Adrian has done a lot of growing up recently. There’s little left of the anger we saw so much of last month.

Actually… I wonder how much is due to him growing up and out of it, and how much is us providing him with better preconditions. We might simply be more adept at parrying his moods, because otherwise his anger wears us all down.

Also, we pay more attention to his sleep. We’re stricter about getting him into bed earlier, and we let him sleep longer in the mornings. Everybody else gets up together at 7, and Adrian sleeps another 20-30 minutes.

He still thinks that he can order people around and they should do as he wants. “Mummy, you will read for me now, because I want it!” And yet at the same time when we tell him he as to do something, he can argue that “you don’t have to do things that you don’t want”, man behöver inte göra det om man inte vill.

He talks a lot; at times almost constantly. The level of his talking varies, of course: sometimes it’s just his mouth moving because it has nothing better to do; other times he is actually talking to us.

Mostly it is about the here and now. Quite often at breakfast he talks about shapes he sees in his half-eaten slice of toast.

Sometimes he talks about strange scenarios that come into his mind. What if the house was hungry, too? What if it was raining stones instead of water? What if we went out at night?

He is also learning the art of conversation. (Interestingly, this is something Ingrid has never done as far as I can remember.) He asks us how our day was and what we did at work. When the extended family was here to celebrate the kids’ birthday, he spoke to his grandfather and wanted to hear what he had done when he was a kid.

He plays with words and rhymes. He makes up nonsense words, and twists existing words into new shapes. Language play must really occupy a large chunk of his brain: he comes up with impressively creative rhymes sometimes. A few weeks ago we had just read a cartoon adaptation of Treasure Island by Mauri Kunnas, and he rhymed “åt det hållet” with “Captain Smollett”. I was pretty impressed.

He’s trying to figure out reading. He’s known his letters for a long time already, and recognised his own name. Now he sometimes tries to follow along when I read for him, and figure out where that word is that I just said.

Adrian wants to be a big kid. He wants to be as big as Ingrid, he says. Anything that Ingrid can do, he also wants. He wants to have a rucksack for his things when he goes to preschool, like Ingrid does. He wants to sit on a big kitchen chair, not a kids’ chair.

Sometimes he still wants to be a baby, too. Mostly he asks if we can play mummy daddy baby, and I can be the mummy and he can be the baby, and it’s time for the baby to go to sleep. Which means he wants me to carry him to the bathroom and then upstairs, like I did when he was a baby.

He isn’t entirely happy about going to preschool and often asks if he can stay at home instead. I’ve thought about taking a day off now and again to spend the day with him, but it’s not going to happen, because he would take that as the new normal and demand it all the time. He is completely unable to handle rules with exceptions.

We used to have slightly sweeter “weekend cereal” at home – not honey-coated sugar bombs but sweeter than what I think is suitable for everyday breakfasts. We had to stop that because he wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t get them every day.

He gets a Numbert book every Saturday, and he complains bitterly about the waiting almost every day, and cries that he wants it now.

Random fact: Adrian likes soft, plush, warm fabrics like fleece and velour. His dream garment would be a fleece one-piece or zip-up pyjamas. I found one on Tradera that was almost what he wanted but it has feet, and while he likes it for its soft fleecy warmth, it’s not quite what he wished for.

Random fact #2: He really likes to eat with his hands. If we insist, he can use his fork and knife passably well, but given a choice, he’d rather use his fingers. He doesn’t eat messy food like casseroles and mashed potatoes, anyway – and for the kinds of food he likes, such as pasta, boiled potatoes, fish fingers, broccoli, or corn fritters, hands work as well as cutlery.