So much is going on in Adrian’s life. His life is full, and he is full of life. So much energy, so much feeling! He is childhood embodied.

This month brought warm weather and Adrian has really enjoyed spring. We’ve been out on playgrounds, tried cycling, and even the inflatable pool has been in use. On playgrounds Adrian loves swings best and he can swing (or rather, have me push the swing) for half an hour before he tires.

It took a while for him to get used to spring weather and new clothes. He insisted on wearing his rubber boots with warm lining, and the “furry” jacket, and taking his mittens to nursery every day. Gradually he came to accept normal shoes and fleece jackets instead, but he’s still a bit suspicious of his Crocs shoes.

Even now he loves wearing a jersey hat, sometimes even indoors. He doesn’t like wind in his hair, he says, and when it gets windy he always puts on a hat. Also he never goes out without shoes, even though he loves being barefoot indoors.

Ingrid’s old tank tops were instant favourites. Not because they were tank tops but because he loved the pictures: a tiger on one, an elephant on the other. The novelty of no sleeves is so great that he points it out to people he meets – inga armar!

Adrian is usually happy to be around strangers but crowds make him uncomfortable. When we went to the Valborg bonfire, he was really bothered by the masses of people, and asked to go home. Det är jättemycket barn. Och mycket tädi och mycket onu. Jag vill inte vara här. (“There is very much kids. And much woman and much man. I don’t want to be here.”) The bonfire itself was scary, too.

He is also afraid of animals, especially if they are running loose and he thinks that they could come close. He doesn’t want to visit his best friend Hanna because they have cats. He pulls back when he sees a dog, and ideally wants to go to the other side of the street. I’ve been explaining to him how the dog is tied to a leash and cannot come closer. One day we saw a hare, and even though it was in a garden across the street Adrian closed his eyes and wouldn’t look.

Cuddly furry animals are scary, and he would never go pet one. But chickens, for example, are less scary than guinea pigs. And tortoises are not too scary at all, and a crocodile (a small one, and behind glass) was more interesting than scary, as we found out at this year’s Djurexpo.

Language-wise he has obviously decided that Swedish is his language. He understands Estonian perfectly well, and knows the names of many things in both languages. But when he speaks, he always chooses Swedish, and only uses an Estonian word when he cannot remember the Swedish one.

He is learning about similarity and groupings, and I often hear him use words like “same”, “similar”, “together”, “only”. He is also interested in amounts, especially jättemycket! and supermycket!. When we pour a drink for him he often asks for supermycket, which I think means that he wants a full glass, not half like I usually pour for him.

He has entered a “can do” phase. He wants to do things on his own without any help. When he drops a grape on the floor, instead of asking me to pick it up (as he used to) he now says Bara jag ska hämta!, “Only I will get it”, sometimes explicitly instructing me not to touch it. I am also not allowed to help him put on his sandals or hat, or to set the table for him, and sometimes even to open my nursing t-shirt for him.

I have made some attempts at getting him to use the potty but had no success. He knows what it’s for and he is perfectly aware that we all do our thing at the toilet. But he has no interest in trying it out himself. When I get him to sit on the potty he produces nothing, and then he gets up and less than a minute later makes a puddle on the floor.

He is aware of his own peeing and pooping, and often tells us afterwards that he needs a clean nappy, but it still seems to take him by surprise every time and he doesn’t seem to have any “premonition” in advance.

He still needs a nap during the day, almost always, but then often stays awake quite late, falling asleep around 9 together with Ingrid. It isn’t rare for Ingrid to fall asleep before him.

He still nurses about as much as he used to: when we wake, when we get home in the afternoon, frequently during the evening, at bedtime, and once or twice during the small hours.

Odds and ends:

• When he is happy, he often runs with his tongue out. So when he falls, the part that feels most discomfort is his tongue, which is then all covered with sand. He then tries to wipe it off with his hand which is also sandy, and doesn’t understand why it gets no better.
• Even when he is upset, angry or sad, he still says thank you. He can be fighting with Ingrid about a toy, crying with frustration, and when Ingrid gives it to him, he chokes out a “thank you” through his tears.
• He watched Rise of the Guardians with Ingrid and Eric and is now looking forward to Christmas. Idag är det jul! Nu kommer jultomten! – “Today is Christmas! Now Santa Claus will come” he says. My explanations about seasons, and having to wait for winter and snow, don’t really make sense to him. He still doesn’t quite understand “tomorrow” so the wait until winter is an unimaginable eternity.

Running

Pippi Longstocking is Adrian’s favourite character, and Ingrid loves many of Astrid Lindgren’s stories, too. So yesterday we went to Astrid Lindgren’s World, a Lindgren theme park, together with another family.

Most of the park consisted of recreations of environments from the books. There was Pippi’s house of course (and a pirate ship next to it), as well as copies of Bullerby, Mattis’s fort, Thorn Rose Valley, and so on. Most things were scaled down to child size, with small houses, narrow streets, even scaled-down cobblestones.

I found the park itself a bit underwhelming. Many of the environments were just façades: the doors and windows couldn’t be opened. In others you could go inside but there was hardly anything there, just bare walls and a bare floor. Cute to look at from afar but there wasn’t much to actually do there.

Mattis’s fort was at least large enough so we could walk around on the walls and climb up and down in the towers, and Karlsson’s roof had some slides. There were also some other bits and pieces where the kids could climb, including a large “don’t touch the ground” trail that Ingrid enjoyed a lot.

There were performances throughout the day, and we saw two of them: one Pippi show, and one sing-along show. The actors also sang and performed between the main shows. I think Pippi and her crew were out and interacting with the crowd almost all day.

Ingrid loved hanging out around the Pippi house with Pippi and her sailors and pirates. She’s now independent enough that we could just sit at a café nearby while she wandered around. Apart from the shows, her favourite attraction was a little knee-deep pond with two cable ferries. She kept going back and forth across the pond, on her own, with Adrian, with random other kids, for around half an hour I think, and only quit after she accidentally stepped into the pond and got rather wet.

Adrian just enjoyed hanging around the park with Ingrid and his friend Hanna, and looking at stuff.

The park was extremely family-friendly. There were picnic tables, toilets, cafés and restaurants everywhere. At times it felt like there were more cafés than attractions there. But it was very convenient, with almost no queueing anywhere. The restaurants served locally sourced food, and it was real food, with no hot dogs or hamburgers in sight. But expensive… 75 kr for a kids’ portion of meatballs and two potatoes is a bit extreme.

We were lucky to be at ALV on a Friday during the off season. The park wasn’t empty but not too crowded either. As we drove past this morning we saw many more people heading that way so avoiding the weekend was a good thing. I can imagine that it could get awfully busy there during the main season which starts in early June. On the other hand it is probably also more fun then, with many more shows during the day, and more characters from the books just walking around in the park.

I don’t think we’ll be going back there next year. Maybe in a few years’ time, when Adrian is as old as Ingrid is now. And in that case probably at the very beginning or end of the high season, so we catch more of the action but (hopefully) not much more of the crowds.

A new kind of independence is developing in Ingrid: she has started experimenting with being completely on her own. It began with an afternoon at the playground, after school. Adrian wanted to stay; Ingrid wanted to go home. I handed my keys to Ingrid and she went on home on her own.

This took me by surprise, because when she last tried being home alone, she didn’t hold out many minutes. Now she was totally cool with it.

So we did it a couple more times. Sometimes she’s gone home from the playground to pick up some stuff. Once I did the opposite and left her at the playground with Adrian while I went back home to pick up something. Sometimes she’s gone to a friend’s place to ask if they can play. A few times she has just gone out to ride her kickbike or skateboard on her own for a while.

She likes staying up late, usually reading. She can usually still get up the next morning, but by the afternoon the lack of sleep catches up with her and she is tired and whiny. So now I try to send her off to bed by 9 at the latest. But sometimes no arguments work, not even the threat of missing the bedtime story (because after 9 we are usually both so tired that I don’t want to tell a story).

When we do have time for a story, she often asks for something that has things (inanimate objects) that come to life and can talk: toys, or the inhabitants of the kitchen, or the numbers one to nine. And preferrably their talking should be arguments about which one of them is the best. A reflection of her daily reality at school perhaps.

Sleeping is just so utterly boring, it seems. “Who came up with the idea of sleeping, anyway?” she asked today. “And why do we have to eat? And poop?” Not really wondering, but just expressing her frustration with these stupid wastes of time.

At mealtimes, too, it is clear that she would rather not have to eat. Whenever she is snacking, she will bring some Bamse magazines to read. At the dinner table she often forgets that she is supposed to be eating, and plays or talks instead, and we remind her to eat. Sometimes she gets bored with eating and leaves the table before she is full, and then realizes an hour later that she is actually still hungry.

At home this isn’t much of an issue, but at school it causes more problems. Their lunch break is short, and she is basically so distracted at mealtimes that she doesn’t have time to eat. And then the break ends and she wolfs down the food that is still on her plate.

For a long time Ingrid had been complaining of stomach aches, off and on, especially after school lunches. But she wasn’t very consistent in reporting them, so it took months for us to figure out the pattern. Finally we realized that the aches usually came when she had had to eat too fast. Now she moved to another table at school, closer to the teachers who can remind her to actually eat. And I don’t think she’s had any stomach aches since then.

Miscellaneous:

• She is letting her hair grow long and it is now often in her face. This seems to bother her more than me. She doesn’t like hair clips, but will accept soft hair bands.
• She likes playing with words, especially names, and turning them backwards.
• Favourite game: vändtia (which seems to correspond to the English Shithead – I’m glad it’s not called that in Swedish!)

We have nine sets of windows that “need” curtains. (I don’t think the storage closet needs any, and the glass wall in the living room is not going to get curtains either.) The bathroom window already had one, which leaves eight. I managed to sew curtains for four of them, so I’m halfway there. Perhaps next winter I will get the rest done.

The “office” was first in line because I wanted to be able to get rid of the glare on our computer screens. Thick, lined, but otherwise un-fancy curtains in a fabric that matches the art nouveau and early-1900s inspiration I’ve generally been following in this house: Sandberg’s Lily of the Valley.

The curtains for our bedroom are similar in style and construction. If your memory is really sharp, you may recognize the fabric: this is the curtain I made for the balcony door back in 2008. Back then I expected it to hang there for the next 15 or 20 years. The door itself only survived for less than three more years, but the curtain got a second life. I removed the tabs at the top, made a twin for it, and now it hangs in our bedroom. I am hesitant to make another prediction about its expected life, but I hope it will be long. The fabric: Sandberg’s Louise.

Actually, the twin is not quite a twin. Or maybe it’s a fraternal twin. The new fabric I ordered did not quite match the old one: one is more beige and the other is more gray. Maybe the old one changed colour in the sun? Maybe in a couple of years they will be indistinguishable. But during the day the curtains are apart, and at night nobody looks at them, so the mismatch doesn’t bother me at all.

The curtains in Ingrid’s bedroom are of a very different style… We looked at photos of curtains online and Ingrid had a very clear idea about what hers should look like. Patterned, but with a small pattern, “like maybe hearts or rings”. Ideally violet or lilac or something like that, or maybe blue. And tied back with nice bows, and with a valance. It took a while to find the fabric because this is not exactly in line with current decorating trends, but Ingrid was very happy with the result. She likes to untie the bows for the night.

And finally, some cushions. We had a set of three old cushions in dark green linen that I sewed in 1997 when I moved in with Eric, and they were really at the end of their life. There were actual holes in the fabric. These new ones are in dark brown wool felt, decorated with fabric in traditional Estonian patterns. My working name for the set is “Rebel yellow”. One of them I made after Ingrid’s wishes – can you guess which one?

PS: If you can’t make the numbers add up – office + bedroom + Ingrid’s room equals three, not four, right? – it’s because the office has two large windows which I count as two, not one.

The oddest things turn out to have 3-year age limits because they are “choking hazards due to small parts”:

• Foam noodle water squirters
• Felt tip pens
• Play tents
• Toy barbecue set in wood and felt (ours is slightly different but also has a 4-year age limit)

I have never hesitated about letting Adrian play with any of these since before he was even two. To me, these are great toddler toys. And marble runs, too.

Well, I would not give marbles or felt tip pens to 6-month babies who still explore the world with their mouths. But surely two-year-olds are well past that stage? It makes me wonder what sort of kids these safety standards are based on.

And how are these toys even choking hazards? The caps on felt tip pens, yes. But noodle water guns? For them to become a choking risk, the kid would first have to tear off a piece. That’s not going to happen easily in normal play. Does the average toddler behave like a wild animal, attacking everything with their teeth and claws?

It’s not a book that gives you practical tips to make your everyday life easier. In fact, after reading this book, your everyday parenting will probably become harder – because the book will make you think about parenting in a different way.

Instead of summarizing the book in my own words, I will let it speak for itself, by quoting the paragraphs that made the strongest impression on me.

This book looks at one such distinction [between different types of parental love] – namely, between loving kids for what they do and loving them for who they are. The first sort of love is conditional, which means children must earn it by acting in ways we deem appropriate, or by performing up to our standards. The second sort of love is unconditional: It doesn’t hinge on how they act, whether they’re successful or well behaved or anything else.
(p. 10)

In our society, we are taught that good things must always be earned, never given away. Indeed, many people become infuriated at the possibility that this precept has been violated. Notice, for example, the hostility many people feel toward welfare and those who rely on it.
[...]
Ultimately, conditional parenting reflects a tendency to see almost any human interaction, even among family members, as a kind of economic transaction.
(p. 17)

The way many kids are treated suggests a lack of respect for their needs and preferences – in fact, a lack of respect for children, period. A lot of parents act as though they believe that kids don’t deserve respect in the way adults do. Many years ago, the psychologist Haim Ginott invited us to consider the way we might react if our child accidentally left behind some item that belonged to him or her – and then to contrast that with the way we might react if a chronically forgetful friend of ours did the same thing. Few of us would think of berating another adult in the tone that is routinely used with kids: “What is the matter with you? How many times do I have to remind you to look around for all your things before you leave? Do you think I have nothing better to do than…” and so on. With an adult, we’d be more likely to say, simply, “Here’s your umbrella.”
(p. 49)

A fair amount of research suggests that people’s basic parenting styles “are already in place before they gain direct experience with their own offspring.” These styles are deeply rooted in experiences they had long ago.

A man left a message on my website recently that read, in part, “I watch, as if a spectator at a train wreck, as my friends use the same parental behaviors that wounded them when they were little. It is not a pretty sight.” Nor, I would add, is it a simple matter to determine why this happens. The folks he’s talking about presumably didn’t sit down and consciously decide to make their own kids as unhappy as they were.
(p. 106)

If you haven’t experienced emphatic parenting, it’s hard for you to become such a parent yourself. The same might be said of unconditional love: If you didn’t get it, you don’t have it to give. People who were accepted only conditinoally as children may come to accept others (including their own kids) in the same way.
(p. 107)

Some parents live in terror of what other people – not only their friends and relatives, but the nameless and omnipresent judge known as “they” – will think of their children, and thus of their own parenting skills. [...] Even relatively secure parents are sometimes made uncomfortable by the possibility that someone somewhere might be thinking, “Boy, that mother doesn’t know what she’s doing. I mean, just look at her kids!” Consider how much of what we do with our children is driven by worries about how we’ll be perceived by other adults.
(p. 111)

These excerpts represent the foundations of the book, and the parts that resonated most with me. But there are also more concrete principles and recommendations. This is a book to return to again and again. It is full of immensely important insights. It is also very readable and “just right”: neither too long nor too short, neither too academic in tone nor too breezy. I wish every adult would read this.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris

At this point I am second-guessing just about everything in all the photos I take, but something is better than nothing, and this is better than what I’ve managed before.

We brought up the garden furniture from the basement, and the outdoor drying rack, and the Crocs and the water guns. Eric inaugurated the drying rack; the kids had fun with the water guns; I had fun spreading manure in the hedges.

I was out all afternoon – no hat, no warm coat!

Tomorrow I’m packing away the woolly hats and snow suits and winter boots.

Fundamentally, Adrian is a happy and sweet child. He is co-operative, considerate and kind: he is usually happy to please others and do as he is asked, and he takes care to be nice to others.

When when we get home and I ask him to put his mittens and boots away, he happily complies. When he comes up with some sort of mischief – such as playing with flour or potato starch while I’m cooking, or throwing all my clothes on the floor, or dipping his hand in the drink in his glass – he asks first. And when I say no, he listens. The fact that I try to say yes as often as possible probably matters, too: he would be less inclined to cooperate if he always got a no.

But this month a new streak of anger and frustration has appeared. When he is denied something that he really wants, or when things don’t go his way, he gets very angry, and he is very aware of his anger.

Sometimes he simply tells us: Jag är jättearg!, “I am very angry!” Or he can tell me, Du får inte prata med mig!, “You mustn’t talk to me!” which really means “I don’t want to hear what you are saying”.

Other times he scolds the thing he blames for his woes. Dumma golvet! (“stupid floor”) when he hits his toe against the floor, dumma lappen! (“stupid cloth”) when he is angry about having his bottom wiped, dumma springa! (“stupid run”) when he runs and falls, and dumma mamma when I won’t let him eat raisins for dinner.

But he can also just shriek to express his anger – with controlled, calculated shrieks, not mindless rage.

One thing that he regularly gets angry about is ownership. He wants to own things, and he likes to tell me how this thing is his, and his only, and not Hanna’s, and how Darin cannot have it. (Hanna and Darin are two of his friends at nursery.) Unfortunately he doesn’t own very many things, and often wants to own things that aren’t really his. He doesn’t want Ingrid to take bread from the same bag as he does, nor to share the water bottle with her. He gets very upset if someone sits on his chair. But he also gets upset if I sit on what in his mind is Eric’s chair.

At the same time he isn’t really very interested in the few things that he does own. The Pippi doll lies forgotten in a corner; the stuffed doll named Johan remains at nursery.

The one exception is clothes. He is fond of many of his clothes, especially the ones with pictures – the Pippi and Bamse t-shirts, the crocodile pyjamas and the one with Winnie the Pooh, the monster socks. But he also loves his jersey hat and his rubber boots.

Pyjamas are his favourite clothes, and he regularly wears pyjamas to nursery. I guess they are soft and comfortably loose. For several days his favourite was a shimmery pink skirt (that I made for Ingrid a long time ago). I called it his disco skirt because he liked to put on while dancing.

He has also tried out Ingrid’s nail polish – blue on the right hand, red on the left – and that was fun. He showed off his nails to everyone we met. But when Ingrid chose glittery black, and he of course had to have the same, he regretted it immediately: black is definitely not his favourite colour.

He thinks that things become his when he has used them for a while. He plays a bit with a ball, then leaves it to do something else, but gets angry if Ingrid then takes the ball. It’s like he’s anxious to own everything.

The same goes for activities. He doesn’t want to miss out on anything. This is especially noticeable when he is with other kids, either with Ingrid at home, or with the other children at nursery. As soon as someone does something that looks interesting, he needs to be there, but at the same time he doesn’t want to let go of what he was doing before. It’s a constant race for him to try and keep up with everything that the others are doing. He is so much more relaxed when it’s just him and me at home, without Ingrid.

Adrian loves being with Ingrid, but he doesn’t really play with the other kids yet. He understands pretending, but it’s a self-conscious thing for him, an act. “Look, I’m a ghost!” or “look, an elephant”, but it doesn’t turn into play. He still prefers adult company to that of other kids, and often seeks out an adult, both at home and at nursery. Mostly he then wants to read or to sing.

He hates having his hair brushed (det gör jätteont!) and having his dirty nappy changed. Brushing teeth is usually more or less OK, and wiping his nose too.

He enjoys chasing and being chased, especially when it is time to brush his teeth or change his nappy.

He plays with the first letters of words. It began with a friend at nursery calling him Adrian-Padrian. First he didn’t like that at all. Jag är inte Adrian-Padrian! But when we made it a game and called Ingrid Ingrid-Pingrid, and Ingrid joined in and said emme-pemme, he was on board. Now it’s Ingrid-Pingrid and Adrian-Padrian and pappa-lappa and emme-pemme and lappen-pappen and all kinds of things.

He has learned to count to two, and understands when things are two. He counts “one, two”, and holds up two fingers: “I have this many meatballs”. But with larger numbers it’s all wild random guesses.

I’ve been spending more time and effort on photography recently, and would now say it’s one of my main hobbies. (Along with blogging, textile crafts, and gardening.) In general I’m making an effort to balance all the “must do’s” in my life with more fun and creative activities. All work and no play makes Helen a cranky mum.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my camera, from a Nikon D40x to a D3200. The new one does video (which I haven’t had a chance to try out yet) and has 11 autofocus points instead of 3, plus various other nice features.

Along with the new hardware I also decided that it was time to learn new things. Previously I mostly used shutter priority or aperture priority modes; now I’ve switched to manual mode most of the time. I also switched from shutter button focusing to back-button focusing, and from auto white balance to the preset modes. (I don’t quite feel up to managing fully manual white balance yet.)

Using manual mode has been working out much better than I expected. I don’t always nail the exposure but the results are at least no worse than before. And the photos turn out more predictable and consistent: previously every photo in a batch would use slightly different settings, because the camera decide to slightly tweak some setting or other, but now they’re all the same, which makes post-processing faster.

Manual mode requires more thinking and effort, which is both good and bad. Every photo takes more time, so I miss some shots because I’m too slow. But it requires me to pay more attention to what I’m doing, and makes the whole thing more interesting. Just enough of a challenge.

The more I practice, the less I like what I achieve, and the more I see how much there is for me to learn. But whenever I feel discouraged, like I’m not getting anywhere, I scroll down to my photos from a year ago and look at how much I’ve learned since then. Look at those chopped limbs! Look at the weird framing! Look at the missed lighting opportunity – why didn’t I take that picture from the other side!

One particular project that I want to tackle is self-portraits. I’m the only one who regularly takes photos in our family, which means that I have lots of photos of the kids (whom I see most), some of Eric (who is at home less) and almost none of myself. Twenty years from now the kids will be able to see what they looked like, but not what I looked like. It’s like I was missing from the family.

It turns out that you really need a tripod for effective self-portraits. I’ve tried to make do without, but it’s hard, and really limits the angles I can use. (For the photo below, for example, I would normally not have faced the direction I’m facing, but the only support I found for my camera was a pile of books on my desk.) So now I’m thinking of buying a tripod. And perhaps some more prime lenses, too… The purchase of one piece of gear triggers a cascade of others.

I’ve also realized that our style of interior decoration – with colour and patterned wallpapers – and the general clutter we have everywhere is not helpful for getting good photos. The colours and wallpapers will stay, because I value this warm, colourful atmosphere more than I value having convenient backdrops for photography. But the clutter I can do something about. Case in point: these cupboards really need doors.

This month, after a long time of increasing frustration (on my part) and increasing obsession (on Ingrid’s part), I started an iPad fast. For just over a week, the iPads have been hidden and out of reach of the kids. Movie time is strictly limited, too, but movies haven’t been a problem in the same way as the iPads have.

YouTube was really the worst. It was just like having a TV in the house: mindlessly skipping from one channel to another, always finding something that is better than nothing, watching whatever happened to be on. And then at about 8 o’clock when iPad time ended, she realized she wanted to play a game, or to for me to read a book for her – except that by then it was too late. So effectively the iPad got the priority slot, and all other activities got whatever dribs and drabs were left over.

Ingrid’s first reaction was as expected, with both tears and whining. But then she adjusted, and now I don’t think she’s even mentioned it for several days.

I was aiming for an iPad-free week, but now I won’t reintroduce it unless the kids ask for it. And when that happens, it will be without YouTube.

Ingrid reads as much as ever. She still likes best the books that she can read from beginning to end in one sitting, and isn’t that fond of chapter books. She likes the feeling of completion, of achievement, I think: when she is reading a longer book, she often comes to me and proudly reports “look how far I’ve read already!”

When I read for her, she listens very attentively. Often she comments on the contents, and especially when she notices parallels to other things we’ve read or seen or experienced. She also asks about words she doesn’t understand.

Bedtime stories are an important part of our daily routine. After she’s brushed her teeth and gotten into her nightie, she gets into a bed, and I tell a story.

At first I used to read a story for her. Then we got to a point where Ingrid and Adrian would go to bed at the same time, and reading no longer worked: Adrian wouldn’t stay still if there was any light in the room, and nobody would get any closer to sleep. So then I’d retell old fairy tales instead. But I ran out of stories after a while, and started making them up.

Now we do that every night. Ingrid gets to pick a starting point, the thing she wants a story about. Often she wants an animal: a story about a cat, or a horse, or a dog and a wolf. And if her chosen starting point is not enough to get my imagination going, I ask for more starter ideas. So we’ve had stories about “a horse who gets stolen”, a “scary story about a dragon”, about a detective, “two squirrels who fall in love” (after watching Ice Age), “a ball who is alive and can talk, and all the other toys as well” and so on.

Sometimes we do the story with Adrian still awake, next to me, and then he often drifts off halfway through the story. Sometimes Ingrid comes upstairs just after Adrian has fallen asleep, and then I half-whisper while Adrian sleeps. When Adrian tires early, we may do the story in Ingrid’s bedroom.

By the end of it, anyway, Adrian is asleep and the story is over. After the story I lie next to Ingrid for a while, and she talks to me about whatever is on her mind – usually things that happened to her during the day.

Then we hug. She touches her nose to mine. We wish each other good night. As I go downstairs, she rolls over to Adrian’s side, and falls asleep while holding his hand.

The good night wishes get more and more elaborate. At first it was just “good night”. Now it’s “good night, sweet dreams, sleep well, have beautiful dreams” and “no, you have an even better night” and “twice as beautiful dreams for you” and so on.

Only this week she suddenly realized that the Estonian head ööd was made up of two actual words, “good” and “night”, not a meaningless sound of hedööd (“g’night”). head… ööd… ja head… und… she wonderingly said, “it’s ’good’ and ’night’!” Yes it is.

New skills:

• Crocheting (chain stitch), nice and even. She crotcheted a pink and magenta bookmark for me.
• Robber language.

When I was pregnant I even worried a bit whether I would be able to breastfeed with such small breasts. But boy did they grow when the milk came in. I was fascinated by the change. Big, round, full breasts, with visible veins. I even had a cleavage!

And they worked great for breastfeeding. Ingrid was over two when I stopped breastfeeding, and I only did it so we could start trying for another kid. Adrian, at over two and a half, still nurses. I won’t really call it “feeding” any more because it’s not about food any more. It’s about intimacy and comfort. Even Ingrid still likes to sit close and lean her cheek against my chest sometimes when Adrian nurses.

During these years I have become friends with my breasts. I now see them more with my kids’ eyes, rather than with others’ eyes. They are yummy and cuddly. They are not there to be looked at, and I really don’t care at all what other people may think of them. Nowadays they are quite small again and it doesn’t bother me the least. I have stopped wearing a bra because I have realized that I don’t need one, even though all the billboards try to sell them to me.

This weekend we decided to make spring nevertheless. We hung up Ingrid’s swing. Eric put up a nesting box. I planted pansies, labeled as “frost tolerant” at the garden centre so I hope they survive. Eric swapped tyres on the car, from winter to summer tyres. Adrian and I took our first bike ride. (Ingrid has bravely been cycling for several weeks already.)

I found one crocus blossom, two snowdrops, and a dozen scillas in the sunniest corner of the garden.

The question that starts it all off is simple: Why do we get injured by running? How come every other animal can run without damaging their body, but not us humans?

It is about seeing running differently, and doing running differently. Running should not be about expensive highly-engineered shoes with thick soles, or gritting your teeth and going on through the pain. Done right, running should be full of joy and not pain. (McDougall is a strong proponent of barefoot running.)

It is about man’s history as a runner. According to one hypothesis, humans are born to run, and running is the skill that gave us an advantage compared to other species. (See the endurance running hypothesis.)

It is about an Indian tribe in Mexico for whom long-distance running is a way of life – the one group of people who still run like humans did a long time ago.

It is about six long-distance runners, all among the best in the US, meeting up for a 50-mile race together with some of those Indians in Mexico’s canyons, and those people’s back stories.

Underneath it all, the book is a song of praise to long-distance running.

The book is interesting, almost a page-turner. I wouldn’t say it’s well-written, exactly (it rambles and meanders, and the hyperbole occasionally gets annoying). But the book is so full of passion and energy that I could live with the author’s style.

I am not a runner, and I have never loved running. After reading Born to Run, I am tempted to become one.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

Cirkus Cirkör is Sweden’s one and only major contemporary circus company. We last saw a show by them in 2010. Yesterday it was time for another one.

I quite liked Wear it like a crown, the 2010 show, except for one thing: the theme. It was about daring to be yourself, and daring to make mistakes. Which is not a bad theme in itself, but it was presented way too loudly and in-your-face and unsubtly in the show. Feelgood pop philosophy aimed at teenagers. But otherwise it was a nice show.

Their show for this year is titled Knitting Peace. I expected something similar to last time, but came away much more impressed. This show is noticeably more mature: quieter, subtler, leaving more to the imagination.

The dim lighting and the simple monochrome visual design, and the music (partly performed live on stage), all came together into one contemplative whole.

Knitting suffuses everything. The scene decorations are made out of rope, knitted or tangled. The props are rope tangles, or balls of yarn (ranging from palm-sized to one metre), or knitted dolls, capes, nets, or just plain ropes. And because they are so simple, they can speak of many things at once.

A man struggling with a tangle of rope: a tangled relationship? or a tricky problem? or Man’s struggle in general?

Self-inflicted or externally caused?

But the yarns and ropes were not just props: not just for decoration, or for the theatrical aspect of the show. Most of the circus numbers were also built around ropes and knitting. Rope-walking, of course, is an obvious one (but you’d be surprised at the number of variations possible). But ropes can also be used for climbing, hanging, tying… Rope can be knit (live on stage); rope ladders can be unravelled. One can balance on balls of rope, and tumble over and around them, or why not climb into one. The variety was amazing.

Technically the show doesn’t reach the same level as, for example, Cirque du Soleil. But in this show the theatrical aspect was so much stronger that the technical skills didn’t really matter as much. The two shows are so different that they cannot really be compared – they are two different genres.

So there is a lot of knitting in the show, but not much of an overt peace theme. Instead, if I were to try and pinpoint one master theme, it would be “struggle”. So, lack of peace? Or perhaps the struggle to find your peace – not peace as not-war, but inner peace.

There are more nice photos at MyNewsDesk.

One day, all of a sudden, Adrian fell in love with his soft stuffed doll. Eric made it for him during the schooling-in week last year, and it’s been at nursery since then. They use them occasionally for some sort of group activities I think. And then one day Adrian absolutely wanted to take it home with him, and to hold it all the way home, and to have it with him during dinner, and then in bed.

We gave it a name because I didn’t want to keep calling it “the doll”. I tried a few names and asked if Adrian liked any of them. “The doll” is now called Johan.

Johan was the drop that started a flood. Now Adrian wants to take stuff with him whenever we go out: bags, toy cars, Johan, his favourite jersey hat, an extra pair of mittens, books… At dinner time Johan (or the car) gets to sit on the windowsill. One evening he took three little Chubbies cars with him to bed, and then tried to hold and hug all three while falling asleep.

Taking things with him when going out is OK, but he also wanted to take things home from nursery, and we had a number of tear-filled disagreements about.

Every afternoon, after nursery but before we pick up Ingrid from school, we go grocery shopping. Adrian wants to hold the most important grocieries in his arms both in the supermarket and afterwards on the way home. And just like with the cars, he has difficulty understanding and/or accepting that he only has two hands. He holds a banana, a pair of mittens and a book in his hands, and hugs a large bag of corn snacks, and then asks for the juice bottle as well.

Adrian’s started to pretend and make believe. A piece of fabric becomes a scarf for the hobby horse. An empty bowl in the kitchen sink is cake dough; a pink drinking straw becomes a flamingo. Food, especially, is good fantasy material: the row of apple chunks is a snake; the half-eaten biscuit is a camel, or a dog, or a train.

Watching Daddy finger on YouTube with Daddy

Colours, which he was so interested in last month, have now clicked in place. He still talks a lot about them, but now he actually gets many of them right: red, green, blue, yellow, purple, orange, sometimes white and black.

He often asks, Vad heter den färg?, and he mentions the colours of things he cares about. And he seems to find it fascinated that several things have the same colour. Den vagnen heter röd. Den skorna också röd! Väskan också röd! (“This stroller is called red. This shoes also red! The bag also red!”)

He has started using compound sentences, with a main clause and a subordinate clause. For example using men inte, “but not”, as in “Mommies have boobs but not daddies”.

Miscellaneous items:

• He has learned to jump with both feet.
• Favourite Melodifestivalen song: En riktig jävla schlager.
• Favourite item in the supermarket: Paulun’s raspberry and pomegranate juice. (“Buy raspberries! Green ones!”)

Insisting on the “big bowl”, “big spoon” and “big glass”

This month’s big news: Ingrid’s first baby tooth fell out. It was loose, and then it was looser, and Ingrid was constantly asking us to look at her loose tooth and to feel it wiggle. And then it was gone. Ingrid was in the middle of boisterous play at the time, so she probably swallowed the tooth without noticing it.

She had a dentist’s appointment (which I’d booked quite independently of the loose tooth) where we also found out that several of her six-year molars are appearing. They were visible for the dentist but not quite yet for us.

Ingrid has been looking forward to losing her baby teeth. It is a bit of a rite of passage, and many of her friends at school had lost theirs. But of course most of her classmates are older than her.

Her peers at school are affecting her a lot, more than I ever noticed at pre-school. Is it because she feels she has to act like the big kids now? And is that, in turn, because everybody else is trying to act like a big kid? I sense that she is looking for others’ approval, trying to fit in and to impress, and to be better than others – not always in a good way.

Talk like “you don’t get anything, do you” (du fattar ju ingenting) and snooty frustrated sighs of ah men! may be an unavoidable side effect of going to school but it’s not the kind of treatment I am used to.

I think that she is generally sweeter and more innocent than the average 6-year-old. Or perhaps she is simply more innocent than all the 6-year-olds with older brothers and sisters. She is still figuring out how to deal with some of the pushier kids. When we talk about her day (on our way home from school, or during our afternoon snack, or at bedtime) she often talks about others trying to tell her what to do. Not kids trying to push her around, but just kids who think they know better than others.

This month’s major new skill is telling time. Ingrid knew the hours already last summer, and has since then been grappling with quarters and minutes and such stuff. Until now, whenever she asked what time it was, she was never quite able to make sense of the answer. “Quarter to four” – is that before or after four? A minute or a second, which is the shorter one? Is “five minutes past” more than “quarter past”? She asked again and again, and I explained again and again, but it never stuck. And now one day it suddenly clicked, and that was that. Now she can tell the time exactly, by the minute, from both an analog and a digital clock.

She also knows all the months of the year, but that’s not really new. I don’t know exactly when she learned them but I think she’s known them for a couple of months now.

Also just at the beginning of the month, at the very end of the skating season, she learned to skate backwards.

Favourite toy: a slinky that she bought with her own pocket money. But afterwards she realized that Adrian has been playing with it more than her. I don’t think she’ll be buying many toys going forward. When we went to the toy shop she spent a long time looking around, but there wasn’t really much there that she liked. She’s fond of stuffed animals, and was thinking of buying one of them, but when she saw the prices, she changed her mind. Now with the slinky she’s understood what I noticed a long time ago: she doesn’t really play with toys.

She still loves reading, and Bamse is still the best. Maybe because we have so many of them, so she can always find one she hasn’t read in a while. She happily devours all the books I bring home from the library, but rarely wants to read any of them twice. Like an adult, but very unlike younger kids, once she’s read the book, she is not interested in reading it again for a while. Except if I read it for her: she likes to listen to me read, and with my reading makes the book feel fresh and new again.

Favourite movie: Alice in Wonderland.
Favourite iPad app: Pettson’s inventions. Also, watching me play Devil’s Advocate. In fact she likes that game more than I do; she likes the shopping part.
Miscellaneous favourites: nail polish, braids and ponytails.

Now that the season is almost over, we had seven or eight large empty buckets in clear plastic. Instead of throwing them away, I gave them to Adrian’s nursery this morning, for the kids to play with.

I thought that maybe they would use them for storing and carrying things. Or maybe they would put the lids on and build towers.

No.

When I got there in the afternoon, I was met by four or five kids, each one wearing a bucket on his head like a space helmet. It was spooky.

The staff told me that these were not helmets, the buckets were mufflers, and they (the staff) were very pleased.

Unfortunately I have no photos of the buckets in use because Adrian was tired and not in the mood. But here’s what they look like with about 5,5 kg of bird food inside. Source: Plantagen.se.