Adrian is so earnest. He does everything so intensely and with such presence and conviction. Everything is for real, everything is 100%.

He comes up with pretend games and then plays them and develops them further with passion well past the point when I get tired of them. Currently, for example, when we walk somewhere on the incredibly icy streets, the ruts in ice are a labyrinth, like in the Labyrint TV show, and in between the walls of ice there are monsters called Taurus (like in the show), and you mustn’t step on the monsters or they will slime you. No, you mustn’t step on the ice because then you will end up in the cage. No, you must step on the monsters because that will make them flat like pancakes. No, stepping on the monsters will make them small like the tip of your thumb. No, stepping on the monsters will kill them and then they cannot slime us any more. And so on.

Monsters and killing them is a recurring theme. There are all kinds of monsters, and all kinds of ways of vanquishing them.

For obvious reasons, ice is another topic that Adrian keeps coming back to. He talks about how ice melts when you take it indoors, asks if ice can kill you if it hits you, and if you can eat ice.

He also talks about growing up. You grow when you eat. And you grow when you have a birthday party. (He insists it is definitely not the other way around.)

Adrian may have a rich imagination, but some things should just the same as they always are. When we play with Lego, he gets angry with me when I put the wrong hair or headgear on a figure, or put a dog in the same car with Spiderman. Nej det ska inte vara så!

When I find a piece I like in our pile of Lego pieces, he “needs that one” and tries to grab it. When I start building something and he likes the look of it, he doesn’t make a similar one – he wants to take mine, or says “make one like that for me, too”.

In other situations as well, when Ingrid or I come up with an idea that he likes, he doesn’t spin it out further but just tries to grab it. On our way home from school I asked both kids what body parts they would like to have. Ingrid says she’d like wings. “I’ll have wings too!” shouts Adrian. I say I want a tail like a monkey. “I’ll have a monkey tail too!” says Adrian.

He tries threats as a negotiation tactic. But his threats are not very well chosen – often he uses threats that would hurt him more than me. I accept this threat, and then he quickly back-pedals. “If you don’t read another chapter then I will never listen to this book again!” OK, I say. “Uh… OK, I do want to listen to it tomorrow as well.”

He is starting to try reading very short words, and asks me what this or that word says. He likes to browse Bamse comics, and asks me about big bold words like “Kaboom” or “Bang” etc. He also tries to spell out the names of his friends on the phone list for his preschool group, when he wants me to call someone for a playdate.

At preschool he works a lot with perler beads. Almost every day he comes home with a beaded object. At first it was just geometric shapes, first with random colours and then with patterns. Then he started following all kinds of patterns that they have at preschool. We have a perler bead bird and a bunny, a cupcake and an ice cream cone, and so on.

Small stuff:

• For a while he kept waking up at night and wandering into our bedroom. We even put the third bed “unit” back so there would be space for him. Then he stopped.
• I gave him fleece pyjamas for Christmas (that I ordered all the way from the US because I couldn’t find any in Sweden) and he so loves wearing them.
• I am making him practice walking down the stairs with just one step per stair, when we walk together. He likes to step left-right on each stair, and the slowness of that approach is beginning to really bother me.
• He has discovered that he likes salmon.