I’m not even going to write about Legos but of course that is still his main interest.

Every few weeks he stays at home on a Wednesday to rest and play with his Legos. Wednesdays are his least favourite days at preschool because they spend extra time outside in the morning. He doesn’t like the rain clothes he has to wear in the current weather.

Lego Chima, his favourite line of Lego models, has been “retired” and replaced with Lego Nexo Knights. Those are also cool. Coolest of all is Star Wars, though. He hasn’t seen any of the real Star Wars movies, but he liked both the Clone Wars animated series and Lego Star Wars. He doesn’t always find those movies very interesting but they are somehow important to him anyway.

We bought a Lego Yoda figure and that one is now his favourite and gets to join in when he plays with the Chima and Ninjago figures, even though Yoda doesn’t fit the theme. And when the figures all go crazy and swap helmets or legs with each other, Yoda gets to keep his. Yoda is special.

Next after Star Wars and Legos come dinosaurs and sharks. When he needed new socks, ideally he wanted Star Wars socks, or dinosaurs. And his swim trunks have sharks on them of course.

When he tires of Legos and I still have work to do, he listens to music. He can put a song on repeat and listen to it for half an hour. He now has his own Sonos playlist so he has easy access to his favourite songs, which include Samir and Victor and their immortal tunes Bada nakna, Saxo-fucking-fon and Success. Also on the list are last year’s Melodifestivalen winner Heroes and this year’s finalist Kizunguzungu.

The next best thing after that is going out. “We haven’t had any fresh air today,” he tells me, and I cannot but agree. So we take a walk to the supermarket and run a few errands, and come home with renewed energy.

After pre-school of course the iPad beckons, and YouTube. He still plays quite a lot of Best Fiends but not so much Dragon City any more.

Random stuff:
He gets really dry, scaly skin on the backs of his hands this time of the year. It is warm enough outside that he can be without gloves or mittens, but cold enough so the air is dry and no good for the hands, especially when you’re playing with wet cold stuff. And I suspect he wipes his nose with the back of his hands, which makes it even worse. I slather on thick creams and salves every evening and they barely hold the dryness in check, but his skin probably heal fully until spring is here for real.

He really loves apples. “Apple boats” (apples cut into eights, core removed) is his favourite snack between meals. Our supermarket still sells Swedish apples (in March!) which is awesome, and we buy a lot of them.

Swim school is going well. As a side effect he has actually learned to like showers, which is pretty convenient, and he doesn’t even mind getting his hair wet any more.

Adrian is very interested in numbers right now. The place-value system has just about clicked for him: that you need to start reading numbers from the left, and that 27 and 72 are not the same. First he got it with two-digit numbers; now I think he’s understood three-digit ones as well.

He likes adding numbers, just because he can, up to and past 10, without using his fingers. Sometimes he does basic multiplication as well (such as two times four or three times three).
“You have four potatoes and I have two. If you gave two to me then I would have four and you would have two. And if you gave one to me then we would have the same.”

Large numbers are interesting, and hard to grasp. He asked Ingrid to tell him the largest number she knew. She tried to make him happy and said something to the tune of three hundred and fifty-six million. Then he asked me, probably hoping that since I am older, I know larger numbers. I told him that I can’t answer that question, because whichever number I say, I can always add one to make an even larger number. Three hundred fifty-six million and one? he asked. Yes, and then three hundred fifty-six million and two.
How about hundred million hundred million hundred million? No, that’s not a number, you can’t mix number words any way you feel like.

He gets great numbers practice from his current favourite iPad game, Best fiends. Like most modern games, it has levels with goals and rewards, and various kinds of resources to amass and use for upgrading your troops. So the game is chock full of numbers. Collect this many of the red things, or kill that many of the monsters. Keep an eye of the number of moves left, consider the attack strength of your troops, check whether you have enough resources for buying upgrades, etc. There’s no advanced math here but it’s great daily practice of simply reading (relatively large) numbers and getting a feel for their size, all while having fun.

The name of the game refers to little critters that help you get through the levels. Those “fiends” are Adrian’s favourite part of the game. He even ordered a plush toy of one of them (but was disappointed by its small size) and has asked me to make drawings of his favourites fiends that he can hang on the wall.

This month’s major new thing is Adrian’s swim school. He was very sceptical at first and not at all excited. At first he didn’t even want to go into the water. But the teachers are great and take excellent care of him and other cautious kids, and while he’s not exactly diving in, he now feels quite OK about being in the water and putting at least a part of his face in the water as well.

One side benefit of swim school is that he’s getting used to showering. He used to hate the feeling of water hitting any part of his body – even just rain hitting his face made him cry. So he’s always being a tub bath person. He’s become less sensitive over time but kept the habit of bathing, which is of course nice for him but sometimes rather inconvenient because of the time it takes, compared to taking a shower. Now he’s learning that showers can be rather pleasant.

Odds and ends:

• He likes glueing things to other things, such as little wooden sticks and knobs and buttons onto larger blocks and pieces of wood – sort of like his random little Lego constructions, I guess.
• Pyjamas are still his favourite clothes, but now for some reason he wants to wear only pyjama shorts. Quite the opposite of the warm fleecy one-piece pyjamas he favoured just a few months ago.
• He has a strong memory for odd details. The other day he told me he saw some movie the Friday when I was away skiing with Ingrid, which was a year ago.
• He still thinks “thief” is a synonym for “generally evil person and rule-breaker”. For example, the other day when we were driving and found our normal route blocked by an accident, we instead took a road where through traffic was not allowed. I explained this to him, and the general idea of traffic rules, and what happens when you break them. “Like thieves do?” he asked. Today when Ingrid told him about Voldemort the evil wizard, Adrian referred to him as “the thief” afterwards.

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.

Just a few photos this time.

Last month Adrian started drawing. This month he has done more of that, and added writing. He makes little books by stapling papers together and then draws and writes in them. He mostly draws people and T-rexes, but also ninjas, aliens and monsters.

As for writing, at first he was mostly writing things that had obviously been suggested by the staff at preschool: “til mama ok papa”. But also his own name, and our names, and the names of his friends. As he gained confidence, he broadened out: he’s written a Christmas wish list, added things to our shopping list, etc.

Of course you don’t need pen and paper to write. An iPad is a great tool for learning to write – not least because writing in an iPad makes things happen. Like magic. Almost as soon as Adrian started writing, he started using it to search for video clips on YouTube and Barnkanalen, images on Google, and music on our Sonos system.

Out of those tools, YouTube has the best UI for a 5-year-old – there is just one search box and no further choices. With Google, you need to know how to get from search results to images, but it’s not that hard. Sonos is more complicated – you need to click the right category of things to search, and then there are menus to navigate before the music plays. Obviously not developed with kids in mind. But even if Adrian cannot manage all of that on his own, with his developing reading skills he can at least skip between songs in a playlist and figure out which might be which.

I also wish these tools were more forgiving of spelling mistakes. Google and YouTube are pretty good. Sonos – not at all. Miss one letter and you won’t find anything. The fact that many of the things Adrian wants to search for are in English don’t make things any easier for him.

HVREJÅGUT BLÅBÄR (havreyogurt blåbär)

Many of the songs he searches for are Melodifestivalen favourites: Guld och gröna skogar, Groupie, Hello Hi, Popular. He likes tunes with a catchy melody, funny lyrics and a “bouncy” rhythm. When the song is in English, he sings along phonetically and it doesn’t bother him at all that he has no clue what they’re saying.

Funnily enough, the same happens with songs in Swedish that he learns at preschool. Sometimes hasn’t quite been able to hear or understand the lyrics, and just accepts that songs contain words that make no sense. Sometimes he asks me. Other times he insists that the nonsense version is the right one: “Ögon, öron, kinden klappefå”.

Legos of course continue to dominate. For the first time he has now actually encountered a Lego kit that was too tricky for him to build on his own, so we’re doing it together. Well, mostly I’m just picking out the right pieces for him, and very occasionally helping him notice when he’s made a mistake somewhere, so he doesn’t get stuck later.

When he turned five, we started giving him pocket money: 20 kr a week. He has spent all of it on Legos. Whenever he feels like he has some money, he wants to go to Toys’R’Us and buy stuff. He is unable/unwilling to save for a goal because his discount factor is just too high.

When he doesn’t have enough money to buy what he had planned, he’ll buy something else he can afford, rather than go home empty-handed. But not at any cost: once when he couldn’t afford anything else he bought a Lego mini figure and was really disappointed when he found out it was a duplicate of one he already had, so he’s not buying those any more.

Current interests:

• There’s been a new surge in perler beading. The most recent theme has been ninjas and Ninja Turtles. I guess someone at preschool has printed out new patterns.
• Balancing on sidewalk edges.
• Learning to make porridge on his own.
• Peeing standing up.
• Dialects. Skeånska.

Other random facts:

• Girl colours are totally out. Adrian will not wear anything violet, lilac or pink. It was jarring for him to discover that one of the Ninja Turtles wears a purple headband.
• We play Labyrinth occasionally. It’s a great game that all ages enjoy and can play together, with some adjustments. Just a few months ago Adrian was mostly just pushing the labyrinth pieces around randomly. Now all of a sudden he’s playing for real and making up plans for his moves. It’s amazing to “see” his brain develop.

Still in Adrian’s life:
Legos.
Ninjas and pistols and lasers and rocket engines and police and superheroes all the way.
Tired afternoons.

New in Adrian’s life:
He’s drawing now! Even though he drew a human figure at his four-year checkup, he only drew shapeless squiggles otherwise. But now suddenly he is drawing human figures, pirates and rocket ships. Most pictures contain the four of us, with body, two to four limbs and recognizably human faces. Sometimes he draws fingers or hair for some of us as well – or muscles for Eric.

Favourite colours: Green and blue, and “fire colours” (red, orange and yellow).

Favourite clothes: Anything thick, soft and with pockets. Anything superhero-themed: he is very fond of his new Batman and Spiderman fleeces (which are surprisingly stylish actually).

Favourite thing to put in pockets: Chestnuts.

Not favourite clothes: socks.

Favourite foods: Apart from the usual (starches of all kinds, and broccoli) he loves smoothies. He’s kind of picky about fruit he will eat (mostly grapes and apple slices) but if I make a smoothie I can put all sorts of goodies in there and he’ll gobble it up.

Favourite books: Teedu ja Peedu imelikud masinad, a book with funny drawings of funny made-up machines, such as “the puddle digger”, “the morning routine automator” and “the helmet bicycle”.

Favourite words that are just insanely funny: põrnitsema and nämmutama.

Favourite TV show: Sveriges yngsta mästerkock, “Swedish youngest master chef”, which is a cooking game show for kids. First I watched the entire season with both kids, and now I’m re-watching the entire thing with Adrian.

Favourite music: Popular by Eric Saade, a Melodifestivalen song from a few years back. Other Melodifestivalen songs and Hits for Kids type of CDs.

When we listen to radio in the car, he asks for “rockier” music. One day he fell asleep in the car listening to Rammstein on Bandit radio.

This month was one long wait for Adrian’s birthday party. I even made a countdown calendar for him because I got tired of all the times he asked me if it was his birthday yet.

A birthday party sounded great in theory. But in practice he was mostly just interested in the presents and the cake and ice cream. Playing with his friends – not so much. He really struggled with the idea that not only he should have fun (and start building the Lego sets he got as presents) but the others should have fun as well, and he needed to play with them.

To be honest a few of the guests also had trouble understanding that they were not the centre of the party and that maybe Adrian deserved more attention than they. There was a lot of need for conflict resolution… Well, nobody left in tears, so I guess it was a reasonably successful party.

Interestingly he again only invited girls to his party. He plays with boy toys, and he plays with both boys and girls at preschool, but he likes girls better.

Legos continue to occupy his attention almost all the time. He builds and rebuilds his Lego sets. He asks when we can buy more Legos. He watches Lego speed build videos on Youtube. Half the living room is filled with crates of Lego pieces, boxes with Lego sets, trays and bowls with pieces of sets in progress, and finished constructions.

Mostly he prefers to follow instructions, and there seems to be no limit to how large and complicated sets he can build. The thing he most wanted to get for his birthday was a large Lego Chima set, Maula’s Ice Mammoth Stomper, which is aimed at ages 8 to 14 and consists of 600+ pieces. He finished it in two afternoons and a morning. Which is kind of impressive but also means that he runs out of things to build and quickly wants more…

He got Ingrid’s permission to rebuild one of her old Lego Friends sets but didn’t find those very interesting. He gave up on the instructions and instead built little robots from the pink, white and leaf-green Lego Friends pieces.

Generally most things turn into (a) vehicles, especially flying ones, with weapons, or (b) robots with weapons. That fly.

For his birthday we also gave him a little wallet and the promise of a weekly allowance of 20 kr. Just like Ingrid at that age he is attracted to all sorts of cheap plastic doodads, and I feel like I am always saying no to him when we’re out doing grocery shopping etc. Now he gets money that he can spend on junk that is important to him but, well, junk to me.

Adrian remains curious and interested in the world around him, in a way that Ingrid has never been. Where does our garbage go? Which was the first boat to sail on the seas? Who lives in that house?

He is no longer angry or whiny all the time. Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. I think consistent, earlier bedtimes helped. I’m pretty sure that most mornings he is in a better mood than he used to be.

He still gets angry as soon as he is asked to do something he doesn’t want, or when we say no when he asks us to do things for him – almost every single time. Especially if it involves the end of something fun, e.g. putting away the iPad in the evening, or going to bed – or if it involves any kind of work. Even the smallest request, such as asking him to put away the toy he’s left on the kitchen table, or throw away his apricot pits, or get his own glass of water, leads to an explosion of yelling and screaming that we are the stupidest in the world, and threats of hitting us. There’s no ramp-up, he goes straight from zero to yelling. Sometimes he still does what he is asked; other times he just stomps away and flat out refuses.

I’m approaching this like I would approach a painful process at work: “If it hurts, do it more often.” He needs more practice in helping out, being asked to help, cleaning up after himself etc. It’ll get worse before it gets better, but it needs to be done before he grows into a lazy, entitled brat.

We spent the first third of this month in Estonia. The trip made a huge difference in Adrian’s ability and willingness to speak Estonian. He now actually spontaneously adresses me in Estonian, while before the trip he would rather be silent than answer in Estonian when I spoke to him.

A less appealing habit that he picked up in Estonia was asking “why do I have to do X”. Once – truly, just once – I jokingly asked, “why do we have to eat so many times every day, can’t we just stop eating?” because I was tired of all the cooking and washing up I had to do. He picked up that pattern and then used it a lot. Except he wasn’t quite able to pick up the part about it being a joke and sounded whiny instead. He also got into the habit of looking for someone to blame. Whenever he found something that wasn’t the way he wanted, he would ask “who put this here”, “who did this”. I do feel like the whining is abating a bit now and he is less negative in his speech.

He is obsessed with Lego. He rarely uses any other toys. He often asks me if and when we can buy more Legos. Thursdays are good days because then Ingrid’s Kalle Anka magazine arrives in the mail, and sometimes there’s a little Lego set included, which Ingrid lets him have. On his birthday wish list there is really one thing only: a giant Lego Chima set (which I’ve ordered already just to be sure that we get one!)

Oh, actually, there is one thing better than Legos: watching Lego themed Youtube clips on the iPad, especially videos of someone building Lego Chima or Lego Ninjago sets.

Quirky habit: constant movement of the mouth. Mostly he talks all the time. When he doesn’t, his mouth makes noises. Humming, random words, random pieces of random words, or just sounds. He can be playing on his own, or putting on his shoes, or eating fish fingers – he makes sound all the time. We sometimes have to tell him to stop humming while chewing, so that the rest of us can talk.
Eric tells me that he was the same as a kid, even when he was quite a bit older than Adrian is now.

Random fact: it seems he has outgrown his milk protein allergy and can now eat dairy products.
He refuses to try any outright dairy products such as cheese or cow’s milk butter, mostly because he generally refuses to try any new food. But since he has no such reservations about desserts, we tested it by making pancakes with cow’s milk one day, without telling him, and couldn’t notice any effects afterwards. Since then I’ve been letting him eat dairy when he doesn’t notice it (pasta with a creamy chicken sauce and parmesan!) and in desserts, pancakes, even dairy ice cream – and it seems to work just fine.

Favourite thing above all: Lego. Nothing compares to Lego. The one thing he simply must pack for our Estonia trip: Lego. The one thing he wants to buy at the toy store: Lego.
Favourite Legos: Lego Creator kits, that let you build three different things from the same set of bricks. Also, Lego Ninjago.
I’ve stopped looking at the suggested age range when we buy Legos. As long as the kit is small enough, he can build them all without difficulty. The only thing he needs help with is putting the tiny stickers on straight.

Favourite movie: Minions! And now he points out all the minion-themed stuff that is everywhere. Which is a lot.

Favourite conversation starter: tänk om, “what if”. His what-ifs are usually not particularly fanciful or bizarre, just very random. What if this table wasn’t here. What if we bought ALL these books. What if it started raining right now.

Favourite topic of discussion: ages. How old am I? How old is aunt Rahel? Am I older or younger than Rahel’s teenage son?
He cannot yet see any logic in ages, it seems to me. You’d think that it would be obvious that “I am a mom, aunt Rahel is a mom, aunt Rahel’s son is a big kid, moms are older than kids… hence I am older than her son” but not for Adrian.

Favourite item of clothing: still pyjamas. He wears pyjamas all the time around the house, and often when we go out as well. I still sometimes feel a need to conform somewhat to social expectations about clothing, so to satisfy both our needs, I’ve started buying pyjamas that look neutral and non-pyjamassy. (As an exercise, you could try and guess which of the t-shirts he is wearing in these photos are actually pyjama tops.)

I have been lax about taking notes this month so I don’t really have much to new to say.

Adrian is still in an angry phase. Inflexible, unwilling to compromise, belligerent. Om jag inte vill så måste jag inte. – “if I don’t want to then I don’t have to”.

But angry is not the same as unkind. He is kind as well, he just… really doesn’t want to do things that he doesn’t want to do. Such as washing his hands. Or going to bed at night.

At the same time he is kind and friendly and cuddly. He gives me big hugs and wet kisses every morning, and tells me that I look pretty (more often than anyone else in my life actually). He likes sitting in my lap and cuddling up close to me.

He is curious and observant, more so than Ingrid has ever been. I suppose that Adrian is really just what a normal kid is like at his age, whereas Ingrid is almost actively incurious – zones out and sometimes simply asks me to stop talking when I answer a question of hers in more detail than she wanted.

He looks at the things we pass on our way home. He notices that a birch tree has white bark that he can pull off, and knows that the tree with the yellow flowers is called golden rain. He notices teeny-tiny red mites on the sewer hole cover, and firebugs on the kerbstone, and the way the cracks in the road surface make it look like a computer keyboard.

He likes soft clothes and pyjamas. The fleecy ones are too warm at this time of the year, but thin, soft cotton pyjamas are the best. Especially if they have dinosaurs on them. Or sharks. He also likes Lightning McQueen, minions (from Despicable me) and Star Wars designs but if I have to buy clothes with big loud designs on them then I definitely choose dinosaurs ahead of Star Wars.

His knees are almost permanently covered in scabs and/or plasters. He runs and he climbs all the time.