Some late night Christmas shopping at MoS. A surprisingly pleasant and stressless shopping experience: the mall is open until 10 pm, and was quite empty late at night. No crowds, no queues. And pretty Christmas light decorations everywhere.

(PS: I ran into a neighbour on Christmas eve and he told me that even then, the shopping streets in central Stockholm were far from crowded. Which is quite different from my experience from previous years. I wasn’t aware that online shopping has made that much of a difference.)

The annual Making of Lussebullar.

Eric enjoys making and kneading the dough.

Ingrid enjoys tasting the dough…

… and making plaited buns.

Adrian got the knack this year of rolling the dough “worms” that you need for making the traditional lussebulle shapes.

Plenty of buns were produced. Since we’re making them quite close to Christmas this year, and generally eating less sweet stuff than we used to, there’s no risk we’ll run out early.

Current favourite book series: Captain Underpants.

His English skills (mostly passive) have apparently advanced in leaps and bounds. Today he looked at a book I was reading and read the title out loud, pronouncing it better than most adult Swedes. (Zero Repeat Forever)

Current favourite franchises: most things related to Minecraft or Overwatch. He plays both games, but not much. Mostly he just likes the concepts and themes. He watches Ingrid play Overwatch, beads and draws Overwatch figures, reads books about Minecraft etc.

He likes hoodies.
He does not like haircuts, or washing his hair.

Making Christmas cards for friends and family. Last minute, as usual.

Current hobby/interest: knitting.

I notice a certain teenage moodiness. She is volatile, a bit fragile, and sometimes says she feels sad for no real reason. And she is acquiring a habit of performing chores or tasks she dislikes with drama, wordlessly demonstrating just how much she hates doing it and what a heavy burden it is.

Growing up is not easy. Quite often Ingrid says she wishes she was a child again, about 5 or 6 years old, with no real responsibilities.

She is full of Christmas thoughts. She’s quite busy making and buying Christmas gifts, and has made advent calendars (with a drawing for each day) for both me and Adrian.

Adrian has started designing 3d constructions with beads. I think he saw a design for a 3d box with interlocking sides and then realized he could generalize the technique to build any kind of thing. These two things are cannons of some sort, red team vs green team. This is version 1.1; the first design he made had shorter “feet” and kept falling over.

I should be cooking dinner, and Adrian should be reading his homework, but we don’t really have the energy right this moment.

Ingrid is opening a “loot box” in Overwatch. Adrian watches and shares the excitement.

Apparently there was good stuff in this box.

He doesn’t like haircuts, or combing his hair. (Every time I make him wash it, he also reminds me that he really doesn’t like that either, but he’s now accepted that there’s no way around a twice-weekly shampooing.) Whenever he finds it lying too straight, especially after washing it, he musses it until it has just that right amount of mussedness.