Ready for Ingrid’s eighteenth birthday festive brunch. Ingrid did all the creative work yesterday – baking and decorating the cake, making the panna cotta, preparing the filling for the devilled eggs. All that was left for this morning was plating and such, plus some slicing of veggie sticks and cheeses.

Devilled eggs is one of her favourite party foods, and now she wants to introduce her friends to the concept. Several of them are generally sceptical about new foods, but the bacon on top of these should convince them.

Fresh fruit, to go with yoghurt and granola, for those who want a lighter meal.

Crostini with burrata, a lemon and olive oil drizzle, and raspberries.

Panna cotta with raspberry jam and a mint sprig.

And now everything is ready for the guests, and it’s time for the parents to make themselves scarce. Ingrid herself was perfectly fine with having us here for the duration, but we all agreed that her friends wouldn’t feel as comfortable with us in the house.

We had Ingrid’s actual eighteenth birthday, and the party for the extended family. Now it’s time for her party with her friends. This one will be a festive brunch, tomorrow.

This is not the first fancy meal that Ingrid invites her friends to, but it will be on a different level. She has been collecting ideas, and then tableware and decorations, for months. The theme for the decorations is sort of romantic in pink and light green, with flower-patterned vintage plates and champagne flutes and candlesticks and slender, elegant vases.

Yesterday, after she finalized the menu, we went shopping for groceries and flowers. Then we cleared most other furniture out of the living/dining room, so that Ingrid could decorate the room and set the table. Ingrid has no school on Fridays this year, so she planned for a full day of baking and food prep today.

I hope her friends have the sense to appreciate the effort that’s going into this!

Ingrid’s workload at school is very intense. There is a never-ending stream of test after test after test, often two or three per week. She spends several hours studying every night – and the moment she can put one test behind her, it’s time to start cramming for the next one. It’s much more stressful than adult working life – I can spend most of my days producing actual work, instead of constantly focusing on proving my value.

Even subjects like psychology and philosophy have been turned into cramming subjects. Back in my day, I took philosophy as an elective course in high school, and I remember spending most of our time in debates and discussions. Things like the trolley problem, or “a hospital is on fire and none of the patients can get out on their own, whom do you rescue first?” and so on. Whereas Ingrid, instead of discussing existentialism, gets to cram and regurgitate facts about it. How to kill all students’ interest in a fundamentally fascinating subject in three easy steps. It’s like anti-philosophy, actually.

Ingrid turns eighteen today.

She is technically an adult now. She can vote now, get married, take any job, get a driver’s license, order alcohol at a bar, and more. When that felt overwhelming, I reminded her that she is still only just one day older than yesterday. She’s allowed to be a teenager still.

The party preparations started several days ago, with three cakes baked over three days. We had an apple-pie cheesecake (Ingrid), a banana and chocolate cake (Adrian) and an almond cherry pie (Eric).

Today Ingrid decorated the house with golden balloons and serpentines.

Then there were guests – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – and presents.

The cakes and cheeses and snacks were eaten with much joy and appreciation.

There had been some concern that three cakes might be excessive, but it really wasn’t.

With no one to take pictures of me, here are two quick selfies to prove that I was also there.

Afterwards, we were tired.

Ingrid has grown barely a few millimetres since last year. Got past me; job done. She didn’t even grow enough to make room to draw a new line for her this year.

We visited my sister-in-law at her cottage. Ingrid drove us all the way there, over 100 km through very varied conditions: city traffic, large roundabouts, long stretches of busy motorway, and then ever smaller country lanes. Along the way she got to practise all kinds of skills, from cruise control, to overtaking lorries, to making space for vehicles on on-ramps.

For all practical purposes, she can drive. Under supervision, for now, because she sometimes forgets some details. But when she took a driving lesson earlier this week to get a gauge on her skills, she came home dejected and stressed out – the teacher made her feel like she knew nothing. They are incredibly nit-picky about things such as the timing of gear changes, how aggressively to accelerate when taking off after a traffic light, etc. If I had to take a driving test today, I would certainly fail.

Ingrid continues to learn to drive. (Have I posted about that? I think so.) Just plain driving on relatively quiet streets is not much of a challenge any more, so we have started spicing things up. Larger roads (with 60 km/h speed limits), driving late in the day when it’s getting dark (although this just happens because that’s when we have time), roads with lots of roundabouts and traffic lights. And today: parking in tight spots. Nine o’clock at night the parking lot at Coop Vinsta was rather empty, but we managed to find a place where we could pretend that there were cars everywhere and we just had to squeeze into the last free spot.

Ingrid arranged a dinner party for a group of her friends. That’s the kind of stage she’s reached in her life: three-course dinner parties, with tablecloths and candles and home-made pizzas.

Her friends’ palates are not as sophisticated as hers, and they’re all meat-eaters, so adjustments are necessary. I don’t begrudge them their pepperoni pizza. But I’m glad that there was enough tiramisu that there were plenty of leftovers for us as well.

Preparing and cooking a three-course meal for six people, including also shopping and decorations, is a full-day project. Ingrid was rather exhausted by the end. I do hope her friends realize what a treasure they have and appreciate her efforts properly.

Ingrid at her summer job.

Does it look like she’s working? No.

Does she feel like she’s working? Barely.

But she is employed and is getting paid and can put it on her resume.

The city of Stockholm offers summer jobs to young people living in the city. The summer is chopped up into three three-week periods, and Ingrid got a job for the last three weeks of her summer break. Her job is to (together with a team) host activities for children at Spånga Torg.

Unfortunately they barely get any children visiting their tent.

I don’t know who did the planning, but they can’t have had much local knowledge. There are no children just randomly hanging around Spånga Torg in the summer. Spånga is an affluent suburb of large-ish detached houses, not an inner-city area. Kids here are either at home with their parents, or more likely out of town.

The team leaders (who are actual adults) work all three periods, and according to them, the group was in other parts of Spånga-Tensta before, where they had a lot more visitors. Yeah, because those areas are densely populated areas of apartment blocks.

The “employees” are making their own fun. Braiding bracelets, painting posters to advertise the tent’s existence, etc. The highlights of Ingrid’s day are when she gets to do face painting on some kids.

We all hope that word will spread, and people will come back from their vacations, and they’ll get more visitors next week.