We’re on our way to the bus stop, so we can take the bus to Kista, where we’ll have lunch at the conveyor belt sushi place, and the girls will see a movie (Inside Out) while I go shopping.

Dark chocolate brittle with chopped almonds, dried figs, cranberries and apricots, and mini-marshmallows.

Today is the 1st Sunday of Advent. We hung Advent stars and unpacked Christmas decorations, Christmas books and other assorted Christmas-related stuff. The Santa hats were best.

The Christmas CDs will stay in their boxes though. We’re 100% digital now, all the way, with the Sonos system playing music from both our own music library (including the Christmas CDs) and Spotify.

Ingrid asked me to take this picture.

She is not fond of homework.

She’s got homework in three subjects, once a week. In Swedish they read a chapter in a book and answer a few questions in writing. In maths they are currently practising their times tables – this week’s was 9 times 0 to 5. In Estonian they have a workbook where they read short texts and again answer questions in writing, and do “fill the blanks” exercises.

Ingrid and I went ice skating at Spånga IP after dinner.

The large outdoor rink is really, really fully booked this season by bandy clubs. It is only available to the general public on weekend evenings after 18:00, and weekdays during daytime (which doesn’t count as being available in my opinion). So in practice we can only use the small ice field, which is generally less well cared for. Not pleased.

Ingrid wanted to make an animated movie “with real things”, inspired by PES Film’s Western spaghetti which she saw at school.

The first movie she made was of a piece of paper getting crumpled and then unfolded again. The second was of a drawing “emerging”. Here she’s photographing the drawing in its stand that we rigged out of a cutting mat, supported by my sewing box and two food cans.

At nine years old, Ingrid has clearly outgrown the “child” stage and is now a pre-teen. She does not play with toys; she plays Minecraft.

Minecraft and Skype are her favourite “toys”. The center point of her evening is the time from after dinner to just after eight that she spends playing Minecraft with her friends while talking to them on Skype. Mini-games and parkour runs and servers and collaborative building and whatnot.

She’d been Skyping with her best friend M for a while, but recently she got in touch on Skype with other friends and now they’re a whole gang who hang out together most evenings, and a big chunk of each weekend as well.

A number of those friends are boys (but not all of them). It seems the kids are in a sweet spot now. They’re past the age when boys don’t play with girls because girls have girl games and boys have boy games – now they have shared interests again. (Or perhaps it’s the all-uniting gender-crossing power of Minecraft, who knows.) But they’re still in that innocent age when they can just play together with no embarrassment. Ingrid just asked today if she could have a sleepover at a boy’s home this weekend.

When she’s not playing Minecraft, she reads Kalle Anka and plays with friends, or hangs out with them. Several times now she has gone to the movies together with a friend, with no adult company. They’ve even had restaurant lunch on their own. It makes her feel grown up and competent.

I like the fact that she now uses the computer to do something, especially something that is both creative and social, rather than just watching Youtube videos. I count “screen hours” much less strictly when I know she’s Minecrafting. (That one Saturday when she was online with her friends from when she got up until 1 o’clock in the afternoon was the best weekend ever, she said.)

Still, she needs a set cutoff time, because she cannot stop otherwise. When she plays, she doesn’t notice the time, nor any signals from her body. In the evening we make her quit early enough that she has time to get the game out of her brain before bedtime – and also time enough to discover that she is actually hungry and needs an evening snack.

That deafness to her own body can reach astounding proportions. At a sleepover party last weekend she slept about 6 hours, which is about 3 hours short of what she needs. Then she went to the movies with a friend. When she got home in the afternoon, it was obvious that she was ready to collapse – emotionally fragile, close to tears about just about everything, no energy for anything. And yet she insisted that she was not tired, and she would never fall asleep even if she tried! And she seemed to fully believe it herself. Five minutes after she lay down on the sofa just to rest a bit, she was fast asleep.

She is surprisingly good at managing other parts of her life – parts that require planning and foresight, rather than listening to her body. She packs her own stuff for school every day, plans her homework for the week and actually remembers to do it. More than I did at 9 years of age, I’m pretty sure.

Ingrid is sewing a plush fleece doll/monster. Not for Adrian, this time, believe it or not! She’s sewing the plushy for her sponsor child.

At her school they have a “sponsor” system where kids in 3rd grade take care of newcomers in grade 0. In Swedish it’s called being a fadder, which can also mean godfather/godmother, but I suppose sponsor works better in English.

Basically each older child is assigned a younger child to take care of and be friendly to. Occasionally there are arranged “sponsor” meetups when the whole class gets together with the other class, the older ones read books to the younger ones and they play together etc. Outside of those meetups the sponsors are just an extra friendly older student.

Ingrid still has strong memories of her sponsor and I remember how cool she thought it was to be noticed by a 3rd grader. It’s a nice way to help the newcomers feel welcome, to show them that the older kids are not scary, and to give the older ones some extra responsibility.