Ingrid has been talking about and looking forward to swimming lessons for about a year now. This spring I signed up for lessons for the autumn term. (Most swimming clubs here offer lessons for kids from the year they turn 5. For younger kids, parents are expected to join them in the water, which wasn’t an option since I had Adrian to take care of as well.)

Then during the summer she realized that swimming lessons meant swimming without her floaties. That led to some hesitation and then growing anxiety and finally “I don’t want to go to swim school!” She probably imagined being thrown in at the deep end and forced to sink or swim, or something equally horrible.

Today it was time for her first lesson, with Spårvägen Sim in Vällingby swimming pool. I promised her that she could take her floaties if she really wanted, and she reluctantly agreed that we could go have a look at least.

Once we were there, things soon fell into a natural flow and before she knew it the teachers had led her and all the other kids into the water. She also found an almost-friend, a girl she recognized from last year’s dance-and-play group. The teachers were nice and friendly, the activities in the water not too demanding, and by the time she came out she exclaimed, “Swim school was so much fun!”

This is more than enough for me. Even if she doesn’t learn to jump in from the edge or to dip her head under water, as long as she enjoys it and wants to continue, I’m satisfied.

We’ve been so busy with our vacation – travelling and meeting people – that there haven’t been many days of ordinary life to observe. Almost half of this past month was spent in Estonia. Ingrid loved playing with her friends there and coming home to no friends (all her preschool friends were still away) was a rude shock. There has been much complaining about “nothing to doooo…”

One tool against boredom is the so-called “loppa”, or “loppis” as Ingrid calls hers, a paper fortune teller. (English instructions, Swedish instructions.) It looks like English kids use this toy for telling fortunes. Swedish kids use it as a fun way to give each other tasks. The flaps hide tasks such as “jump 10 times on one foot”, “run 5 circles around the house”, “hug a friend”, “find a pine cone” etc. Making the “loppis” is at least half the fun, especially the colouring and idea-generating and writing. Ingrid has trouble fitting her writing into the small space so most of the time we’ve had to do the writing part, but she has no trouble reading the tasks later. Sometimes she dictates the items to be written, sometimes we do it for her and let her discover them one at a time.

Another boredom alleviator is a CD with Br’er Rabbit tales in Estonian (Onu Remuse jutud). I had these records when I was a child and remember listening to them over and over again, and knowing large chunks of the text by heart. “Kirbud, kirbud, hundionu!”

From this CD and from books she’s started picking up unusual and bookish expressions and asking about their meaning, and trying them out in her own speech. There’s been a lot of kuid and ning and plaan läks luhta recently. On the flip side she is also learning words like puupea (“bonehead”, literally “wooden head”).

She doesn’t use the latter with us but she likes sneaking up to Adrian and whispering “puupea” or “bajskorv” into his ears. Her way of expressing her frustration with having a sibling in the house who takes up our time and attention, I guess.

Most of the time she’s pretty happy to have Adrian around. She likes giving him food at mealtimes, and pushing him on his swing. She’s even discovered that she can carry him, if she takes hold around his chest from behind.

We continue to read, sometimes more, sometimes less. I bought a bunch of new books just before we went to Estonia, and a bunch of Estonian books while we were there. I’ve been bringing them out one at a time to make them last longer.

Her favourite book is Scary Godmother, which she loves but I find a nightmare to translate on the fly, so we only read it when there’s peace and quiet and we don’t have Adrian tugging at my skirt. The princess theme is also going strong, so we read Prinsessor och drakar, Oskar och den utsvultna draken, the så gör prinsessor books etc.

In the past few weeks she’s also rediscovered her interest for crafts, after a slump of many weeks, if not months. She’s made those paper fortune tellers, and we’ve painted a little cardboard chest, and done marble painting, and she’s made a paper house, and pimped her swing with fabric ribbons, etc.

The most watched movies at the moment are Shrek and Pippi Långstrump, I believe.

A final observation… For some reason Ingrid has a strong aversion to asking for things. When she wants something she will state the problem, sometimes in a whining tone, other times more matter-of-fact. But she will not ask for what she wants, even when I encourage or even push her. I tell her it is more pleasant for me to hear a positive sentence, something she would like, rather than negative complaining about things she doesn’t like. But she doesn’t want to do that.

She may say “I cannot reach the milk” or “The milk is too high! EEEHH!” but she will not say “Mummy can you please give me the milk.” Yesterday she wanted me to carry her upstairs to put her to bed (since I had done it the day before) but instead of just saying so she said it in about three or four roundabout ways. “My legs are so tired I cannot walk. I don’t know how I will get up the stairs. I am so tired I will just collapse. I wish I didn’t have to walk.” But not “mummy could you carry me upstairs today again?”

This month things have been going unusually smoothly. Case in point: yesterday she walked all the way to the train station without a single complaint, and then from the train to the bus, and from the bus to Junibacken. And after a full day of playing she repeated all that on the way home, still with no whining about “my legs are tired”. She even hurried when I asked her to, so we could catch a train and avoid a 15-minute wait.

Ingrid loves our swimming pool. It is deep and wide enough for her to do some serious splashing. She even wants her swim floaties when she’s in there. But in order for her to use it, the starting cost needs to be near zero. If the pool is covered or the door is closed, she won’t ask to bathe. So in warm weather we leave the cover off (and to hell with the stuff that falls in) and she often bathes several times a day. She insists on using her swimsuit, “it feels better around my tummy this way” she says. It’s good practice – I no longer hear any complaints about getting water in her eyes, and she often jumps up and down so her whole head ends up under water.

By the way, now that I see her running around more or less naked so often, I see that she has become noticeably slimmer. She’s always been sort of on the chubby side. She isn’t stick-thin like the average 5-year-old usually is but she has now finally lost most of her baby fat, and is actually slimmer than a couple of her friends. Since her three-year checkup we’ve done our best to encourage physical activity and had firm rules about the amount of sweet stuff she can eat. It is good to see that our approach has worked. (Or perhaps it would have happened anyway, who knows?)

We have started using Youtube for entertainment. One evening she wanted to “do something together with you, mummy” and I was all out of energy so I went to Youtube and we watched Popular by Eric Saade, which she’d been humming since they sang it at preschool. I’m struggling to find good child-friendly entertainment there but recently realized that I can just start with her Hits for Kids set, pick a song and look for a video for that song. I have now experienced the horror that is Jag är en gummibjörn.

She likes tracing swirls in books. When she encounters swirls or curlicues in a book illustration, she asks me to wait while she traces them with her finger. Several of the books by Carin & Stina Wirsén, especially the books about liten skär, have lots of those. Ingrid’s current favourite is En liten skär och alla ruskigt rysliga brokiga. (CDON.com has a preview of the book.)

Her taste in books and movies is unchanged. She loves watching all the old Donald Duck short films, and Disney princesses (The little mermaid in particular). Sometimes I think her choice of movie is mostly guided by convenience. She prefers my laptop and the iPad to Eric’s computer which needs to be turned on. She will watch whatever is already there rather than get a DVD or ask Eric to rip a new movie for her.

She is learning a lot of English from those movies but probably doesn’t quite understand what she is learning. “Steak! Steak! Steak! Come on steak! I won!” she repeated today, with near-perfect pronunciation, after watching Donald’s Dinner Date. But I doubt that she knows what a steak is. Sometimes she learns more consciously and asks us about words. She brings out the picture ABC we bought for her when she was tiny and we lived in London, and we go through some words there together. Or she points at something and asks me what it is called in English. Today, for example, she pointed at various colours and asked for their names.

(She also loves to speak fake English by saying Swedish words and phrases with an English pronounciation. I don’t quite know how to reproduce these utterings here without resorting to the phonetic alphabet… “Den här”, meaning “this one”, becomes “den here” and “så här”, meaning “like this”, becomes “so here”, and so on.)

In Swedish she can now write impressively long words. With enough context (or with words that she herself has written on a previous day) she can also read quite long words, such as solglasögon or leksaker. With unknown words she hits her limit at about 6 or 7 letters. She is learning about weird Swedish spelling rules, and figured out on her own that körsbär begins with a K.

She asks more questions in general. She’s never had a “why” period but now she’s more likely to ask what words mean, why we do things the way we do them, and so on. The other day she asked us “how did the first human come to Earth?” and we gave her a 1-minute summary of evolution. She doesn’t have the patience for long explanations.

Teaching Adrian to crawl

She loves playing with Adrian. He loves her attention. But empathy isn’t her strong suit, and she doesn’t really understand how small and weak he is compared to her. She also has zero understanding for the concept of private space and personal integrity. She teases him by holding out a toy and then snatching it away time and time again, or blocks his way again and again when he’s crawling. She pokes him in the face with her foot, or tickles him too hard. She doesn’t intend to hurt him as far as I can see, and does all this with lots of laughter, but she also seems completely oblivious to his expression of discomfort and doesn’t notice that he isn’t sharing her fun. I don’t want him to get used to being a toy, I want him to keep his sense of integrity, so I often have to point these things out for her and ask her to stop. She complies but I don’t think she understands, because an hour later she does the same thing again.

More and more often she is spending the whole night in her room. When she doesn’t, she often comes into ours without anyone else waking and noticing. She had long asked for an alarm clock for her room, but we told her that there’s no point if she isn’t there when it goes off. We agreed that we’d get one after she spends 7 whole nights in her bed. She did that, and we bought one. Of course she chose a Disney princess one. (Perhaps I should have just bought a more tasteful one for her – there are other princess clocks out there – but on the other hand, why should I impose my taste on her? It’s her room after all.) She wanted us to set the alarm, too, but it turned out that the alarm won’t wake her but will wake me in the room next door, so now it’s off again.

Small stuff: She likes twirling and spinning around, on her own two feet (holding on to my finger), or on a merry-go-round, or in our swivel armchair. It was a happy moment when we brought it up from the basement after the building works were finished here.

She likes abbreviating words. Compound words to their first part, simple words to their first syllables, entire sentences to a key word. Körs for körsbär, tramp för trampcykel (as opposed to sparkcykel), lägg for jag vill lägga mig.

She likes to play that she’s a baby. Sometimes she is a newborn and can’t do anything but wave her arms and legs and mewl. Other times she’s a one-year-old and talks baby talk and crawls on all fours.

A month of ups and downs. For a week or two Ingrid was sunny and happy; then she became moody and whiny again like she was last month. There is a lot of complaining about “why do I have to do everything”.

I wrote the above about Ingrid last month, but it applies equally well to this month. There is an awful lot of complaining. Especially any time we ask her to do something. “Do I have to? Why do I always have to… It’s unfair!” even when all she needs to do is pick up her sock from the floor and walk three steps with it to the laundry hamper.

Mealtimes bring out the worst in her: the food is wrong, the plate and the cup we’ve set on the table for her are wrong. If we don’t set the table for her she complains about that. She complains even before she knows what she is complaining about: “I don’t like this food. What is it?” She complains about having to get her own yogurt from the fridge and about having to take her plate off the table after the meal. Even the most basic requests are delivered in a whine. Basically she’d just like to sit there and order us around, and have us satisfy each of her wishes immediately.

Interestingly, she doesn’t seem to understand how her whining and complaining affects us. We do ask her to please speak nicely to us, we tell her that we don’t like it when she whines and orders us around. After enough whining I tell her she has to either stop whining or leave the kitchen so the rest of us can eat in peace. She has on occasions whined until both Eric and I are so fed up that we physically lift her up and carry her away from the kitchen – or tell her to just leave me alone because I do not want to be with her when she’s like that. And then she suddenly realizes we mean it, we’re annoyed for real, and gets all upset because I’m annoyed with her and don’t want to hug her.

For a while, earlier this month, she would end each mealtime with “Tack för maten den var god, mitt i maten stod en ko. Kon heter Kajsa, hon stod o bajsa’.” And every time she joked, she’s finish with “Jag skojar, jag skojar, du är en papegoja!”. Now that’s passed.

She likes the playhouse in its new pink incarnation (and new location) and uses much more than she used to. She especially likes sitting there with her friends and eating her afternoon snack.

Ingrid is still very fond of the iPad and wants to watch movies or play games on it every day. Her favourite game is Plants vs. Zombies. I had already played through the whole game so she can pick and choose between all the levels, and the mini games. She especially likes to play it together with me or Eric. I wouldn’t have expected her to like this game because in the past she’s avoided games where she can fail or lose, but I guess she is getting used to it.

She continues to practice reading, slowly and steadily getting more comfortable with it. It used to take all her concentration, dragging a finger along each letter. Now she has no trouble reading/recognizing familiar short words, especially words that she herself has written. Sometimes I hear her mutter words that she’s reading off the page that I am reading for her, so she can do it while she’s doing other stuff with part of her brain.

She has acquired a tendency to pose, in a stiff and silly way, when she notices me taking photos of her.

The current favourite movie is Tangled. Favourite food is, I think, soft tunnbröd with liver pâté and sliced apples. She seems to be going through a growth spurt just now – she’s much hungrier than normally.

Ingrid loves picking flowers. There is no end to the amount of flowers she’d pick if given the chance. I ask her to pause when we run out of vases in suitable sizes.

We limit the picking to flowers in our own garden (with bulbs like daffodils and crocuses off-limits) and in no-mans-lands: outside fences, on roadside greens etc. And we try to leave flowers that are large and beautiful but few, such as if there’s a small stand of poppies just outside someone’s fence.

Other than that, she’s got free hands, and I don’t guide her. She picks anything that flowers. Scillas, hyacinths, wood anemones, daisies, cowslips, dandelions, forget-me-nots, pennycress, buttercups… cow parsley or something like it (hundkäx/harakputk), deadnettle (vitplister/piimanõges), greater celandine (skelört/vereurmarohi), etc etc etc. I think we had about a dozen species on our kitchen table as of today.

It turns out that cowslips, grape hyacinths, daisies and deadnettles keep very well in a vase, for many days. Both cowslips and daisies can even recover after wilting when running out of water if the water is then replenished. Scillas don’t live long in a vase; anemone flowers survive for several days but their leaves wilt quickly; buttercups spread lots of annoying yellow particles around them.

At work: more software installations. Visual Studio, Resharper, SQL Server Management Studio, TortoiseSVN, AnkhSVN, CCTray, Notepad++, Office, Filezilla, and probably some that I’ve forgotten already.

During the afternoon I replanted the three tomato plants I bought 10 days ago, and cleaned out all the paper junk that’s accumulated in Ingrid’s room. Almost every day she brings paper home from nursery, sometimes with drawings, sometimes with scribbles, sometimes just folded up and wrapped up with sticky tape. Of course she wants to save them all, but then a few days later she forgets all about them. I plan to go through all her toys someday soon, too.

Adrian is still semi-ill, and eating and sleeping badly. I think I got about four hours of sleep this past night, in three separate pieces. But tonight he fell asleep on his own: we nursed, I turned him on his tummy, he twisted and tossed for a while, and then he was asleep.

Eric took him to his 8-month checkup and it was uneventful. He can sit unsupported, he is not cross-eyed, his babbling includes non-vowel sounds: check, check, check. 9.4 kg and 69.7 cm.

We had a lovely storm during dinner, with lightning and thunder and hail and pouring rain. Falling cherry petals filling the air made the storm look even more fierce.

A month of ups and downs. For a week or two Ingrid was sunny and happy; then she became moody and whiny again like she was last month. There is a lot of complaining about “why do I have to do everything”.

The one thing she is consistently happy about is going to preschool and being with her friends. She is almost aggressively social. With Adrian she gets up close, is loud and very much “in his face”. She dances and waves her arms and sings loudly and tickles him. She isn’t aggressive but not gentle either. Overwhelming, I guess.

With her friends she’s always the one to say “now let’s do this” and “come, we’ll do that”. She tends to boss them around. And the others are generally happy to follow as far as I can see. Whenever we bring one of them home with us, the others will gather around and say that “me too, I want to go to Ingrid’s house, too!”

Perhaps this is why I’ve been experiencing friction between the two of us: I will not have her ordering me around. She has not learned to ask politely, or does not want to ask politely. Being the one who decides is sometimes more important to her than the actual subject of her request. Setting a good example has obviously not made any difference whatsoever; reminding her to ask politely leads to huffing and demonstrative exaggerated phrases of rote politeness (“dear mummy could I please have the …”); ignoring impolite requests leads to a battle of wills. Giving in and doing what she asks even though the request is impolite and patently ridiculous (asking me to help her cycle by pushing her even though she’s on a downhill stretch) is sometimes an OK short-term fix when everyone’s good mood matters most, but it is not a general solution. I have not yet been able to find one.

She writes more and draws less. Whenever we bring stuff home from preschool it is usually short written notes. These can contain anything from a friend’s name (when Ingrid and a friend switch names and hang name tags with each other’s name around their necks) to “Happy Easter to the whole family”.

Her drawing is very much still the formulaic, symbolic kind. When she does draw, it’s still mostly girls of various sorts. One day she and two friends wanted to draw some fish so they could play fishing, and they were unsure how to draw a fish. The oldest girl drew one and since then that is how fish have to be drawn. A few days later Ingrid asked me to draw a fish and it absolutely had to be done the same way. My kind of fish were not right. She tried herself but couldn’t quite get it right so instead she instructed me exactly as to what should be done how.

She continues to learn to read. Short words she sometimes manages straight away but often she needs to try and pronounce the word a couple of times before she can figure out how to put the parts together. Especially in Swedish where one letter can stand for different sounds (like in English but not as bad) and, the length of each sound is not obvious, and neither is the stress. “Toomater, tåmateer, tåmaater!” when reading “tomater” (tomatoes). And the Swedish letter sounds infect her Estonian reading, too. When she’s trying to read an unknown word and it happens to be in Estonian, I often have to tell her that it is in Estonian before she can make any sense of it. Swedish is her default assumption.

Often she will try to guess the word before she’s properly read it. She reads the first few letters and then makes wild random guesses that are nowhere close the real thing.

She has really learned to judge whether she is tired or not and will go to bed voluntarily and without any fuss in the evenings.

She has been falling down more than usual when running and cycling – or perhaps we just notice it more now that it’s warm outside and falls actually result in scraped knees.

Today was Estonian playgroup day. Even though the event itself takes two hours (10 to 12) it takes up well over half of our Sunday. First we have to make sure we don’t dawdle over breakfast. Next I have to either get Adrian to sleep in the sling, or keep him awake until it’s time to leave so he can sleep in the stroller. Then it takes us about an hour to get there (walk/cycle, train, metro, walk). Afterwards, eat a snack (sandwiches from the cafe for Ingrid, packed milk-free sandwiches for me). Then about an hour to get home, usually a bit more since I cannot time it with the train schedule. Finally a late lunch when we get home. By this time it’s usually three o’clock.

Ingrid was in a bad mood on the way home, pretty much from the start. It began with the usual “my legs are tired” and then everything seemed to make things worse. By final part of the journey, walking and cycling home from the station, she was snapping at me all the time.

And then she cycled into me. I could feel her cycling right behind me, almost touching my heel. I don’t know if she wanted to hit me or if she was just seeing how much such snapping at my heels would annoy me. In any case she did cycle onto my foot, and it wasn’t an unfortunate accident. I was totally mad at her, grabbed her bike and carried it home, and declared it off limits for the rest of the day. She, not the least bit repentant, kept yelling at me about how she couldn’t possibly walk home and how she wanted her bike.

The bike curfew (or whatever I should call it) was easy to explain: if she cannot use it sensibly without hurting people around her, she is not allowed to use it.

But what I was really mad about was how she just thought I’d forget about this and be all cuddly and want to hold her hand to comfort her (because she was upset about having to walk). She more or less deliberately runs me over and then she’s the one who wants comforting?

We had a talk about it afterwards. She doesn’t like to talk about upsetting stuff but we did it anyway. I believe that she fundamentally doesn’t “get” empathy yet. She hears that I sound hurt/upset/angry but doesn’t seem to understand how I feel. It’s as if she thought I’m just putting on an act. She doesn’t understand why you should say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. We don’t hurt each other very often at home – she is not a hitter, I don’t hit her, we don’t have many painful accidents – so perhaps she doesn’t get much practice. I know the staff at preschool try to teach the kids to apologize when they’ve hurt each other, which they certainly do with reasonable frequency, but it doesn’t look like she’s gotten the point. She apologizes for ridiculous small accidents – for spilling juice on the table, for dropping a spoon – but not for the big stuff. I explained the purpose of apologies but I’m not sure how much of a difference it can make if basic empathy is lacking.

An ordinary month with no major developments or events.

The general tone has been somewhat negative: Ingrid is quick to say no to everything, to voice negative opinions, to say that whatever we propose is boring. When the food is good she says nothing; when there is some minor part of it she doesn’t like she is quick to tell us “I don’t like these ones”. I keep telling her that I am tired of hearing it, just leave whatever parts you don’t want, but it doesn’t seem to register.

She whines and complains; she orders me around; she huffs and groans; she answers my questions in a very exasperated tone. “What would you like to drink?” – “But MUUUMMM I don’t WAANT anything to drink!!!” A mini preview of her teenage years, I guess. All drama.

She’s learned or discovered sneaking. A fresh realization that mothers are not omniscient? She might ask me if it’s OK for her to taste whatever dinner ingredient I’m preparing. I tell her it’s OK to take a few pieces but that’s enough. When I leave the kitchen and then look back, I see her stealing another piece. She never used to do anything like that before. Once I saw her take a piece and sneak off to the bathroom to eat it.

Likewise she has started peeking at me when something goes wrong – when she spills her drink, or drops her sandwich in the glass while playing around with it. (I’ve mostly noticed it at mealtimes.) To check my reaction? To see if I noticed? Not sure.

She’s at preschool all days of the week again. Shopping and running errands together with me and Adrian has lost its charm. She’d rather be with her friends.

When I drop her off att preschool or leave her for some other reason, she almost invariably tells me “Emme ma teen kõike” – “Mamma jag gör allting” – literally, “Mummy I will do everything”. I hear this daily, often several times (first at preschool in the morning, then when I leave her on her own so I can put Adrian to bed) and I have no idea what she means by this. I have asked her to explain but she cannot.

Speaking of bedtime, she is often going to bed earlier than she used to, as early as 7 o’clock. At first it was because she didn’t want to be on her own while I put Adrian to bed. Now she sometimes does it even when Eric is at home. (She is generally more OK with being with Eric nowadays, I’m no longer the one and only.) And it’s good for her – she’s more rested in the morning. So she isn’t going to bed too early just to avoid being on her own, it’s the other way round: she used to go to bed too late so as to not miss out on anything exciting.

She’s also getting better at falling asleep on her own. When I need to put both kids to bed I first prep both of them (brush teeth, go to the loo / put on a night nappy, etc). Then we go up to Ingrid’s room where I read for here while Adrian plays with her stuff. Then I tuck her in and go to our bedroom to put Adrian to bed, promising to come back when he’s asleep. She is never happy about it but at the same time she’s no longer really upset about it either. Quite often she’s asleep by the time I’m back. Some time during the night she always comes to our bedroom, which now has a mattress on the floor for her, asks to hold my hand, and goes back to sleep.

Continuing steady progress in reading and writing. She writes longer sentences without losing track of where she is, and can usually read what she just wrote. Usually she writes scriptio continua, with no spaces between words. Sometimes she puts vertical bars between them. She writes small notes, probably copying my GTD-style note-taking: whenever I think of something I need to do, or she tells me something we ought to do, I tell her I will write it down. A sample note: “PÅUNSTASKAJAGÅTILMAJKEN” – “på onsdag ska jag gå till Majken”.

She can read single-syllable words of up to four or five letters, and some simple two-syllable words. The other day she read “Det var en gång en prins som hade”, for example. It goes well as long as there aren’t any weird letters, like G that sounds like J and so on. I wish she could learn to read in Estonian rather than Swedish, because the spelling is a lot more regular. But for that we’d need more Estonian books to read, and better Estonian books, too. But with the library here it’s inevitable that we read a lot more in Swedish. Still, it could be worse – she could be growing up in London and trying to learn to read in English.

Ingrid still tottering around, supporting herself on the heel of her left foot. Called the clinic, they said that as long as it isn’t broken there isn’t much they can do, so no point going there.

Lovely weather today, really warm and sunny, so I wanted to get out of the house – both Ingrid and Adrian would be really bored if they had to sit at home all day. I hesitated for a long while, since Ingrid’s not being able to walk properly would make things tricky. But then I dug out the Urban Jungle buggy, and the kiddy board, and we went out anyway. Worked pretty well: both kids alternated sitting in the buggy; when Ingrid rode in the buggy I had Adrian in a sling, and when Adrian rode, Ingrid stood on the kiddy board. Adrian accepted the buggy well enough when he was awake but didn’t like it for falling asleep – it’s forward facing only and he likes to be able to see me.

We went to IKEA since it’s easy to get to, not so crowded on a weekday, reasonably fun for Ingrid, and even marginally useful. Bought a rope ladder (to be hung either from the cherry tree or from Ingrid’s fort), some toy food for Ingrid (ice cream cones and a birthday cake, pretty nicely done), a soap dish, a soap dispenser. Then to a bike shop nearby where we got a basket for Ingrid’s bike. Pink of course.

Brought out a picnic blanket and we all spent some time in the sunny garden when we got home. Ingrid got bored pretty soon and went inside to watch a movie on the iPad; Adrian tasted moss and dry grass.

Adrian is still crying a fair amount because of teething. The two front teeth at the top are on the way, I can see them through the gums but not yet feel them. Gave him paracetamol in the morning and that kept him happy for a good six hours. Now I’m thinking about how much paracetamol is OK in such a situation. If he had a high fever I’d just follow the instructions, 4 times a day until he gets better. But teething? It’s not as major as a high fever, but it makes him unhappy. Once day is OK, even several days in a row. Twice? Getting iffy. Three times – too much in my opinion. Luckily the teething pain comes and goes in about half-hour intervals, so he’s not unhappy all the time and it is possible to actually prepare a dinner and get other such stuff done.