Ingrid uses me as a random number generator occasionally, although she doesn’t of course know that that’s what it’s called. “Gold star or gold heart?” she asks me, or “Dora or Bolibompa?” – and then makes some sort of decision based on my answer. Last time I think it was to decide the order of eating her breakfast.

Adrian still farting and pooping all the time. I counted five dirty nappies on the floor after the night. I think he produced three of them between the hours of 4 and 5 in the morning. Then he was so tired in the morning that he didn’t even wake when the alarm went off at 7 and the rest of us got up – he slept until a quarter to nine. Pretty whingey most of the day, not at all interested in food, nursing lots instead.

Went to the supermarket, did some laundry. Finished entering my backlog of receipts into our expense tracker; started checking off the latest quarterly bank statement.

Tried to remove the gravel that’s been left in some corners of our garden by the snow dumped there. Some parts had so much gravel that you couldn’t see the grass or the earth. A stiff brush worked best to get the gravel out of the grass, and then simply scooping it up with my hands, or just scraping or brushing it straight into the hedge. There, it might actually be useful and keep the weeds away.

Ingrid wanted to go to bed unusually early. Once in bed it turned out she wasn’t actually tired at all, she just wanted to cuddle with me. Well, tough luck – Adrian isn’t going to accept sitting quietly in a dim room. I had to leave the room with him, so she got the opposite of what she’d planned. That’s what you get when you try to trick your mum.

This will be a very brief monthly post for Ingrid, since (a) I have hardly taken any notes, and (b) I didn’t get this done before the vacation.

Ingrid got bored of staying at home with me and asked to go back to preschool on Thursdays. For now she will still be at home on Mondays, sort of as an extended weekend. The clinginess I saw during last month is now gone. Indeed she is experimenting with distance from me: when we’re out and about, she will regularly ask if she can take a different route. For some reason this happens most often in train stations: she will take the stairs while I take the elevator with Adrian’s pushchair, and we meet at the other end.

The first time we did that she underestimated how much slower the elevator would be, so she got a bit worried when she had to wait for me. Now the only thing I worry (slightly) about is bystanders’ reactions – that they will try to help her find me (even though we’ve agreed specifically that she will wait for me at the top of the stairs) and then I will have to go looking for them.

She still longs for spring to arrive and happily points out every puny little green speck, even if it’s last year’s grass in someone’s lawn. The moment it was above-freezing she started walking home from preschool in just a long-sleeved top, or perhaps a t-shirt and light sweater.

Happy with her new bathing suit

She likes to jump over things while walking. It makes walking slightly less boring (because otherwise walking is just about the worst thing she knows, topped only by getting a shot or taking bitter medicine). She jumps across puddles, manhole covers, and cracks in the street. She jumps across spaces marked by whatever happens to be in the street: from one crack to another, or from the edge of a shadow to the edge of a darker section of asphalt.

As always, the jumping is a social activity. She tells me to watch her jump, and asks me to guess beforehand: “do you think I can jump this one? what about from here?”.

Her new favourite toy is a small pink glittery plush unicorn, about the size of my fist, which I found at Myrorna (a chain of charity shops). The unicorn also plays the jumping game, just like a little plastic horse of hers used to. “Do you think it can jump over this table? Over the table AND the chair AND this highchair?” “No, surely it cannot manage THAT!” is the right answer, and then enormous surprise when indeed Ingrid “jumps” the unicorn over the chosen obstacle.

Ingrid is definitely getting bored with being at home with me. I’m hearing frequent complaints about how she has nothing to do, how her legs are tired, how boring it is to go the supermarket.

Almost finished Adrian’s new hat yesterday but then I ran out of yarn, with about 100 stitches to go… I will have to buy another skein so I can finish it.

Yesterday something went wrong with one of the wheels on the pushchair. First it was a bit hard to push and then one wheel stopped turning altogether. When I inspected it today I found what seemed to be a ball from the bearing, stuck between the wheel and its bracket, so I guess we will have to get the wheel replaced. Bother. I made do with just the slings today, but it’s not something I want to do for many days, as long as he refuses to sleep in a back carry.

My new theory about Adrian’s tummy troubles is that perhaps he’s allergic to shellfish, too, in which case it would be the prawns in sushi that cause trouble. I’m now considering taking him to a specialist to get some more clarity about this. As long as it was just cow’s milk, it was easy, but now it’s beginning to get complicated.

Ingrid has been sort of sensitive this month, worried about loss, about being alone, about not being able to hold on to things forever. She has difficulty letting go of things, in case she can’t get them back, just in case she needs them later.

For about a week we had tearful good-byes in the morning when I dropped her off at preschool. Then she told me she didn’t want to go there at all. She wanted to be with me all the time – or, she suggested, a preschool where parents are welcome, too. Now we have a compromise where she is there for 3 days a week and stays at home with me the other days. Every morning she tells me she’d rather be with me. At home she tells me she doesn’t want to be alone, not even in another room.

Yet when she is forced to be on her own (e.g. when I put Adrian to bed on nights when Eric is away) she handles it very well. But even then her activities are social by their nature: often she will draw a picture or write a letter for me.

Most recently she’s drawn puzzles for me: the kind where there are, say, 3 kids and one apple and tangled lines from each kid, and you have to follow the lines to see which one gets the apple. Her versions have a castle as the “prize”, and various people/animals around it: for example a girl or two, a baby, and two squirrels with pine cones. When she draws, it’s still almost always girls or princesses.

She mentions (occasionally but not daily) that we will die before her, but that it is a long time till then. We’ve discussed that we probably won’t live to be a thousand years old, but might well reach a hundred, which, luckily, feels like an eternity for one who’s four.

She has started collecting things again. It used to be sticks and stones; now she also wants to keep empty egg cartons, the foil lids from yogurt pots, empty chewing gum bags, and most other empty jars and boxes. She wants me to save the shopping list after we’re done shopping. When she borrows my camera and happens to take a blurry photo, she tells me I mustn’t delete it. She got very upset the other day when I deleted some RSS messages with pretty photos from my inbox. Today when she saw me surf the web, she worriedly asked me if I would be throwing any pictures away.

Ingrid is, in general, not so good at handling adversity. She doesn’t like iPad games where she can fail (except if it is easy to try again, such as Angry Birds). She’d rather not try at all than try and fail. She skips the boring parts of movies; she has a tendency to walk away from conflicts with friends.

Writing remains a favourite activity. She likes writing lists, messages, letters etc. It’s becoming a normal and everyday thing for her. In terms of skill she’s at about the same level as last month. Sometimes what she writes is legible, other times she skips half the letters so I have to ask her to read it for me. Sometimes when she runs out of space she squeezes in letters wherever she can, so the letters of the second half of the word is interspersed between those of the first half.

She’s not so interested in reading, although she does try occasionally. Some words she knows by sight. When she tries to spell out an unknown word, she often gets tripped up by the names of letters. When she sees “KUU” she reads “KA, U, U” – “KAUU?”.

With numbers also she’s about where she used to be. She does simple sums with small numbers without a problem. But it’s interesting for me to see that she really has no feel for numbers, no intuition. We have a card game where you’re supposed to find numbers/cards that together make up 10. She has, say, 5, 7 and 8. She tries 5 and 7 – twelve, too much. She then tries 5 and 8, without even thinking that since 8 is more than 7, there’s no way that would get her closer to 10. But if given 1, 3, 8, she tries the combinations and then realizes that what she needs is between 1 and 3, that she needs a 2.

The cards in that game have both a number and the corresponding amount of some thing. (One hedgehog, two bikes, something like that.) When she adds, say, 2 and 8, she will always count the things on both cards. She knows that the card says 8, but she won’t count 8, 9, 10 only – she starts at 1 and counts every item. No shortcuts.

She likes composing things out of other things: decorating things with stickers, playing Fablescapes on the iPad. While I cook she often creates sculptures out of stuff in the kitchen. It started with matchbox towers; then she added spoons and tea sieves to that; the latest sculpture covered half the free space on the kitchen counter and was made up of about 15 things: tea jars, wooden spoons, etc etc.

Recently there have been fewer complaints about walking but she is not a fan, by far. At some point I suggested to her that what we really need is a pair of wings, and she adopted that idea completely. Now she often brings up wings whenever she tires of walking. Ideally she’d like wings that fly on their own, that you don’t need to flap – perhaps with hooks or handles where you can hang your bags too – and perhaps some sort of place for a baby, because they’re too young to have their own. Or perhaps a flying house (and then we discussed how many rooms it should have, and she told me that it absolutely needs windows so we can see where we’re going, and doors so we don’t fall out) or perhaps a flying armchair, with two seats like twin strollers, and a canopy for rain, and someplace to put our bags, and a tray table too. Unless she’s really really tired, these ideas take up enough of her attention to get us home without too much fuss.

She enjoys amusing Adrian. It makes her glad to see him look at her, or smile at her. She will put toys in front of him (or on top of him), wave them in front of him, etc. He mostly watches with bafflement.

She does not like wearing socks. I think her feet get too hot, and that she’d happily wear socks if she had thinner winter boots.

She likes nightgowns better than pyjamas.

She has discovered chewing gum, and loves it. Wrigley’s Extra with blueberry and pomegranate, or with strawberry flavour. In fact she likes berries in just about any form: blueberry jam is better than apple; raspberry juice is better than orange; ice cream, yogurt, etc.

She’s also discovered the concept of wish lists, and has a long one that contains everything from “a Swedish flag” and “a music box” to “plastic duck with wheels” and “pretend flowers”.

Had a chat with staff at Ingrid’s preschool for how to continue. I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to be at home all the time, and taking a new decision every day is going to become stressful for both of us. Conclusion: she will go to preschool on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; Monday and Thursday are stay-at-home days.

After several weeks of mild weather, winter has returned with a vengeance. Snow storm today, with lots of fine snow and stinging, gusty wind. The weather forecasts are promising up to 20 cm of fresh snow – it’s like being back in the beginning of December again, except with a thick layer of ice underneath it all. Looks lovely right now, with fresh snow covering everything.

The plumbers installed a water tap in the new laundry room yesterday, and today they moved the washing machine and the tumble dryer. I inaugurated the laundry room by washing a load of baby clothes.

Disassembled the bouncy chair since Adrian will immediately start doing situps when I put him there.

Received a Hippy Chick hip seat in the mail, as well as two pink nightgowns in size 100 for Ingrid. All bought 2nd hand from Tradera, and immediately put to use.

Ingrid still insists on staying with me rather than going to preschool, and really is at her best behaviour almost all day long. It’s worked unexpectedly well.

She is starting to miss her friends, but as she pointed out herself, all but one of them are in a different group at preschool anyway, so she wouldn’t get to meet them much even if she did go there. I’ve decided to take her there anyway on Wednesday so I can go to playgroup with Adrian – bigger kids are not welcome there on baby days.

In the morning, a trip to the clinic for Adrian’s 5-month vaccinations and the inevitable weighing and measuring. (8.2 kg and 68.5 cm.) Then to the pharmacy to pick up a cortison cream for a patch of eczema he has, plus some cream against his cradle cap, which isn’t bothering us in and of itself, but it’s covering his eczema and making that hard to treat.

In the afternoon, grocery shopping and a visit to the library.

A contractor was scheduled to come here today to start put up scaffolding, so the builders can start working on the new roof. But this weekend we got the builders’ estimates for the remaining tasks. (We’ve been nagging at them since before Christmas about this. I guess paperwork and estimating isn’t their idea of fun.) And the roof came in at about twice their original back-of-the-envelope estimate, so we cancelled the scaffolding immediately. With the sums we’re now talking about, the new roof is not going to happen. Not because we don’t have the money but because it’s not worth it. As an investment, it would never pay for itself – we’d never get that money back if we had to sell the house. Had it been cheaper we could have done it anyway, just because we ourselves would be happier with the house that way, but not for this kind of money. We can think of many better ways to spend it. So it looks like we’re stuck with our shoe box of an extension. Sigh.

Ingrid didn’t want to go to preschool today either. She said she wanted to be with me instead. We talked about it… I told her that I needed to go to town today for some urgent shopping, and would do a lot of walking. I needed to buy a christening gift, and had left the shopping way too late (the christening is this Saturday) so online shopping was not an option. And I told her that she’d probably get bored without her friends, and that she wouldn’t like all the walking I do. (“I haven’t got anything to do” and “My legs are tired” are two ever-recurring refrains here.) But she insisted that she would not complain about either of those things. Fine, I said, we’ll give it a try.

And would you believe it. Not a single complaint about either boredom or tired legs.

It took us a while to get to town – there were severe disruptions to the train traffic. Just as we were approaching the station I was so glad that we’d make it just in time for the next train… and instead we found out that that train was cancelled. As the time approached for the next train, there were messages about it being delayed, first 10 minutes, then 20. So instead of just making it, we waited over half an hour.

By the time we were in Stockholm Central it was almost lunchtime. Because it was so late I skipped some of the shops I had planned to visit. A quick visit to a jewellery shop (which had nothing nice), the children’s department at NK (where I found both a nice gift and some chewy toys for Adrian), then a sushi lunch, and finally on the way back to the station we stopped by at Krabat and Iris Hantverk. I think Ingrid quite enjoyed the shopping experience: toys and handicrafts and other fun stuff to look at. She probably wouldn’t have liked it as much if I’d been shopping for shoes or curtain fabrics. Well, actually, she might have liked that, too…

In the afternoon she didn’t want to go to her dance-and-play group either. We read a bit, she actually helped me hang laundry, and then played on her own for some time while I was making dinner etc.

Adrian was unusually cranky in the afternoon. Didn’t want to be carried or held, didn’t want his dummy or his toys, didn’t want to eat or sleep… I was getting really annoyed (pointless, I know, but I couldn’t help it) as I tried everything I could think of. Then he started screaming and finally I realized it was his tummy again. Felt really bad about being annoyed with the poor guy when he was in pain.

The only things I ate that I hadn’t cooked myself were one piece of bread, and the sushi lunch. The bread had all its ingredients listed and it was almost the most basic bread you could imagine: 2 kinds of flour, yeast, salt, sesame seeds. And I couldn’t see anything milk-like in the sushi either, no weird rolls with cream cheese or anything like that. According to the internet there’s no milk in surimi (“crab sticks”). What can it be?

This is really bad, because if I cannot even eat bread or sushi, what am I going to do for lunch in the future? Bring my own sandwiches every time?

Half of this month was filled with Christmas holidays, so we haven’t had many normal, ordinary days recently. I think we were all happy when Ingrid went back to preschool: towards the end she was spending several hours per day with either iPad games or movies. Neither Eric nor I could muster the energy to play with her, read to her, or otherwise activate her all the time.

We’ve somehow slid into a pattern where she asks for a movie or the iPad as soon as we get home. Then, when the hour runs out (which I think is an appropriate length of time for her to spend staring at a screen) it’s just about time for me to start preparing dinner, which means that she is bored then. I think we will try to turn that around, so I can do something meaningful together with her when I have time.

Almost always when I nurse Adrian, I read for Ingrid, so we read at least a book or two every day. Always, with every single book and movie, she will stop at some random point and ask me, “Mummy do you know which one I am? I am this one. [Names or points at some figure.] Which one are you?” This can be pretty annoying: here I am, giving her my best reading, and all she thinks about is which animal she is.

We play a bit of games. Her games have passed some magical threshold and now some of them are actually fun for me, not just because I’m spending time with her but intrinsically. We’re on a more equal level. We’ve played several kinds of guessing games. The simplest one is one where I guess which of her hands is holding the coin.

Sometimes we guess words (“I see something that begins with a K, in Swedish”) – on the bus, in a picture spread in a book, in the living room. For added spice I’ve got Ingrid’s ideas of spelling to take into account. “Giraff” begins with an H in her mind, and “kära” with an S. When the guesser gives up, the other player gives hints, or sometimes the guesser asks yes/no questions, 20 questions style. A couple of times we’ve also played something approaching 20 questions, with animals.

A variation on the guessing theme is the hiding game. One of us picks a random object and puts it somewhere in the house, and then gives a hint or two: “It’s something pink and it is inside a large orange thing”, or “something gray is behind something gray”. Again, if it is too hard, we ask for extra hints.

Ingrid still also likes the role reversal game from last month, and the gift-giving game, where I get a random container with some random thing inside. Also the magic game, where she is a fairy and does magic for me – magically makes Adrian stop crying (pretend only), or cleans the sofa table (for real), etc. Also the “prohibition game” (as I think about it) continues: “you must not step on the yellow tiles or you will become a dragon”, etc.

Meal times in particular are filled with games. It can take her 20 minutes (and that’s no exaggeration) to eat a small 100g yoghurt. She twirls her knife on the table and pretends it’s the hands of a clock, pretends her spoon is an ice cream, dips her spoon in yoghurt and then in juice, ladles juice onto her yoghurt, plays with whatever toy I’ve put in front of Adrian, etc.

Basically, she manages to entertain herself pretty well as long as there is (1) someone to keep her company, and (2) something that she ought to be doing but can drag out. Eating is one such activity. Walking is another: she climbs on the mounds of snow along the road, races me, walks backwards or sideways, etc. (On the plus side, she rarely complains about tired legs any more.) More annoyingly, brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed is another such activity.

She is interacting more and more with Adrian. I’m hoping to find time soon for a separate post about that. But basically she now sees him as a fellow human, and takes an interest in him. She pops in the dummy, puts toys in front of him, etc.

She is very very close to being able to read, but not quite. I think the only block is a mental one: she thinks that she cannot read, therefore she cannot. She can more or less write, but since she cannot read what she’s written, she loses track of where she is at. Short words, no more than 3 letters, work best. She wrote us a Christmas card, “GOD JUL MA Å PA FLÅ INGRID”. I’m saving that one.

She still likes numbers and basic addition. Sometimes she now does sums like 4+2 without holding up fingers, but I can see that she is counting fingers mentally.

She has developed an interest for learning some English. Counting in English came last month; now she notices them in movies (“sixteen” in Sleeping Beauty) and asks me to translate other words that she hears in them. We’ve read some Dr. Seuss books a few times: much of Fox in Socks can be understood just with me pointing at the pictures, while The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham need some more translating.

She says she longs for spring to come. She doesn’t like the bulky winter clothing, and misses cycling. And she is already talking about how much she looks forward to her birthday.

I mentioned sleep routines in my last post.

Ingrid has always been a lousy sleeper, and her sleeping habits were almost an obsession for me. (See this post, and this one, and this, this, this, this and finally this one.) It goes a lot better nowadays – she no longer fights sleep, and goes to sleep pretty easily.

But she does not want to do it on her own. She is quite cuddly in general: she likes to cuddle up with me when we read or watch a movie, to hold my hand when she is upset and wants help calming down, and so on. And at night she very much wants to hold her hand on me to go to sleep. (Also some time in the middle of the night she still wanders from her bed and her room over to ours.)

Getting to this point took some effort: when we stopped breastfeeding, I’d lie down next to her. Then I’d sit next to her on the bed, so she could cuddle up next to my legs. Only then could I sit by the side of her bed and let her hold my arm.

This closeness seems important to her. She gets visibly upset as soon as I mention the possibility of changing this routine. I’m sure I could just ignore her wishes and decide to stop, to force her to do it some other way. But if it is that important to her, I don’t see why I should. It’s actually a pretty nice ending for our days: quietly, pleasantly, together.

We have made sure that it doesn’t absolutely have to be this way. Weekend nights are Eric’s, and she manages those just fine. But she clearly views them as second best.

Adrian is a much better sleeper. He goes to sleep in bed every night, with a bit of fussing but usually no screaming. He does need breastfeeding in the evening, though. (And just like Ingrid used to, he gets hungry at night: usually wakes every 3 or 4 hours and eats a proper meal each time, despite eating frequent large meals during the day as well.)

So I’ve ended up putting both kids to bed most nights. This can take over an hour even on a good day, much of which I spend sitting in one dark room or another. Pretty boring. Added to that, Ingrid, being tired, is often less than cooperative during the bedtime routine (brushing teeth, going to the loo, putting lotion on her dry skin, getting into her pyjamas). She whines, complains, wants things done like THIS and not like THAT, etc.

Afterwards I am always drained.

This has been the part of my day that I am least happy with, so as part of my non-New-Year’s resolutions, I’ve decided to change it.

The new routine is that I continue putting Adrian to bed (easiest for all involved parties that way) and I will sit with Ingrid while she falls asleep, but Eric takes care of the practical parts of Ingrid’s bedtime routine. This way I still do a fair amount of sitting quietly in a dark room but at least I don’t have to get struggle with Ingrid’s whims, and am in a much better mood afterwards.

And, knowing her, I suspect that she will not come up with so many delays and objections during the pre-bed-routine, because the faster she gets them done, the sooner she gets to hear her bedtime story with me. Whereas when I do the pre-bed-routine, she has every reason to drag her feet: being with me is preferable to being asleep, even when she is making me cross.

Plus, this way Ingrid will start the bedtime routine earlier (since she doesn’t wait until I’m done with Adrian) so she gets more sleep, and I get more free time in the evening.

The results after the first few days are encouraging. We’ll see about the next step once this routine is firmly established.