Ingrid and Adrian.

Ingrid has been preoccupied with thinking about our upcoming trip. During the February school holidays (during last week of February) she and I will take a brief skiing holiday. She has wanted to try out skiing for some while now, so now we’re going to do it. And she gets to travel, which she enjoys; and she gets to spend a few days with just me, which she also enjoys.

As soon as we booked the trip she started to plan and make lists. For a while she could hardly think about anything else. Anything she saw or heard, somehow led to thinking about the trip. Snow? Skiing trip! Car? Driving to the airport! Me? Go on holiday with me! Now it has sort of settled down a bit, but she is still very excited about it.

But apart from exciting events such as vacations, and weekend activities, Ingrid likes life to be comfortably routine. She doesn’t like surprise changes to our daily activities. On one or two occasions I have picked her up from school before picking Adrian up from pre-school, instead of the opposite, and that change was enough to disrupt everything for hours. Changed routines plus afternoon tiredness is a particularly bad combo, so now I know better than try and change our afternoon plans on the spot – even if the change would seem to somehow make life easier for us, it’s not worth the emotional mess.

So everyday life continues. Ingrid spends more and more time with her friend M, whom (I believe) she doesn’t think of as her best friend, but enjoys being with. They both have strong wills and can be pretty stubborn, and M even more than Ingrid. So they fight a lot, and it’s not uncommon for them to leave school and go home without resolving their quarrel. Ingrid wants to talk about it; M stubbornly refuses. Those fights affect Ingrid pretty strongly and she can be upset about it all evening. Luckily neither bears a grudge and the next day they’re playing together again.

On her own, Ingrid almost never plays. I can’t recall when she last did it. She doesn’t do anything else either, really. She reads. Possibly, when she is left to her own devices for several hours, she might draw or paint something. When she tires of those activities, she complains about having nothing to do. She can literally spend an hour complaining of boredom, rather than come up with something to do. Everything bores her – to the point where I am beginning to worry about her. How can a child be so bored?

She has even realised and told me that she does not need any more things (for birthdays or Christmas or such) – “only magazine subscriptions”. All our toys, crafts materials etc, lie unused.

The only time she is not bored is when she needs to NOT do something. For example, ideas and games magically appear in her head when it is time to go to bed, or when she has finished dinner and is sitting and waiting while the rest of us finish.

Her greatest wish, the kind she would wish if a fairy offered to fulfil one, used to be a pair of wings. Now she wishes for a clone of herself. A whole cloning machine, in fact, so she can make clones whenever she needs one. The clone will do whatever she asks, such as her homework. And when the job is done, Ingrid will take the clone’s memories if she wants, and the clone will disappear.

Random stuff:

• She has taken to wearing skirts and tops instead of her colourful dresses. Peer pressure at work?
• She likes to do the “wheelbarrow” walk with me. Especially from the living room to the kitchen, on weekday mornings when it’s time for breakfast.
• Melodifestivalen occupies every Saturday evening.

Ingrid watching mello

Ingrid and I played a board game.

Valentine’s day is a week away and Ingrid is thinking of boys, and one special boy in particular. Here she is browsing Valentine-themed images on Google image search, dreaming away.

Ingrid wanted to make dinner. She made a potato gratin. (I did help out with the peeling and slicing because we were under a bit of time pressure.) Here she is grating the cheese.

After noticing last month that I know Ingrid less and less well, I’ve made an effort to connect again. Not by doing anything special, really… mostly by listening more – and better.

I make sure to not brush her off when she appears to be complaining about trivial things, or when I really would rather be doing something else. I am super cautious about objections, and very careful with questions so she doesn’t feel interrogated. I refrain from offering advice and solutions. I am re-reading the excellent How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

Surprisingly often a conversation starts with a complaint about something trivial, but when she gets that out of the way, it turns out that there was a bigger issue behind it, and maybe something even larger behind that one.

Ingrid may start by complaining about a hurt toe (or something of that magnitude), then grumble that it feels like everything has been going wrong today, then go on to describe a quarrel she had with a friend at school, and end up telling me about how kids mock others at school for not being like everybody else.

She is very sensitive to others’ opinion about her, and especially to being mocked or made fun of – far more than I had realised. For example, I now know that she stopped borrowing Daisy Meadows books from the school library because one (one!) boy once (once!) told her they were “wimpish” (töntiga). That was in spring. And she hasn’t tried again since then.

When something bad happens during the day (like a quarrel with a friend) and doesn’t get resolved, the bad feeling can remain with her all day. It’s difficult for her to let go of worries and negative feelings. It’s most noticeable at night when it’s time for her to go to sleep: when the world is quiet around her and there is nothing to distract her, all the day’s worries come back. That’s also the time when she is most likely to talk about things that are on her mind. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why she always wants to be so busy: so she won’t have to think about her feelings.

Recently I’ve also noticed her being unusually sensitive to criticism, especially if it makes her feel stupid. Sometimes she is even hurt by what she interprets as criticism from Adrian – who is half her age, often gives very little thought to what he says to her, and whose opinion Ingrid normally doesn’t care much about at all. But all she notices in that case is that someone thinks that she is no good.

Sometimes it’s OK that criticism makes her feel bad – sometimes I really am angry with her and criticise something she’s done because it was a stupid thing to do. But other times all I want is to suggest a different way of doing something, or remind her about something she’s forgotten to do, and in that case I have to be really careful about how I express myself.

She feels insecure and vulnerable (which makes it extra hard, but also extra important, for her to talk about her “bad feelings”). She says she likes falling asleep in our bedroom because she feels more secure there. Not that she’s afraid of the dark – but she doesn’t get as many “bad thoughts” there.

She says she doesn’t like going to town, or taking the train. I tried to winkle out the cause, and it seemed to be that she doesn’t like the feeling of so many people around her, looking at her.

She says she wants things to be “the way they usually are”, som det brukar vara. And at the same time she appears bored with things always being the same. Some novelty is good, but the foundation needs to stay secure.

I wonder how much of all this vulnerability and insecurity is a recent thing, and how much of it has been there for a while and only just become more visible now that I am making an effort to listen and see. There’s definitely some of both.

Random facts:

• Ingrid is discovering the social side of the Internet. Favourite game: Animal Jam, an online game with the usual pets-homes-and-accessories theme. Her best friend M introduced her to it and (because this is an online game) they have been playing it together, while talking on Skype.
• She was interested in ballet for a short while. We looked up some beginner tutorials on YouTube, she tried a few positions and steps, and talked about ballet lessons. But the interest passed, and ballet lessons were not interesting enough to drop any of her current activities.
• Same with playing the guitar.
• Latest favourite purchase: a large plush horse. It is not just a toy but has also served as book support, iPad support, and a helper for maths homework where she had to estimate and then measure the length of things.

Ingrid fixing her hair in a restaurant mirror.