Adrian with his new sticker book. It’s got spaceships!

I’m posting backdated daily images below the kids’ monthly posts as I slowly catch up with culling and editing my photos. So scroll down if you want to see them all!

Quirky habit: constant movement of the mouth. Mostly he talks all the time. When he doesn’t, his mouth makes noises. Humming, random words, random pieces of random words, or just sounds. He can be playing on his own, or putting on his shoes, or eating fish fingers – he makes sound all the time. We sometimes have to tell him to stop humming while chewing, so that the rest of us can talk.
Eric tells me that he was the same as a kid, even when he was quite a bit older than Adrian is now.

Random fact: it seems he has outgrown his milk protein allergy and can now eat dairy products.
He refuses to try any outright dairy products such as cheese or cow’s milk butter, mostly because he generally refuses to try any new food. But since he has no such reservations about desserts, we tested it by making pancakes with cow’s milk one day, without telling him, and couldn’t notice any effects afterwards. Since then I’ve been letting him eat dairy when he doesn’t notice it (pasta with a creamy chicken sauce and parmesan!) and in desserts, pancakes, even dairy ice cream – and it seems to work just fine.

Favourite thing above all: Lego. Nothing compares to Lego. The one thing he simply must pack for our Estonia trip: Lego. The one thing he wants to buy at the toy store: Lego.
Favourite Legos: Lego Creator kits, that let you build three different things from the same set of bricks. Also, Lego Ninjago.
I’ve stopped looking at the suggested age range when we buy Legos. As long as the kit is small enough, he can build them all without difficulty. The only thing he needs help with is putting the tiny stickers on straight.

Favourite movie: Minions! And now he points out all the minion-themed stuff that is everywhere. Which is a lot.

Favourite conversation starter: tänk om, “what if”. His what-ifs are usually not particularly fanciful or bizarre, just very random. What if this table wasn’t here. What if we bought ALL these books. What if it started raining right now.

Favourite topic of discussion: ages. How old am I? How old is aunt Rahel? Am I older or younger than Rahel’s teenage son?
He cannot yet see any logic in ages, it seems to me. You’d think that it would be obvious that “I am a mom, aunt Rahel is a mom, aunt Rahel’s son is a big kid, moms are older than kids… hence I am older than her son” but not for Adrian.

Favourite item of clothing: still pyjamas. He wears pyjamas all the time around the house, and often when we go out as well. I still sometimes feel a need to conform somewhat to social expectations about clothing, so to satisfy both our needs, I’ve started buying pyjamas that look neutral and non-pyjamassy. (As an exercise, you could try and guess which of the t-shirts he is wearing in these photos are actually pyjama tops.)

Legos apparently work as a bath toy, too. Or, well, since the Legos and the bath do not interact at all, I guess they are more of a bath distraction: they help me get Adrian in the bath and soak there for a while.

Quirky habit: Pre-emptively saying “what?” with a shrug when she is doing something that she thinks we might question, even though I have no intention of questioning it.
Quirky habit #2: calling everything grejsimojs (“thingamajig”).
Random fact: avatars are important. When we play Just Dance on the Wii or some other game, she must have a nice-looking avatar. It needs to look like a girl, and it must have stylish colours. Silly animals, bearded faces etc are not OK. Same with usernames. Her top choices currently are mostly pretty girl’s names, and sweet names like “cupcake” and “candy”.
Fashion choices: she’s transitioning from child to tween. She always used to choose dresses with strong floral patterns in a lot of bold colours (especially purple and violet). Now for the first time ever she has asked for blue jeans, which she has always dismissed as way too boring and colourless.
Bedtime stories: Narnia with Eric; Doctor Dolittle with me.

Favourite new thing: an activity-tracking wristband.
Favourite food/drink: carbonated water with a bit of apple juice.
Favourite entertainment: Minecraft videos. She especially loves iHasCupquake and her videos about the Enchanted Oasis mod.
Favourite entertainment #2: radio! Until now we’ve only ever listened to the radio while driving. It’s perfect for her. She likes pop music, she likes to have a lot of sensory input, she likes variety. She even enjoys the advertising. Now we happened to find a radio in the basement and it was an instant hit.

Ingrid has two friends in Estonia. Two of my childhood friends just happened to have children who are almost exactly her age, to within a few months. Whenever we are in Estonia, those three spend a lot of time together.

Adrian does play a bit with them, too, but not so much. No, Adrian’s best friend in Estonia is Artur, the big brother of Ingrid’s friend Katariina, ten years older than him. Adrian absolutely adores him, and when we started planning our trip to Estonia, all he talked about was Artur. And Artur is so incredibly kind and patient with Adrian, which of course makes Adrian adore him even more. He lets Adrian climb all over him, carries him when Adrian’s legs get tired, and so on.

Still in Rõuge, we went on a little excursion to Luhasoo bog.

Estonia has a lot of bogs – about one fifth of the area is covered in marshes and bogs. (Here’s a bit more about Estonian nature for the non-Estonians among you.) Many of them have plank paths for hiking, and some have raised viewing platforms.

Luhasoo has a hiking trail of about 5 km with a very nice plank path through the bog, to and around the lake in the middle of the bog. Many of the planks had started rotting – not so much that there was any danger of ending up in the bog water, but they were springy enough to notice when walking. Which I actually rather liked.

At intervals along the trail there were educational boards with information about the ecology, plant life etc of the bog – really well made and interesting. I learned that bog water is so acidic that it harbours no bacteria and is therefore very safe to drink, and for the same reason peat moss can be used to cover wounds. I also learned that the correct English name for the wild berries that in Swedish are called “blueberry” is not actually blueberry but bilberry.

This evening we drove out to Rõuge to a friend’s country house. As night started falling, we had the most beautiful fog outside, so some of us went for a very late walk. Others ran around like madmen.

Yet another breakfast shot!

Seriously, after two nights of crappy sleep I was so tired today that I didn’t pick up the camera all day except for this shot. I felt like a traffic hazard driving from Tallinn to Tartu. Then we drove around in central Tartu in its totally tourist-unfriendly labyrinth of one-way streets, looking for a parking spot. After we finally got access to our apartment and did some urgent shopping for fish fingers and breakfast materials, we all fell into bed.