The mornings are cold. The porridge season has begun.

I have no energy. Nothing seems like fun. There is nothing in my life that feels like worth taking a photo of.

This tends to happen each autumn, so it’s no surprise. This time, work is particularly unfulfilling and drags me down even further.

It will pass.

My trench-digging project (for the hedge-planting project) is not going too well. All of June was lost to crises and panics at work. I hoped to catch up in September but now I’ve been sick with sinusitis and not doing much digging. Looks like I may have to postpone the planting until spring.

And in the meantime, the weeds are back. I cleared them out in May and promised myself to not underestimate their growing power again. Did I learn from that experience? Apparently not very much. Because now they have invaded again.

Those gloves for Adrian are more effort than I expected. This was my third attempt at knitting the fingers, and for the third time I ended up ripping them up. Too narrow, still too narrow, then too wide… knitting for small fingers with a thickish yarn, there is no margin of error. On the plus side, re-doing the fingers isn’t much work, because they are so small.

School has started and Adrian is in first grade. And seven years old. It strikes me how big he is, how much he’s grown, both physically and mentally.

He’s grown a lot over the summer and outgrown all his trousers. All the new ones we bought had to be soft and “not too tight, not too loose”. He agreed that it was good to have one pair of more durable trousers, for outdoors activities, but those had to have a soft jersey lining.

At school he is way ahead of the curriculum. At that personal development meeting, the questions the teacher asked to ascertain his maths skills were on the level of “how many fingers am I holding up” while he practices adding two-digit numbers in his head. The teacher asked if he could write his name, and at home he is reading chapter books.

In addition to school, swim school has started up again. The group he used to be in has its class way too late on Sunday evening so we switched him to a different one. He doesn’t like the new teachers and he doesn’t like the new pool so he’s not super happy about this.

A new addition this term is scouting. He’s been hearing about all the fun that Ingrid has for years, and has been looking forward to it for a long time. He had to admit he didn’t know exactly what scouts did… but he definitely wanted to do it. Now he is finally old enough to join the beaver scouts himself.

He is still full of restless energy. Unless he is focusing on something he is interested in, he talks all the time and fidgets all the time. At the “personal development meeting” at school, he was talking constantly and climbing around in the chair until he actually fell out of it. At swim school likewise the one voice that can be heard chattering loudly, almost without a pause, is Adrian’s. It is tiring. Sometimes when it gets too much I tell him to stop saying each thought out loud, but he soon starts again. I hadn’t noticed how much I had gotten used this noise until one of Ingrid’s friends spent the weekend with us and had to ask him several times to stop talking because she couldn’t hear herself think.

He talks because he cannot help it; all those thoughts need to come out. But he is also interested in words. He asks us about uncommon words he encounters – such as ish (yes, that word made its way into Swedish, too) and omfamna (“to embrace”) and anamma (which also happens to mean “to embrace” but in the non-physical sense, like you might embrace an idea, and which came up for discussion because it is part of one of Captain Haddock’s curses in Swedish) and genomskåda (“to penetrate, to see through”). And afterwards he tries to actually use them in sentences. Instead of asking me for a hug, he now says he would like to embrace me.

Scars from an active life, and a juice moustache.

• Favourite birthday present: two Nerf guns.
• Favourite fruit: after half a year of almost nothing but Pink Lady apples, he now prefers clementines.
• Favourite book: Beast Quest and Bamse are still best, but he is also really enjoying the book about Nordic myths and legends he got for his birthday.
• Lessening interest: Pokemons, believe it or not.

It’s Adrian’s birthday tomorrow. The presents are waiting for him, when he wakes up tomorrow morning, first of us all.

School has started. Ingrid looked forward to it, but after about a week she was kind of tired of it already. Homework, sitting still in a classroom, listening to boring lessons… Luckily there’s sports class to look forward to, and music, art, and crafts.

School has also already had their “personal development meetings” where the kids think about what they need or want to focus on this term. Ingrid wanted to work on expanding her vocabulary in Swedish and English. She’s borrowed The Hunger Games from the school library, in English – because she wants to read it and not because it will help grow her vocabulary, but it should certainly do that as well.

After school, there’s scouting and dancing. She’s dropped street dance (it wasn’t her style at all) and focused her ambitions on disco. She continues with the disco class she’s been doing for some while now, and to that she added “preparatory competitive dance” at the same dance studio.

We sorted through her wardrobe and then went shopping for clothes because she had outgrown almost everything, and most of the (few) things that fit had too much colour or patterns or decorations. The clothes we bought were almost all plain skinny jeans and plain tops in discreet colours. Plus, interestingly, one or two tops in what I think of as “US sports sweater style”: a word or two, and some large digits.

• Favourite songs: Symphony (by Clean Bandit w. Zara Larsson), Instructions (by Jax Jones), Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor Swift)
• Favourite book series: Harry Potter and Warriors
• Favourite snack: peanut butter, straight out of the jar
• Other favourite things, according to herself: Overwatch (the game – which she has tried at a friend’s place and now has at the top of her birthday wish list) and sushi
• A recent interest: IQ tests

Adrian and I played Yatzy. I think he enjoyed the maths practice of adding up the points for each round as much as the game itself. It didn’t take him long to realize that a 1-2-3-4-5 straight always gives the same score.

Most years, I plant a fuchsia in a hanging basket just outside the front door. I like fuchsias: they combine cool flowers, strong colours, and attractive shape.

In Cornwall this summer we saw fuchsias as large bushes. In our climate, fuchsias don’t survive the winter, so I have to plant a new one every year. By the end of the year, it’s always still pretty small.

Somehow he still fits into the BiBaBath foldable tub.