Adrian now rides a bike. A few weeks ago we brought out Ingrid’s old balance bike for him to try. He loved it from the very first moment, and “got it” almost immediately. At the very beginning he just walked with the bike between his legs. A day or two later he was rolling. Now he’s hooked. He rides it to and from nursery and school; he accompanies me to the supermarket on it; he goes out riding just for fun.

Now he’s so confident on it that he’s experimenting. “Look, I can ride like this!” And “like this” may mean that he keeps pushing with only one foot and holds the other one in the air, or holds both of them up, or goes backwards.

And he’s fast. When he dawdles, looking at stuff we pass, then he gets on about as fast as I walk. When he decides to go fast, I have to run to keep up.

Speaking of riding, Adrian has definitely gotten over much of his fear of animals. When Ingrid’s riding lessons started in January, he was really scared, almost terrified of the horses. I had to hold him almost all the time, and when I didn’t, he cowered in a spot where he could see me but be as far as possible from the horses.

Now, believe it or not, he is OK with riding a pony himself. Earlier this week we spent a few days at a farm, and he rode their Shetland pony (with someone leading it of course). He also sat in a rabbit enclosure and fed them dandelion leaves from his hand.

So while it is kind of inconvenient to have to take him along for Ingrid’s riding lessons each time, it’s been very useful practice for him.

This Thursday he gave up his dummy. For a long time already he had only been using it to fall asleep at night, and I had already been thinking that it’s time to stop. So when we found out his friend Hanna was quitting at Easter, I decided Adrian would do the same.

There is a tradition in Stockholm for kids to give their dummies to the kittens at Skansen, an open air museum. They used to have huge colour co-ordinated garlands of dummies there. Those seemed to be gone now. Instead there is a neat little machine where the kids put in their dummies and press a button and then watch it go through a chute, up a slope on a little wagon, etc., and then in to an enclosure with homeless cats.

Adrian was not bothered at all. When he goes to bed in the evening, he finds it a bit difficult to calm down without the dummy. He tells me it’s “hard to sleep”, and it takes him somewhat longer than usual. But that’s it.

Likes:

• Pretending he’s a baby. He likes to play “mummy daddy baby”. But sometimes he also just likes to talk like a baby, or crawl like a baby, or be spoon fed like a baby.
• Building with Lego. He has very precise stories to tell about seemingly simple constructions. A lump with three longer pieces sticking out is a diving tower with three platforms, one for kids, one for me, one for Eric. Another lump with two long pieces is a flying car. (Not an airplane.)
• Splashing in puddles.
• Playing with water while I’m doing the dishes.
• Reading. When he’s upset or tired, his go-to solution is to ask me to read for him.
• Making art with glitter glue.
• Drawing. He no longer makes tangles – now it’s mostly roughly circular shapes, often coloured in, sometimes joined by lines.
• Sunglasses.

Random fact: He often speaks very loudly for some reason, and both Eric and I keep telling him to please not shout.