When Ingrid was five, she seemed like such a big girl. Now that Adrian is five, he’s “half Ingrid’s age” and seems so young. Adrian of course sees himself as a big boy. And he is. His growing and development just sort of happen under the radar.

He just had a growth spurt recently when he was eating like a horse and then got hungry again two hours later. I think the peak of it is now behind us, but he can still eat adult-sized portions when he likes the food.

When he eats, he often still eats like a kid: the best pieces first. He eats the noodles first and leaves the veggies till later; picks the apple slices off his grilled sandwich and then eats the bread. And his time discounting is still pretty steep: given the choice between an OK dessert now and a great one later, he picks the former without hesitation.

He is still as curious as Ingrid is not. Space and the human body are two favourite topics, but he’s also interested in other areas of the world. He likes looking at flap books with facts for kids, making small experiments, and just talking about these things. Today at dinner, for example, he asked us if we knew that the human body is made of cells. Then we talked about space elevators, the distance to various planets, how long it would take to fly to Pluto, and how large the Sun is.

At preschool they made ice blocks by filling empty milk cartons with water and putting them outside, so he also experimented with making ice at home. (There are benefits to the ‐14°C weather we’ve been having: the water freezes fast.)

He’s also been spending more time on small crafts: painting and decorating little wooden toys, glueing and taping random objects to other random objects. Four strips of a broken rubber band to a small stone; old chestnuts to a dry stick. I think I might introduce him to the possibilities of a glue gun soon.

The constant Lego building is actually abating. Some days he doesn’t touch his Legos at all. For Christmas he got a long-awaited large Lego Chima set which took him many days of building – maybe he’s taking a brief break after that one. He still likes to browse the latest Lego catalogue and quite often asks when we can buy a new set. Lego Chima is no longer part of the Lego range; the newest thing is Lego Nexo Knights. Conveniently, the Nexo Knights sets are not available in stores yet, so the nagging is less than it might otherwise have been.

There is a Nexo Knights game app, though, which he has tried out. Right now he also likes Marvel Puzzle Quest – the match-three game mechanism is easy to grasp, and it’s got Marvel superheroes! Recently, as we were purging his iPad of apps he no longer uses, he rediscovered Dragon City and now plays it again. He likes breeding new dragons and feeding them as large as possible and ignores all the dull resource management tasks. I’ve been “putting on the food” for him at night so he has some food for his dragons each afternoon.

Making porridge

Ipad and Youtube use leads to learning English. He asks about words or confirms a guess. He is now also aware that he is learning it, and proudly tells me when he’s figured out a new word.

Too bad that English spelling is so hard. Spoken English only takes you so far in the modern, digital world: in order to get further you need to be able to spell so you can search for stuff on Youtube (or Toys R Us, or Google image search, or Spotify). He makes brave efforts (anggribödch – Angry Birds) but they are generally doomed from the beginning.

Spelling in Swedish is easier. He may not get it 100% right but he can write so that others can understand what he means, and not just us. Like Ingrid, he masters writing before reading and it is not uncommon for him to write a word but then not be able to read it back again.

He likes numbers and counting. -teens and -ties are hard to keep apart, even though their names in both Estonian and Swedish are more logical than in English. We’ve spoken about how fyrtio means fyra tior and likewise in Estonian; I think it’s sinking in.

A few evenings he’s asked me to count for him instead of singing lullabies. He asked if I could count to one thousand and I promised I would. That day he was asleep by about 330. Today I barely got to 200.

Random tidbits:
Adrian started swim school last week. He was quite hesitant and didn’t really want to go at all. Afterwards he said he thought they would have to be in the deep pool, and I guess he must have been expecting other scary things to happen as well. But in the end of course he was just fine. He’s not like a fish in water, by far, but by the end of the first lesson he was at least blowing a few bubbles and not too bothered by splashes on his face either. It’ll take the time it takes.

When one of us is working late, he sometimes types small sweet messages and asks to send them by email. jag jilar dej and jag älskar dig jätemyke eric and papa jag elskrdej. In our family, he’s by far the one who most often tells others he loves them, or spontaneously hugs them. When I go to work in the morning, his good-bye to me always involves big hugs and at least three kisses (one on each cheek and one on my forehead). But while he loves all of us a lot, he tells me he loves Ingrid the most.