6.25

Ingrid has been a delightful little buddy this fall.  We've had a good time traveling with her, running around on the weekends, and trying to pry information about her day from her when we finally corral her at home in the evenings.  She has also prompted several really fun spontaneous dinner parties, as her gaggle of neighbor friends often end up staying over for dinner, and sometimes their parents come to hang out too.  Karl and I really like them all and give Ingrid credit for forcing us to finally be social with these people we didn't speak to for the first two years we lived here.

First grade is going well.  She had a tough start -- her teacher is much stricter than last year, there's more work and less play than kindergarten, and the schedule moved up two hours.  It took six full weeks for her to come home not looking exhausted.  She seems to have adjusted and the work is paying off, especially in reading.  She can now crank through books like Room on the Broom and is very proud of her skills.  Fritz loves for Ingrid to read to him.

Ingrid is super sweet to Fritz.  They have a funny relationship -- they seldom play together but he goes to Ingrid when he needs something, or if one of the other kids makes him mad.  She's like his second mom.  Ingrid and Heidi still play a lot and squabble a lot, but it's mostly positive.  She gets very annoyed at Heidi following her and her big friends around, but if I can arrange it so that Heidi has a younger sister to pair with, they all do well together.  After many months of mostly ignoring each other, Ingrid and Henry have gotten back into playing together in the evenings.  It usually involves running around and being rowdy, and ends with Ingrid clawing Henry like a cat, but at least they're spending time together.

She is doing gymnastics this fall.  After asking me to enroll her, she fought hard against going the first couple of weeks.  I told her she had to go three times before she quit.  Parenting win!  She ended up really enjoying it.  She isn't the most athletic child and seems to be making slower progress than most of the kids in her class, but she doesn't seem to care, and said she wanted to enroll in the next session even though she wasn't invited to level up.  I'm proud of her for that.

My favorite quirk of the moment is her ability to make up very long backstories that have no basis in reality.  They're winding and rambling and she is clearly making them up on the fly.  Verbal Rube Goldbergs.  Karl describes it as her Just-So stories.  She can be very sweet with these stories, like when I accidentally bought her pajamas a size too large, and she just invented a story about how pajamas are actually better when they're too big because one time she grew really fast overnight and when she woke up her pajamas were too small and it was hard to get her feet out and she fell down while she was trying to get them off so she always wanted her pajamas to be a size big from now on.

Our Thanksgiving trip to St. Louis hit all the highlights for Ingrid: making/wrapping birthday presents for Grandpa, getting dressed up for the theater with Grandma, a new doll, and a case of fancy jewelry and trinkets from Aunt Amy.

And now we're on to Christmas -- Ingrid is the very best Christmas elf.  The whole season is just right up her alley.  Extra sparkly decorations to put all over the house, a tree full of lights and glass, packages to wrap and cards to stamp, sweets to bake, friends to host.  She hasn't been into hanging around and helping me with things this fall -- then December hit and she is all over it.  She sealed, stamped, and return-addressed at least half of the 100+ cards and independently wrapped most of our Secret Santa gifts.

I'm looking forward to Christmas with our girl.  In good Ingrid fashion, she gave Santa a list of options that contained both the very practical (keychains) and the completely fanciful (a robot unicorn).  When we had the chance to chat with Santa -- because, shockingly, no one else was waiting to see him outdoors in 15-degree weather -- she gave him the skeptical eye and asked how he could get everywhere in one night.  He answered, "It's just magic."  Which totally explains it to Ingrid.