Nothing brings the kids together like inspecting, inventorying or evolving pokemons.

She’s growing up. Have I mentioned that yet? Topics like deodorants are coming up at home, and Ingrid’s class have had their first sex education lessons at school.

Best right now:

• That the dentist’s appointment she had been dreading for many weeks is now behind her
• Planning for and thinking about the ski trip we’ll be making in just a week
• All the non-academic subjects at school, especially crafts (both wood and textile) but also art, music and sports. They’re doing viking-themed crafts at school now, ranging form casting tin to carving in wood and crocheting a coin purse.
• Melodifestivalen and Sweden’s youngest master chef on TV
• Sims 4
• Zoomer the robot dog that she bought for her own money after saving for months
• The bean bag she got for Christmas

Doing a lot of:

• Dancing – street dance on Tuesdays and disco on Thursdays. The disco class is level 3, which is both faster and more complicated than the beginner and advanced beginner she’s done before, so it’s a proper challenging workout.
• Reading jokes and puns from magazines etc out loud, and coming up with her own puns
• Drawing cute things in the Draw So Cute style. Half the fridge door is populated by things with spookily large black eyes.
• Thinking about cavities in her teeth, and eating less frequently to avoid these

Worst:

• Being forced to do chores such as picking up her stuff, putting away her laundry, unpacking her sports bag etc

Ingrid suddenly discovered she has almost no jeans to wear, so we went shopping.

Gone are the days of colourful dresses. It’s all jeans this winter for her. Light coloured, skinny, stretch jeans, with none of that pre-worn hole fashion.

Since a possibly broken arm is not life-threatening, our wait at the hospital lasted half the night, in one waiting room after another. The last of my photos is dated 03:28.

In the end no actual structural damage was found. Ingrid is very sensitive to pain. The smallest scratch is “hurts a lot”, and this time it was obvious she was in great pain. But apparently that’s all it was.

Ingrid fell and badly hurt her arm – she couldn’t move her hand and it hurt if anyone so much as put a finger near her hand or arm. We spent the latter part of the evening at the nearest emergency department to get it checked out. By midnight we were still waiting.

Ingrid making a late night egg and mayo wrap sandwich.

Both kids longed to play a board game, and we settled on Ticket to Ride, one of our favourite games. Even Adrian can now join in, with just a few adjustments.

It began well, but then as time passed, things started going downhill. Ingrid made a mistake (built the wrong route at one point) and then decided to get all huffy and sulky and took to throwing her cards when it was her turn. Adrian had increasing difficulties with sitting still and kept fidgeting and climbing around. My mother was constantly complaining about how worthless cards she kept getting. Eric and I made efforts to steer everyone back towards enjoying the game, then gave up on that and enjoyed ourselves only. Finally everybody else’s obvious non-enjoyment got to be too much for us as well, and we simply aborted the game and packed up.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, they complained about that as well. They all got some odd kind of pleasure out of their non-enjoyment of the game.

Ingrid cooking corn fritters.

Ingrid, walking down our street. With wet asphalt and no snow, you might notice… Apart from the fact that the sun barely reaches above the houses, this doesn’t really feel like winter at all, even though we should be right in the middle of it.