite type of clothing. This one she got from me, and I got it from work. It’s a very nice and comfortable tretton37 hoodie, warm and thick and with a silky lining. It’s just not in my colours or my style at all, and Ingrid is getting way more enjoyment out of it than I would.

Since her thirteenth birthday, Ingrid doesn’t have an allowance any more. Instead she gets her entire monthly child benefit in her bank account, and is responsible for buying her own stuff. Clothes, shoes, books, friends’ birthday gifts, decorations for her room… Everything and anything that she may want to buy. The only cost that is purely for her but doesn’t come from her budget is all her various activities, because I want her to keep dancing and scouting without having to weigh the cost against other things she could spend that money on.

We were talking about buying clothes, recently, since she will need to buy new winter clothes soon. Ingrid’s summary of her approach to buying clothes was something like this: “Do I need it? Do I like it? Is it a hoodie?”

Ingrid is catching up with her sentence-a-day diary.

As Ingrid turned thirteen, she became eligible for a whole bunch of new banking services. Today we all went to the bank and arranged for her to get access to Handelsbanken’s banking app, Swish (for instant money transfers) and a MasterCard. All of which she was very excited about.

When she tried out Swish, she immediately zoomed in on the social features of the app. Her first payment to me – just to try it out – came with a card attached, and animated effects. I’ve used the app for years and never even noticed that those features existed. How differently we approach these things!

It’s nearly Halloween. Today we carved pumpkins (just look at Ingrid’s stabbing!) and bought lots of candy for the trick-or-treaters we hope will come.

On Saturday we saw the Tower of London from the outside. Today we came back, bought tickets and went inside. Ingrid was a bit sceptical at first but agreed to give it a try, especially when she saw the informational signs about Henry VIII and his six wives. (Her love of Hamilton has led her to listen to other musicals as well, including Six, about those six wives. “Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.” Musical + Tower = history coming to life.)

There was a lot to be seen and done there, enough to keep us occupied for half a day: the history of the Royal Mint, exhibitions of all kinds, the various walls and towers themselves, and then of course the crown jewels. The queue for those snaked back and forth across the entire courtyard but moved quite quickly so the wait didn’t feel as long as it was. And the crown jewels are quite magnificent to see. The oldest ones are massive gold and big colourful jewels; the newest are all edges and sparkle.

Our final afternoon activity was a tour on the London Eye. The tour itself was half an hour, but booking, getting the tickets and then queueing to get onto the thing took forever, so the whole endeavour literally filled our afternoon. It was a nice and relaxing experience. Too bad they’ve wrapped Big Ben in scaffolding though.