Ingrid does disco on Wednesday evenings. She seems to enjoy it and is excited about the idea of performing at the end-of-term show.

She takes after me in preferring to be barefoot when possible. She is the only one dancing barefoot in her group, just like I am always the only one barefoot in my cirkelfys classes.

Ingrid and I are in Idre for this year’s skiing holiday. This time we have my mum with us as well. During the days we will each be going our separate ways as we ski downhill while she does Nordic skiing. But we had company for the six-hour drive, and for breakfast and evenings.

The lifts close at 16:30 already so today we didn’t have time for much more than picking up our skis and just enough skiing to make our bodies remember what it feels like.

Tail end of stomach flu, no appetite.

Breakfast: a clementine.
Lunch: four pieces of sushi.
Dinner: a tiny portion of ice cream.

Ingrid is making preparations for a space-themed dress-up disco with her scout club this coming Friday.

Ingrid continues to cook dinner once a week and enjoys it. She likes both the cooking itself, and the responsibility of it. Plus she gets to choose what she gets to eat for dinner. As usual, she enjoys experiencing new things – she has cooked a different meal each time rather than repeating any favourites.

She says she wants more responsibilities, so she has less free time, because she doesn’t know what to do with it. (That’s my interpretation of it at least.) She fills every spare minute with Minecraft or Youtube, and when her computer time is up, drawing and reading. Not a single moment of doing nothing.

And then when it’s bedtime she discovers she wants to plan her dress-up costume for the upcoming disco, needs to cut her toenails, etc. She keeps her brain so full of other stuff, so anxious to avoid any boredom, that she never has time to remember these things during the day.

Drawing might be emerging as a new hobby. She often draws Minecraft-themed stuff. Sometimes it’s pencils on paper; sometimes digitally on the iPad. Somehow she found ibisPaint, an app that allows you not only to draw things, but to see what others have drawn using the app, and how they did it. So it builds in a social aspect (which Ingrid loves of course) and makes it easy and fun for her to learn to draw better.

With all these sedentary activities and no more sports after she quit riding, I thought she was getting too little exercise and asked her to pick a new activity. Now she’s started doing disco dancing once a week. She seemed to feel unsure while she was there, but afterwards said she loved it. We’ll see.

I try to get her out and moving on weekends too. We did Friskis & Svettis together twice, which was sort of OK but didn’t exactly get standing ovations. This weekend we went swimming instead: while Adrian is at swim school the main pool is closed for the general public but the swim school staff told us it was OK for us to use it during the lesson. That’s an excellent solution for Ingrid: she quite likes swimming, diving etc but gets stressed when the swim lanes are crowded and others swim into her, or she veers off course and swims into someone else’s path.

Least favourite activity: homework.

Pasta bake.

Learning point for me: give Ingrid a proper recipe to follow. An ingredient list with rough notes is not enough, and just means that she has to ask me about every single step, probably multiple times.