Phew. Back to normal. Ingrid is her usual self again: occasionally volatile, sometimes whingy, but generally a happy girl. Life is much much more pleasant.

Ingrid’s latest “thing” is singing. We used to sing a lot, but then lost that habit somehow. Now it’s back again. A lot of Christmas songs, naturally: they’ve been practising for the Lucia celebrations at preschool for several weeks. A lot of Santa Lucia of course, but I also get to hear En sockerbagare, Tre gubbar and Tipp tapp frequently. Other non-Christmas favourites include Jungfru, jungfru skär, Tingelingelinge tåget far and the eternal Blinka lilla stjärna.

She particularly likes to sing while sitting in the sledge on our way to or from preschool. Today, when one of her friends accompanied us home for the afternoon, the two of them kept looping Jungfru, jungfru skär almost all the way home. Very uplifting!

She also likes to experiment with singing. Take a snatch of lyrics of an existing song and then sing and speak them over and over again, while varying everything that can possibly be varied: melody, pitch, speed, rhythm, stress, tone of voice etc. Or she mangles the lyrics, and twists each word into something vaguely similar-sounding but not quite: “Bjällerklang, bjällerklang” becomes “Pelikan, pelikan” and so on. Or she picks a random phrase and then sings that. Yesterday’s phrase was “tvätta mina tår” – “wash my toes”; this Monday she was singing “så såg jag smutsig ut i hopbyggnaden” – “so I looked dirty in the construction”. Go figure. This can often go on for a good while in the background while she is half-busy doing something.

She still plays with words, too, with rhymes and alliteration. “Jag vill ha mjölk” becomes “Na nill na nölk” etc. Me she now calls “mammis” – the Swedish mamma has replaced the Estonian emme, and then acquired the -is suffix (which is a very common and productive one in Swedish). She’s started picking words apart: she’s noted that both Barkarby and Vällingby (place names near where we live) have “by” in them, and Vällingby is made up of välling (“gruel”) and by.

In Swedish and Estonian, she’s started asking me what words mean. Usually she’s just picked them up and used them. But now with more abstract concepts, it’s not so obvious what people mean when they say a word or a phrase. For example, nära ögat (“near escape”, literally “near the eye”) and umbes (“approximately, roughly”) and typ (“sort of”). “Nära ögat” in particular seems to resonate with her: once I’d explained it for her, she started using it several times every day.

She’s learned to count in English. Up to 12 she gets them right every time; after that she usually needs a bit of prompting. She also picks up snatches of English from movies occasionally: everything from “You’ll never catch me” (from Disney’s The tortoise and the hare) to the Happy Birthday song (again from Disney, Pluto’s Party).

A few days ago, she got a simple calculator together with the fifteenth and last of her 1-2-3 books. It only has the digits 0 to 9, plus, minus and equals. She likes it a lot and has played with it daily. It’s not rare for her to mistype some number or press the wrong key somewhere and then tell me that 3 plus 4 equals 38, or something like that. I try to teach her the habit of first thinking for herself what the answer should be and then check with the calculator, rather than just blindly trust it. We’ll see if that catches on.

At preschool they have a maths project. They’ve split the large group into three smaller ones, each with a different theme. Ingrid’s group focuses on “short and long”. (The others have “light and heavy” and “time” as their themes.) They measure stuff in various ways, draw long things and short things etc. It’s made some sort of impression on Ingrid: several times she’s spontaneously reflected on the different sizes of things, said which one is shorter than the other etc.

She’s also interested in what things are made of, in materials, mostly in the context of which things will break and which won’t. “This cup is made of china. It is rather fragile.” “The fork is made of metal. It is hard. Look, I can do like this [tries to bend fork] but it won’t break. But if it fell from the roof all the way to the street, then it would break?” Glass, china, metal, wood, paper, fabric, clay – those are the materials that have come up at some point.

For a while we did a lot of crafts – cutting, glueing, painting – but then I think she tired and we haven’t done much in the past week or so.

For a while she was very interested in names, and still is to some extent. She picks or makes up pretty names for me / herself / her dolls: her favourites include Evelisa, Evelina, Rosetta and Josefin. Always girls’ names. Sometimes when she thinks of a particularly pretty name, she tells me that when I have another baby, if it is a girl baby, we should give her that name.

We also still play the role reversal game, where she is the mummy and I get to be big sister. Mostly it means that I should talk a lot and ask her questions about stuff, the way she does – “Mummy why does that man not have a hat”, “Mummy are we there yet”, and so on. And that is hard! I cannot blather like a 4-year-old. I get tired of that game pretty quickly.

She has begun to play a lot with her food and utensils, to the point where I often have to remind her to eat. “Just det, jag glömde det!” she says. The spoon is a playground slide, or a bridge, or the hands of a clock. The plate is a sea, or a sandbox. The piece of cookie is a shoe, or a sheep.

She is, still, most unwilling to play on her own. She’d rather complain that she has nothing to do than walk up the stairs to her room to get a toy. But when it’s time to do something – get dressed, brush her teeth, go to bed – she’s all play and silliness.

One thing I forgot to mention last month: we stopped using night nappies around her birthday, and this time it’s worked. But it requires one of us (Eric, or sometimes me) to take her to the loo a few hours after she falls asleep.

This has been a month full of whining, complaining, yelling, and general contrariness. Ingrid finds fault with everything we say or do. It’s like having a teenager in the house, I imagine.

It appears that she has, for some reason, decided to be unpleasant and unfriendly towards us. She can be perfectly polite to others, but when she addresses me, it’s often by shouting or screaming. When she wants me to pour milk, it’s no longer “Can I have some milk please” but “MIIILLK!”. Once she even started with “Can I…” but then interrupted herself and shouted “MIIILLK!” instead.

When she wants me to help her get her boots on, she refuses to come stand where I am sitting. (I refuse to crouch on the floor when I’ve got Adrian in the sling, because it is very uncomfortable for both of us.) Sometimes she even yells when she wants me to play with her or read to her. “Du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig!” (“You must read for me”) she screams, and of course I must do nothing of the sort, I must leave the room instead in order to keep my temper.

Anything I suggest is rejected. Anything I mention in a positive tone, she decides to dislike. “Look, there’s one piece of apple left!” she gladly says. “Yes, I thought you might want one more so I left it for you” I say. “I don’t want it” she responds sulkily.

And she wants help with everything. She can even ask for help moving a plate to the side of the table, and complain that she doesn’t have the strength to move it, and demonstrate by poking at it with a limp hand and an exhausted face. When Eric and I can’t help but laugh out loud at that, she gets very upset and cries that we mustn’t laugh at her.

My guess is that this is a reaction to Adrian’s arrival. A bit delayed, you might think, but then again Adrian was much easier to take care of during his first month. Now he requires more of our time and attention, and even though I do my best to spend time with Ingrid, she cannot have all the attention she wants. Is she testing us, perhaps? “Do they really love me? Do they love me if I do this, this and this?” Or perhaps she is simply mentally tired and stressed by the change and by the new order.

Tellingly she really only behaves that way with me and Eric. When, for example, another parent at preschool notices that we are having trouble (read: Ingrid is yelling at me without pause and asking for help while refusing my way of helping her) and asks if s/he can help, Ingrid explains reasonably politely what she needs help with and gladly accepts it.

During all of this I try to remind myself that:

• I cannot control her behaviour but I can control how I react to it (and that covers both my internal and external reactions).
• If we are to break the spiral of negative emotions and negative behaviour, it’s up to me to do it.
• I can choose to treat her the way she “deserves” to be treated, or the way that is likely to break the spiral.

When she yells for help doing something ridiculously easy, I may think that that kind of request really deserves to be ignored until she addresses me in a more polite manner, or refused because she can do it herself perfectly well. But all that achieves is an escalation of the spiral. Instead I can interpret her shouting as a way of saying “I feel ignored and tired and unloved and I hate it and I want company”, gently remind her that I would prefer if she asked me kindly instead of shouting, and help her.

But there are times when she has decided to not cooperate at all, and then it can be physically difficult for me to help her. I cannot lift her when I am carrying Adrian; I cannot put her mitten on if she keeps her hand all limp. And there are times when my patience runs out and I just cannot take her yelling any more, and I walk away from the room or the situation.

It is bloody exhausting to have two cranky kids. I don’t tolerate loud noise well, and when two children are screaming right next to me, it leaves me tired and with frazzled nerves, even less willing to indulge in Ingrid’s whims or to get engaged in her activities.

Another reaction to having Adrian in the house: Ingrid has started telling us that she has a stomach ache, when she clearly has no such thing (and forgets it as soon as she gets distracted), most likely because we have explained to her that Adrian cries so much because his stomach hurts. If it works for him, and gets him lots of attention, why not for her, too?

Ingrid’s favourite “toy” is our iPad. She watches movies on it, plays games, draws, plays dress-up and so on – together with me or Eric if possible. We also read (a good activity to combine with breastfeeding Adrian), do crafts, and play games (board games, card games and such).

She likes to pretend she’s a wizard or a fairy or an angel, and do magic. (Fairies and angels seem pretty much the same to her – pretty girls with wings – and since I don’t see much actual difference myself, I haven’t bothered trying to explain the very different cultural backgrounds of the two.) There have been magicians and fairies in many of the movies we’ve seen recently, as well as in fairy tales, ranging from the story of Sleeping Beauty, via Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to Shrek and Aladdin.

She will ask me what magic she should do, wave her wand and say some magic words, and present me with the result. Sometimes she clarifies that “it’s just pretend”, that I shouldn’t expect real wings or that she cannot really magically bring daddy home early. I’ve begun using magic as a distraction when she’s in a bad mood: “wouldn’t it be nice if we could magically grow wings, then you wouldn’t have to walk home on your tired legs”. It sometimes works.

Often she or one of her soft toys is a kitten, walks on all fours and miaows pitifully. The kitten has lost its parents while picking berries in the forest, is sad and wants company. (We’ve read an Estonian fairy tale about a girl who gets lost in the forest while picking berries.) Now most recently the kitten has actually been abandoned in the forest by its father (since we’ve read about Hansel and Gretel).

Whenever I ask what she did with her friends at preschool, she tells me they played mummy daddy baby. She usually gets to be the baby, being among the smallest and youngest kids in their huge group. At home she plays she’s the mummy, and various toys and dolls get to be babies. She breastfeeds them, picks them up when they cry, and puts them to sleep. Sometimes she wants to be a mom for me, and I get to be big sister. She asks me how my day was, what I learned at school, and I am supposed to act the way she usually does. When she borrows my camera, for example, I am supposed to badger her “let me see, let me see [the photos]”.

There is also a fair amount of talk about being in love, and marrying. Contagion from all the older girls at preschool. She is in love with me and with Elin (a friend) she says, and will marry us both. Being in love means you like someone a lot, she says, and getting married means you live together.

When she draws or paints, it is only girls and princesses. Just plain girls more often than princesses, nowadays. They all follow the same template: head like this, dress like that, long hair on both sides. Very boring for me.

She has effectively learnt to write. Often she still wants one of us to tell her the letters, but when I instead say the word again, or just ask her what letter she thinks should come next, she gets it right 9 times out of 10. The most common mistake she makes is skipping a letter in the word. For example when she wante to write PIRN (for “pear” in Estonian) and had done P and I, she said that N should come next. But when I said that that would make PIN, she thought a bit and figured out on her own that R should be there too.

It’s like when she learned to stand and walk: she wouldn’t actually let go and do it until she was 100% able to do it. Back then it was some sort of subconscious or instinctive behaviour, but now it’s more conscious. She simply has a strong aversion to failure.

Speaking of walking, Ingrid is still not fond of walking so she cycles to preschool every day, if at all feasible, and most other places too. We had to walk when the streets were full of snowy slush. But when there are just some icy patches here and there, we take the bike. Slipping and falling a few times causes less fuss and complaining than having to walk all the way, especially on the way home in the afternoon. Even better than cycling is having a cycle race, meaning that she sets a goal (“first one to that brick house wins”) and races ahead on her bike, and I walk after her as fast as I can (cannot run with Adrian in the sling, he either throws up or wakes up) while shouting “this time I will surely win” or “now it really is my turn to win” and she laughs at me.

She can now hop on one foot (her right one) for a good 12 to 15 jumps, all the way across the kitchen. On her left she manages just a few.

Likes: painting my face (they do face painting at preschool on Fridays). Making silly faces and waving her arms around when I try to take a photo of her. Winning. Ice cream. Sundays, because then she gets ice cream. (Sometimes she starts counting down to Sunday already on a Tuesday.) Selecting clothes for Adrian. Torches. Balancing on pavement edges, ledges, and power cords on the floor. Playing rock paper scissors during train rides. Also during train rides, playing shop and selling me the houses, cars, boats and towers on the seat fabric. (Can’t find any official pictures; a slightly fuzzy photo can be seen here.) Plates, cups and cutlery with pictures or patterns.

Does not like: our tasteful green china. The colour black, or brown or grey. Waiting. Missing a train – even when I tell her the next one will be there in 2 minutes, she is upset.

Ingrid has been riding her balance bike all summer and autumn, and is now a real pro: she can cruise without her feet touching the ground for as long as the bike will keep rolling at reasonable speed. But she’s almost outgrown it, so for her birthday we got her a real bicycle. And she was off riding within minutes. (I was going to post a video but it’s 12MB and I don’t have the time to figure out how to compress it.)

The balance bike was obviously the right way to go: she learned balancing and steering first, and now she just had to get used to the pedals. Learning all of those things at the same time would have been immensely more difficult.

When she started taking the balance bike to and from nursery, she was the only kid with one. Gradually more and more kids turned up with balance bikes – inspired by our example, I believe. Similarly, we got the idea after seeing just one girl ride one, back when we were still living in London. When you see a kid on one, it is just so obviously a good idea.

If you’re a parent of a preschooler who cannot cycle yet, get them a balance bike!

This month’s big thing is of course Adrian’s arrival. Ingrid had been excited about the impending arrival of The Baby for a long time already. After he was born, she was very proud to be a big sister, and wanted to show him off to anyone who’d listen.

Now that he is here, she’s not quite so excited any more. I totally understand her: he isn’t very exciting, really. At first she tried to show him stuff (toys etc) but when he turned out not to be ready for that kind of interaction, she pulled back. He does cry quite a lot, and loudly, which Ingrid doesn’t like much, so she keeps a bit of a distance to him: cautiously pats him occasionally, but otherwise stays away.

She’s coping well with all the disruptions to our normal routine, and is pretty understanding when I cannot help her or spend time with her right when she wants. And while she may not like it, this change is also pushing her to do things on her own, without my help. On Tuesday nights Eric is away from home and I have to put both children to bed. This Tuesday Adrian was awake and most unhappy just when it was time for Ingrid to go to sleep. I left the room and told her I’d be back when Adrian stops screaming. When I came back, she was asleep: the first time she’s gone to sleep on her own.

Similarly Ingrid is now forced to get by without the stroller, which she was so very fond of. She can walk, run or bike, or stand on the buggy board. And of course she manages just fine, and doesn’t even complain much. When she sees that there is no choice, she is usually very sensible and accepts reality.

There is some frustration, of course, but I’m not even sure that there’s more than in a “normal” month. Ingrid’s current way of expressing her frustration is through (more or less realistic) threats and blackmail, or calling me “stupid mummy”. “If you do X then I won’t invite you to my party” and “if I can’t get an apple now then I will just stand here [in the middle of the street]”. She’s even taken to hitting me sometimes, but not with real force, mostly as a challenge.

I’m “stupid mummy” at times but Eric gets an even rougher deal. If Ingrid had her say, he’d always be last and get the least. And his clothes are the ugliest and so are his shoes. When Ingrid happens to draw three humans, the largest and prettiest one is mummy, the middle one is big sister, and the smallest one, drawn almost as an afterthought, is daddy.

That is mostly an act: when I’m busy and can’t be with her, daddy is perfectly acceptable. Again, when it comes down to it, Ingrid is a sensible girl.

The one thing she’s least able to cope with is boredom, and having to entertain herself. She’s always been very social and is never happier than when she’s playing with someone else. Then she can be as inventive and full of ideas as anyone could wish. But on her own, nothing is fun. When she has a choice between doing something on her own, or standing next to me and whinging “mummy can you read for me NOW” and “I have nothing to do” and “what shall we do”, she will choose the whining more often than not.

When we play, it’s mostly board and card games. I can’t even recall the last time we played shop or doctor or anything like that. When she plays with her friends, it’s often role play with dolls, and the girls themselves are mommies or big sisters. At nursery they also seem to play group games (vargen och kycklingarna, which in English is called “sheep, sheep, come home” I think, and bro bro breja). Ingrid has also brought home a counting rhyme from nursery (ole dole doff) which she uses in all sorts of situations, such as choosing a toothbrush in the evening, deciding which chair to sit on, etc.

The iPad remains a big favorite and is now even crowding out movies. Ingrid likes games where she cannot really fail: when she does fail some task in some game, she often decides she doesn’t want to play that game any more. Her favourite app is a dress-up game, and the next best one is a drawing app. Both often turn into social activities: we choose clothes together in the dress-up app, and take turns drawing or choosing colours in the drawing app.

Ingrid has figure out addition and can add small numbers. When both terms are no greater than 3 she knows the answer without thinking, and she can usually figure out the sum as long as it is under 10. Pairs of numbers are easiest: 3 and 3 makes 6, 4 and 4 makes 8. On a few occasions she’s done some subtraction, too (without knowing it herself). One day she was painting invitation cards for her birthday party. Eric and Ingrid had previously counted that they needed to make 6 cards. Halfway through she said, “Now we’ve done 3 cards, so we have to make… 3 more. Then it will be 4, 5, 6.”

At the same time she is close to figuring out writing. She used to focus on the dominant vowel in each word: she’d say that “raamat” (book) begins with an A and so on. Now she can say the word slowly for herself and pick out the first letter, and a few more as long as the word isn’t too long or tricky. She does even better if Eric or I pronounce the word for her, really slowly, focusing on each letter in turn. Interestingly, when she writes, she sometimes writes an L instead of an R because she pronounces them the same.

Writing seems to interest her more than reading. She isn’t interested in trying to spell out written words. But she does like emptying our mailbox and sorting the letters (E for Eric, H for Helen, I for Ingrid) – in part because she hopes that one of them will be for her. And the other day she recognized that ingen (as in signs saying “Ingen reklam tack”) starts the same way as Ingrid.

She also likes rhyming words. And with the help of the alphabet song (which they seem to sing at nursery) and a connect-the-dots app, she seems to have learned most of the alphabet.

Likes: The dance class. Slippers. Drawing princesses and hearts. Going to the library. Surprises and presents (real or play). Eating nuts.

We now have a name: our son is called Adrian Felix. He is now a week old (minus a few hours).

Not only did the birth go very smoothly, everything else is going unexpectedly smoothly as well. Adrian falls asleep easily, and actually likes to sleep lying down. Breastfeeding is going well, too. It’s all so easy.

With Ingrid I was lost, overwhelmed, and exhausted for several weeks. Now within the first week Eric and I already been to IKEA, I’ve taken Ingrid to her dance group, etc, with Adrian hanging along. Eric’s actually going back to work on Monday already, since I feel I’ve got things under control here.

For us, going from one child to two was a much smaller step than going from zero to one. I know it’s not the case for every family. Perhaps it’s because Ingrid is already quite a big girl, and more mature than the average child of her age? She’s been very tolerant of the disruption to her life, and quite understanding of my inability to, for example, read her good night story when Adrian demands to be fed. (The birth hasn’t just brought inconvenience to her: now that the belly is out of the way, there’s room for Ingrid to sit properly on my lap again, and I can actually lift and hold her again.) She’s also very proud of being a big sister, and shows off “her baby” to anyone who will listen.

It has been an unusually ordinary month. Or perhaps I have not been paying enough attention?

There has been a lot of talk about the baby, of course: about what s/he will be able to do (sleep and drink milk) and will not be able to do (walk, play), things that Ingrid is allowed to do but the baby won’t (help cook dinner, play with daddy’s iPad), things Ingrid will help the baby with (teach her songs), and so on. Ingrid is taking a long view of things and is already planning for how she will help carry the balance bike down the garden stairs when the baby is old enough to use it. I guess she finds it easiest to relate to her own age, so she imagines the baby in her place.

Eric’s iPad, by the way, has been a very appreciated toy. (I agree, I like it too.) It made its way into her life during a longer car trip we undertook, and has since then been almost a daily fixture. Eric has found a bunch of apps for her: finger painting, dress-up, jigsaw puzzles, simple connect-the-dots, memory (find the pairs) and so on. She can manage all of them on her own, because the interface is so simple. The touch screen is perfect for her – so much easier and more natural than using a mouse or a stylus – and the small size is also a big plus.

iPad use counts towards the one-hour screen time limit I try to keep to, so there hasn’t been much movie-watching this month. Not much reading, either, although I don’t think that’s because of the iPad. In fact I don’t know where all our time goes. She hardly plays with any toys, rarely touches her jigsaw puzzles, hasn’t drawn much… we’ve played some board games now and again but not much of that either.

Every week she spends one or two afternoons with friends, either here or at their place. A few afternoons are filled with errands, and since I don’t walk very fast nowadays we get home so late that it’s time to cook dinner. She usually helps me with that, or just potters around.

If she could, I think she’d have a friend over every single afternoon. She loves company. She also loves novelty: other kids’ toys are far more interesting than her own. And now she and her friends often play together on their own for long stretches of time, which means that I am more than happy to have her friends here, and I don’t feel like she’s too much of a burden for their parents either.

I don’t really know what she and her friends do together. “Mummy daddy baby” is one game that I’ve heard them play. Various sorts of dress-up, too: whenever I arrive to pick her up, she’s wearing fairy wings, flouncy skirts and such. There are also games with rules: “if you step on the gray ones then you die, if you step on the green ones then you win, and on the red ones nothing happens”. Death is a common part of such games. Stepping on certain stones in the street, touching a certain part of the rug, etc, all lead to death. Not very seriously, though: she’s not concerned at all when she does happen to step on them. There’s a general focus on the bad things in life – perhaps an effort to conquer them? When drawing with Majken she told me they were drawing “things that you can die of, and stinging nettles”.

She thinks a lot about her friends when they’re not together, too. She draws pictures, or takes home drawings from nursery, and tells me that this one is for Elin, or for Julia or Majken, and wants to take them with her when she next meets them. Since Julia lives in our street, just two houses further up, she sometimes walks to their house to put the drawing in their letterbox.

At first it was just the drawings; now it’s growing into a whole exchange of letters: the drawing is either folded and taped or put in an envelope, and then we have to write “FROM INGRID TO JULIA” on it (me spelling it out, her drawing the letters), and then she delivers it. Apparently Julia likes this too, because sometimes we find similar letters in our letterbox, which always makes Ingrid very happy. She checks the mail every day and inspects all the envelopes to see who they’re addressed to. (She can spell her own name all the way, and knows the first letters of mine and Erics. She’s viewed I as her letter for a long time; now all the letters in her name are “hers”. “R as in Ingrid!”)

During the first few “mail runs” I kept watch from the garden; now I just let her do it on her own. It’s a quiet street where cars are few and drivers are careful. Ingrid walks very carefully along the side of the street, looks to both sides when crossing, and shows a great sense of responsibility altogether – far more so than when we’re out walking together.

During weekends we’ve been to the circus (twice) and to the swimming pool (twice). Now that the school term has started, various organized activities are also starting up, including our Estonian playgroup. We’ve tried to find some more organized activities for her, since her hours at nursery will be shorter during our parental leave – now she’s there about 8 hours a day, but she’s only allowed 6 when one parent is staying at home. I looked for swimming lessons, but there weren’t any groups that took children under 5. Eric and Ingrid tried out “family judo” but she didn’t like that.

Today we tried out a dance group, since Ingrid has been talking a lot about dancing recently, and every nice dress is a “dance princess dress”, and her favourite thing by a mile is a pair of purple “dance slippers” with Hello Kitty. Really there was very little dancing involved and a lot running around with music, and some music-related games (Head, shoulders, knees and toes, Follow the leader, Freeze dance etc.) – just right for Ingrid, it seems.

Other minor points:

• We’re back to using nappies at night, full time. Every time we try to make it without, there’s a puddle in the bed.
• Ingrid has realized that some mushrooms actually taste good, and will not poke them to the side. I guess all our talk about tasting food before rejecting has not fallen on deaf ears. Still doesn’t eat onions or “leaves” (which covers everything from lettuce to spinach to herbs).
• Other things she likes: Cake dough. Picking flowers. Opening surprise parcels and packages. Pink clothes. Cuddly blankets.

Ingrid is good at keeping Swedish and Estonian apart. When she mixes, it’s mostly semi-intentional: if she doesn’t know the right word in one language, she may borrow from the other.

But then there are some cases where she’s picked one word and keeps using it in both languages, even though a word with the same sound exists in that language and means something completely different. She does it very thoroughly and uses the grammar of the “surrounding” language, which makes it sound even more surreal, and even harder to figure out unless the listener knows both languages.

Thus, we have doppa (to dip) in Swedish – often used at mealtimes because she likes dipping bread in soup, dipping pasta in ketchup, dipping carrots in milk etc. No matter how many times I refer to it as “sa kastad” in Estonian, she keeps saying “ma topin”, which means “I’m stuffing”.

Sticking/piercing (as in sticking a needle in something) is called torkama in Estonian. Ingrid keeps saying torka in Swedish sentences, too, but torka means to dry in Swedish. So when she wants to say “I want to stick the potatoes” (to see if they’re done) she says “I want to dry the potatoes”.

A mug is called kruus in Estonian, and Ingrid keeps calling mugs krus in Swedish, too – “pappa kan du ge mig den blommiga krusen”. But krus in Swedish means ripple, crimp, although there is also an older word meaning large jug. An arrow is called nool in Estonian, and Ingrid uses that in Swedish, too (“vi ska gå dit nålen pekar”), but nål means needle in Swedish.

This is sort of funny to hear, but it is also interesting to observe, because in most cases, when I think about it, the words may mean different things in the two languages today, but they probably share a common root and origin. Needle / arrow is an obvious pair, mug / jug likewise. The Estonian language has gotten a lot of words from its various Germanic neighbours and conquerors, and it’s interesting to see just how deep such loans go, how common and quintessentially Estonian the words now feel. (The homophony of pierce / dry, however, looks to me like a total coincidence.)

There is no doubt about it: the theme of this month is secrets and surprises. There is a lot of “don’t look now” and “no peeking”. Then she does something – sometimes for a minute, sometimes for ten. If it takes long, she will remind us to not look, about once a minute. And then finally she says “come look now”, or sometimes “dinnng” which also means that the surprise is done. Sometimes she comes to me with a surprise already prepared, hidden behind her back, and then proudly uncovers it.

The surprise can be anything. Quite often she shows off her ability to do things on her own: either taking care of herself (getting dressed in the morning, or undressing and getting into bed at night) or helping us (setting the table for dinner, or bringing out all the breakfast goods), or even playing on her own. Once the surprise was that she had assembled like seven or eight jigsaw puzzles on her own. Or she may go out and pick berries for us, or show me a picture she’s drawn.

But the surprise can also be something sneaky, such as bringing a garden trowel and sneaking it underneath my skirt, where she lays the cold trowel against my legs, and then squeals with laughter when I yelp. Or something totally quirky and unpredictable, such as taking 10 books and standing them all up on the living room table so they make a “house”.

Most good surprises bear repeating. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been subjected to the trowel surprise.

Repetition combined with surprise has also been a theme in several of our games and conversations. There was the wizard game, when she’d ask me again and again what I wanted to be turned into, and then the sneaky wizard always turn me into something else instead. I’d wish to become a crocodile and she turned me into a stone instead, then I’d ask to become a bird and she’d turn me into an ice cream, and so on for a long time.

Or we might talk about how some people have cars and others don’t, and then she would start making up other things for which this is true. First seriously (bicycles, and houses, and trees in the yard) and then as weird as she could make it (roofs, doors, noses etc).

There is a lot of talk about ages. “When I am 5 I will be able to go to swim school. When I am 6 I will go to school.” But also: “I cannot go to the playground on my own. (Me confirming: No.) But I can do it when I am 6. (Me: yes.) But when I am 7? When I am 10? When I am 8? When I am 4?” and so on about many many things. She is very aware that she is three and almost four, and often informs friendly-looking strangers of this important fact – people on the train, other kids’ mums, neighbours etc.

We also talk about babies, and what they can and cannot do – sometimes in general, sometimes specifically about our baby. They cannot sit up, walk, eat, talk, etc. The baby won’t be able to ride on her bike, or climb the stairs, or even play with any toys at first.

Ingrid often mentions her own upcoming birthday. We’ve been talking about it for a long time already. Early summer we spoke about how we will first go to Estonia, then I will have my birthday, then she will go back to nursery, then the baby will probably come, and only then in the autumn will it be her birthday. Now she is back at nursery, and various other signs of “autumn” are appearing (the library is open again, and the ice cream seller at the playground has packed up for the season), so she thinks her birthday should be close, but of course it is still two months away. What an eternity to wait.

She is now quite confident with the days of the week, so anything that is less than a week away can be easily explained. This is very convenient. Yesterday she counted Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-…-Sunday about 7 or 8 times in a row and asked, “will it be my birthday then?” and I said indeed it will. Today when we spoke about her birthday again, I told here it is many many days from now, and she said, “all the days I counted before!”.

The concepts of today, yesterday and tomorrow are, actually, harder than weekdays. She doesn’t seem to feel comfortable with the fact that “tomorrow” refers to different days. “Is it tomorrow today?” she asks. Now she mostly prefers to call them today, “the day that was” and “the next day”.

She’s also learned the basics of reading a clock. She knows to ignore the fast hand that moves all the time, and knows that the short hand is the important one. She knows that it is, for example, two o’clock when the short hand is on the number 2 and the long one is at the top. I don’t think she’s understood half hours yet – whenever the long hand is not at the top, we usually describe the time in relation to the full hour. “Getting close to two o’clock now, just past two o’clock, halfway between two and three” etc.

She’s comfortable with numbers up to 20, and can count to 29 without help. From there on at every x9 she gets stuck, but when prompted with the name of the next multiple of 10, she will keep going up to 100, as long as she doesn’t tire first. She often skips numbers like 44, 55 and 66 (as if one six should be enough already) and often forgets the sevens (37, 47 etc).

She may be able to count, but I get the impression that anything greater than 10 is still just an abstract concept for her. When there is A LOT of something she may say, “there could be twenty! or a hundred! or maybe ten!” as if all those big numbers are just about the same size.

On a few occasions she’s done some simple addition under ten: two plus two, three plus three, five plus two, and such. I think she knows two plus two by heart, but the rest she manages with the help of her fingers.

On a completely different topic, she’s come into contact with the concept of death repeatedly this month and the previous one. We’ve sometimes mentioned how people die, flowers wither, and food goes bad. We’ve encountered some roadkill, we’ve read fairy tales with stepmothers (where the mother has died), and she’s seen the frog king die in Shrek 3. “It’s like Snow White, but you never wake up.” She understands enough to know that everybody will die, and that it is not good. But there hasn’t been much more talk than that.

Other habits and skills worth mentioning:

We’ve done a lot of swimming and splashing around in the water, both this month and the last. Ingrid has long liked playing in water, but she has gained a lot of confidence this summer. She used to really dislike water on her face but can now put her whole face under water, or blow bubbles, or jump up and down so she gets water splashing over the top of her head. She can (either with my help, or with her armbands) float on her back. The greatest advances happened this weekend: she figured out how to actually move in water. With her armbands on she’d walk into quite deep water (up to her chest), lift her feet from the bottom, and then float and actually move in various directions using her arms and legs. She was actually swimming, albeit short distances and not very efficiently.

Ingrid now manages basic naviagation and playing movies on both Mac and PC, all the way from turning on the computer to turning it off again when done. Choosing the right profile, opening Explorer, choosing an mp3 file or opening the DVD in the media player, starting the movie using the shortcuts of the appropriate OS, switching to full screen mode, adjusting the volume, pausing, closing etc. The only thing she needs help with is knowing which media player to use (because we’ve got DVDs for various regions that won’t all play in the same one) and getting the DVD out of the case (and that’s mostly because we don’t want her to do it, after severe scratching of some DVDs).

She has acquired a habit of talking in a whiney voice, and various other distorted voices, when the mood strikes her. Both Eric and I find the whingy voice very annoying and say so, and we hope that it will pass soon. The other voices are not particularly annoying but can be almost impossible to understand, which doesn’t stop her from using them. She also likes to talk “like a baby”, meaning mostly “eeh” and “daah” and half words and lots of pointing. She is also still fond of the alliteration game, where the first sounds in all words are exchanged for a common one. “Klag klill kla kölk” for “Jag vill ha mjölk” and so on. Works reasonably well most of the time, except this morning I asked her, “who will pour the juice – you or me” / “mina või sina” and she wanted to answer using the alliteration game and got stuck… whatever letter she chose, “mina” ja “sina” were indistinguishable. So she switched to baby language and said “daah” and pointed at me.

She continues to be physically much more active than she used to be, say, half a year ago. Cycles to and from nursery, does not begin to immediately complain about walking, runs, skips and jumps. She is just learning to jump on one leg and can do about two hops in a row.

She goes to sleep in her own room and sleeps there until she first wakes, which can range from 2 o’clock to almost 7. Sometimes she wakes and shouts for me because she needs to go to the loo. We tried going without a night nappy for a while, when the nappy had been dry every single morning for a few weeks. But that quickly led to big puddles three nights running, so now the nappy is back. And the nappy is dry every morning again, so yesterday and today we tried without it again. Yesterday went well; we’ll see about tonight.

Quote: “Pink, pink, other colour, pink, pink, other colour, pink…”

This month saw the arrival of the era of Pink and Princesses.

Ingrid has never cared much for pink – whenever she mentioned a favourite colour, it was always green, and when she chose clothes she mostly went for green or red or brown. Now she says that pink is the prettiest colour and purple is pretty, too. Peer pressure begins its work.

And princesses. She’s loved fairy tales for a while, with all their magical ingredients: kings and queens, princes and princesses, dragons and magicians. Now it’s all princesses. She wants princess colouring books and princess stories, and so on.

I would be gagging already but luckily there is a Swedish series of children’s books about unconventional princesses. The first book is titled Så gör prinsessor or Princesses do that, and talks about a princess who, admittedly, begins her day by choosing a dress and a crown and brushing her hair 1000 times, but then goes on to scare away robbers, tame a dragon and rescue a prince. (Have a look at Prinsessor.nu for more.)

Here in Estonia she also found a princess book that she wanted to buy and I most happily agreed: it was full of Disney princesses teaching about manners. Snow White teaches table manners to the seven dwarves, Ariel learns about apologizing, Cinderella’s mouse friends talk about being friendly and nice. Quite a good idea. (Amazon US, Amazon UK, Apollo.ee)

I think the summer break might let the pink princess wave abate somewhat. There hasn’t been much talk about pink at all during the past 10 days or so. We’ll see what happens when she’s back at nursery.

Other things Ingrid has learned from the kids at nursery: (if you don’t do x) “then you can’t come to my party”. Social blackmail already.

Also possibly from nursery, or possibly an independent invention: roars of opposition. When she wants to be very clear about not agreeing to whatever it is, she turns to face me directly and lets out a deep chesty roar/growl. No tantrum, no yelling, just a roar.

At nursery she’d almost always greet me in the afternoon with “Emme can Majken come home to us?” or “Emme can I go home with Julia?” (often followed by “Emme you will not come with me”). Even 8 hours at nursery surrounded by people is not enough for her. Totally my opposite.

Now during the summer break she misses her friends from nursery. Luckily she has a good friend here in Estonia too, just a few months older than her. It took them a little while to “find” their relationship again, after a year’s absence, and of course we will be going home soon… but they’re having fun in the meantime.

When I look for a thread/pattern in her interactions with her friends, I see a focus on identity and comparisons. Several times they have swapped names – “Emme, now I am Julia and she is Ingrid”. Once she’d swapped clothes with a friend, which was quite funny – my brain had real trouble with resolving the situation. Majken in Ingrid’s clothes looked weirdly wrong, and I couldn’t find Ingrid among the crowd of 10 other fair-haired kids, because my eyes would always glide back to the familiar clothes.

Often it’s about being/doing/having just the same as the other girl. The other kid wants a banana? Ingrid must have a banana, too. The other kid decides to draw with a green pen? Ingrid also wants a green pen. The other kid finds a snail on the path? Ingrid wants to find a snail.

Sometimes it’s all about being first. “No I want to be the first to the door! No I want my milk first!” I find myself halving plums, and turning away from them while pouring milk in two glasses so they can’t see who got their milk first.

An interesting behaviour I’ve noticed is covering her ears and telling us “you mustn’t say that”. Sometimes it’s when I repeat an unpleasant truth, or remind her of something she must or must not do, but it can also happen when I comment on something she’s done well (washed her hands after going to the loo, etc). Is it because she doesn’t want to think about the unpleasantness more than absolutely necessary? Or does she want it to feel like she did it all on her own, not because we nagged her about it?

Ingrid still draws a lot. When she draws on her own, it’s mostly people. They are now much more detailed: there is hair, fingers and toes, sometimes fingernails, boobs and navels, ears, necks etc. When she draws me, she will often also draw a baby in my belly, like in the picture above. Not all of the body parts are always present, but I don’t think I’ve seen her draw a single tadpole this month. From blobs to mum-with-fingernails-and-baby in under two months.

Often she draws together with me or Eric. (Anything you can do on your own, Ingrid will want to do together with someone.) Sometimes it’s complementary drawing, but more often it’s parallel drawing. Complementary: Eric draws a train, Ingrid draws a passenger. Parallel: I draw a bus, Ingrid draws a bus; I draw a car, Ingrid draws a car. Quite often she will proceed to cut out the thing she has drawn.

Colouring books are not of much interest, but the princess series (see above) has a painting book that she likes. Each page has half a picture or a scene, that the kids then complete – a dinner table with no guests, or the princess’s half-empty wardrobe, or half the head of a dragon. This is not only fun for Ingrid but a great help for me, when my head is too tired to come up with ideas.

Ingrid got her own room this month, with a bed of her own, and an alphabet rug that she has longed for. She bravely said she would sleep in her own bed, but until now she’s ended up with us every night, some time in the early morning hours. Since she mostly manages to do it quietly and without disturbing us much, and there is more than enough space, I’m not bothered.

Otherwise the trend towards slowly increasing independence continues. (She gets more practice now that my pregnancy makes me tired.) She’s a lot more willing to do things with other adults, without me being present: with Eric of course, but also other kids’ mums, and her grandmother and step-grandmother, etc. Last year when we were in Estonia I hardly had a free moment; now I could nap for an hour after an exhausting morning, while she was out picking berries and playing with her step-grandmother. She’s also more accepting of my need to get things done, and negotiates around them: “first you cook a little dinner, then you read a little, then you cook some more, then you read again”.

In other news this month, I discovered brown spots on her teeth and we went to see the dentist. I was fearing the worst but there were no cavities, luckily, just weak tooth enamel. I guess she’s inherited my poor teeth. So now we’re even more diligent with brushing her teeth, and more restrictive about snacks between mealtimes. I used to let her snack on fruit pretty much as she wanted, except just before a meal. Not any more.

Favourite movies: old Disney shorts, which she could watch forever, and Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter (like a Swedish Sesame Street). She likes to watch the same few episodes over and over again: A and 7, P and X and 6.

New and improved skills: buckling her bicycle helmet. Knowing the names of all weekdays, in the right order, in Swedish but not yet in Estonian. Cutting veggies without any help (but with close oversight) – hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, string beans and rhubarb stalks have been great practice material. Catching a large ball, and throwing it back to me. Almost manages to make a swing go: she can make it happen for a short while but then loses the rhythm.

Favourite foodstuffs: raspberries, ice cream, blueberries (but the garden kind, not the wild ones). Anything with ketchup.

The general tone of this month has been positive. The endless stream of NOs has abated, and she no longer feels that she has to decide everything. Eric described it like this: a few months ago she discovered the concept of deciding, and now she’s understood how it really works. She understands that in some cases adults will decide, and children can decide over some things but not everything. It’s made our everyday life a lot smoother.

There has been a lot of drawing and writing going on this month. Almost every day she has a few drawings to take home from nursery. Her drawings are very much based on schemas and symbols. She copies things that she sees the other kids draw. She tells me, “look, this is how you draw a hand”. She asks me, “how do you draw a tree”? (My first attempt at a simple tree was too complicated, with roots and branches. “I can’t draw that,” she said, so I simplified it to a green ball on a brown stick. Plus red blobs for cherries. That was accepted.) When the first attempt at copying is not close enough, she aborts and tries again.

She likes drawing the same things again and again: mostly people, but also cars, houses – and traffic lights. Often she draws them the same way, too, with just the most essential parts, but sometimes she adds details. The people sometimes get fingers, or hair, or bags, or glasses (in which case they are daddy), or eyelashes. I don’t think they ever have bodies, though – the arms and legs are attached directly to the head.

The drawings are often accompanied by writing. And whenever I write something (a note, a shopping list), she wants to join me. She asks me, “How do you write ’rubber boots’? flower? leek? milk? eggs? traffic lights?”

The letters are more and more letter-shaped, and almost always in a row. However the row can go either left or right or snake around in any other direction. Occasionally, they’re of reasonably equal size, but that seems to be a matter of chance.

Most recently she’s discovered the concept of the alphabet. She’s been singing snatches of the alphabet song (from nursery I guess), and found it at the back of an ABC book we’ve read.

Not all the stuff that she learns from the older kids at nursery is equally useful. She’s learned to whine: please, please! She’s learned to talk with a silly babyish lisp. She’s learned to mock others, ranging from the superior “ha ha!” to such mature terms as bajskorv, fisbajs, fegis and dumma dumma bajskorv (delivered to the tune of “na na na na naah na”). In english that would be “poop turd”, “fart poop”, “coward” and “stupid stupid poop turd”.

Pott, kann, pirn, kork, porrulauk

We’ve spoken a bit about not saying such things to others because it tends to make them upset. At some point I happened to tell her that it was OK to say “ha ha” to me, that I didn’t mind. She then generalized that to all the mocking, and I now get called “poop turd”. She says it with such joyful innocence that I really can’t get upset and have to laugh instead.

She remains an intensely social creature, and she is totally unwilling to do anything on her own. It’s not that she needs someone to entertain her – she just wants company. That someone no longer has to be me. But whatever she is doing, she wants to talk about it, share it, do it together. When she is with a friend, she is good at taking initiative to come up with activities: “Come, Majken, let’s paint! Majken, do you want to take a bath with me?” and they can entertain each other for a long time. But on her own, she’s lost.

As a result, she is quite good at social relationships and social language: taking turns, sharing, finding activities that both enjoy, resolving disagreements.

Last month it was very important for Ingrid to “win” at everything, i.e. be the first. First up the stairs when coming home, first to wash and dry her hands after going to the loo, first everything. That’s still there but less markedly.

The cycling and swinging continue. And it seems the cycling has generally made her more active. Some days she’s even run all the way to nursery. Even on the days when she wants to take the stroller to nursery, she’s likely to walk and run on the way home. (The latest game: running ahead of me and stopping, arms and legs wide apart, to make a “gate” to block my way. Initially the gates could be opened by a button on her nose. Then some required a coin, or a key. For some, just saying “please, gate, could you open” worked. Lately some gates were broken and had to be climbed over or around.)

Favourite books: the 1-2-3 series, and fairy tales.

Favourite item of clothing: her new brown Scooby Doo Crocs. Otherwise her taste in clothing is weird, tending towards a lot of layering. Shorts over trousers, tank top over dress, dress over skirt… you name it.