the -is suffix<\/a> (which is a very common and productive one in Swedish). She’s started picking words apart: she’s noted that both Barkarby and V\u00e4llingby (place names near where we live) have “by” in them, and V\u00e4llingby is made up of v\u00e4lling (“gruel”) and by.\n<\/p>\n\nIn 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, n\u00e4ra \u00f6gat<\/i> (“near escape”, literally “near the eye”) and umbes<\/i> (“approximately, roughly”) and typ<\/i> (“sort of”). “N\u00e4ra \u00f6gat” in particular seems to resonate with her: once I’d explained it for her, she started using it several times every day.\n<\/p>\n
\nShe’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<\/i>) to the Happy Birthday song (again from Disney, Pluto’s Party<\/i>).\n<\/p>\n
\nA 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nAt 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.\n<\/p>\n
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\nShe’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.\n<\/p>\n
\nFor 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nFor 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nWe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nShe 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 gl\u00f6mde 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nShe 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.\n<\/p>\n
\nOne 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ingrid_johanna","category-monthly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17754,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions\/17754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Ingrid_1.jpg\")
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