Ingrid made the medallion in our favourite colours – orange is mine, and the blue and green are there to represent turquoise which is Ingrid’s favourite. And she bought me roses for her pocket money. It is not often that I get a gift worth a week’s income.
Ingrid has matured a lot recently. Life with Ingrid is surprisingly smooth now. She is content and co-operative. She listens and understands. Ingrid has even become polite – really polite. I am hearing “please” and “could you” and “thank you” all day long.
This is quite a change, and I think it is incredibly nice. I believe she notices and appreciates this.
One day I asked her to start helping out more at home. We talked about what chores she could do, and she chose to help with setting the table. Every day before dinner she now sets out plates and cups and cutlery, and brings out drinks etc from the fridge. On weekends she does it for breakfast and lunch as well. This has worked incredibly well; we’ve had no arguments about it at all. I hope she notices that I really appreciate it, and I believe it also helps her feel more grown.
Often she leaves it until the last minute. That’s her general tendency with all kinds of chores: unless she sees an obvious immediate payoff, she will choose to do it “later”. Clean laundry lies in a pile on her floor for days, despite gentle reminders, until we decide that enough is enough and make her do it then and there. When she runs out of clean clothes she fishes for a pair of leggings in the pile and then leaves the rest, rather than put it away.
But if there is a clear benefit, she will get things done fast and efficiently. Our mornings run like a pretty well-oiled machine now. She gets up with the alarm on her phone. She gets dressed, comes and helps wake Adrian, brushes her teeth, packs her bag, eats breakfast – and often even has a bit of time for some reading before it’s time to go.
It probably helps that she goes to bed a bit earlier now. (Most days she and Adrian go to bed at the same time, shortly before nine.) She wouldn’t wake this early on her own, but neither is she too tired in the mornings.
Ingrid is more interested in society and the wider world. Not hugely interested but at least some. Perhaps this is spillover from social studies at school.
She has been especially curious about money-related questions. She is interested in what different things cost. We talk about bank accounts, salaries, taxes, and saving. We talk about ways of paying for things. Do we pay the lady who cleans our house every other week? Do we give her cash? Why do we use money and not apples to pay for things? We talk about vacations costing a lot of money, and about saving some money every month. What are taxes for? What does it mean to be retired, and how can you live without a salary?
Another area of interest is… well, I don’t know how to summarise it. Crime and warfare? Danger, perhaps? When she builds Lego doll’s houses, there are both fire alarms and burglar alarms, and every room has an alarm button.
When we’re out in the garden, Ingrid and Adrian have been playing war recently. Luckily they have very non-violent wars. There is a fair amount of chasing each other and some waving of the sticks that Adrian has collected over time. But there is even more talking: about who is who (Ingrid is Estonia, and Adrian is a spanjol or maybe from Arablandet), and where their headquarters are, and which stick is the shooter and which stick is the fixer (that you fix a broken shooter with) or the carver (that you use to carve your name in the shooter). Ingrid brags about her shooter, which shoots laser and bullets and arrows and cannonballs and slime and glue as well – and it has a password, too. And the headquarters have an anti-alarm-system. Adrian’s does everything that Ingrid’s does.
She has learned her own phone number by heart, as well as mine. Very practical.
She has grown physically. All sorts of clothes have become too short, and we had to raise her bicycle seat recently.
She is actually choosing to walk quite often, rather than cycling everywhere.
As before, she likes to have things to look forward to. Currently she is looking forward to our trip to Estonia. She drew a countdown calendar with a square for every day, after some counting of weeks in our wall calendar. (It started out at 9 weeks and 3 days.) She is already talking about what clothes she will pack and in what bag, and what other things she will want to bring, and which of her favourite things we will be doing again this summer.
Favourite:
It’s Easter this weekend. Ingrid has been talking about Easter for three weeks already. She wants to know what we’ll do and where we’ll be. She talks about the egg hunt she wants us to have, and in what kind of places we should hide the eggs, and how she might help Adrian, or how we could mark which eggs are hers and then she could leave the ones that aren’t so Adrian can find them. She makes plans for her Easter witch outfit, where she will go, which basket she will have for her Easter cards and which one for the candy. And so on.
It’s not just Easter, of course. She spends a lot of time time planning and thinking about what she will be doing tomorrow, or next weekend, or two weeks from now; how things might turn out, what she might do. Some of it is anticipation, the pleasure of looking forward to something nice coming up soon. Some of it seems to be a real anxiety to know.
It is very unlike how I function and frankly I find it pretty annoying at times. Talking about something that might happen in the future, instead of enjoying what we are doing now; trying to plan things in way too much detail, way too far in advance. I’m trying to find a balance, letting her keep the anticipation but reducing the excessive planning – or at least ensuring that it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the now.
And yet at the same time she likes surprises and to be surprised, and is immensely disappointed if someone (read: Adrian) ruins a surprise.
She has difficulty making choices and committing herself. She makes such an effort to get it right and is worried about missing out. She changes her mind, second guesses herself.
Before a weekend she mentally makes long lists of all the things she wants to do and then usually ends up disappointed because she cannot be in two places at the same time, and cannot fit all her plans into the hours that a day has.
Ingrid wants to be, and is, competent. She wants to accomplish things on her own, without anybody helping. It really annoys her when someone decides that she needs help with her horse during a riding lesson. Usually she is pretty good at judging what she can and cannot manage.
We got her a phone a few months ago. She feels proud about having it and especially enjoys receiving text messages. She also likes reading the ones I get for me.
Her phone also doubles as an alarm clock and this is working out really really well. I don’t know if this is because it’s actually easier for her to wake up this way, or because she feels like a big girl this way.
She also likes helping Adrian (most of the time), for example helping him put on his clothes in the morning. She enjoys playing with him, but also gets really angry at him at times. They have a lot of ups and downs.
Ingrid has been ill twice this month, which is quite unusual for her. She is usually very healthy but this winter she’s clocked up 7 sick days. I don’t think she’s had this many ever before. Admittedly this is the first year for which we have official records (since all absence has to be reported to the school) so my recollections may be faulty for previous years.
The sick days also included her first ever ear infection.
Normally Ingrid’s most common health complaint is stomach ache. She complains about stomach aches in all sorts of situations, and for all sorts of causes, and she can generally not differentiate between them. It can be anything from feeling nervous, eating too much too fast, hunger, needing to go to the toilet, tiredness etc. Physical causes and psychosomatic causes all get lumped together.
I’ve long suspected that sometimes what she feels is not even a stomach ache, not even a psychosomatic one. For example, after she once complained about stomach aches after going on a merry-go-round, we figured out that she reports nausea as “stomach ache”. She truly doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference.
Now I’ve started a project to try and train her to recognise the different kinds of stomach aches. Whenever we manage to identify the cause, she will try to remember what that kind of stomach ache feels like.
The other day she had a “stomach ache” after dinner. Where, I asked, and Ingrid pointed to the upper part of her chest. That’s not your stomach, I said, that’s your chest. Oh, I call everything “stomach” that’s not my arms or legs or head or back, she replied.
I tried to explain the benefits of using words within their generally accepted meanings rather than making up definitions of her own.
New interest: marbles. The kids at school were playing marbles this Friday. (It was “take a toy to school” day, which they have occasionally.) Ingrid loved the game but was still very sure that she would not bring any marbles to school to play, because she could lose some to the other kids in the game. This despite having about a hundred marbles, none of which she normally plays with.
She continues to enjoy the riding lessons and does pretty well at them. It’s just enough of a challenge for her. It is a good way of learning that others will not always do what she wants, and that some ways of trying to communicate with them will work better than others.
Favourite movie: a kids’ game show named Labyrint which involves green slime, puzzles, and robot-like monsters. Also Horseland and Frozen.
Favourite books: LasseMaja. Last time we visited the library we were lucky; someone must have just returned a pile of LasseMaja books. We borrowed six. Usually they’re all out, or maybe you can get one or two. Ingrid has been reading them back to back since we got home.
Favourite collection: bottles of Danonino strawberry yogurt, shaped like a little blue creature in various professions (doctor, firefighter, farmer etc).
Ingrid and Adrian have their occasional loud disagreements – mostly when both want to have the same thing, or when Adrian messes up some activity of Ingrid’s. This often happens because he cannot understand what is important to Ingrid. This piece of paper that she was drawing on? Surely it’s OK if Adrian also makes some squiggles on it, too? He has no idea that Ingrid was making a story book and definitely does not want his squiggles on it.
But the root cause is that he wants to do the same as her, because he looks up to her so much. Anything that Ingrid does, Adrain wants to do as well. He may not be able to express it well, but he loves her. And Ingrid understands that, and sometimes even says things like “wouldn’t it be boring for Adrian if he didn’t have a big sister” (and I agree).
I am not entirely sure if she quite understands how much emptier her own life would be without him, because she is more aware of the frustrations. She is old enough to sometimes want to play with her friends without Adrian being around all the time. But most of the time she enjoys his company as well.
Horses. This month’s big thing is definitely horses. In Ingrid’s own words, she has become “hästtokig”, horse obsessed.
She tried horseback riding once last summer and loved it. She’s been talking about riding since then, and now this spring term she finally got a chance to do it again, with riding lessons every Thursday.
I sort of thought it might have been just a one-off, a passing fancy. But she absolutely loves it. Even on the one occasion when the riding lesson turned out to be a theory lesson (the basics of saddling and bridling and grooming) with no actual riding, she came away happy.
Ingrid has had 4 actual riding lessons now I think. For the first few lessons the kids all had someone holding a lead rope but now they’re mostly managing things themselves, at least most of the time. They’re working on the basics: halting and steering, and some trotting.
Ingrid has also discovered that the horse won’t always listen to her or do what she wants.
She feels reasonably confident when she’s sitting in the saddle, but on the ground she’s not yet very comfortable near horses. Well, they’re ponies, really, but still quite a lot larger than her. She’s afraid that she’ll be stepped on, or crushed against the wall when the pony steps sideways. Or bitten; there’s one pony there at the stables who seems to enjoy nipping people’s arms, or at least threatening to.
And she’s not very fond of the messy side of it. When a horse nuzzles her chest her first instinct is to go and clean it off. Horse manure on the ground is “eugh!”, and rinsing horse saliva from the bit is yucky.
It’s not just the riding. She borrows horse-themed books at the school library. She buys horse-themed magazines instead of Bamse. She took down all her Bamse posters from the wall above her bed and put up three horse posters instead. She’s been looking at stuffed plush horses on the internet and is thinking of saving up to buy a big one. And she’s told me she’d like to decorate her whole room with a horse theme, curtains and rug and bed sheets and everything.
Apart from horses, the main theme in Ingrid’s life is independence. When she is bored at home, she now sometimes goes for a walk on her own, or maybe goes to the supermarket.
Twice she went skating on her own. The sports field is about 2 km from here, so she took the bus. (We practiced this together a few times first.) When she got there she got some random parent to help her put on her skates. She’s pretty good at asking for help from adults, doesn’t really feel shy about it or anything. And she found other kids to play and skate around with.
Once she got a lift home with some kid who lived roughly in this direction. (I guess the parent didn’t feel comfortable about Ingrid alone on the bus.) The other time she took the bus home afterwards, and that was really the only part of the whole experience that went less well. She just barely missed one bus, waited 10 minutes, and then the next bus went right past and didn’t stop for her. But she got home on the next bus.
For those trips she borrowed my bus card and my mobile phone (and phoned home several times, for help or advice or just to check in). But now we’ve bought her both a bus card of her own and a mobile phone as well. They might not get much use yet but there’ll be more and more of this kind of thing.
Favourite movie: Bamse och tjuvstaden. Also, Lou!. And Melodifestivalen, the song contest.
Favourite books: Daisy Meadows’ fairy books, still. She’s outgrowing Bamse and mostly reading Kalle Anka now.
Favourite things: YooHoo plush toys, which Ingrid has started collecting. She has five. I’m glad she has her pocket money for this kind of stuff.
New skill she’s learning: writing in cursive.
Lots of things are happening in Ingrid’s head right now.
And lots of things are wanting to come out of Ingrid’s head. She talks SO MUCH. At times I would even say she prattles incessantly.
Mostly her talk is centered around herself, especially things she has done and (even more) things she will do. She spends a lot of time living in the future, anticipating fun things to come. Sometimes annoyingly so: while we are doing something fun in the now, her attention is already elsewhere, thinking ahead to the next activity – and talking about it, and distracting everyone else.
The world around her doesn’t seem to interest her much. She’s never really wondered much about how the world is, why things are the way they are, how things work.
The other day she mentioned they were learning about the US at school. That to her seemed to mean memorizing some random, mostly meaningless facts about it that she read in a book or fact sheet of some sort. She knows that the US is the third largest country in the world, that it has 50 states (“like New York and such”), and that they have a president named Obama – and that it is one of the permanent members of the UN security council. It doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t understand what this means.
When she does wonder about something, she makes up some answer in her head. It doesn’t seem to be important to her to find out what reality is like. She just seems to need some sort of image in her head. For example, she’s about to start riding lessons, so she’s been wondering recently about how big the horses and ponies will be. Instead of wanting to find out for real, she just makes it up: “I think that the foals may be about as tall as I am, and the smaller horses might be as tall as you, and the larger ones might be as tall as pappa.” And she’s satisfied with that.
When she talks about her day, she rarely mentions things that happened at school. She doesn’t seem to find them particularly noteworthy. I don’t really know what they do all day.
I do know that her homework is trivial. Maths homework this week was addition in the 0 to 5 range. And that’s after half a year at school!
Meanwhile she keeps learning maths naturally as part of life. She adds up pocket money; multiplies the number of meatballs by 5 seconds each so she can heat them up in the microwave oven; tries to divide 20 things by 7 days of the week and realizes that there will be one less for one of the days.
She is also learning Swedish spelling (and has a pretty good memory for it) and working on her handwriting. Less than a month ago I was pointing out to her that a t is taller than an i. Now her writing is very tidy and legible. For special projects such Christmas cards she likes to draw the letters “double”, i.e. draws their outlines.
Ingrid talks fast, and she mumbles when she talks. Often I have to ask her to repeat herself, not to make a point but because I really can’t understand what she’s saying.
But she is paying more attention to the people around her. When her blather cuts me off and I go quiet, she notices, and asks me what I was going to say.
She has begun to offer her help to others. It began with routine situations that she effectively learned one by one, e.g. helping Adrian get out of his snowsuit, or helping me carry our bags from the garage to the house. But now she actually also notices when others might need help in novel situations. She grabs a piece of paper towel during dinner, and asks if Eric needs one.
She is often most helpful towards Adrian. Really she is often very sweet and kind towards him. But naturally, sometimes she gets frustrated with him as well, especially when Adrian bothers her when she wants some time on her own, or when Adrian intrudes on some activity that she really wanted to do with me, without him.
The first time it happened was when we went to town one day for shopping. Ingrid was just upset for a long time and refused to tell me why. Maybe she thought she wasn’t allowed to want to have me for herself. Finally I got her to explain, and now she knows to tell me in advance when she wants it to be just me and her. Depending on the activity, sometimes she gets that, but other times I insist that everybody in the family is allowed to join. I think she accepts that.
Favourite expressions:
Favourite movies:
Favourite books:
Favourite things:
Favourite activities:
We went skating today. Which may not sound like a big deal, because we’ve been doing a lot of skating recently. But today we went skating even though it was dark, seven o’clock in the evening, the temperature was -8°C (which isn’t shockingly cold but is about 10 degrees colder than what we’ve had thus far this winter) and windy to boot. Ingrid even chose skating ahead of watching a movie. I’m amazed.
The reason? Yesterday Ingrid got two bandy sticks and a bandy ball as a late Christmas gift. She was over the moon about them and really wanted to try them out today.
And despite the circumstances, she (and I) really enjoyed it – even though the bandy field felt like it had not been resurfaced for at least a week and was covered with snow, so the ball kept getting stuck. By the end (close to 9 o’clock) it was just us two on one side of the field, and twenty men playing bandy for real on the other side. A weird but fun experience.
The snow on the ice and the snow in the air made new games possible. We skated so as to make pretty patterns in the snow, and by the time we’d skated to the other end of the field (against the wind) and come back again, twice, our previous tracks were already almost obliterated by the snow so we could make new ones.
A few days ago Ingrid and I went climbing, at an indoor climbing centre.
Ingrid had been climbing once before with her class at school. Last spring maybe? She liked it, and has been asking to do it again since then. I have never done any climbing indoors, but Eric and I took several scrambling and via ferrata vacations back in the days before kids.
We started out on the beginners’ wall for some warm-up and then gradually tried harder trails, with a bit of overhang and sparser handholds.
Ingrid took to climbing like a fish to water. She is strong, has great balance and coordination, and no fear of heights at all.
Interestingly, it looked to me like each trail was about the same difficulty for both me and her. I’d have thought that she would have to work harder since her reach is shorter. But I guess that I just reached for the next handhold further up, while she reached for something at the height of my chin or something.
Ingrid has been in a sporty mood recently. We’ve been going skating a lot, sometimes daily. For the spring term, Ingrid’s signed up for more swimming, but she also wants to start judo again, as well as riding. (She did family judo when she was younger but then took a break. Horseback riding is a new one; she tried it this summer and adored it, so now she will be trying it for real.)
Three sports activities every week sounds ambitious… we’ll see if we can keep it up.
Back in August, or maybe it was September, we had family photos made in Drottningholm. I was going to share a few but totally forgot. Now Henrik, the photographer, has published the photos on his blog, which brought back some warm summery memories!
The kids were pretty wild and keyed up, especially Ingrid who was running around giggling much of the time. This seems to be her default way of coping with a situation where she is uncertain. So we got lots of photos of kids running and not so many with the whole family together. But they were beautiful photos nevertheless.
And the kids had fun, which is not unimportant: it means that they will be happy to do it all over again if and when we decide to do that. They both talked about the session for weeks, and Henrik’s “snigelfis” (to get smiley faces out of the kids, instead of saying “cheese”) made an especially strong impression.
Here’s a selection of the photos. There’s lots more at Henrik’s blog.
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