Adrian is four… and yet he’s always “the little one”. At this age Ingrid felt so big, but now that I have an eight-year-old to compare to, Adrian feels young whatever he does.

He himself wants to be bigger. He says he wishes he was as big as Ingrid, or that “Ingrid came out of you after me” so he could be the older one.

It’s hard to notice Adrian growing because he’s my second child. His development is not news, I’ve seen most of it before, so I really have to pay attention. I get regular little surprises when I notice how much he’s grown.

Today for example his friend D came home with us after preschool. They played together for two hours, needing no help from me with conflict resolution, which really took me by surprise. There were occasional discussions and disagreements but those got resolved incredibly smoothly and peacefully.

On Friday he had his 4-year checkup. Mostly the things they check are incredibly basic, like walking along a line on the floor, threading large wooden beads on a shoestring, answering simple questions about pictures, etc. He was also asked to draw a man. On his own, he never draws anything but scribbles and tangles. But here to my surprise he drew a surprisingly advanced man: head, eyes and mouth, neck, body, legs (but no arms), and even food in his tummy. I had no idea he could do that. He is never interested in drawing at home.

He surprises me with interesting questions as well. How are fridges made? What is in glass? How did the Earth get made? What is inside the Earth? He’s especially interested in those last ones and has asked me to retell that story several times.

Some weeks ago he tried out an iPad game called Magic Garden. There’s a board with a set of tiles, and you have to rotate the tiles to make the pieces match up so water can flow through the pipe system. To my great surprise he got through like 20 or 30 levels, all on his own – and towards the end they were really complex.

Mostly, though, he chooses YouTube videos or simple games instead of thinking games – because he is tired. He is tired when he wakes in the morning, can’t calm down enough to sleep at preschool, refuses to go to bed early, and usually takes a long time to go to sleep at night.

He’s not really too grumpy, like he was earlier this autumn. But he complains about having to go to preschool, and in the afternoon he complains about having to go home. (It’s comforting to hear him say he doesn’t want to go home in the afternoon, because it means his complaining in the morning is about not wanting to go anywhere, rather than about preschool itself.)

At night the bedtime ritual revolves around singing. First we read a book. Then we sing the songs in his cardboard Ellen och Olle song books. I had given them away to his baby cousin, thinking that surely he had outgrown them. But he really missed them and kept asking for them, so I asked them back, and now we use them every night.

Often he joins me. Sometimes he sings the actual song for real. They’re practising Christmas songs at preschool, so he joins me for Räven raskar över isen for example. More often he sings some nonsense sound instead, but with the same melody as the song I’m singing: “pata pata paa-ta patapatta patta paa-ta” for “har du sett min apa, min söta fina lilla apa” for example. Sometimes he varies the rhythm as well, putting in two quick ones where the real lyrics have one long sound, etc. Which makes it a bit challenging for me to keep singing the real thing, but it’s fun as well.

Then we put the books away and turn off the light, and I keep singing. “First Trollmor, and not too last Kalle Theodor” he reminds me. “Not too last” means it can come later, but not so late that he will have fallen asleep before I get to it.

Favourite clothes: fleece one-piece pyjamas. Oh how happy he would be if we could buy more of those, but I can’t find any. Also, his snowsuit. I brought it up from the basement one cold day, and he kept using it even when the weather turned warmer again. I guess it’s more comfortable than jacket and trousers.

Not favourite clothes: socks. He doesn’t mind them at home but whenever I pick him up at preschool, he’s always taken off his socks.

Favourite food: porridge, but not as intensely as before. Soy “yoghurt” – Carlshamn’s blueberry Soygurt and Alpro’s berry-flavoured yoghurts. “Apple boats” – apples, cored and cut into chunky segments.

Adrian and his friend, in accidentally almost-matching striped outfits, sharing an iPad, surrounded by the leftovers of previous activities: a sofa fort, boxes with Lego and train tracks holding up that fort, and two pirate swords.

Every other Tuesday we get a box of organic vegetables from Ekolådan, “the organic box”. These are the contents of today’s box.

Mostly I welcome the challenge of cooking based on what I get. But sometimes it’s really hard.

Onions, tomatoes – no problem. Aubergine, courgette, beetroot, Jerusalem artichokes, pumpkin: the adults love them, the kids not so much, and I have no trouble coming up with meal ideas to use them up.

Cabbage is harder, because they are always huge. One pumpkin is one dinner. Two aubergines is also roughly one dinner. But one large head of cabbage is at least two dinners if I let the cabbage totally dominate the meal, or four if I don’t, and coming up with creative ways to serve cabbage twice a week is challenging. I currently have one ordinary cabbage, one savoy cabbage and one and a half Chinese cabbage, all waiting to be eaten.

Lettuce I’ve totally given up with. There’s almost always a head of lettuce in the box, and nobody in our home is fond of lettuce. Eric eats some when served, and Ingrid and I might eat a leaf or two if it’s in a hamburger or sandwich. Adrian of course will not even try it. So there is no way we will eat a head of lettuce every two weeks. So I found a neighbour who is fond of lettuce, and most Tuesdays they get ours.

No idea what to do with the chillies, either. We don’t really do spicy food at all normally, and that’s a lot of chillies…

More and more often, when I sit down to write my monthly post about Ingrid, I realize how different she is from me. At times it almost feels like looking at an alien in a human body.

She is very extroverted. She exists for interactions with other people, especially other kids. Being on her own, having to do things on her own, is a real hardship and drains her of energy.

At the same time, she is rather tone deaf when it comes to human interactions, at least when it comes to interacting with us (myself, Eric and Adrian). She talks without listening and seems mostly uninterested in what we have to say, or what we think and feel. Perhaps it’s because we are as alien to her as she is to us. Or perhaps this is just how 8-year-olds are: I’ve never lived with one before.

She will try to dominate any interaction. With us, it’s just annoying; with Adrian it’s worrying. I think her interactions with her friends probably work better. They are on a more similar wavelength, compared to us – and they can push back more effectively than Adrian.

Whenever Adrian is doing something and Ingrid is not otherwise occupied, she walks in and, without really being aware of it, take over Adrian’s activity. She tries to steer his play, tells Adrian what pen to use when he’s drawing, etc.

She sometimes treats him as a servant: asks him to fetch and carry for her, or take messages to me. He often does as she asks. I spend quite a lot of time telling her off for that – even though they both think it’s OK, I don’t want Ingrid to treat others that way, and I don’t want Adrian to get used to being treated that way.

She is often annoyed and irritated by him, for example when he mimics her and echoes her words, or when he sings some nonsense song over and over again. And she cannot help snapping at him when she gets annoyed.

And yet at the same time she really enjoys playing with him, and truly cares about making him feel good. Or maybe she cares about making him not feel bad? She hates it when he is sad or angry (unless he’s angry because she’s been snapping at him) and makes sincere efforts to make him happy again. And the other day when we were buying Christmas gifts, her top priority was finding good gifts for Adrian.

She is incredibly utilitarian. Activities without an immediately visible utility are pointless. There are few activities that she does for the sake of doing them. Reading is the one big exception.

Take drawing, for example. As she says herself, she knows that the end result will be a finished drawing that she has nothing to do with, so she will throw away, so what is the point? Unless she is drawing at school with her friends, in which case it becomes a social activity.

She is totally incurious. She is not at all interested in finding out about how the world works. She never asks how or why about anything that isn’t in her immediate here and now. When she encounters an unfamiliar word in a book, she asks what it means, but will not listen beyond the first sentence in my answer.

Favourite books:
She reads the same series of books that she read a year ago – LasseMaja and Kalle Anka. She rarely looks for new books to read. The books she likes are those that have a fast pace, and lots of action and suspense. Alternatively, the book should have lots of pictures, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. She also likes jokes – especially what would be called anekdoodid in Estonian, and roliga historier (such as bellmanhistorier) in Swedish.

Favourite game:
The robot game, which means that I am a robot and carry her on my back or shoulders, and she gives me instructions: “forward”, “stop”, “turn”. We play this when it’s time to go to the kitchen for dinner, or to the bedroom at night.

Favourite iPad games:
Various animal-raising games, where you breed and feed animals and collect money from them to get more animals, like Dragon City etc.

Favourite foods:
Brämhults strawberry and lime juice, with their raspberry juice as a runner-up. Cheese buns. Clementines.

Ingrid has recovered from the lumbar puncture and is feeling well again, but she’s still on antibiotics and her facial nerves are still not working quite properly. From what I understand, it might take a while for all the symptoms to disappear. But they no longer affect our everyday life.

Ingrid shopping for pralines for me.

Today was another girls’ day for Ingrid and me. We took the train to town for some shopping. Ingrid wanted to buy Christmas gifts; I wanted to buy socks. Twilfit was out of plain black socks so we only came home with some Christmas gifts.

Eric and Adrian were away so Ingrid and I had a girls’ day. This included having pizza and going to the movies. Ingrid asked for a coke with her pizza and I obliged her. Then she asked me to help her open it because she didn’t know how. I guess this probably was her first can of coke ever.

On our way home we stopped at a playground. We were the only ones there.

Ingrid having lunch lying down. Pasta, meatballs and ketchup.

She went to school in the morning because she was feeling so well then, and also because she really wanted to be there in her horse mask for children’s literature day. But after less than two hours she couldn’t continue any more and came home.

Then I did some googling and learned that the thing to do when you have a post-lumbar puncture headache is to lie down totally flat. Not just lie down and rest, but get the head level with the rest of the body. (I really wish someone at the hospital had thought of telling us.) So that’s what Ingrid has been doing most of the day today, including at mealtimes. It seems to be working – she has been feeling a lot better.

Caffeine is also supposed to help so Ingrid got Coca-cola with her lunch.

Ingrid is not feeling well at all. Headache and backache and nausea and generally feeling miserable. I’m not sure how much is due to the disease and how much to Sunday’s lumbar puncture – probably a bit of both. She’s feeling so ill that she cannot event watch a movie – any time she tries to do anything, she feels worse.

Here she’s resting in my bed, which is softer than the sofa and is more comfortable for her back.