I gave in to the kids’ wishes and installed Pokémon Go on my phone so we could all go out and “Pokémon go” together. That turned out to involve a lot of Pokémons and not a whole lot of “going”.

Apparently the neighbourhood is crawling with Pokémons, and every few minutes you have to stop to throw virtual balls at them.

The kids also noticed that we hadn’t walked so much, after we got home and they saw that their Pokémon egg was nowhere near hatching. (Eggs hatch after you have walked a certain distance with them.) They tried walking around in the house to get it to hatch, but the GPS signal was too weak and this did not work at all.

We had some snow overnight, and then some more during the day, so the kids got a sled ride home. An exceptionally good ride, even, because the snow ploughs had not had time to clean our streets. A thick layer of snow, packed hard by cars, untouched by plough or gravel.

I aimed the camera at them with one hand while continuing to pull the sled with the other, so I had no real idea of what I’d captured. Both balancing acts and sneaky snowball attacks behind my back, apparently!

Ingrid and I are making preparations for her birthday party next weekend (yeah, just a little bit late). Invitations, cakes and ice cream, decorations, games, and all that.

This is Ingrid preparing for “pin the tail on the donkey” except in Sweden the donkey is a pig, and the kids draw a tail rather than pinning a ready-made tail.

With the many large trees we have, we get a lot of leaves. Much of the ground is covered so thickly that you cannot see the grass through the leaves.

Today was an excellent day for raking leaves: sunny, warmish, dry, and almost no wind. And of course raking leaves also means throwing leaves, rolling around in leaves, jumping in leaves, burying each other in leaves, etc.

We bought a new rug. The kids knew exactly what to use it for.

On Tuesdays, the kids have their Estonian lesson in the afternoon, so they finish school at the same time. I’ve been picking them up afterwards until now, but this morning I asked if they could come home on their own. They had no problem with that.

Ingrid is now 10 years. Double digits!

She is 135 cm tall – the shortest in her class. Shorter than many kids in the years below her, even. I’m glad her school focuses so much on the kids being nice and polite towards each other – there has no teasing at all. Still, she seems to think about this a lot. I don’t think it bothers her, quite, but few days go by without it coming up in conversation in some context.

The tallest girls in the class are approaching 160 cm. And growing breasts and having their first periods. At ten!

Ingrid has probably inherited my genes for late physical development. I was the next shortest girl in my class all the way up until my mid-teens, even though both my parents are average length or above. Then I caught up, and now I’m about average. And everybody had boobs and wore a bra while my chest was still completely flat. I remember being very self-conscious about it.

I am pleased that she can be so matter-of-fact about it. And I’m pleased that she feels she can talk about it with me. I don’t think I ever had such discussions with my parents.

She appears to be doing pretty well at balancing conformity against going her own way. She wants to wear bra tops because the other girls do. But she isn’t ashamed to tell her friends that she still gets a bedtime story almost every night, even though none of her friends do. I wonder what will happen to that confidence as puberty approaches.

Teenage fashion is creeping into her wardrobe. Tight jeans are gradually taking over, even some with worn patches and almost-rips. Tops with cute animals and black long cardigans.

Teenage habits are creeping into her daily life. Mornings sometimes start with chatting with her friends in some app or other, before she’s even come down for breakfast or gotten out of pyjamas and into clothes. After some pressure from parents, her class is not allowed to use their phones during breaks in the school day, but I suspect that they sit and twiddle with their phones much of the time at “the club”.

Youtube is a strong influence. Words like “frickin'” are turning up in her vocabulary.

She likes music, dancing, theatre and film. When the kids got to choose elective courses for this year, Ingrid chose drama. The best part of her social sciences class was making a movie about the Vikings. She’s often listening to music and singing along, and likes learning song lyrics by heart. In her dance club she’s in both a disco class (advanced beginner) and a beginners’ hip hop class this term. The disco moves and the whole disco style of moving her body definitely comes more easily and naturally to her than hip hop.

Celebrating Ingrid’s birthday with family lunch at a conveyor belt sushi place.