Adrian’s preschool held open house this afternoon. I see the preschool every day, but for Ingrid it was the first time in a long while. She’s tired of school (it’s almost the end of the school year after all) and this visit brought with it a wave of nostalgia. There was a quiz walk that took us through all the rooms, and she reminisced about all the places where she used to play and read and eat; about what had changed and what was still the same. She met several of the staff who cared for her back then and still work there now. She climbed her favourite outdoor play structures. And she said she wished she could go back to preschool and play all day long.

It appears to be impossible to just buy and own a phone. Immediately the phone is screaming for accessories of all kinds: leopard-patterned, bunny-eared, and so on.

Blowing dandelions, on our way home from preschool.

We saw the first blowable dandelions a few days ago, and Adrian picked every single one. Today there were slightly more, but still few enough that both kids ran to them and almost kept count to make sure each of them got a fair share.

The end-of-term show for Ingrid’s dance school.

We went there to see Ingrid’s group perform, but the rest of the show was unexpectedly interesting to watch. Not artistically interesting, perhaps, but intellectually.

A few points I observed:

Expression and emotion matter at least as much as technical and physical skills. Dancers who looked like they were really enjoying themselves were more fun to look at than others who perhaps performed the movements with more skill and precision.

After an hour, it started feeling repetitive. The choreographies mostly consisted of the same basic moves, and the similarities outweighed the differences after a while. I guess there is a limited number of moves you can use for kids who have danced maybe a year or two, once a week.

The more advanced groups had more interesting choreographies, but the competition groups almost went in the other direction: their acts were technically more complicated, and a lot faster, but not so much more interesting from an artistic point of view – choreographed with judges in mind, not general audiences.

It turned out that one of the teachers at the school (Kindahls dansskola) is the choreographer behind several of the performances at Melodifestivalen. Those also consisted of the same “vocabulary” of moves.

Ingrid loves her iPhone. She reorganizes her apps, sets reminders for herself, takes selfies and other photos, and generally finds a reason to fiddle around with the phone almost all the time.

Apart from the phone, she likes reading kids’ magazines and newspapers. Now it’s not just Kalle Anka anymore but also Kamratposten and SvD Junior. She devours each issue as soon as she gets one. “Newspapers have facts”, she told me. And it’s facts of a certain kind she likes reading – about people, current events etc.

The two best parts of all of the magazines are jokes and quizzes. She likes reading them out loud for us.

In a way she likes fiction books as well. She just doesn’t have the patience to read them. But one of the highlights of each day is the bedtime story. Eric reads Harry Potter to her every other night (they recently started on book 3). The other nights I read Üle linna Vinski.

She has started playing on the Wii again, after a lull lasting some months. She has gotten Adrian to try Just Dance with her a few times. The most recent game is Mario Kart which she plays together with Eric.

Ingrid is getting somewhat tired of school and is counting days to the beginning of the summer break. They have very little homework (mostly times tables, currently) but even that is too much. She wishes she was back at preschool with no lessons and could play all day long. She’s looking forward to Adrian starting school in autumn – and talks more about it than Adrian himself does. With some jealousy she describes how little actual schoolwork he will be doing in grade 0, and how much she has to do. She’s also making plans for how they can walk to and from school on their own, so I can do other things in the afternoons. Perhaps not this autumn, yet, but we’ll see.

The end of the school term is near and after-school activities are also ending. She’s had her last dance class and the end-of-term show, and enjoyed both more than I had perhaps expected. She’s already talking about maybe taking not one but two dance classes in autumn. But there’s also scouting, which she definitely wants to continue doing, and she’s thinking about kickboxing as well (because there’s a club nearby that offers girls-only kickboxing classes, and three of her friends do that). Choices will have to be made.

Ingrid and I spent much of the day cleaning out Ingrid’s room – sorting through all the piles of stuff that have accumulated everywhere, throwing away junk and finding appropriate places for non-junk. We took a big box of toys down to the basement, and lots and lots of papers to the recycling bag.

On our way back from the birthday party in Otepää.

Yesterday when we drove from Tallinn to Otepää, I ignored Google’s #1 suggestion of taking the obvious route via Tartu and chose a shorter and more scenic route. We had some time to kill and nothing better to do with it. In the end I don’t think that road even took any longer than the primary one – the roads were slightly smaller but much emptier.

Today for various reasons we took the Otepää-Tartu-Tallinn route after all. This drive was no longer but I enjoyed it much less. An empty road is so much more pleasant.

I don’t normally enjoy driving. It’s a chore. But I now realized that the thing I don’t enjoy is in fact not driving itself but traffic. When there is none, I can relax and actually enjoy driving. Just like with skiing: when we were in Idre, I noticed that I instantly became a much better skier when there were no other skiers sharing the slope with me.

At the end of our drive we had an hour of slack time in Tallinn and spent it in Kadriorg park. The spot in the photo is one that I remember from my childhood visits to the same park. At least I believe it is the same spot: the park has changed over the years. It’s a small brook, trickling along a picturesque arrangement of mossy stones, shaded by large trees. As a child I always thought there was a fairy tale kind of feeling to it.

The phone and Ingrid are unseparable.