Nothing new to say, since I haven’t done anything much in the last few days because Ingrid’s been ill. Runny nose, cough, fever (peaking at over 40°C on Tuesday) and feeling generally tired and miserable. Every few minutes she tells me “jälle nohu!” and wants me to wipe her nose. Today she was so tired that she even let me wear her in a baby carrier for over two hours, for the first time in half a year.

I don’t think we’ve done anything majorly new or interesting this month. Just the same old stuff. So this month I’ll focus a bit more on life’s basic parts – the kinds of things that I haven’t written much about for a while, and won’t be able to remember when I look back at this time 5 years from now.

Slouching in front of Teletubbies

Eating. Ingrid eats surprisingly well and with surprising skill. I’m pleased to say that she eats almost all kinds of food: starchy stuff, dairy and eggs, pulses and vegetables, and since I’ve heard no comments from nursery, probably meat too. She is fond of sweet stuff of course: she picks the raisins out of her buns, loves to drink juice with her breakfast, and wants a lot of jam on her pancakes. She licks the butter of the bread, and eats sour cream with a spoon.

Food tastes especially good when we’re preparing it. She’d much rather eat the ingredients while I’m cooking than the finished meal. Canned beans in particular – often she eats so much from the jar that she’s full by the time I’m done cooking.

I think she’s also started to pay attention to the shape of food. She sees shapes in her half-eaten pieces of bread, likes to eat “butterfly pasta” (farfalle), and prefers heart-shaped gingerbread cookies to round ones. Just a matter of time until she starts building porridge mountains and milk lakes.

The amount she eats varies a lot. Sometimes I wonder how she can possibly subsist on the tiny amounts she eats. But just now she’s come out of a major eating phase when she ate twice her normal portions, with no more than 3 hours between meals. Nevertheless she is much slimmer now than ever before (except as newborn). Not a skinny girl by any means, but not the little sumo wrestler she used to be.

Sleeping. Back in June it looked like she might be giving up naps but that reversed and she now naps every day again. Sometimes she objects, but when I go to the bedroom she’d rather join me than play on her own. Once we’re there she’s happy to lie down with me, and soon after that she falls asleep. The evening bedtime routine takes longer. I tell her a story and then give her a cuddle, and then wait about 15 minutes for her to actually fall asleep. Not too bad, all things considered: it takes a while but there’s no struggle.

Once she’s gone to sleep she sleeps well and soundly. Occasionally she kicks off her covers and I need to pull them over her again. Around 5:30 or 6:00 she shifts into lighter sleep, and any movement in the room will wake her. She sort of goes back to sleep when I lay a hand on her, but neither of us gets much proper sleep after that. I imagine she would sleep longer in the morning if she slept in a room of her own, but there’s no such room to be had right now.

Potty. Ingrid’s nappy-free most of her awake time now, but still wears a nappy for naps, and when we’re out on town and cannot always get to a potty fast (e.g. on the train). Sometimes she tells me she needs to go potty, and sometimes I ask her and she says yes. The occasional accidents happen when I suspect she needs to go, but she says no for some reason – probably because she has more interesting stuff to do. And she almost always ends up pooping in her panties. I know she knows when it’s about to happen, but for some reason she doesn’t want to do it on the potty.

Helping me pin a curtain hem

Skills. She picks her own clothes every morning and generally puts them on herself. She now likes dresses and skirts – but unfortunately only has one of each. She used to have no interest in clothes and would wear whatever I dressed her in, and I haven’t quite caught up with this new interest in clothes. (I tried to find more skirts but couldn’t find anything in the shops that looked good and seemed comfortable.)

She knows how the microwave oven works and how we cook food. She hands me stuff while I’m cooking, measures and pours water for me (with quite a lot of guidance from me). Her favourite task, apart from eating the ingredients, is to put veggies in the saucepan for cooking. She knows that the stove and the saucepan are hot, and that the water must be boiling (must have “big bubbles”) before we put the food in. And then we wait until the knob on the timer reaches the little O and makes “rrring”, and then the food is done.

Language. Swedish is definitely gaining the upper hand. Whenever Ingrid talks to herself, it’s almost always in Swedish. I still always speak Estonian to her, and she mostly responds in Estonian, too, although Swedish words sneak in quite often. A losing battle.

She can mostly keep apart the words, but grammar is harder. She often mixes the two: “en hobune” – one (Swedish) horse (Estonian), and “juurde emme saapad” – next to mummy’s boots, Estonian words but Swedish word order, and even “på laua peal” – on (Swedish) table on (Estonian).

I think she’s close to figuring out pronouns now. She talks of herself in 2nd person (du springer – you are running, sa tahad juua – you want to drink) because that’s what she hears from the adults around her. Sometimes even in 3rd person – I guess she hears how the nursery teachers talk about other children. But I get the feeling that she knows it’s not quite right, and I’ve started to say things like “Ingrid says ’I am hungry’” rather than saying “you are hungry” to make the distinction clear.

She understands simple questions (what, who, where) but she doesn’t ask any herself. She can ask “Kus on Ingrid?” (where is Ingrid?) when she wants me to play hide and seek with her, but she’s repeating a phrase she’s heard me use, rather than asking the question herself. Likewise she can say “Mis see on?” when she wants me to guess what sort of shape she sees in her biscuit, but when she really wants to know the name of some thing, she says “Den!” (“that!”) in a demanding voice instead.

Recently I’ve started asking her what she did at nursery and sometimes I actually got coherent answers from her. She’s told me that they’ve sung Happy Birthday for Elin, another girl at nursery, and that they’ve played, and that she didn’t like Ahmed because he hurt her. Quite often the most important thing for her is to tell me who was there and who wasn’t.

We still read and sing quite a lot, even though an hour of each evening is consumed by Teletubbies. We go to an Estonian playgroup every other week, and spend about 40 minutes singing, and they spend some time singing every morning at nursery too. She may sit and stare mutely while she’s there, but she often sings the songs later at home. Now her singing clearly has a melody, and she can sing several simpler songs from beginning to end. Some that she hasn’t heard for a while get abbreviated to the most important parts: “Lilla bocken Bruse… Alla bockar Bruse… i skogen!”

Last month I mentioned puzzles, and Triin told me that her son, who’s a few months older than Ingrid, can manage a real jigsaw puzzle with help. Eric got a 16-piece wooden jigsaw (with farm animals) for Ingrid, and we both guessed that it would probably be suitable in a few months time. It turns out that we severely underestimated both her interest and ability. She’s played with it every single day I think, often putting it together several times in a row. Initially she needed a lot of guidance but now she can do it all on her own. It’s got a frame to guide her, which helps a lot, but mostly she does it by memory. “Horse piece… here. Sheep. Cow piece… here.”

Following the leader

She’s actually played with both the jigsaw and her Duplo set all on her own a few times, but generally she still spends very little time on her own. She remembers and likes to re-play the same games with me. When we build with Duplo, we don’t just build: we build a “snake” or a “wall” or a “house for Bu and Bä” (two of her soft toys). And whenever we build a house for Bu and Bä, it’s always for those two toys and no others.

We’ve played hide-and-seek, which means that she crawls in under the table and tells me “Where is Ingrid?” and I’m then supposed to go looking for her while loudly commenting – “Is Ingrid in the oven? No! Is Ingrid on the step stool? No!”. Sometimes we play follow-the-leader where we both lie on the floor and kick, or stretch one leg towards the ceiling, or “cycle” with our legs, etc. She also likes running, jumping up and down, twirling until she’s so dizzy she cannot stand straight, and tumbling around on the floor with me. She’s not a climber though: I never find her climbing on the sofa or even the low table.

Half a year ago Ingrid preferred walking to riding in the pushchair. I remember reading some sort of brochure to parents and laughing out loud at their advice: “Let your child walk sometimes instead of always sitting in the pushchair”. Ingrid was rushing around like a madman all the time and wouldn’t sit still.

Then the running habit disappeared and suddenly she hardly ever wanted to walk. Always the pushchair. And then she even started watching TV – a true couch potato!

Now all of a sudden she’s in a walking mood again. Several days this week we’ve walked home from nursery, and today we walked all the way from the nursery to the supermarket. Which is great, and I like that she’s walking… except that it takes absolutely forever.

The nursery-to-supermarket walk takes me no longer than 5 minutes, and would maybe take 10 with her short legs. If walking actually meant walking forward in a straight line, that is. Today it had been raining and there were puddles everywhere, and Ingrid could not pass a puddle without jumping in it. The first, really large one, stopped her for several minutes, and she could have stayed there much longer if I hadn’t suggested that we go see if we can find some more puddles, some new and even better ones. From then on we walked from puddle to puddle. At each one she would stop, carefully position herself at just the right distance, and then jump with both feet. If it was a really good puddle then she jumped some more.

I was so pleased that she was walking that I didn’t want to force her into the pushchair, so I let her jump. Besides, I expected her to actually tire of the puddles after a while. She didn’t, of course, so the 10-minute walk took us well over 20 minutes. I was actually relieved she wanted to sit in the pushchair on the way back…

We had our work Christmas dinner yesterday, at a nice old manor house, with everyone’s partners and everything. It was interesting (but not exactly surprising) to see that the colleagues who I enjoy talking to, also had partners I enjoyed talking to, and the colleagues I’d never felt a connection with had partners I couldn’t connect to either.

I think we (Eric and I) managed to prove to everyone that we are incurably odd, since we decided to walk home from the party, even though it’s about a half-hour walk and it was raining a bit. But after 3 hours of sitting and stuffing ourselves we really felt a need for some fresh air and exercise. The Swedish smorgasbord-style Christmas dinners almost seem to be designed to make everyone eat too much.

Ingrid was at home watching Teletubbies with my mum. Her last time with a babysitter was almost a year ago, and we were a bit unsure about how it would go. In the end it went as smoothly as anyone could wish. She didn’t even ask for us, not even when it was time to go to bed. I warned her in advance that grandma would come for a visit and mummy would go out and Ingrid would stay at home. The first time, a few days before, she didn’t like the idea much at all: big teary eyes and trembling lower lip. The second time, the day before, she looked a bit cross and said she wanted to come with me. The closer we got, the less she cared, and by the time I was about to leave she didn’t even care enough to come to the window to wave me good-bye. So to all those who claim that children need to be left early on with babysitters in order to train them, and that all this co-sleeping and babywearing and liberal cuddling will cause trouble later, I just say “hah!”.

I was writing a longer post for today but it’s taking even longer than I thought, and I am trying to not sit in front of the computer too late in the evening because otherwise it will take me a long time to fall asleep afterwards, so I’ll just post a photo instead and continue working on the long post tomorrow.

In just a few weeks, with very little effort from our side, Ingrid’s effectively become nappy-free. I won’t call it potty-trained, because there hasn’t been any training.

And less than a month ago I’d resigned myself to the fact that we’ll probably be using nappies a while longer, and bought more nappies because she’d outgrown the old ones… All these pretty nappies and no one to use them! Ah well, hopefully we can use them for the next child.

Ingrid had been sitting on the potty at home a few times every day, but it was hit and miss, with more misses than hits, and our attempts at letting her run around without a nappy couldn’t be classed as anything other than failures. But we kept the habit going.

When she started going to nursery, three months ago, we told the staff that she sits on the potty sometimes, and they kept up the habit there as well. It turned out that there’s a little toilet at the nursery, child-size, which Ingrid liked even better than the potty.

The little toilet was so much fun that Ingrid’s first successes came at nursery rather than at home. The teachers would ask her if she needed to go to the toilet, and she’d say yes and actually do it. So they started skipping nappies and using panties all day except during nap time. We did the same at home, but still had accidents almost every evening. (They generally happened when she was watching TV – too absorbed by Teletubbies to pay attention to her body.)

This week, though, it seems she’s really mastered it. She’s been nappy-free and puddle-free several days at nursery and the entire weekend. (Bowel movements sometimes still happen in the wrong place.) I was most impressed yesterday when we were sitting in a car on the motorway and she said she wanted the potty. We asked her to wait, drove half a mile to the nearest stop, stopped, and got out the potty – and she waited all that time!

1.
Spånga is colder than central Stockholm. Most days the difference is a couple of degrees Celsius. For a good while I thought I was imagining it, or that it might be because I am in Spånga during morning and evening, while I’m in the city during the day, when it’s obviously warmer. But then we had about a week of near-freezing weather and I realised that it really is colder here. Every morning I’d go from the snow and ice in the streets of Spånga to the wet streets of Stockholm city. Here the ice never melted, even during the day, while in Stockholm it never froze, even during the night.

2.
Our house is badly insulated and generally kind of cold. I now understand why the previous owners put in three indoor thermometers, and that’s just on the ground floor. But what I don’t understand is why the thermometers seem unreliable. The one in the living room almost always says something like 17.7°C or 18.1°C. But sometimes that’s so cold that my fingers are stiff and it’s hard to type, and then the day after it feels quite OK. It’s not just me – Eric feels the same.

3.
Ingrid, on the other hand, is almost never cold. I am wearing a t-shirt, a fleece sweater, trousers or long fleece skirt, and woollen socks. Ingrid walks around in panties and socks. When we go out and I offer her clothes, telling her that it’s cold outside, she generally refuses most of the clothes and tells me “want be cold” (“tahad külm oleks”). It’s not uncommon for her to wear nothing but her indoor clothes plus a pair of boots, when we come home from nursery. On the other hand, when I tell her that it’s wet outside, she accepts that as a valid argument, and will put on her waterproof trousers or rubber boots. For a while I was losing hope that she would ever put on her snowsuit, and she probably wouldn’t have done it for the sake of the temperature only. But now she has found out that snow on bare hands is not pleasant, so when there’s snow outside she actually accepts snowsuit and mittens.

4.
A sledge is essential winter gear. I had thought of sledges as toys but they are also an important mode of transportation. We hadn’t realised that, and had to buy one really quickly when the snow came, because taking Ingrid to nursery in her pushchair through mushy snow was hard work.

5.
Speaking of essential winter gear, Smartwool makes the best woollen socks. They have sporty models and dressy ones, simple gray ones and colourful striped ones, high ones and low ones. (I like these best.) Nice-looking, comfortable, neither itchy nor scratchy, really durable, and can be machine washed on a normal program with the rest of our clothes.

It started snowing yesterday evening and continued, off and on, until late morning. By the end of it we had about 10 centimetres of snow.

Snow in winter is no big deal, of course – in Stockholm, that is. But after 7 snowless years in London, Eric and I were both all gosh and wow over this. Fresh new snow is very pretty, after all, especially in a garden.

Ingrid had never seen snow before, other than in books. First we looked at it through the window. Then she wanted to go out, but refused clothes. Poked the snow outside our front door with a finger, then stepped on it with her bare feet. Changed her mind 10 seconds later and came in crying. After that she accepted one layer of clothes, plus boots, and enjoyed the snow a lot.

Every month when I sit down to write this monthly update, I think about how fast Ingrid is growing up. The big obvious milestones like walking and talking are well behind her now. But when you look closely enough, she’s still changing and learning all the time. In a way the changes now are more interesting, because they’re more subtle and more complex.

Speaking of walking and talking, she has just learned to jump with two feet and is very proud of it. Her jumps are tiny, with both feet just barely leaving the floor, but she enjoys it a lot and will happily demonstrate this skill for us many times.

On the language front she is now grappling with grammar. She understands singular/plural (koer vs. koerad) and genitive (pappas tallrik) as well as some basic verb forms (springa vs. springer). More recently I’ve noticed that she is starting to use the definite forms of Swedish words (hämta boken) and to figure out some Estonian verb forms (oota / ootama / ootan). That last one is going to be a hard one; Estonian grammar is not for the faint-hearted.

Her love of letters (which I mentioned two months ago has cooled somewhat, but now and again she still likes me to point out letters for her. Somehow she’s also learned to count to 10. It’s not something we’ve practiced specifically, but I do count to 20 while brushing her teeth to get her to sit still long enough. (I count very fast when she’s really tired and cranky, and really slowly when she’s preoccupied and happy to let me brush. Time is relative.)

Last month’s emotional turbulence has settled and life is calmer here again. Or perhaps we’ve just become more adept at managing it? It seems to me, anyway, that it’s not as important any more for Ingrid to control every small aspect of her life, and she doesn’t react as strongly when things don’t go her way. We have found a workable balance again between our wants and needs.

My life also became a fair bit smoother when she discovered the wonders of Teletubbies. Now she spends about an hour watching Teletubbies every evening. When she’s tired she wants me to sit there with her (so I read a book or a magazine) but quite often she’s happy to watch it on her own for a while, which leaves me time to prepare dinner (for example). Very convenient.

I was somewhat less happy when she discovered the joys of candy. Of course all candy is near the checkouts in the supermarket, at eye level for a toddler. I made the mistake of letting her buy candy a few times, and then she came to expect it every time. When I realised where this was heading and started setting limits (no, it is not OK to eat a pack of sweets every day before dinner) she was quite upset. Luckily she’s more interested in buying the candy than eating it, so my current solution is to let her buy some occasionally, but then only let her eat a small part of what she bought, so that next time we’re at the supermarket I can tell her that she cannot buy any more because we still have candy at home. Or even better, I do the grocery shopping on my own – this way she doesn’t even think about candy, and rarely asks for it at home.

Ingrid watching TV, with cow and sticky plaster

Luckily Ingrid has found several other new interests, too. Singing is one of them, and she likes it almost as much as reading books. She brings me a songbook and asks me to sing for her, one song after the other. She also knows a lot of them by heart and sings them herself. (Well, not quite sings, but she speaks the lyrics with a special tone of voice, and sometimes there’s a bit of melody and a rhythm.) Any mention of a star or sight of a star (quite frequent this time of the year, with Christmas decorations popping up everywhere) is likely to set her off singing “Twinkle twinkle little star”. And many times she just picks a random song and starts singing it. Of course with many of the songs she has no chance of understanding the lyrics (“fjärran lockar du min syn / likt en diamant i skyn”… no chance!) but she still generally manages to pronounce something that we recognise.

Drawing and painting is another favourite – but painting with a brush, rather than with her fingers, which toddlers generally begin with. She had tried finger painting a few times at nursery, but not liked it much, so I wasn’t in a hurry to try it at home. But when she got to try painting with a brush (at the Estonian playgroup we go to) she really enjoyed it. So now we occasionally do that at home, too. She generally doesn’t like to get “stuff” on her hands, whether it’s sand or mud or paint, and tries to wipe it off straight away. When she finger paints, she does it carefully with the tip of one finger. When she draws with a pen or a brush she seems to feel a lot freer, and the result is far more vigourous.

Even some toys are interesting now: all kinds of puzzles. We’ve got a whole bunch, ranging from stuff that we thought she had outgrown (a knob puzzle with five large wooden geometrical shapes of different colours) through just-hard-enough (a set of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of 3 pieces each, with pictures from Disney’s The Jungle Book) to some that she definitely needs help with (a nine-piece cube puzzle).

Ingrid’s approach to knob puzzles is clearly based on memory: she’s got one with four blob-shaped pieces with animal pictures, and she puts each one in the right slot without having to think about it. With the geometrical one, she knows where the pieces fit, but she tries other approaches, too, discovering that while the rectangle will fit into the square slot, the square then won’t fit; and that the circular piece can be rotated in place but the others cannot.

She solves the jigsaws in two phases. First she finds the three pieces of the elephant (for example) because she knows what the picture is supposed to look like. Then she fits them together, based on shape (knob vs hole) and picture. The pictures make it easy, because they’re generally cut in three (head, body, feet) and she knows that the head should be above the body and the feet below.

But with cube puzzles, where there are no knobs to guide her, she always needs help. She can find the cow pieces on all cubes, and lay out the cubes with the cow side up, but she hasn’t figured out how to match adjacent cubes. Sometimes she lays them in a row, sometimes in a square (if she has the box to guide her) but she puts them in random places and with random orientation. I try to tell her that she needs to turn them to make them fit together, or switch them around, but she doesn’t understand how it all works.

Ingrid’s latest favourite “toy” is a sticky plaster. Has to be the little pink one, the larger blue ones won’t do. She doesn’t want to put it on, and she doesn’t seem to do much with it, just hold it and carry it around. She takes it with her to nursery in the morning (and then loses it during the day and must get a new one when we get home). Yesterday she took one with her to bed, too. And I wasn’t allowed to put it on the bedside table – it must be on her pillow. The first thing she said when she woke up in the morning was “plåster!” and wouldn’t rest until we’d found it, under the blanket somewhere.