Ingrid’s school has an annual cake competition. Ingrid and a couple of her friends made a volcano cake. Chocolate coating for the volcano itself, strawberry jam for lava, and some liquorice pieces for a staircase up to the mouth of the volcano.

It did not win any prizes but was the cake that everybody most wanted to eat.

The slug season has begun. There are already dozens of those little devils in and around our garden. They ate most of the new growth of a hosta plant before I noticed them.

Ingrid and I go on regular slug hunts. The hunting is best in the evening or morning, after rain. The best hunting ground is the wasteland between the street and the root cellar, and onwards along the edge of the road. It looks like the ones that reached the hostas also started their invasion from that direction. I guess some of them wintered somewhere in that area, and now laid a batch of eggs.

I pay her a bounty: 1 krona per slug found, and another krona if she also disposes of it. One night she found 16 slugs and earned almost as much as a week’s pocket money in about a quarter of an hour.

They are easy to spot in low grass and on plants, but not so easy on bare soil. And they are especially not easy to spot when there is dead plant material on that soil. A wet old piece of wood, a curled-up dead leaf, a piece of pine bark mulch: there are surprisingly many finger-length brown objects in a garden.

Ingrid and I played “football”. I had an upside-down bucket and a watering can to mark my goal; Ingrid had two sticks on the ground. A piece of rope marked the halfway line.

Actually what we played was more like air hockey with a ball… each one stayed on their side of the halfway line and tried to kick the ball into the other’s goal. It felt like we spent most of our time fetching the ball, because the garden slopes downwards behind both my goal and hers.

Not much to say this month.

Sometimes she is so much a child, and other times I almost get tween vibes from her.
Sometimes she is so girly, and other times so tough.

She doesn’t play with toys much, of any kind. But sometimes she still plays with her old doll, changes it into a different outfit, brings it with her when we go out. For her pocket money she bought two Ever After High dolls (Apple White and Briar Beauty). The EAH dolls first talked fashion in very girly voices: “yellow doesn’t suit me at all, I will only wear pink and black”. And then the dolls got more assertive: “assume position 95, kung fu!”. That juxtaposition is very “her”.

Favourite skills: Recognising songs. Blowing bubbles with gum.
Favourite activities: Listening to ads on the radio. Being with friends.
Favourite games: Just Dance on Wii, and Machinarium that we play together.
Favourite expressions: “I’m allergic to” (…going to bed, Mondays etc). “You’re kidding!”

Ingrid was bored and wanted to bake a cake. She got to bake; I got a lovely rhubarb cake.

Ketchup and meatballs.

What a cake looks like when Ingrid has cut herself a piece, aiming for the biggest strawberry.

Ingrid got an atrociously annoying, loudly beeping electronic whack-a-mole toy with this week’s Kalle Anka. Opening it up to put batteries in (which had to be done as soon as we got in through the door, right there on the hall floor) was more fun than actually using it. I think even the kids found its noise too much.

Ingrid and I playing Machinarium together.