From mid-May until late September, there’s a vegetable stall in the square in Spånga centre, run by a friendly bunch of Turkish guys. They have much better choice, better prices, better customer service and better everything than the supermarket. (Except for spelling.) Between the stall and my vegetable box subscription from Ekolådan, I hardly buy any fruit or veg from the supermarket during summer.

Now, in the beginning of the season, it’s not too exciting. I just buy some vegetables now and again. But my mouth already starts watering when I think of the fresh local(ish) fruit and berries that they will be selling in a few weeks.

Adrian’s preschool held open house this afternoon. I see the preschool every day, but for Ingrid it was the first time in a long while. She’s tired of school (it’s almost the end of the school year after all) and this visit brought with it a wave of nostalgia. There was a quiz walk that took us through all the rooms, and she reminisced about all the places where she used to play and read and eat; about what had changed and what was still the same. She met several of the staff who cared for her back then and still work there now. She climbed her favourite outdoor play structures. And she said she wished she could go back to preschool and play all day long.

A handsome and practical hair style.

It appears to be impossible to just buy and own a phone. Immediately the phone is screaming for accessories of all kinds: leopard-patterned, bunny-eared, and so on.

Summer is effectively here and the kids at preschool spend a lot of time outdoors. Adrian keeps coming home scratches and scraped knees, with and without sticky plasters. Their games seem to involve a lot of sand and stones – I always find sand and gravel in his pockets.

When we get home, he is usually not only dirty but also tired and hungry. The standard procedure is for me to first remind him to wash his hands (and now also his arms up to his elbows), then make “apple boats” for him. He eats a few apples and/or other fruit and watches stuff on the iPad. Then he tells me he is still hungry and asks whether dinner is done soon.

It is Adrian’s responsibility to set the table for dinner. He grumbles about it, almost daily, and says he is tired, but still does it. He has been doing it for weeks, but still asks me almost every time whether he has put each piece in the right place. Mostly he gets it right – fork on the left, knife and glass on the right. When he is really tired, he loses track halfway, and sets some places correctly while others end up mirrored.

Favourite activities: movies and Legos. He never asks for any other toys, only for Legos. We buy a new Lego model him roughly monthly, or bi-monthly if he wants a larger one. When he has enough pocket money saved up, he buys more for his own money. The latest one we bought was a Star Wars X-Wing fighter. Two favourites in one – Lego and Star Wars! He’s got his eyes on the Millennium Falcon model, which is unfortunately too large and too expensive.

He may like the cool, large models, but actually he seems to have more fun with smaller sets. With the big ones, he builds them once, then admires them, plays with the figures, and that’s it. Then we take them apart and put them away, and he is not very interested in rebuilding them. The larger the set, the less likely he is to rebuild it.

He spends much more time building random weird things from a smaller number of pieces, for example a part of a smaller model, or the leftover pieces of a larger one. He likes building with odd-shaped pieces in particular, that you can’t just put together any which way. The outcomes are always interesting to look at, and in his head they are even more interesting – he often has fanciful explanations for what they really are.

Favourite movies: Star Wars: Clone Wars and Lego: Justice League – naturally. He wants to see the actual Star Wars movies but we tell him he’s too young. Also, Batman.

Favourite clothes: sweatpants and sweat shorts. Crocs shoes, which give him blisters when he walks around in them all day, so he wears them with socks.

Favourite colours: blue, green and orange.

Odds and ends: for a few weeks he was waking really, really early in the morning – around 5:30. A year ago he would have woken us, because he couldn’t be on his own. Now he goes downstairs (as quietly as he can manage, which isn’t very quiet really – which is how I know when he wakes) and then watches something on the iPad. I think that has now passed; this morning he woke with us at around 7.

He can still comfortably squat like a kid

Blowing dandelions, on our way home from preschool.

We saw the first blowable dandelions a few days ago, and Adrian picked every single one. Today there were slightly more, but still few enough that both kids ran to them and almost kept count to make sure each of them got a fair share.

The end-of-term show for Ingrid’s dance school.

We went there to see Ingrid’s group perform, but the rest of the show was unexpectedly interesting to watch. Not artistically interesting, perhaps, but intellectually.

A few points I observed:

Expression and emotion matter at least as much as technical and physical skills. Dancers who looked like they were really enjoying themselves were more fun to look at than others who perhaps performed the movements with more skill and precision.

After an hour, it started feeling repetitive. The choreographies mostly consisted of the same basic moves, and the similarities outweighed the differences after a while. I guess there is a limited number of moves you can use for kids who have danced maybe a year or two, once a week.

The more advanced groups had more interesting choreographies, but the competition groups almost went in the other direction: their acts were technically more complicated, and a lot faster, but not so much more interesting from an artistic point of view – choreographed with judges in mind, not general audiences.

It turned out that one of the teachers at the school (Kindahls dansskola) is the choreographer behind several of the performances at Melodifestivalen. Those also consisted of the same “vocabulary” of moves.

Ingrid loves her iPhone. She reorganizes her apps, sets reminders for herself, takes selfies and other photos, and generally finds a reason to fiddle around with the phone almost all the time.

Apart from the phone, she likes reading kids’ magazines and newspapers. Now it’s not just Kalle Anka anymore but also Kamratposten and SvD Junior. She devours each issue as soon as she gets one. “Newspapers have facts”, she told me. And it’s facts of a certain kind she likes reading – about people, current events etc.

The two best parts of all of the magazines are jokes and quizzes. She likes reading them out loud for us.

In a way she likes fiction books as well. She just doesn’t have the patience to read them. But one of the highlights of each day is the bedtime story. Eric reads Harry Potter to her every other night (they recently started on book 3). The other nights I read Üle linna Vinski.

She has started playing on the Wii again, after a lull lasting some months. She has gotten Adrian to try Just Dance with her a few times. The most recent game is Mario Kart which she plays together with Eric.

Ingrid is getting somewhat tired of school and is counting days to the beginning of the summer break. They have very little homework (mostly times tables, currently) but even that is too much. She wishes she was back at preschool with no lessons and could play all day long. She’s looking forward to Adrian starting school in autumn – and talks more about it than Adrian himself does. With some jealousy she describes how little actual schoolwork he will be doing in grade 0, and how much she has to do. She’s also making plans for how they can walk to and from school on their own, so I can do other things in the afternoons. Perhaps not this autumn, yet, but we’ll see.

The end of the school term is near and after-school activities are also ending. She’s had her last dance class and the end-of-term show, and enjoyed both more than I had perhaps expected. She’s already talking about maybe taking not one but two dance classes in autumn. But there’s also scouting, which she definitely wants to continue doing, and she’s thinking about kickboxing as well (because there’s a club nearby that offers girls-only kickboxing classes, and three of her friends do that). Choices will have to be made.

Ingrid and I spent much of the day cleaning out Ingrid’s room – sorting through all the piles of stuff that have accumulated everywhere, throwing away junk and finding appropriate places for non-junk. We took a big box of toys down to the basement, and lots and lots of papers to the recycling bag.