This was the month of will and wanting – and not wanting. The two most commonly occurring words in Adrian’s vocabulary are min (my, mine) and inte (not).

Well, Adrian’s min does not really mean “mine”. In reality I believe it covers a wide range of meanings, from the actual “mine” through “I want to have this thing” to “I like this thing”.

When I pick him up at nursery, he proclaims min mamma! to everyone who ventures close, and holds on to me just in case they intend something sneaky. Also min vagn! (stroller) and min macka! (sandwich).

Other people’s mums are important, too, and he points out all his friends’ mums and dads when we run into them. Hanna, our friends’ daughter who is just two days older than Adrian, is his best friend. He always greets her happily when she comes to nursery in the morning, shows off his Pippi shirt, says Hanna kom! and drags her off to some activity. He almost always points out her house when we pass it.

At meal times at home there is a lot of min mumin!, meaning “I want my Moomin plate and cup”. He got a set of Moomin tableware for his birthday and now effectively refuses to use anything else. As the bowl gets emptier and the design at the bottom becomes visible, he happily points out the characters.

Pippi is his favourite character, in all shapes and forms. He would wear his Pippi shirt every day if he could, he loves the Pippi books and movies, and he adores the Pippi song. At Ingrid’s birthday party, after we had sung Ja må hon leva for Ingrid, the whole family sang the Pippi song for Adrian. He was overjoyed.

But he’s a fan of various other branded characters as well – not only Moomin but also Bamse and Barbapapa. He has a Bamse t-shirt which is his second best after his Pippi shirt; he asks for Barbapapa clips on Youtube. The only characters I know he doesn’t care about is Teletubbies. He seems bored by them.

Another favourite brand is the jingle for SF, the Swedish movie studio behind the Pippi movies as well as all the other film adaptations of Astrid Lindgren books.

inte comes and goes in waves. Sometimes it seems like all he can say is inte. He can say inte macka! (“not sandwich!”) and at the same time take the sandwich he is offered and bite into it with gusto. He can walk around mumbling inte inte inte to himself.

Nappy changes are almost always inte. He hated them so much that we’ve switched from cloth nappies to disposable ones. Brushing teeth and brushing hair is sometimes OK and sometimes a fight. He often has very strong opinions about clothing, wants this set of pyjamas and not that, this hat and not that. He likes his rubber boots and a soft stripy jersey hat with a fleecy inside (which Ingrid also loved for years, and only gave up because she outgrew it).

Usually he is relatively sensible about his clothes, so I let him choose. Once we’re outside and he realizes that his choice may not have been ideal, he has no trouble admitting that and putting on more clothes. Sometimes he wears less than I would, but he doesn’t seem cold. But he’s not at all as warm-blooded as Ingrid, who could cycle home from nursery in her indoor clothes in +5°C. Adrian always wants at least a fleece when we go outside.

I guess he gets to hear a fair amount of inte at nursery. I sometimes hear him repeat phrases like inte knuffas and inte bitas – “no pushing”, “no biting”.

Other phrases that Adrian has picked up from nursery: illa dig där (“hurt yourself there”), låt det vara (“leave that alone”).

There is also a lot of flytta på dig and akta på dig (“move over”, “get out of the way”) which could come from nursery but he may well have picked those up from Ingrid as well. For him they seem to mean “this thing is in my way” – he can say flytta på dig! to a chair that is blocking his way when he tries to push his step stool to the kitchen counter.

The nursery staff tell me that he is always very busy during the day. He wants to do everything that the others are doing. When three kids around him are doing three different things, he wants to do all of these. There is a lot of rushing around, trying to keep up. And he is so frustrated when he cannot manage to do everything that the slightly older kids do.

Adrian likes and/or notices sounds, and often points them out to me. Låter! he says when an airplane flies past, or we pass some loud machinery, or hear a neighbour’s chainsaw in the distance.

He has started to play with his food. A piece of bread will often become a car that drives around the edge of his plate, or a boat, or a crocodile (when the slice of bread looked like jaws after he’d taken a big bite out of it).

But the playing rarely distracts him from eating – unlike Ingrid, I have to say. She can get so lost in her daydreams or playing that she totally forgets to eat. Adrian has been eating quite a lot, although his diet is not much more varied than it used to be.

Anything that looks unfamiliar gets flat out refused. It’s the looks that matter: I can make courgette fritters which consist of maybe 85% courgette, 10% egg and 5% flour, but they look like pancakes, therefore they are pancakes, and thus edible.

Most veggies he refuses. He eats peas and sweetcorn (and calls both of them corn) and that’s about it. But he eats most fruits and berries. He eats raspberries but refuses bell peppers and tomatoes which can taste much sweeter.

He is almost always hungry when I pick him up at nursery, because they don’t let him eat whatever he wants. For their mid-afternoon snack, for example, the kids get one flatbread each, and after that they can have as much crispbread as they want. Adrian likes soft bread much better than crispbread, so he goes hungry instead. And sometimes he probably doesn’t eat much at lunch, either. I often hand him a sandwich as soon as we’re off, or we go straight to the supermarket to buy bananas.

He is also hungry early in the morning. I stopped feeding him at night about six weeks ago. After several weeks he was generally sleeping well all night, but he kept waking at around 5 or 5:30 every day. He’d cry and just could not go back to sleep for a long time. Some days we had to get up at 5:30, other days he fell asleep again after a long while. Eventually I figured out that he might actually be hungry (duh) and I started nursing him again at that time. Now he wakes, feeds, and goes back to sleep, all within 10 minutes. During the rest of the night I refuse, and he has no trouble accepting that.

I took away his dummy during daytime and that has generally worked pretty well. During the first couple of days he was immensely upset. He screamed all the way from nursery to Ingrid’s school (that used to be a time when he would always suck on the dummy). But after a couple of days he forgot that habit, and now there is no screaming at all on the way home, and not much during other times either. Generally he has been taking it very well. Only sometimes when he is really upset about something, he wants a dummy to console himself. But he has been nursing more in the afternoon, replacing the rubber nipple with the real thing.

He likes numbers and counting. He can “count” to four (in both languages I believe) but I don’t think he really understands anything above two. It’s just like a kind of a verse.

Ingrid discovered that she can calm him by counting: one day on our way home from school he was upset about something, and she just started counting for some reason – “one, two, three…”. At around four he became quiet. When she reached ten and stopped, he was all calm, and didn’t start up again. She tried it again this evening when Adrian wanted to nurse while I wanted to finish my dinner: she counted slowly to ten, which kept him calm so that I could finish eating. A very cool trick, I have to say.

We’ve reached a point where Ingrid sometimes understands him better than I do. It used to be that I had to tell Ingrid how to interact with him, to tell her that he doesn’t seem to like this or that. Now she notices behaviours and reactions that I don’t, and comes up with tricks and ideas that I wouldn’t even think of.