I hung up the Advent calendar. This year we have an activity calendar again, with activities ranging from massage to making Christmas ornaments.

The strips of paper all look the same. I wonder how many times I’ll have to unroll and reorganize them to fit them around yet another birthday party or Christmas event.

Today is the 1st Sunday of Advent. We hung Advent stars and unpacked Christmas decorations, Christmas books and other assorted Christmas-related stuff. The Santa hats were best.

The Christmas CDs will stay in their boxes though. We’re 100% digital now, all the way, with the Sonos system playing music from both our own music library (including the Christmas CDs) and Spotify.

Whatever it was, it was riveting.

View from St. Eriksbron towards the city.

Ingrid asked me to take this picture.

She is not fond of homework.

She’s got homework in three subjects, once a week. In Swedish they read a chapter in a book and answer a few questions in writing. In maths they are currently practising their times tables – this week’s was 9 times 0 to 5. In Estonian they have a workbook where they read short texts and again answer questions in writing, and do “fill the blanks” exercises.

Ingrid and I went ice skating at Spånga IP after dinner.

The large outdoor rink is really, really fully booked this season by bandy clubs. It is only available to the general public on weekend evenings after 18:00, and weekdays during daytime (which doesn’t count as being available in my opinion). So in practice we can only use the small ice field, which is generally less well cared for. Not pleased.

We went for a short forest walk with grilled sausages. It’s been sub-zero for a few days so the ground was all covered by amazing spiky ice formations.

Adrian eating ice cream.

He still doesn’t like cow’s milk, refuses cheese on his quiches and grilled sandwiches, prefers his dairy-free “butter” to real butter and soy “yoghurt” to the real thing. But when it comes to ice cream he is perfectly happy to eat dairy ice cream. And when real yoghurt has Star Wars imagery on it, it also suddenly becomes delicious.

Ingrid wanted to make an animated movie “with real things”, inspired by PES Film’s Western spaghetti which she saw at school.

The first movie she made was of a piece of paper getting crumpled and then unfolded again. The second was of a drawing “emerging”. Here she’s photographing the drawing in its stand that we rigged out of a cutting mat, supported by my sewing box and two food cans.