Lots of new photos in the gallery. The albums are dated as of today (because that’s when I finally got the pictures uploaded) but the photos themselves vary in age; some were taken as long ago as February.

There’s a small eatery on our street, about a third of the way from home to the T-bana station. Ingrid passes it several times a week, if not quite daily. For the first few weeks of April, just after we’d moved here, we would often see a big shaggy dog sit just outside the entrance. Perhaps it belonged to a friend of the owner? Who knows.

Ingrid was very interested in the dog. She hadn’t seen many dogs or cats in England, so the multitudes of animals she could see everywhere in Stockholm really caught her attention, and this one was better than most because it was so big. She’d point it out every time we passed.

After those few weeks we didn’t see the dog there again, but every time we come home from the T-bana, she still points at the spot where the dog used to sit, and says “auh” (which is the sound that Estonian dogs make). Two months later she still hasn’t forgotten about it! And people say young children have short memories.

We don’t have many toys, and most of the ones we have are baby toys. Buying toys for her has been a hit-and-miss affair, with generally more misses than hits. Things we expect her to really like are totally ignored, while she plays with empty cornflakes boxes instead. And then for almost half a year Ingrid had very little interest in any toys: she’d rather climb or slide or swing, or read books, or play with things she found around the house. So we bought almost nothing for several months.

Earlier this spring we got her a little bucket and a shovel, and both have actually been used. Encouraged by this experience, as well as her gradually growing interest in building blocks (which we have) and dolls (which she has played with in playgroup), we decided to get her a few more toys. So yesterday we went toy shopping, and it looks like the money wasn’t totally wasted.

She got her first doll, and she seems to like it. At least she keeps bringing the doll with her, so they both sit on my knees, or the doll gets to sit in her highchair. I was surprised by how hard it was to find a normal, plain doll, that requires no batteries, does not talk, pee, or do other tricks. Almost all dolls advertised “9 different functions!” and had labels saying “don’t forget the batteries!”. But I succeeded, and we came home with a pleasantly normal old-fashioned doll that does nothing except close its eyes when it lies down.

We also bought a Duplo set. She’s done no building yet, but she likes to hand me blocks one by one while I build, and then methodically tear my buildings apart. It’s also fun to pour all the blocks out of the box onto the floor, with a huge clattering noise.

Any favourite toy tips for an almost-two-year-old?

Ingrid has spent the past month naming things, especially animals. Man gave name to all the animals / in the beginning… She has a favourite book: Djurlexikon. It is big and has lots of pictures of all kinds of animals, and Ingrid’s appetite for this book is unsatiable. She knows cats and lions and wolves and apes, but also bats and butterflies and owls and penguins and snails and sharks and skunks and ostriches and snakes. Her pronunciation of all these words is often very remote from the real thing, but it’s clear that she knows the word and knows what she wants to say.

Ingrid and Eric reading about tigers

Some animals have Swedish names, some have Estonian ones. A moose is always põder, while an ostrich is a struts and nothing else. I think she goes for the language with the shorter, punchier word. And when the “wrong” parent “reads” the page about the ostrich, for example, she takes the book to the other parent because she wants to hear the “right” word. (The skunk is a good animal because it has the same funny-sounding name in both languages.)

And other animals she only calls by their sound. A lion is neither lejon nor lõvi but a roaaar, even though she understands both the real words as well. Mice, likewise, are called piip. Wolves are interesting because she uses both parts for them: they’re called uuuuu…. varg.

Lately she has been particularly fascinated by all the animals’ tails. She points out tails on all the animals, even those where she knows there should be one, but it isn’t visible.

Speaking of naming animals, Ingrid has finally also started saying emme (“mummy”). She started saying pappa months ago, but managed to get by without a name for me. Which is logical, I guess, since I was there with her. There was no need to talk about me, but there was need to say “go see if daddy is awake” or “look, daddy’s coming home”. Now that I am away during the day and Eric is at home, I am greeted by a loud happy “emmmeee!” when I get home from work in the evening, a sad “emme!” in the morning when I leave, and lots of “emme, emme, emme” while I am at home.

Just in the past week or so Ingrid has also started saying her own name. She pats Eric and says “pappa”, points at me and says “emme”, then pats her own chest and says “Ittii”, beaming with pride.

Her vocabulary is still almost all nouns. There are a few important action words like “go out” and “sleep”, and we have tried things like “stripes” and “spots”, “big” vs “small”, but I don’t think she’s really understood those.

She has also started mimicking the various small words that we say often without thinking much about them, with the very same tone that we use. The “jaa” where the tone goes down-down-down-up (“Do you think it will rain? Jaa, who knows…”). The confirmatory “neh” (“That wasn’t so good. Neh.”). And above all “oj” which for us means “oops” and for Ingrid means “look at this interesting thing that happened”. “Oj”, I poured water on myself. “Oj”, I threw food on the floor.

Pouring water

She wants to do like we do and be like we are. She wants to brush her own teeth, hold a phone to her ear and talk into it, splash with water in the kitchen sink while we are doing the dishes, and “help” us peel vegetables. She doesn’t get to play with phones very often (she won’t accept fakes, and we are not particularly willing to let her play with ours) but she did get a step stool and a waterproof smock so she can help in the kitchen. The stool was an instant hit and gets lots of use.

The best thing about the stool is that she can get up on it on her own. She likes climbing. She can climb into her (rather high) pushchair, and onto the sofa as well, and of course all sorts of climbing frames and other such things (including climbing up slides, from the wrong side). Either she has become taller or she’s developed better technique, because she didn’t manage the pushchair a month ago.

Odds and ends:

She enjoys lifts and escalators. She tends to walk up stairs with the right foot first, and down with the left foot first. She does not like having sand or dirt or other icky stuff on her hands or clothes, and makes great efforts to brush it off. She doesn’t like being dried after her bath, but she likes rubbing lotion on her tummy.

She likes beans but doesn’t like ice cream. She likes milk. We last tried offering her milk about half a year ago, and she rejected it very firmly. Now she loves it. She also loves yoghurt, juice, and pasta.

She is starting to look like a girl, so now maybe only half the strangers we meet refer to her as “him”. She sometimes lets us cut her fingernails while she’s awake and not even breastfeeding, without jerking the hand away. Her hair is still like a crow’s nest at the back of her head, with lots of broken hairs, because she tosses and turns so much in bed. She has 10 teeth (4 + 4 in the front plus 2 molars) and a hint of an eye tooth. She takes one nap during the day, preferably in the cycle trailer.

A few weeks ago we bought Ingrid a new spring hat: a stretchy, floppy hat in brown striped cotton jersey. For some reason she loved it from the moment she first held it. I think the softness was part of the reason, but more importantly, the hat is mostly shapeless and just a little bit too big for her, so she can pull it on herself. Her winter hat fit tightly and had ear flaps, so it had to be put on just so. This new hat she can pull sort of kind of roughly in the direction of her head, and it ends up in a reasonable position. Often skewed and wonky, but who cares? She likes this new power.

It also turned out to be a great sleep aid. When she wants to go to sleep, she likes pulling the hat down over her eyes to shut out the world.

A few days ago we somehow lost the hat. It probably got thrown out of the pushchair and we didn’t notice. She missed it. Today we bought a new, identical one, and she was so happy to get her hat back that she didn’t want to hand it to me at the till. For the next hour or two she wouldn’t let go – she would either wear it or hold it all the time.

The picture shows Ingrid and the hat in our Chariot Cougar cycle trailer. It’s one of our best baby investments: expensive, but well worth the money. Well designed and well made, robust, easy to use, convenient and comfortable – great in every way.

An all new photo album with pictures of Ingrid in various baby carriers.

Through some magic, Ingrid has learned to sleep.

Step one: she learned that sleep is good. One of the few signs we taught Ingrid (before her spoken language got going) was the sign for sleep. We signed “sleep” every evening before I put her to bed. One day, several months ago now, she signed “sleep” before I did, and walked off towards the bedroom on her own. Since that day, our evenings have become a lot smoother.

Sometimes she still resists going to bed (and what child wouldn’t, when there is so much to be done?) but many days she happily toddles off towards the bedroom (or towards me, when she would rather be carried) when I suggest sleep. And sometimes when she’s tired, she suggests a nap before I’ve even thought about it.

Step two: she learned to go to sleep. Something happened, and suddenly she got to a point where she can fall asleep in less than five minutes, assuming she’s calm and tired. She does things that I had previously only heard stories about: drifts off in the pushchair while we’re out walking, or even sitting in my lap. No boobs and no crying and no jumping involved. Absolutely wonderful.

In the evening she still likes me to lie next to her for a while. But she doesn’t complain when I slowly move away to sit by her side, once she is almost asleep. Most evenings she falls asleep with me holding her hand, or just sitting there and doing nothing at all.

The hard part is making sure that she is calm and tired in time for bedtime. She needs to get out and run about during the day, in order to be properly tired for the night. The days we spend indoors, for one reason or another, she usually has trouble falling asleep. Instead she runs about like a madman even though it’s late. Some part of her brain and body is tired, but not the right part, so she cannot calm down. When I put her to bed in that state, she can spend a good 40 minutes getting the energy out of her: kicking her legs against the mattress, flexing her legs again and again, slapping her feet against the wall, etc etc. And then the night ends up too short, and she’s cranky in the morning and the day after… So we generally make an effort to get her outdoors every day.

Step three: she learned to go back to sleep on her own. It used to be that whenever I heard a whimper from the bedroom, I rushed in, because if I didn’t, the whimper inevitably grew into loud crying that escalated until I went in to calm her down. Now she sometimes cries out but then goes right back to sleep (or maybe she doesn’t even wake). Sometimes she makes more noise, and then I usually go in to find her sitting up in her bed. She appears confused and peeved, but is effectively asleep, so the moment I lay her down again, she is asleep again.

Other times she half-wakes and seems really annoyed and I just cannot calm her. I suspect that it’s because she pees in her sleep, and doesn’t like the feeling. She wears disposable nappies at night, but even with those she feels something. And she hates night-time nappy changes that follow. She doesn’t like laying down flat on her back. During the day she stands up for nappy changes, but during the night of course she definitely does not want to stand up, she wants to lie down and sleep! And she isn’t sufficiently awake to understand that it will be easier to go back to sleep when I’ve changed the nappy. So whichever way I choose, she struggles and fights me. I usually end up breastfeeding her after these episodes, because that’s the only way to calm her again when she’s that worked up.

But in general, we all sleep better than we’ve done in a year and a half.

At the bottom left.