A mostly unorganized list of Adrian’s current favourites based on my interview with him.

• Book: Kalle Anka, both Pockets and the thin magazines
• Good night stories: Supilinna salaselts with me, His Dark Materials with Eric (although in Swedish and not English)
• Music: no absolute favourite, though he does like Queen, especially after we watched Bohemian Rhapsody
• Movies: Shaun the Sheep, and The Lord of the Rings
• Movie character: Legolas, because no matter what he does, he does it in a cool way
• TV series: Mandalorian, His Dark Materials
• YouTuber: CaptainSauce
• Video games: Subnautica. Blazing Beaks together with Eric. Horizon Zero Dawn he enjoys but paused because he arrived at a boss that looks hard to beat. Mostly he likes trying out new games and then loses interest after a week or two.
• Board games: Catan, Small World, Bondespelet
• Food to cook: making pasta
• Food to eat: pasta with a pea sauce; spring rolls and dumplings.
• Drink: Innocent’s apple and raspberry juice
• Fruit: raspberries, strawberries and paraguayo peaches
• Sweet: chocolate, mud cake and brownies
• Ice cream flavour: Adrian hasn’t eaten enough ice cream yet this year to have a favourite
• Friends: Elvira and Hanna. The best thing to do together with them is “just hanging out”.
• Subject at school: art, and woodworking. He likes building random things without instructions, and enjoys the wide range of materials and tools available at school.
• Activity at after-school care: building Legos, playing in the sandbox, drawing, and Ubongo, and “me and Elvira chase Silas”.
• Clothes: oversized t-shirts, soft socks with food patterns, and fluffy fleeces. He also loves the banana t-shirt we recently bought, and misses the cinnamon bun t-shirts he had as a baby.
• Body part: his big toes, “because they are big”
• Color: green
• Job when grown up: none. Adrian would instead like to be a pig when he grows up – one of those mini pigs who are kept as pets and don’t get eaten.
• Superpower: take out things from pictures and movies and make them real; and to be stretchy, because “I can’t reach and I don’t have the energy to walk”
• Season: summer, autumn, winter, spring
• Place in the house: sofas
• Animal: koalas and narwhals, like last year
• Coolest things, if only they existed: aliens with cool gadgets and zappers och UFOs and universal translators
• Thing he wishes we could do this summer: visit Estonia and go to Otepää adventure park
• Looking forward to in 4th grade: “the club” (which is the bigger kid version of after-school care) and meeting Kristian, his favourite after-school teacher
• Shoe size: 36
• Clothes size: 140

Here is last year’s list.

Adrian’s current favourite things in life, in no particular order.

• Activity: fiddling with small things, preferably something moldable, such as a lump of sticky putty, a small agglomeration of Plus Plus pieces, or a bread bag clip band. He has something like that in his pocket at all times, if not in his hands. Also: watching movies.
• Colour: green
• Movie: the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie (with all the big battle scenes), and Megamind.
• Video game: Spiderman, which he has nearly finished, and Fortnite.
• Book: Kalle Anka Pocket
• Food: hamburgers, without any ketchup, mustard or other dressing or sauce
• Fruit: raspberries and flat peaches
• Toy: Plus Plus
• Clothes: hoodies, shorts, and loose oversized T-shirts. Also socks and underwear with a food pattern, such as pizza slices or fruit. He’s very fond of his one pair of Happy Socks with bananas on them.
• Music: “Natural” by Imagine Dragons
• Best friends: Edward and Silas
• Looking forward to: our Estonia trip, starting third grade, and his birthday.
• School subject: maths
• Game or movie characters: Electro (a Marvel supervillain) and Leviathan (a Fortnite skin)
• Future job: builder
• Superpower: to be able to change his shape like Plastic Man does
• Toe: big toe. (Do you have a favourite toe? I don’t. But Adrian definitely does. He likes socks with holes where the big toe can peek out.)
• Thing: his plush fleece blanket. It even comes with us on many trips.
• Way of travelling: ferry to Estonia
• Drink: homemade elderflower cordial
• Shop: Gamestop, with all its Funko Pop figures.
• Time: lunchtime, because lunch is good
• Ice cream: Magnum Strawberry White
• Animal: koalas, because they are funny, and narwhals, because they are cool.
• Season: autumn, because that’s when his birthday is
• Youtuber: Matinbum and his video game videos

This was the month when Adrian broke his front tooth.

It’s summer and school’s out, but for Adrian it won’t really feel like summer until Eric and I also start our summer vacations. He goes to fritids for two weeks (this past week and the coming one) but would much rather be at home with us. Especially since summer care is not offered at his own school but a neighbouring one. It’s the same staff as usual, and some of his best friends are there, but that doesn’t matter much when the place is just wrong.

It’s summer and Adrian got his summer haircut. He has never been fond of washing or combing his hair, but he wanted to keep his hair for warmth during the cold season. Now that the weather is warm, all of the hair came off.

Pokemons and Minecraft are still Adrian’s favourite hobbies. Every other Friday the kids can take a toy with them to school, and Adrian’s chosen toy is almost always his Pokemon album. Then he and his friends sort and organize and compare and trade the Pokemon cards all afternoon.

His “Pokemon Go phone” gets a lot of use. He is quite diligent about playing daily to keep up his “streaks”, and he puts a fair bit of work into practising his throws. We often go out for evening walks together.

While Pokemon Go is something that he does together with myself or Eric, Minecraft is the bond between him and Ingrid. Ingrid finds new mod packs and servers, and Adrian enthusiastically follows along. After some initial technical difficulties we figured out how to make multi-player mode work, with Adrian on my computer and Ingrid on her own, and now they play together nearly every day.

When I tell him to get off the computer, Kalle Anka is his go-to way of just making time pass. Legos and Plus Plus are back in play again as well.

Soft clothes, uncut hair, usually somewhat grimy and with scabbed-over knees. He doesn’t seem to notice dirt much, neither on himself nor his clothes. I have certain standards in that regards, so I usually inspect him before I put him to bed in the evening. Quite often I find his clothes so dirty that they go straight into the laundry hamper, no matter how favourite they are.

Another part of the evening routine is the application of various creams. He has dry skin, although that’s become much better after we left winter behind us. He also has one molluscum wart – just one! – that has been bothering him since last summer already. The wart itself sometimes itches a bit but really isn’t too bad, but unfortunately it irritates the skin around it so Adrian keeps getting eczema in the crook of his elbow. We salve it and it goes away, and then it comes back again. Both Adrian and I are quite fed up with it now.

Adrian likes climbing trees, and has often told me he wishes we had better climbing trees in our garden. But the ones we do have are pretty OK too. And of course he climbs every climbable tree we find when we’re out in a forest or park somewhere.

The era of Bamse is over and Adrian has graduated to reading Kalle Anka instead. When a new Bamse issue arrives he still reads it, but is done with it in five minutes. And he no longer spends all evening reading old issues. Instead, Kalle Anka is the thing.

Of games, Minecraft is his favourite, especially when we play it together. He likes building best, especially tall constructions with towers. I’m more into exploring and mining. In our current world his ongoing projects include a trampoline made out of green slime blocks, and a sniper tower that he wants to use for shooting monsters from a safe distance. (We’re not very good at fighting monsters and I regularly get killed when I run into skeletons, and then we have to restore from a save point and that is annoying. We do want some monster excitement in our world, but ideally all the monsters should be clearly weaker than us.)

And Pokemons, of course. He’s saved up so he could buy a used iPhone on which he can play Pokemon Go. We paid enough to get him a phone, because before long he will be walking home from school on his own. That was about half the cost of a modern-enough iPhone, and he contributed the other half. It remains to be seen if it ends up like Ingrid’s “Pokemon Go phone” which was initially so very important and which she now almost never actually uses for Pokemon Go.

Random fact: he likes carrying out small lumps of Blu Tack-like putty and playing with them: squeezing, pulling, rolling, pressing them onto his thumbnail or an uneven patch of wall, etc. I think he probably keeps one in every pocket.

Likes:

• Captain Underpants. Reading in general, especially late in the evening when it’s bedtime.
• Cycling.
• Board games. We’ve been playing Secret Code several times recently.
• Minecraft. Playing the pocket edition on his iPad is no longer enough. I’ve now set up an account for him on my computer and installed the real deal, so that he can play on public servers etc. Just like Ingrid at about the same age.
• The Mumin books (which Eric is reading for him) and The Brothers Lionheart (which I just finished reading for him).
• Climbing. Particularly in trees, but other objects – such as large rocks, sacks of earth, etc – also work. He is disappointed that we don’t have more and better climbing trees in the garden.
• Most foods, except for tomatoes, unless they’re turned into tomato sauce. Well, that and anything sour/sharp, line vinaigrettes and such. Most recent surprise favourite: kohlrabi.

Minecraft has become Adrian’s favourite pastime. Legos are out, and so are beads, PlusPlus and all the other things that he used to spend so much time on. Oh, he still does those to some extent when Minecraft is not an option, but they just cannot compare. We’re actually packing away all his Lego models and bricks because all they do is take up space and gather dust.

When he watches videos on YouTube, half the time it’s about Minecraft. When he reads a book or a magazine, there’s a good chance it’s about Minecraft.

• Favourite dinner: pasta with a pea and goat’s cheese “pesto”
• Favourite sweet: Singoalla biscuits with mango and passion fruit flavour
• A few favourite books: Captain Underpants. Upptäckare och äventyrare by Sarah Sheppard.
• Favourite songs from Melodifestivalen: In my cabana by Margaret, Everyday by Mendez.
• Looking forward to: cycling season

His hair is growing really, really wild. He says he likes it long like this. Somehow it never gets tangled, even it rarely sees a comb.

He also really likes hoodies. All other clothes he wears out of necessity, but when it comes to hoodies he has definite favourites. When all the best ones are in the dirty laundry hamper, he just cannot be without them and asks us to wash his clothes.

He is following in Ingrid’s footsteps, playing Minecraft and Overwatch and occasionally reading Kalle Anka (although he likes Bamse better). We’ve played Minecraft together a few times on the PS3 and he navigates the interface like a pro. The part he likes best is building and furnishing our house, and hunting animals for meat and wool etc.

He also likes to order me around in the game and tell me what to do. I guess he’s used to children’s way of sounding totally overconfident about everything and when I don’t talk that way, he thinks I need help and direction with everything. Which is rather annoying.

Current bedtime stories: The brothers Lionheart and The comet is coming.
Current favourite snack: rice cakes with pizza flavour.
Currently learning at school: the finer points of writing. Lowercase and uppercase letter shapes, and getting them correctly positioned, and not mixing one with the other.

Adrian still loves reading Bamse. Every morning, as soon as he is dressed and has come downstairs, he grabs a binder of old issues of Bamse comics and sets it on the kitchen table, before he goes looking for breakfast. Like a morning paper. In the evenings he’s been reading LasseMaja books (detective stories).

He enjoys watching Ingrid play Overwatch, and plays a bit himself. His fine motor skills and reaction speed are nowhere near Ingrid’s, so he stays in the training arena and skirmish mode or whatever it’s called, rather than playing against other human players. The best part is opening loot boxes, though.

Legos are, amazingly, losing their charm. It’s been a while since he built with them, or even spoke longingly of getting new models. Recently he’s been building with Plus Plus instead.

He likes comfy, soft hoodies and knitted sweaters. All other clothes are simply something to wear and he just grabs one from his chest of drawers, but the hoodies are important.

He has his winter hairdo, which simply means no haircuts, because it’s warmer this way. His hair passed a phase when it looked simply overgrown, and is now more wild, which actually looks kind of better to me. Or maybe I’m just getting used to it.

He has dry, rough skin during the cold, dry season and I put on lotion on his arms etc every other evening. The arms are easy, actually, but he also needs lotion on the backs of his thighs, and around his stomach and waist – sensitive areas where he is both a bit ticklish and really feels the coldness of my hands. It always leads to a lot of wriggling and squealing laughter.

Current favourite book series: Captain Underpants.

His English skills (mostly passive) have apparently advanced in leaps and bounds. Today he looked at a book I was reading and read the title out loud, pronouncing it better than most adult Swedes. (Zero Repeat Forever)

Current favourite franchises: most things related to Minecraft or Overwatch. He plays both games, but not much. Mostly he just likes the concepts and themes. He watches Ingrid play Overwatch, beads and draws Overwatch figures, reads books about Minecraft etc.

He likes hoodies.
He does not like haircuts, or washing his hair.