From an administrational point of view it’s winter here, which means that the skating rinks are open. Meteorologically there are no signs of winter; we have constant above-zero temperatures. This is not a bad combination: we can go skating without freezing our noses off!

Ingrid loves skating even more this year than the last. She can happily stay at the rink for an hour and a half. Probably longer, especially if there are other kids to keep her company; when we go home it’s always because I’ve had enough, not because she is tired of it.

We skate at Spånga sports field, Spånga IP. It has both an indoors ice rink and an outdoors one. We tried the indoors rink once but it was hockey-oriented – noisy and dominated by fast skaters and fast pucks – so we didn’t like it at all.

The outdoors rink on the other hand is great! It’s a bandy rink, which means it’s really big. It is refrigerated, so it’s usable in weather that doesn’t allow natural ice to form (like right now). And because it is used for major league games, it’s well maintained and resurfaced every few days at least.

The downside is that the rink is not always open for the general public, but the schedule seems to allow at least a couple of hours of general access every day.

A month of growing up and maturing.

Ingrid has been more responsible, self-managing and independent than I’ve seen her before. In the mornings, she used to need prompting and reminding for every step, and otherwise just absentmindedly dawdled or, more likely, started to read something. Now she remembers what she’s supposed to do and actually remembers to do it as well. Get dressed, have breakfast, brush her hair, brush her teeth, pack her bag. Now she is more likely than me to remember her gym bag – I don’t even pay any attention except on the days when she is exceptionally tired in the morning.

She used to want me to brush her hair and teeth, but now does it herself. She can’t get all the tangles out, so I do her hair over again every few days.

She’s tried walking to school on her own, as well as coming home on her own in the afternoon. It worked out well but was frustrating for Ingrid. The big deal for her was to be in charge. But the teachers at school intruded and sent her home when they thought the time was appropriate, instead of letting her decide. Tomorrow, when Ingrid will walk home on her own again, she will have a letter from me where I make it as clear as possible to whoever needs to know that she can go when she wants.

But she does the same thing herself: she intrudes on discussions and decisions that are simply none of her business. When I ask Adrian something, she answers for him. She tries to decide for Adrian what book I should read for him, or what sweet he should choose after dinner.

Some days she’s helpful and co-operative, helps me prepare dinner, etc. Other days she’s touchy, grumpy, whiny. On those days, when I ask her to do something, she can flare up in tears or anger, måste du tjata på mig hela tiden, du bara skyller på mig hela tiden (although based on her intonation I suspect she means skäller and not skyller). She goes off into her room to sulk, or walks well behind me if we’re out.

When she’s upset, she doesn’t want others to get involved. If something happens when we’re about to go home to bring her to or near tears, often one of her friends will notice, stop by and ask why Ingrid is crying. She always refuses to talk to them and absolutely doesn’t want me to explain either, so I say something generic that satisfies the friend and yet doesn’t reveal anything.

She herself is still struggling a bit with the whole empathy thing. She notices when others are physically hurt, and if she accidentally hurts someone in the middle of playing, she always apologizes, and it comes from her heart. But that understanding doesn’t reach beyond the physical. She is often intentionally slightly cruel towards Adrian: taunts him, grabs the toy that she sees him reaching for.

She is restless and impatient. She is physically unable to sit still unless she has something to concentrate on, such as a movie or a book. After dinner when she’s waiting for us to finish (so we can all have dessert) she fidgets, climbs, see-saws on the chair, fiddles with her cutlery, makes noise with her plate… anything to not be still. In fact even while she’s reading, she’s constantly shifting around, moving her legs, poking at stuff with her feet.

Reading, with restless legs

Possibly related is her habit of speaking as soon as she has something to say. That thought just has to get out, right now! She interrupts in the middle of a word while Eric and I are talking, or while I’m reading for her, or singing for Adrian. She doesn’t even seem to notice it, even though it annoys the heck out of us and we always tell her so.

With only a week left until Christmas eve, her thoughts are full of Christmas. She isn’t as obsessed as she was with her birthday, but she talks about it almost every day. She and Adrian share the felt Advent calendar I made a few years ago. There’s also an advent calendar to follow on TV and another one on the radio, but those don’t seem to be very important to her – often she skips them and then catches up a few days later.

Ingrid has learned to play “Nu tändas tusen juleljus” on the piano. I took her through it a few times and that was all it took. After that she practiced on her own, and when she forgot some note, she figured it out by trial and error. She’s not the most musical of kids, and her whistling and singing are tuneless even to my tone-deaf ears. (My own is probably equally bad but I don’t hear it myself.) But she hears enough to notice when she hits a wrong note.

She has also learned both finger knitting and knitting. She was very enthusiastic about both at first but hasn’t done recently.

She got a mild concussion one day at school and stayed at home the day after. With iPad games and movies off-limits, she was quite bored, until she came up with the idea of making Christmas cards for her friends. Her favourite crafts projects are often of this kind: decorating rather than making from scratch, and usually paper-based. She also enjoys origami and scrapbooking.

Apart from the trip to Tenerife, this has been a most ordinary month.

Ingrid goes to school, does well and loves it, and stays for as long as she can. She doesn’t want to go home in the afternoon until most of her friends are gone.

At home she reads. She got a bunch of Daisy Meadows fairy books for her birthday and was overjoyed, and now reads them a lot. Bamse and Kalle Anka make up the rest. Sometimes she reads out loud for Adrian; some of the library books are fun for both of them (at least for one reading).

She has become addicted to the iPad again, not even trying to come up with any other activity in the evenings. I have announced an iPad detox of unspecified duration.

Within a few weeks she lost three of her front teeth. One on the day of her birthday party (the “birthday tooth”), one on top of Mount Teide (the “volcano tooth”) and one last Sunday evening. That last one was really really loose all day and then finally got kicked out in the evening while she was roughhousing with Adrian.

She loves Adrian but now sometimes also loves to annoy him in a passive-aggressive way. When Adrian wants to be first to somewhere, she just casually runs ahead of him – not necessarily because she wants to be first but because she doesn’t want him to have that joy. Or because she wants that feeling of being better, faster, stronger than him? When Adrian wants to sit on one side of the sofa, she lays herself in his way to block him.

Both of them really, really like being first.

What Ingrid wants most of all, if a fairy could grant her any wish: (1) to get to decide everything (because adults get to decide way too much she thinks), and (2) to have a mini car or a self-driving chair on wheels, so she wouldn’t have to walk anywhere. (And ideally it would have wings, too.)

No, what she would really want to wish for is that the fairy would grant her ALL her wishes, but she guesses that the fairy wouldn’t agree to that. (She’s seen Aladdin, after all, and knows how genies think.) She’s kind of disappointed that fairies don’t exist.

She’s pretty sure that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist and that it’s me putting coins under her pillow. Regardless, she did not want to put her 3 latest teeth under her pillow for the tooth fairy for 10 kr apiece – she’d rather keep them, she said.

Ingrid may not like walking but she cycles well. Today we cycled to Vällingby together to go to the cinema, about 3 km each way, without a problem.

She also swims well, and this Friday she participated in her first swimming “competition”. She normally has a swimming lesson every Friday, and twice a term the ordinary lessons are replaced by a competition. This doesn’t apply to the very youngest kids, but Ingrid has advanced far enough that she’s in the deep pool and doing real swimming, so her group is included. The swimmers don’t compete against each other, only against themselves and against a set of target times. Ingrid swam 25m backstroke.

Ingrid liked my tripod and remote release and has been borrowing my camera on a few occasions. Here she did a series of self-portraits with a range of moods, from angry through neutral to happy.

After last month’s changes, this has been a stable month, almost eventless. Well, except for all the birthday celebrations of course. Ingrid has been thinking about them almost all the time, I think.

The best things with birthdays are presents and sweets: the more, the better. Those are the things she talks about most. She finally settled on waffles for her actual birthday, and for her party a Swiss roll – with ice cream or whipped cream, so the kids can put sprinkles on top.

As for gifts, she has been talking a lot about stuff that the other girls in her class have: My Little Pony, Littlest Pet Shop, Lego Friends. We got her some Lego Friends; she’s thinking of buying some My Little Pony toys for her pocket money.

Ingrid gets pocket money every week, and my expectation is that she should pay for her own toys. Otherwise she will be insatiable and never consider the cost. Now she is hyper-aware of the cost. When she realizes that buying this advent calendar would cost half her money, and that pony castle set would cost ALL her money, she really doesn’t want to part with her money. Not because she has her sights set on something else, but because she doesn’t like handing over the money.

On the other hand, not getting pocket money doesn’t bother her too much: she bought a Bamse subscription and paid for it in instalments, i.e. she did not get any pocket money until it was paid off. That was no big deal. The endowment effect in action…

Other kids’ opinions matter not only for toys. She is discovering self-consciousness and embarrassment. Not that she hasn’t felt these things in the past, but now she knows what she’s feeling and has the words for it.

She wanted to buy a onesie (the thing that looks like loose zip-up pyjamas). We found one that was in a pretty fabric, but tight rather than loose, more like a dance suit. Ingrid thought about it and then said she wouldn’t want to wear that to school, it would be too embarrassing. But a few other kids have loose onesies, so she felt more comfortable with that.

Otherwise her taste in clothing is refreshingly individualistic. No blue jeans for her, no frilly skirts and tights, no t-shirts with kittens or glittery hearts. No – Ingrid wears dresses and tunics, and tights or leggings. There was one week when she wore skirts for some reason, skirts that I’ve bought for her at some point and that normally lie unused in her dresser. That week in the afternoons I could hardly find her at school – I almost didn’t recognise her at a distance.

All her clothes should be soft and stretchy and preferably tight. Especially when it comes to trousers she really doesn’t want any loose jeansy ones, only leggings. And everything should be colourful and patterned, preferably in floral patterns. Molo’s crazy flowers-and-rabbits-and-clouds style patterns are her particular favourites. She happily combines different strongly patterned items that almost make my eyes water. But she also has definite colour preferences, so the end result may be eye-catching but usually isn’t totally uncoordinated.

She has asked me to braid her hair several times now. It’s shortish, especially at the front, so a plain braid would leave much of it still loose. Therefore I’ve tried my hand at French braids and Dutch braids, with the help of YouTube. (The trick is to moisten the hair first, with a spray bottle.) She’s been surprisingly patient, and liked the results – and also liked the wavy hair she gets when we unbraid the hair.

Ingrid has been interested in telling time again. She learned it this spring but then kind of forgot about it, and has now relearned it again. When we’re near a clock she often just tells me the time, because she can.

The quarter hours are particularly tricky because they work differently in Estonian and Swedish. In Swedish it’s the same as in English: quarter to, quarter past. In Estonian, as soon as you’re past the hour, you start thinking about the next one: a quarter past six becomes “quarter [of] seven” and then a quarter to seven is “three quarters [of] seven”.

(And while we’re at it, half-hours work the same in Swedish and Estonian: both are forward-looking, unlike English. So the English “half past six” becomes “half seven” in both Estonian and Swedish.)

Last week we were invited to the school for the parent-teacher meeting for the autumn term. The English name is misleading, really: it’s a “development discussion” in Swedish, and it’s definitely not just for the parents and the teacher: the student is present and an important part of the discussion. Also the meeting is both backward- and forward-looking, and results in a plan for the student’s learning for the rest of the term.

Ingrid is still well ahead of the school’s expectations in reading, writing, maths and English. Her learning plan included practising block letters (as opposed to the all-uppercase they all started out with), and beginning to read in English.

At home she mostly plays with Adrian, or plays on the iPad, or reads the usual stuff: Bamse, Kalle Anka, Daisy Meadows’ fairy books. She borrows new Daisy Meadows books at the school library every week, never anything else, and will probably keep this up until she’s read all they have.

Back to school. Ingrid chose the location. First she posed, then she did a song and dance number.

This month has been packed with news and newness.

First and foremost, this was “back to school” month. Ingrid went from grade 0 to grade 1, from Kindergarten to “real school”. She was very excited about this, and still is. New school building, new teacher, new classroom, new routines, new just about everything.

In grade 0 the kids had no fixed places; now Ingrid has her own seat and desk. In grade 0 there were communal boxes with pencils and crafts materials; now she has her own pencils and crayons and glue stick, as well as writing books and a reading book.

Her schedule is mostly filled with Swedish, i.e. reading and writing. There’s also maths, as well as “social studies” and “nature studies”, and even a bit of English. The class teacher is in charge of all of this.

The kids also have a music lesson once a week, and gym class twice a week, with specialist teachers. Twice a week they go to the school library where they can borrow books to read in the afternoons.

School work ends at one o’clock and after that it’s after school care: playing with her friends, reading, doing crafts projects etc.

This year the grade 0 kids are in the same building as grade 1, so several of Ingrid’s friends from preschool (about half a year younger than her) have “caught up” with her, including her very best friend Elin.

Ingrid has rediscovered beading and regularly brings home beaded circles and hearts decorated in geometrical patterns. Then she hides them somewhere in the house and prepares a treasure hunt for me, with drawn clues leading me to the final treasure. Her sketches of the hiding places are often really carefully observed. Last time, for example, four of the hiding places were in different lamps, and each one was clearly distinguishable: my desk lamp, a reading lamp by the sofa, the lamp over the kitchen table, and the ceiling lamp in the hallway.

Also new for this month is a new bicycle for Ingrid. She could still use the old one, but because it was relatively small, she couldn’t go particularly fast on it, and not particularly far either. When we were going somewhere together by bike, I sometimes had trouble keeping my balance because I had to cycle so very slowly.

On her new bike she can keep up much better, so the bikes are our main mode of daily transportation. We cycle to and from school, to friends’ birthday parties, to playgrounds…

Every other Sunday we cycle to a beaver scout meeting. Eric was a boy scout when he was a kid, and scouting seemed like the kind of thing that Ingrid might enjoy as well, so we’re giving it a try. She’s enjoyed the first two meetings and is looking forward to the hike next weekend.

The one activity to which Ingrid has not tried cycling is swim school. It’s on Friday evenings, quite late, and I suspect she might not have any strength left for the trip back home afterwards.

Favourite books: Bamse and Kalle Anka, and the Daisy Meadows’ fairy books.

Favourite on-screen entertainment: kids’ programmes on SVT Play, especially Världens bästa fritids but also Vampyrskolan, Max och Ruby etc.

Favourite toys: Lego. Yes, Ingrid has actually been playing with toys recently! She has been making little cars and houses, and then playing with them. Sometimes she ties the cars together with pieces of string and makes a train out of them. Often the cars are flying cars. Sometimes the cars live in the house. I bought a box full of doors and windows for her, and I think we also need more wheels, and more figures who can live in those houses and fly around in the cars.

Ingrid has had an activity-filled month.

She still loves swimming and playing in water. I got her a new two-piece swimsuit in June, to make it easier for her to get it on and off, and it already looks like it’s been through some serious abuse. The snorkel and mask we bought have also been in constant use.

Other favourite physical activities include driving (go-carts, electric cars, and pretty much anything else you can imagine) and horseback riding, but also climbing (like those indoor climbing walls, or adventure trails, or just large playground climbing structures) and jumping, such as bouncy castles and trampolines.

All this moving around, much of it outdoors, has made her strong. It’s been a long time since she complained about her legs being tired, which used to be a never-ending complaint in this house.

She’s also quite fearless. Speed, heights, water, you name it: she dares more than many others at her age. At the beach she goes deeper and deeper until the water reaches her chin and she is almost on the tips of her toes, and still she tries to go further. At any playground climbing structure she never stops until she’s at the top. At the adventure park in Tartu she never even seemed to notice the height, or consider being cautious about it. At driving tracks etc she always looks for the fast cars and tries to overtake any other kids.

Meanwhile her helpful, friendly mood continues. She has helped me cook dinner on several occasions. And not just joined me for a few moments and then disappeared when the novelty wore off, but actually helped me cook entire meals.

One evening she decided she wanted mashed potatoes, and it was way past dinnertime. (I can’t remember what happened to her actual dinner.) So she proceeded to make mashed potatoes for herself from scratch, with me only guiding her but not doing any actual work. Well, I did the mashing, because she didn’t have the arm strength. But she took care of all the peeling, boiling, mixing, seasoning, etc.

Then she proceeded to pour ketchup on top of it and mixing it together until the lovely freshly-made mashed potatoes were a red mess… but she loved them nevertheless.

Miscellaneous:
We have given up on letting her go to bed when she is tired, because she just won’t. Instead we now have set a 21:30 deadline for her for getting into bed. In practice she often goes to bed earlier than that, so she can fall asleep together with Adrian. Often she is already asleep shortly after nine o’clock.

She continues to devour Bamse magazines and Kalle Anka Pockets. (Kalle Anka is Donald Duck’s Swedish name.)

She has discovered air hockey.

She still does not see any point in keeping her hair out of her face, and I have to keep reminding her to at least put a headband on while she is eating.

This has been a month of summer. School’s out, so Ingrid has been in fritids (after-school care) for two weeks and at home for two more.

Whenever the weather is good, she spends her day outside playing in water, as much as possible. She’s brown as a cookie (just have a look)! We have a small inflatable pool at home, and she also hangs out at a nearby playground with a nice large paddling pool. There she finds not just water but often also kids to play with as well.

Since that is much more fun for her than for anybody else in our family, she now often goes there on her own, or we go together and then I go home again with Adrian when he gets bored while Ingrid stays on. It’s a great independence exercise for her. Not just the being on her own, but also having to manage her things, packing them up and carrying them home afterwards, and so on.

She likes to bring a lot of stuff to the pool. Swimsuit, beach towel, bath robe, mask and snorkel, swim ring, maybe some water squirters, snacks, Bamse… We bought a snorkel and a mask for her for this summer and she loves them. Mostly when she is in the water she’s swimming with the snorkel and often the swim ring, too. I suppose she likes the sensation of just floating, without any effort or struggle to keep afloat, or keep the water out of her nose and mouth. She stays on the surface, with the snorkel clear all the time, and does not dive at all, but she will probably love snorkeling for real in a few years or so.

Because Ingrid loves playing in the water we’ve also been to local lakeside beaches several times this summer. A trip to the beach is a great combination of bathing (for Ingrid), a picnic (for both kids), and a cycle trip (fun exercise for me). Maltesholmsbadet is the beach we visit most often because it’s closest to us and never crowded. Last time we tried out Ängbybadet instead. The water turned out to be too cold even for Ingrid so we played miniature golf instead.

Most of her friends are out of town for the summer (although we’ve managed to organize some play dates for her) so she has been a bit lonely and bored. She’s made a new friend, a boy about a year younger than her, who recently moved in to a house across the street from us. I suspect his main appeal to Ingrid is his availability… but they also share an interested in things with wheels. Most of the time they’ve spent together, they’ve just been cycling around in the street. That’s usually how we notice that L and his family are at home: L is out cycling in the street.

Ingrid likes stuff with wheels. She saw a note about Lådbilslandet in a book and immediately asked if we could go there. It’s a small amusement park with mostly driving-oriented activities: three-wheel go-karts (severely limited in speed, which Ingrid found a bit frustrating), a traffic area with mini cars and trucks, a train track etc., but also rafts, a bouncy castle, an adventure trail etc. Ingrid drove for what felt like hours.

We’ve also been to Tom Tits Experiment, a hands-on science centre with all sorts of experiments and activities for kids and adults to try: everything from blowing giant soap bubbles to heat-sensitive cameras. During summer they also have lots of activities in their park: a labyrinth, various kinds of water play, a storm simulator, a “free fall” simulator/ride (which Ingrid did 9 times) etc. More than enough for a whole day, and had they not closed at 6pm, Ingrid would have stayed all night, too.

Another fun summer activity has been picking strawberries. She likes to pick and eat them, but also to pick for the rest of us, and then share them equally among us. We have quite a lot of strawberries, both wild ones in various places in the garden and cultivated ones. Often she invites Adrian along on her “strawberry hunts”, as she calls them. She is not very thorough in her picking, so once every few days I go through the raised beds and usually find a bunch of berries that are bordering on over-ripe that she has missed.

Summer and no school also means no early mornings. She often stays up past 10 o’clock, reading. I wake her in the morning at about 8:30 to keep her day roughly in sync with the rest of the family.

She now has 2 adult teeth halfway out at the bottom and 4 loose teeth at the top. The loose ones have been loose for what feels like forever but are not even close to coming out, but they are loose enough to make it hard for Ingrid to bite into an apple for example.

Ingrid has been much more agreeable to be around than last month. She doesn’t purposefully try to annoy us, and doesn’t whine or complain all the time. She tries to be polite when asking for things. She has decided that she wants to be helpful, too. Not generally helpful – she just wants to help me (and sometimes Adrian). She often asks me if there is anything she can help me with, and I try to think of activities that we can do together. That helpfulness appeared overnight, not gradually, and I’ve been trying in vain to recall what discussion or event caused it. Regardless of what triggered it, it’s pretty nice, although somewhat forced at times. It will become more natural with practice, I expect.

I am so happy that our kids love each other and get along so well.

Adrian can wake up in the morning and declare, first thing, “I love Ingrid” (jag gillar Ingrid). Ingrid likewise says “I love Adrian, he is so cute”.

When Adrian needs waking from a nap, I send Ingrid. Both of them love it best this way. If I wake Adrian, there’s a good chance that he awakes grumpy and whiny, whereas if Ingrid does it, he’s always happy. And Ingrid much prefers Adrian to wake her in the morning rather than us. “He does it better,” she told me.

Sometimes Ingrid helps dress him and even change a wet nappy. It ususally involves lots of giggling from both.

Adrian idolizes Ingrid. Anything she does, he wants to do. He tries on her skirts and headbands; he “reads” her Bamse and Kalle Anka pocket cartoon magazines, he wants to join her in all her games and activities. Vänta på mig (“wait for me!”) and jag vill också! (“I want [to do this], too!”) are heard in the house throughout the day.