Adrian is very much in a deciding mood right now. It is important for him to decide about all kinds of things. Primarily he decides about his own life, of course, the small things that a child can decide. But he also wants to decide what other people should do, and how. Things should be done just so and not any other way!

I used my fingers to hold a potato I was cutting up for him, instead of holding it with a fork, and this was so totally wrong that he was in tears. Du ska göra så, inte så! And the corn flakes need to be poured in his bowl before the oat squares, not after. (Or was it the other way round? I’m not sure any more…) It is also important to him do do things on his own, nej inte du, bara jag! just like last month. So now I usually confirm with him before I do anything that I think might affect him.

This has led to him offering me choices about all sorts of things, too. It’s always either-or choices. “Do you like this stone or this one?” Vill du ha den eller den? Do I want a small piece of bread or a large one? Do I want a skirt or trousers?

Of course there are also the things that don’t really affect him, but that he cares strongly about nevertheless. I want to change out of my office clothes when I get home; Adrian doesn’t think I should. Adrian doesn’t think Ingrid should stand where she is standing. Adrian doesn’t think others should talk funny, only he is allowed to do that. Sometimes I humour him; sometimes I really want to make my own decisions. Lots of drama and tears.

When he wants to get me to do something, and the first attempt does not work, he tries different strategies. Sometimes he does it the Ingrid way and asks with exagerrated politeness: snälla kan du göra det. Sometimes he shouts orders: du SKA göra det! Sometimes he just yells: GÖR DET! Sometimes he simply screeches.

He likes talking funny and making funny noises. Also he likes talking like a baby. Jag är bäbis, he tells us. They play mum and dad and baby at nursery, and I guess he is usually the baby.

He seems to enjoy this kind of pretending, but mostly in company with other kids. Sometimes he is a baby. Other times he is a tiger that roars. Sometimes he is a pirate who says “hah-haa!” like Pippi Longstocking does in the movie. Then he asks me if it was too scary and if I say yes, he does it more quietly and gently the next time.

But these things should be done the right way. Only he talks funny; he doesn’t like us mimicking him. When he serves us toy food, we should pretend to eat it the right way, with the right pretend sounds. Not too realistically! “Only pretend” he admonishes when our mouth goes too near the toy corn cob.

He is interested in sizes. He talks about things being big or small, or medium (litemellan) or just right (lagom).

Adrian is also interested in names. Whenever he decides to talk to some stranger (such as the cashier at the supermarket, or some mom at the playground, or the man sitting next to us on the train) he asks for their name. Quite often they reply and then ask him the same. Usually he answers Adrian, but sometimes he also says he is lillebror, “little brother”.

He also asks me about others’ names: people we pass in the street, people in newspaper photos, in ads, and so on. And he often asks me about who lives in what house. Of course we pass a number of houses where we know the people: his friends, our neighbours, and so on. Some of them he knows perfectly well but he still likes to ask me. But he also asks me about strangers’ houses, and when I say I don’t know, he sometimes informs me that people live there, or a man, or a woman.

When someone asks him how old he is, he says he is two, and holds up two fingers. Now he has also sort of understood three: he knows that the older kids at nursery are now three years old, and he can hold up three fingers. Sometimes he can correctly say when there are three of something, such as potatoes on his plate, but sometimes he also says three when it’s really four.

On two occasions recently he has surprised me by trying new food. Once he ate sugar snap peas. And once he actually ate real cooked food with several ingredients: a tomato soup with macaroni and sweetcorn. Otherwise he still subsists on carbs (bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereal), meatballs and fish fingers, fruit, and sweetcorn and peas.

Favourite activities:

• Face painting. Ingrid and Adrian have painted each other several times.
• Swinging.
• Blowing dandelions with Ingrid. But he doesn’t like getting any of the seeds on him or his stroller. He is OK with having sand all over himself, but not “stuff”.

Favourite things:

• His Lightning McQueen baseball cap.

• Ingrid’s hair clips with a picture of Tinkerbell.

This has been a frustrating month. Ingrid is in one of her moody, irritable phases: there seems to be a lot of anger in her, sulks and contrariness. She responds with irritation to all our polite requests and friendly questions, and deliberately does things that she knows will annoy us.

Dinner time. We ask her to come and eat. She is busy reading. We ask again. She comes, with a sulky face. I ask if I shall pour some juice for her. She stares but does not say a word. I wait. She waits. I start doing something else (serving food to Adrian). She mumbles something. I tell her I didn’t catch that, could she repeat herself? She shouts “I already told you I wanted juice, how many times do I have to say that!” I tell her that I will do it in a moment, when I’m done with what I’m doing right now. Etc.

She takes and takes and asks for more, but will not give. She asks for my help, my company, my attention, but whenever I ask her to do things she ignores me, or refuses, or complies with much complaining and huffing.

I find myself saying no to her more and more often, because otherwise she will take everything I have and I will have neither time nor energy for anything else in my life. Perhaps this is turning into a negative spiral, with her annoyed by my no’s and therefore demanding even more? I wish I knew.

This mostly seems to surface when she is with us. With others she is all sunshine. Whenever she’s been playing at a friend’s home and we arrive to pick her up, the mums always comment on how sweet and friendly and happy she is. I wish she would choose to show that side of herself to us a bit more often.

But it’s not all anger and spite. She has also shown unusual persistence this month. She has decided that she wants to learn something, and then practised and practised every day until she can do it.

First she taught herself to whistle. Now she is learning to vary the pitch so she can whistle melodies.

Then she learned to skip rope. Already several months ago she learned to skip a long rope with others turning the rope (or with one turner and one end of the rope tied to a stationary object). This she learned at school, and it was accompanied by a rhyme in two parts. First she counts a letter of the alphabet with every jump. When she misses, that letter is used for the second part. If the letter is G, for example, she would first think of a thing beginning with G – a giraffe for example – and then chant: “Mamma mamma får jag en giraff, svara ärligt, ja eller nej? Ja – nej – ja – nej…”

Now she has progressed to skipping on her own. Interestingly she first learned to skip backwards: she had trouble with her arm technique when turning the rope forwards. But soon after she figured out the forwards movement as well. That day, when she first mastered it, she skipped for at least an hour, and the next day her muscles were so sore she could barely walk. Now she does it every day. Her technique is still a bit weird, with her arms stretched out shoulder-high, but I guess she’ll figure out more effective arm movements later.

Her hair is growing quite long and I now insist on some sort of containment for it at least when she is eating. We bought a bunch of new hair clips (with a Tinkerbell theme) and hair bands and elastics. It was fun for me to see a girl emerge from behind the blond mane: I realized that for a month or so I had rarely seen her entire face.

This month Ingrid also celebrated the end of her first school year. School is over now and starts again on August 20th. But Eric and I don’t get two months of vacation so Ingrid is in after-school care for another few weeks, until early July.

Miscellaneous:

• Favourite summer activities: Bathing. Blowing dandelions. Eating strawberries. Blowing soap bubbles.
• Bamse magazines have been joined by Kalle Anka pocket, Donald Duck.
• Favourite craft: beading bracelets.
• When she wants to say something that she is ashamed of, or suspects that I might not be happy about, she writes me a note instead.
• She has been interested in temperatures and thermometres. She doesn’t quite understand the scale yet but is sort of getting it now.
• Turquoise is by far her favourite colour.

The deer are getting bold. This one didn’t move more than an ear even when I opened the door 10 metres away from her.

June 6th is Sweden’s National Day. We celebrated by joining the picnic and National Day concert at Hagaparken.

Those rats we had? It seems that one of them (or maybe some other small creature, who knows) has gone and died somewhere underneath our kitchen.

There is an unpleasant dead odour that is strongest in one corner of the kitchen, and an awful lot of very fat flies.

I crawled into the foundation under the kitchen and looked around. I saw droppings of some small animal, but there was no dead rat to be seen. The smell was there, too, now coming from above, so the dead thing is probably somewhere in the floor substructure.

So now we wait. And kill flies. Fly paper, which I haven’t seen since my childhood days, apparently still exists, and works. But a plain old rolled-up newspaper is much more efficient. Especially with these flies: many of them are unusually slow and dull, and don’t even try to fly away. One afternoon after work I swatted fifteen, and Ingrid did another four, while the fly paper had caught only a handful during the day.

Adrian has discovered face painting. He likes being painted, and he likes to paint. Sometimes Adrian and Ingrid paint each other. Ingrid paints flowers, strawberries, hearts, or just colours that Adrian chooses. Adrian also very kindly asks which colours Ingrid or I want, and then applies them with great care, concentration and tenderness.

Yes, I am wearing the same fleece jacket as in my previous self-portrait, AND the one before that. I do own other clothes, and even other fleece jackets, but this one is a favourite.

The pansies I planted in April? They got eaten by deer.

Twice.

I am seriously annoyed. They don’t just nibble at the flowers, either – when the deer come, they eat every blossom bigger than the tip of my thumb. The destruction they leave behind may be small in size but it still looks quite depressing afterwards.

On the plus side, deer apparently do not eat French marigolds (tagetes), garden cosmos, or petunias, so my plantings behind the house have been left in peace.

So much is going on in Adrian’s life. His life is full, and he is full of life. So much energy, so much feeling! He is childhood embodied.

This month brought warm weather and Adrian has really enjoyed spring. We’ve been out on playgrounds, tried cycling, and even the inflatable pool has been in use. On playgrounds Adrian loves swings best and he can swing (or rather, have me push the swing) for half an hour before he tires.

It took a while for him to get used to spring weather and new clothes. He insisted on wearing his rubber boots with warm lining, and the “furry” jacket, and taking his mittens to nursery every day. Gradually he came to accept normal shoes and fleece jackets instead, but he’s still a bit suspicious of his Crocs shoes.

Even now he loves wearing a jersey hat, sometimes even indoors. He doesn’t like wind in his hair, he says, and when it gets windy he always puts on a hat. Also he never goes out without shoes, even though he loves being barefoot indoors.

Ingrid’s old tank tops were instant favourites. Not because they were tank tops but because he loved the pictures: a tiger on one, an elephant on the other. The novelty of no sleeves is so great that he points it out to people he meets – inga armar!

Adrian is usually happy to be around strangers but crowds make him uncomfortable. When we went to the Valborg bonfire, he was really bothered by the masses of people, and asked to go home. Det är jättemycket barn. Och mycket tädi och mycket onu. Jag vill inte vara här. (“There is very much kids. And much woman and much man. I don’t want to be here.”) The bonfire itself was scary, too.

He is also afraid of animals, especially if they are running loose and he thinks that they could come close. He doesn’t want to visit his best friend Hanna because they have cats. He pulls back when he sees a dog, and ideally wants to go to the other side of the street. I’ve been explaining to him how the dog is tied to a leash and cannot come closer. One day we saw a hare, and even though it was in a garden across the street Adrian closed his eyes and wouldn’t look.

Cuddly furry animals are scary, and he would never go pet one. But chickens, for example, are less scary than guinea pigs. And tortoises are not too scary at all, and a crocodile (a small one, and behind glass) was more interesting than scary, as we found out at this year’s Djurexpo.

Language-wise he has obviously decided that Swedish is his language. He understands Estonian perfectly well, and knows the names of many things in both languages. But when he speaks, he always chooses Swedish, and only uses an Estonian word when he cannot remember the Swedish one.

He is learning about similarity and groupings, and I often hear him use words like “same”, “similar”, “together”, “only”. He is also interested in amounts, especially jättemycket! and supermycket!. When we pour a drink for him he often asks for supermycket, which I think means that he wants a full glass, not half like I usually pour for him.

He has entered a “can do” phase. He wants to do things on his own without any help. When he drops a grape on the floor, instead of asking me to pick it up (as he used to) he now says Bara jag ska hämta!, “Only I will get it”, sometimes explicitly instructing me not to touch it. I am also not allowed to help him put on his sandals or hat, or to set the table for him, and sometimes even to open my nursing t-shirt for him.

I have made some attempts at getting him to use the potty but had no success. He knows what it’s for and he is perfectly aware that we all do our thing at the toilet. But he has no interest in trying it out himself. When I get him to sit on the potty he produces nothing, and then he gets up and less than a minute later makes a puddle on the floor.

He is aware of his own peeing and pooping, and often tells us afterwards that he needs a clean nappy, but it still seems to take him by surprise every time and he doesn’t seem to have any “premonition” in advance.

He still needs a nap during the day, almost always, but then often stays awake quite late, falling asleep around 9 together with Ingrid. It isn’t rare for Ingrid to fall asleep before him.

He still nurses about as much as he used to: when we wake, when we get home in the afternoon, frequently during the evening, at bedtime, and once or twice during the small hours.

Odds and ends:

• When he is happy, he often runs with his tongue out. So when he falls, the part that feels most discomfort is his tongue, which is then all covered with sand. He then tries to wipe it off with his hand which is also sandy, and doesn’t understand why it gets no better.
• Even when he is upset, angry or sad, he still says thank you. He can be fighting with Ingrid about a toy, crying with frustration, and when Ingrid gives it to him, he chokes out a “thank you” through his tears.
• He watched Rise of the Guardians with Ingrid and Eric and is now looking forward to Christmas. Idag är det jul! Nu kommer jultomten! – “Today is Christmas! Now Santa Claus will come” he says. My explanations about seasons, and having to wait for winter and snow, don’t really make sense to him. He still doesn’t quite understand “tomorrow” so the wait until winter is an unimaginable eternity.

Running

Pippi Longstocking is Adrian’s favourite character, and Ingrid loves many of Astrid Lindgren’s stories, too. So yesterday we went to Astrid Lindgren’s World, a Lindgren theme park, together with another family.

Most of the park consisted of recreations of environments from the books. There was Pippi’s house of course (and a pirate ship next to it), as well as copies of Bullerby, Mattis’s fort, Thorn Rose Valley, and so on. Most things were scaled down to child size, with small houses, narrow streets, even scaled-down cobblestones.

I found the park itself a bit underwhelming. Many of the environments were just façades: the doors and windows couldn’t be opened. In others you could go inside but there was hardly anything there, just bare walls and a bare floor. Cute to look at from afar but there wasn’t much to actually do there.

Mattis’s fort was at least large enough so we could walk around on the walls and climb up and down in the towers, and Karlsson’s roof had some slides. There were also some other bits and pieces where the kids could climb, including a large “don’t touch the ground” trail that Ingrid enjoyed a lot.

There were performances throughout the day, and we saw two of them: one Pippi show, and one sing-along show. The actors also sang and performed between the main shows. I think Pippi and her crew were out and interacting with the crowd almost all day.

Ingrid loved hanging out around the Pippi house with Pippi and her sailors and pirates. She’s now independent enough that we could just sit at a café nearby while she wandered around. Apart from the shows, her favourite attraction was a little knee-deep pond with two cable ferries. She kept going back and forth across the pond, on her own, with Adrian, with random other kids, for around half an hour I think, and only quit after she accidentally stepped into the pond and got rather wet.

Adrian just enjoyed hanging around the park with Ingrid and his friend Hanna, and looking at stuff.

The park was extremely family-friendly. There were picnic tables, toilets, cafés and restaurants everywhere. At times it felt like there were more cafés than attractions there. But it was very convenient, with almost no queueing anywhere. The restaurants served locally sourced food, and it was real food, with no hot dogs or hamburgers in sight. But expensive… 75 kr for a kids’ portion of meatballs and two potatoes is a bit extreme.

We were lucky to be at ALV on a Friday during the off season. The park wasn’t empty but not too crowded either. As we drove past this morning we saw many more people heading that way so avoiding the weekend was a good thing. I can imagine that it could get awfully busy there during the main season which starts in early June. On the other hand it is probably also more fun then, with many more shows during the day, and more characters from the books just walking around in the park.

I don’t think we’ll be going back there next year. Maybe in a few years’ time, when Adrian is as old as Ingrid is now. And in that case probably at the very beginning or end of the high season, so we catch more of the action but (hopefully) not much more of the crowds.

A new kind of independence is developing in Ingrid: she has started experimenting with being completely on her own. It began with an afternoon at the playground, after school. Adrian wanted to stay; Ingrid wanted to go home. I handed my keys to Ingrid and she went on home on her own.

This took me by surprise, because when she last tried being home alone, she didn’t hold out many minutes. Now she was totally cool with it.

So we did it a couple more times. Sometimes she’s gone home from the playground to pick up some stuff. Once I did the opposite and left her at the playground with Adrian while I went back home to pick up something. Sometimes she’s gone to a friend’s place to ask if they can play. A few times she has just gone out to ride her kickbike or skateboard on her own for a while.

She likes staying up late, usually reading. She can usually still get up the next morning, but by the afternoon the lack of sleep catches up with her and she is tired and whiny. So now I try to send her off to bed by 9 at the latest. But sometimes no arguments work, not even the threat of missing the bedtime story (because after 9 we are usually both so tired that I don’t want to tell a story).

When we do have time for a story, she often asks for something that has things (inanimate objects) that come to life and can talk: toys, or the inhabitants of the kitchen, or the numbers one to nine. And preferrably their talking should be arguments about which one of them is the best. A reflection of her daily reality at school perhaps.

Sleeping is just so utterly boring, it seems. “Who came up with the idea of sleeping, anyway?” she asked today. “And why do we have to eat? And poop?” Not really wondering, but just expressing her frustration with these stupid wastes of time.

At mealtimes, too, it is clear that she would rather not have to eat. Whenever she is snacking, she will bring some Bamse magazines to read. At the dinner table she often forgets that she is supposed to be eating, and plays or talks instead, and we remind her to eat. Sometimes she gets bored with eating and leaves the table before she is full, and then realizes an hour later that she is actually still hungry.

At home this isn’t much of an issue, but at school it causes more problems. Their lunch break is short, and she is basically so distracted at mealtimes that she doesn’t have time to eat. And then the break ends and she wolfs down the food that is still on her plate.

For a long time Ingrid had been complaining of stomach aches, off and on, especially after school lunches. But she wasn’t very consistent in reporting them, so it took months for us to figure out the pattern. Finally we realized that the aches usually came when she had had to eat too fast. Now she moved to another table at school, closer to the teachers who can remind her to actually eat. And I don’t think she’s had any stomach aches since then.

Miscellaneous:

• She is letting her hair grow long and it is now often in her face. This seems to bother her more than me. She doesn’t like hair clips, but will accept soft hair bands.
• She likes playing with words, especially names, and turning them backwards.
• Favourite game: vändtia (which seems to correspond to the English Shithead – I’m glad it’s not called that in Swedish!)