Adrian is in a negative phase again, like he was around his birthday in September. It feels like he complains about everything all the time. It feels like I am always hearing “I don’t like doing this”, “I never get to” and “Why do I always have to”. He has no nice way of expressing dissatisfaction, he goes from zero straight to whining. It is tiring to be with him.

Maybe it is because he is tired. He has been saying that he wishes it was weekend all the time and he didn’t have to go to preschool. Perhaps his mood will improve with summer holidays.

And just like in September, he is quite clingy and does not want to be on his own at all. He wants to know what room I am in. When I go out, he must come; when I go in, he must go in. When we are out walking, he walks within two steps of me, ideally holding my hand all the time. When he does let go of my hand, he walks so close to me that I almost step on his feet.

Adrian has become interested in geography. We have been reading Världens djur, a book about animals, as our bedtime story. He likes the animals but also likes to hear about all the different places where they live. (The book is organised by habitat: the polar regions, desert, forest etc.) And while everything in that book is exciting, one of the most important facts about each animal is what part of the world it lives in. And for each place I mention, he asks if we could go there sometime. Can we go to Madagascar? And Antarctica? And the Middle East? And a desert? But maybe not a desert because there are scorpions there.

He also wants to go to a place where we can find dinosaur fossils. And to Japan, where there are ninjas! And robots! (Which we learned from the book of maps, Kartor.)

Pirates are also cool. He loved the pirate-themed sticker book I gave him and worked on it almost daily until it was all done.

He also likes reading about the Earth and its climate, things like earthquakes and tsunamis and hail.

He enjoys consciously breaking clothing rules. Mostly he is quite norm-conscious and usually wears jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt. (He doesn’t think twice about wearing a pink t-shirt, though, or wearing a dress to a party. Because dresses are pretty and comfortable.)

But now and again he comes up with something mildly crazy, such as going to preschool in pyjamas, or walking around at home with no trousers. He is very aware that what he is doing is slightly odd, and that’s what makes it fun.

He now likes baths, and has graduated from the small tub (which he barely fit into) to the large one that Ingrid uses. Well, what he likes is sitting in the bath. He is still not at all fond of actually washing himself. Washing hands is sort of OK, but not when I tell him he has to use soap as well. He also doesn’t like washing his neck and ears or wiping his nose, but he’d rather do it himself than let me scrub him. It’s a good thing he likes having his hair so short – I cannot imagine making him comb his hair every day.

Adrian’s head is so full of thoughts. Thoughts are spinning, flying, spinning off new thoughts, all the time. The activity seems to be constant.

What if our house had feet? And what if it was like a robot, and it went off at night and bought something and then in the morning we would find it and ask, where did that come from? What if the bicycle had, like, a little roof so we wouldn’t get wet when it rains? Look, our shadow is cycling with us!

Our bodies are endlessly fascinating, and food and digestion in particular. What colour is the brain? How did we get teeth? How does food go to all parts of my body? Is the poop coming out now the food that I ate for lunch an hour ago? Poop is still fascinating as well as funny.

How does a four-year-old boy explore spelling? One day he told me that there are three letters in “kiss” and four in “bajs”.

All this thinking and talking makes him very distractible. Getting dressed in the morning and getting into bed at night takes ages, because the moment I turn my back, he starts thinking about something else. Same with calming down and falling asleep.

Even reading a nighttime story and singing for him is an exercise in frustration. He climbs around in the bed, starts talking about other things, and then asks me “did you sing Trollmor already? I didn’t hear it, can you sing it again?” Gaah!

Meals take an eternity and a half. Everybody else is finished (and I am a slow eater, if anything) and he’s still only halfway through his meal. And if we leave the table without waiting for him he is angry and in tears, and if we stay there then Ingrid squirms restlessly, out of her mind with boredom.

He’s getting sort of lazy with reading now, or perhaps overconfident. Often he reads the first two or three letters of a word and then makes a wild guess.

Favourite toy: Lego. Building is fun, and so is playing with the finished things. The least fun part is looking for the pieces he needs. We’ve upgraded our Lego storage so we now have a wide, shallow bin, and we often pour it all out on the floor for easier access – and still he hates looking through the pile. When he’s building something random he just adapts his construction to the pieces he finds, but sometimes he wants to build something based on instructions, and then he needs that tiny white piece of which there are exactly four in our giant pile of Lego… He really appreciates it when I help him build, which mostly means helping him find the pieces he needs.

Favourite stuff: pirates, and dinosaurs.
Favourite books: Bamse.

Not favourite activity: washing hands, especially if soap is involved. But because he plays outside in the sandbox at preschool I make him wash his hands when we get home, and because he often eats with his hands, and quite messily, I make him wash them again after most meals.

He has also started helping me cook, and that means more hand-washing… He likes stirring and pouring, but also chopping: carrots, potatoes, bananas.

Unrelated to the hand-washing (I believe) he has really dry skin on the backs of his hands, rough and almost cracking. We apply creams and ointments, it gets better for a while, and then worse again.

Baths, which he used to hate, are a mixed experience now. I only force him to bathe once a week. He objects, and he postpones, and he yells at me when I say there will be no more postponing – but once he’s in the bath he’s quite happy.

Odd habit: Wearing shoes without socks, with the velcro straps very loosely closed so he can take them off and on without undoing them. I don’t understand how he can do it without getting blisters.

The boy who only wore velour for half a year has started wearing jeans. At preschool they have to put on “outdoor trousers” over their indoor clothes when they go out, but not if they’re wearing jeans. (An understandable policy: even if I personally wouldn’t be too bothered if Adrian wore holes in his trousers, most parents probably would.) Adrian doesn’t like the extra layer, so he’s opted for jeans instead.

Magma, with lava coming out of it

Adrian learned to read this month. Just like that he went from last month’s “AI!” and “PANG” to such words as “asteroider” and “mjölkfri” and “skogräns”. He reads letter by letter, pointing at each one with his finger. Naturally, long words are hard and compound words are harder still, but as you can see from the example words, he’s not letting that stop him.

He likes to read the chapter headings when I read a book for him.

Now he just needs to get his speed up so he can start reading sentences, which would unlock the treasure trove of Bamse magazines that we have and that he so loves looking at.

While we’re on the topic of learning, he likes adding numbers. Even without me prompting or doing anything in particular to encourage him, he tells me that three plus five is eight, etc.

Double-digit numbers are complicated. It doesn’t help that Swedish (just like English) has irregular names for the numbers between ten and twenty. He knows there is something there to be figured out, something he is close to figuring out, so he keeps asking questions like “what do one and six make” when he sees a pair of numbers somewhere. He hasn’t quite understood that the order matters, so his “one and six” might mean sixteen or it might mean sixty-one.

He has learned to do up buttons, and I don’t know where or how because he doesn’t have any clothes with buttons. But one day he told me “I will button your cardigan”, probably because the buttons happened to be right in front of him, and then he proceeded to do that. And then he unbuttoned it again. Just for fun.

Adrian likes watching TV. We’ve blocked YouTube so the endless mindless surfing of play-dough movies is off the table; he’s forced to watch Swedish children’s television on SVT Play instead.

His favourites nowadays tend to be documentaries and shows about people doing things. He watched all episodes of “Fixa rummet”, an interior decorating show for kids where they redecorate kids’ rooms; then “Bacillakuten” which teaches kids about the human body, and most recently “Alex hittar hobbyn” where Alex tries out various hobbies ranging from figure skating and street dance to making sushi.

I don’t think he plays much on the iPad. The one game I saw him play was Field Runners. He has watched Ingrid or me play a few times, and I explained a few concepts, and off he went. Positioning his units, upgrading, saving money for upgrades, etc.

He is often tired in the afternoon after preschool, and often asks to go to bed before our eight o’clock official bedtime. But then other days he shouts that he is “not tired at all!” and refuses.

The bedtime routine now includes some reading, often from a chapter book. Then I sing for him. Currently he has a fixed list of five favourites, after which I can sing whatever I like. The five are Sockerbagaren, Trollmor, Ekorrn satt i granen, Kalle Teodor and Tre gubbar – in that order. For “my songs” I usually pick some Estonian ones. The cardboard songbooks that were so important a few months ago are now not.

He likes talking like baby or otherwise distorting both his voice and the words to the point where I have no idea what he is saying. Then he translates for me.

Adrian is still doing perler beads. Beading is often what he says he was busy with, or just about to start, when I pick him up at preschool. Last weekend he did a fair bit of beading at home and I watched. He was impressively good at it. He reads patterns like a pro. “Three blue ones in this row, and then in the next row there is one extra on each side. And I will need five pink ones and then four more.”

Often he wants to his beading projects to be surprises. We’re not allowed to see them, and then he gives them to one of us as a gift. Sometimes he starts off by saying that it’s a gift for me, then changes his mind and says it’s for Eric instead, or vice versa. The main thing is that it must be a surprise and a gift.

Just like Ingrid at that age, he is picking up simple maths in his daily life, for fun, with no real effort. We count things when an obvious opportunity arises, and add them up when that makes sense. First three grapes and then another twig with three more, that’s six grapes. And so on.

Adrian can count to twenty but doesn’t know how to go on from there – but he can also count from one hundred to one hundred and twenty. He can count backwards from ten to zero, but only in Swedish.

I often find him browsing Bamse comics. He can’t read them yet but that doesn’t seem to bother him. Sometimes he asks me, What does it say here? when there is a sign or a letter or some other written object in Bamse – but not being able to read the speech bubbles don’t seem to bother him.

He loves it when someone reads to him. His taste in books is surprisingly mature, as long as the book doesn’t use any complicated words. We can read chapter books for him, with few pictures (but more pictures is better). Currently, for example, Eric is reading Brandkårsmysteriet (a LasseMaja mystery) for him at bedtime.

He gets bedtime stories, like most kids, but in our house we also have a morning story. I began doing it this autumn because he was always so angry about being woken on weekday mornings. It was an instant hit, and by now it is a strong tradition that both kids enjoy. Because he can listen to chapter books, and Ingrid still enjoys books with lots of pictures, usually it isn’t hard to find books that suit both of them.

Bottoms are still incredibly funny. We have a page-a-day art calendar in the kitchen, and one day’s image was Titian’s Venus and Adonis. The ONLY thing that Adrian noticed with lots of giggles, from the other side of the kitchen, was rumpa!

In my notes for this month I had noted down “anger” again but by now that has subsided again. The periods of barely-controlled anger come and go: times when he reacts to any opposition and any obstacle by yelling.

Right now he is more likely to express himself with words – such as calling me dummaste mamman, “stupidest mom”. When his anger subsides, he comes and looks at me with sorry eyes and says I am the kindest mom, the best mom, and we hug.

Random things:

• He hated tagging along for Ingrid’s riding lessons so badly that we rearranged things. He now stays really late at preschool instead. Ingrid and I pick him up after riding school at about 17:15. We’ve done it this way twice. The first time he was the only kid left; the second time it was him and one other boy whose mum arrived at the same time as us. I thought this might bother him but he’s been fine with it. Much more content than at the stables.
• Adrian loves music. But the kids’ cheap CD player has become more and more unreliable, so they have started to use our Sonos wireless hifi system. It is a lot more complicated than the CD player, so Adrian cannot really navigate it yet, but he is learning bits and pieces. Mostly he listens to the soundtrack from Frost, and the Barnkammarböckerna (which are easy to find).

Likes:

• Bamse. Frozen.
• Fixa rummet, a “fixer upper” kind of TV show where they redo kids’ rooms.
• Rice cakes. Raspberry jam.
• Thick ski mitts and fur-lined winter hat.

Dislikes:

• Baths (despite the impression you might get from the photo below) and washing his hands.

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Adrian is so earnest. He does everything so intensely and with such presence and conviction. Everything is for real, everything is 100%.

He comes up with pretend games and then plays them and develops them further with passion well past the point when I get tired of them. Currently, for example, when we walk somewhere on the incredibly icy streets, the ruts in ice are a labyrinth, like in the Labyrint TV show, and in between the walls of ice there are monsters called Taurus (like in the show), and you mustn’t step on the monsters or they will slime you. No, you mustn’t step on the ice because then you will end up in the cage. No, you must step on the monsters because that will make them flat like pancakes. No, stepping on the monsters will make them small like the tip of your thumb. No, stepping on the monsters will kill them and then they cannot slime us any more. And so on.

Monsters and killing them is a recurring theme. There are all kinds of monsters, and all kinds of ways of vanquishing them.

For obvious reasons, ice is another topic that Adrian keeps coming back to. He talks about how ice melts when you take it indoors, asks if ice can kill you if it hits you, and if you can eat ice.

He also talks about growing up. You grow when you eat. And you grow when you have a birthday party. (He insists it is definitely not the other way around.)

Adrian may have a rich imagination, but some things should just the same as they always are. When we play with Lego, he gets angry with me when I put the wrong hair or headgear on a figure, or put a dog in the same car with Spiderman. Nej det ska inte vara så!

When I find a piece I like in our pile of Lego pieces, he “needs that one” and tries to grab it. When I start building something and he likes the look of it, he doesn’t make a similar one – he wants to take mine, or says “make one like that for me, too”.

In other situations as well, when Ingrid or I come up with an idea that he likes, he doesn’t spin it out further but just tries to grab it. On our way home from school I asked both kids what body parts they would like to have. Ingrid says she’d like wings. “I’ll have wings too!” shouts Adrian. I say I want a tail like a monkey. “I’ll have a monkey tail too!” says Adrian.

He tries threats as a negotiation tactic. But his threats are not very well chosen – often he uses threats that would hurt him more than me. I accept this threat, and then he quickly back-pedals. “If you don’t read another chapter then I will never listen to this book again!” OK, I say. “Uh… OK, I do want to listen to it tomorrow as well.”

He is starting to try reading very short words, and asks me what this or that word says. He likes to browse Bamse comics, and asks me about big bold words like “Kaboom” or “Bang” etc. He also tries to spell out the names of his friends on the phone list for his preschool group, when he wants me to call someone for a playdate.

At preschool he works a lot with perler beads. Almost every day he comes home with a beaded object. At first it was just geometric shapes, first with random colours and then with patterns. Then he started following all kinds of patterns that they have at preschool. We have a perler bead bird and a bunny, a cupcake and an ice cream cone, and so on.

Small stuff:

• For a while he kept waking up at night and wandering into our bedroom. We even put the third bed “unit” back so there would be space for him. Then he stopped.
• I gave him fleece pyjamas for Christmas (that I ordered all the way from the US because I couldn’t find any in Sweden) and he so loves wearing them.
• I am making him practice walking down the stairs with just one step per stair, when we walk together. He likes to step left-right on each stair, and the slowness of that approach is beginning to really bother me.
• He has discovered that he likes salmon.

This month’s themes:

Friends. Adrian often asks to play with a friend after preschool. I have to say no more often than I would like, because of Ingrid’s activities. I try to make sure he gets at least one playdate a week.

Singing. The kids have been practising Christmas songs at preschool, so Adrian has been singing Santa Lucia and such. But he also sings other songs, everything from En elefant balanserade to Vem kan segla förutan vind (which turned into a funnily illogical Vem kan ro utan vind in his version).

Building. He builds with Lego at home and Polydron at preschool. Among the first things he learned to build with the Polydrons was a spinning top. Spinning tops, by the way, are no longer called snurra by today’s kids but “beyblades”, or more likely “beybleys” if the kids are young. So Adrian calls the Polydrons in general “beybleys”.

Christmas. Adrian is excitedly looking forward to Christmas. He closely follows the various Christmas calendars around the house and knows exactly what date it is today. He has a Lego Christmas calendar that he is very fond of.

Empathy. He is developing an understanding of other people’s feelings, and has a kind soul. One day when we played Den försvunna diamanten, a board game where you walk around trying to find a lost diamond, and he was having a particularly lucky streak, I said something disappointed about losing. He instantly comforted me, very sincerely, and offered me some of his money.

Potty humour. Pee and poo and bottoms and penises are incredibly funny. Put Adrian together with another boy of the same age, and there is no end to how many potty words you will hear.

Adrian is four… and yet he’s always “the little one”. At this age Ingrid felt so big, but now that I have an eight-year-old to compare to, Adrian feels young whatever he does.

He himself wants to be bigger. He says he wishes he was as big as Ingrid, or that “Ingrid came out of you after me” so he could be the older one.

It’s hard to notice Adrian growing because he’s my second child. His development is not news, I’ve seen most of it before, so I really have to pay attention. I get regular little surprises when I notice how much he’s grown.

Today for example his friend D came home with us after preschool. They played together for two hours, needing no help from me with conflict resolution, which really took me by surprise. There were occasional discussions and disagreements but those got resolved incredibly smoothly and peacefully.

On Friday he had his 4-year checkup. Mostly the things they check are incredibly basic, like walking along a line on the floor, threading large wooden beads on a shoestring, answering simple questions about pictures, etc. He was also asked to draw a man. On his own, he never draws anything but scribbles and tangles. But here to my surprise he drew a surprisingly advanced man: head, eyes and mouth, neck, body, legs (but no arms), and even food in his tummy. I had no idea he could do that. He is never interested in drawing at home.

He surprises me with interesting questions as well. How are fridges made? What is in glass? How did the Earth get made? What is inside the Earth? He’s especially interested in those last ones and has asked me to retell that story several times.

Some weeks ago he tried out an iPad game called Magic Garden. There’s a board with a set of tiles, and you have to rotate the tiles to make the pieces match up so water can flow through the pipe system. To my great surprise he got through like 20 or 30 levels, all on his own – and towards the end they were really complex.

Mostly, though, he chooses YouTube videos or simple games instead of thinking games – because he is tired. He is tired when he wakes in the morning, can’t calm down enough to sleep at preschool, refuses to go to bed early, and usually takes a long time to go to sleep at night.

He’s not really too grumpy, like he was earlier this autumn. But he complains about having to go to preschool, and in the afternoon he complains about having to go home. (It’s comforting to hear him say he doesn’t want to go home in the afternoon, because it means his complaining in the morning is about not wanting to go anywhere, rather than about preschool itself.)

At night the bedtime ritual revolves around singing. First we read a book. Then we sing the songs in his cardboard Ellen och Olle song books. I had given them away to his baby cousin, thinking that surely he had outgrown them. But he really missed them and kept asking for them, so I asked them back, and now we use them every night.

Often he joins me. Sometimes he sings the actual song for real. They’re practising Christmas songs at preschool, so he joins me for Räven raskar över isen for example. More often he sings some nonsense sound instead, but with the same melody as the song I’m singing: “pata pata paa-ta patapatta patta paa-ta” for “har du sett min apa, min söta fina lilla apa” for example. Sometimes he varies the rhythm as well, putting in two quick ones where the real lyrics have one long sound, etc. Which makes it a bit challenging for me to keep singing the real thing, but it’s fun as well.

Then we put the books away and turn off the light, and I keep singing. “First Trollmor, and not too last Kalle Theodor” he reminds me. “Not too last” means it can come later, but not so late that he will have fallen asleep before I get to it.

Favourite clothes: fleece one-piece pyjamas. Oh how happy he would be if we could buy more of those, but I can’t find any. Also, his snowsuit. I brought it up from the basement one cold day, and he kept using it even when the weather turned warmer again. I guess it’s more comfortable than jacket and trousers.

Not favourite clothes: socks. He doesn’t mind them at home but whenever I pick him up at preschool, he’s always taken off his socks.

Favourite food: porridge, but not as intensely as before. Soy “yoghurt” – Carlshamn’s blueberry Soygurt and Alpro’s berry-flavoured yoghurts. “Apple boats” – apples, cored and cut into chunky segments.

Adrian has done a lot of growing up recently. There’s little left of the anger we saw so much of last month.

Actually… I wonder how much is due to him growing up and out of it, and how much is us providing him with better preconditions. We might simply be more adept at parrying his moods, because otherwise his anger wears us all down.

Also, we pay more attention to his sleep. We’re stricter about getting him into bed earlier, and we let him sleep longer in the mornings. Everybody else gets up together at 7, and Adrian sleeps another 20-30 minutes.

He still thinks that he can order people around and they should do as he wants. “Mummy, you will read for me now, because I want it!” And yet at the same time when we tell him he as to do something, he can argue that “you don’t have to do things that you don’t want”, man behöver inte göra det om man inte vill.

He talks a lot; at times almost constantly. The level of his talking varies, of course: sometimes it’s just his mouth moving because it has nothing better to do; other times he is actually talking to us.

Mostly it is about the here and now. Quite often at breakfast he talks about shapes he sees in his half-eaten slice of toast.

Sometimes he talks about strange scenarios that come into his mind. What if the house was hungry, too? What if it was raining stones instead of water? What if we went out at night?

He is also learning the art of conversation. (Interestingly, this is something Ingrid has never done as far as I can remember.) He asks us how our day was and what we did at work. When the extended family was here to celebrate the kids’ birthday, he spoke to his grandfather and wanted to hear what he had done when he was a kid.

He plays with words and rhymes. He makes up nonsense words, and twists existing words into new shapes. Language play must really occupy a large chunk of his brain: he comes up with impressively creative rhymes sometimes. A few weeks ago we had just read a cartoon adaptation of Treasure Island by Mauri Kunnas, and he rhymed “åt det hållet” with “Captain Smollett”. I was pretty impressed.

He’s trying to figure out reading. He’s known his letters for a long time already, and recognised his own name. Now he sometimes tries to follow along when I read for him, and figure out where that word is that I just said.

Adrian wants to be a big kid. He wants to be as big as Ingrid, he says. Anything that Ingrid can do, he also wants. He wants to have a rucksack for his things when he goes to preschool, like Ingrid does. He wants to sit on a big kitchen chair, not a kids’ chair.

Sometimes he still wants to be a baby, too. Mostly he asks if we can play mummy daddy baby, and I can be the mummy and he can be the baby, and it’s time for the baby to go to sleep. Which means he wants me to carry him to the bathroom and then upstairs, like I did when he was a baby.

He isn’t entirely happy about going to preschool and often asks if he can stay at home instead. I’ve thought about taking a day off now and again to spend the day with him, but it’s not going to happen, because he would take that as the new normal and demand it all the time. He is completely unable to handle rules with exceptions.

We used to have slightly sweeter “weekend cereal” at home – not honey-coated sugar bombs but sweeter than what I think is suitable for everyday breakfasts. We had to stop that because he wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t get them every day.

He gets a Numbert book every Saturday, and he complains bitterly about the waiting almost every day, and cries that he wants it now.

Random fact: Adrian likes soft, plush, warm fabrics like fleece and velour. His dream garment would be a fleece one-piece or zip-up pyjamas. I found one on Tradera that was almost what he wanted but it has feet, and while he likes it for its soft fleecy warmth, it’s not quite what he wished for.

Random fact #2: He really likes to eat with his hands. If we insist, he can use his fork and knife passably well, but given a choice, he’d rather use his fingers. He doesn’t eat messy food like casseroles and mashed potatoes, anyway – and for the kinds of food he likes, such as pasta, boiled potatoes, fish fingers, broccoli, or corn fritters, hands work as well as cutlery.

Forty-eight months; four years today.

It isn’t easy to be Adrian right now. He is anxious and worried. He is tired. He is irritable and sensitive. He is angry. There is something in him or his life that is not letting him just be.

He is worried and clingy. There’s no separation anxiety per se: he has no difficulty letting go of us, there are no tears when we drop him off at preschool, no problems sleeping in his own bed. But he wants to know all the time where I am, and if I by any chance go upstairs without telling him and he notices, he’s in tears and tells me to wait for him. In the morning when I leave for work he must get a chance to give me hugs and lots of kisses; just saying good-bye is not enough.

This weekend when we were walking in the forest he held on to someone’s hand almost all the time, and when he didn’t, he stayed within a few steps of us. When Ingrid falls behind on the way home from school – not far, maybe just 10 meters – he starts to worry. At birthday parties (which we’ve had at a pace of about once per week) he insists on me or Eric staying there during the entire party.

He is easily upset and inflexible. When things are not exactly the way he had planned or expected, he breaks down. No bananas in the house? “Then I won’t eat any breakfast at all!” Favourite pyjamas are in the laundry? “Then I don’t want go sleep at all!” He cries and shouts and stomps out of the room.

Sometimes just saying no to him is enough, even in the kindest possible tone. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be an explicit no, even something like “be careful here, the saucepan is hot” can cause tears and drama.

If it’s me causing the problem (by warning him about hot saucepans for example) “then I won’t talk to you” and “I want to be by myself!” or “then you’re the stupidest mum in the world!”

It’s always worst when he is tired or when he has low blood sugar. Mornings are sensitive, especially before breakfast on weekday mornings when we have to wake him. Evenings likewise. We are very careful not to let him stay up too late because it will only end badly, and have repercussions the morning after, too.

He’s almost always tired when I pick him up at preschool – I suspect he may not eat enough. He used to ride his balance bike to and from preschool; now he’s always too tired and I bring him home on the back of my bike. And he always needs at least one banana immediately after preschool. Some days he eats three during the 5 or 10 minutes it takes us to get to Ingrid’s school.

The rest of us try to compensate. We do our best to be extra flexible and accommodative, to break bad news (such as the lack of bananas) gently. To mention alternatives, but suggest no solutions; to give choices, but not too many. It can become pretty taxing mentally, to have to be so careful around him.

In between he is friendly, kind and sweet. Then he tells me I’m the best mum in the world. He asks me how my day was and likes to listen to me to describe everything I did during the day.

He plays well together with Ingrid, and as far as I know he’s happy and sociable at preschool. He likes playing with girls best. For his birthday party this Saturday, his guests will be 4 girls. He used to have a few boys he played with but many are too wild for his taste. He especially doesn’t like the ones who play wild, angry games with “shooters” and lots of noise.

Favourite toy: Lego, by far. Sometimes when he walks away in anger from the breakfast table he goes to our office (which is the room furthest away from the kitchen) and slams the door shut. Other times he notices the bin with Lego blocks on his way and stops there, and calms himself down with some building work.

Favourite clothes: pyjamas.

A lot of growing up has been happening here.

About a month ago, Adrian moved out of our bedroom into what used to be Ingrid’s room and is now the kids’ room. We had been talking about a bunk bed for a while, and when we found out that Eric’s father had one just kind of lying around, we made it happen. Both kids were immediately in love with the bed and Adrian wanted to sleep there that very night.

And that was that. Since then he’s slept there every night, and fallen asleep there every night but one. He has not wandered into our bed even once.

From about five in the morning he often sleeps restlessly and noisily. That used to lead to him moving closer to me or Eric in our shared bed, but in his new bed the lack of other warm bodies doesn’t seem to bother him at all. I was a bit worried that he might wake Ingrid but that hasn’t happened. Occasionally the noise he makes has woken me instead, especially early on when we kept the doors open between our bedrooms. I’ve even thought that surely he must have fell out of the bed, and waited for the cries, but nothing… I think he might be hitting the wall with his feet or elbows or head or something.

When the room became the kids’ room instead of just Ingrid’s room, it wasn’t just the sleep habits that changed. Until now Ingrid’s room was really just Ingrid’s bedroom – during the day the kids were always downstairs. Now all of a sudden they’ve started playing there. (This might also have something to do with new, stricter limits on iPad use in the evenings…)

During summer both kids would sleep until about 7, then get up and play with their iPads while we slept on. Now our alarms go off a bit before 7 and there is no iPad time. And then there is the time pressure to get up, get dressed, eat breakfast… Adrian is grumpy almost every single morning now. Getting up earlier helps because then we don’t need to hurry as much, and I can take 15 minutes to cuddle and read for him and Ingrid.

When we read, he’s started looking at the text and asking me where it says that thing that I just read. He’s figured out that words in extra large type or in a different style are the important or loud ones.

We’ve started reading the Mitt första 123 books that Ingrid got around this age and Adrian is very fond of these. The first one, I think, we read every day for a week. We’re taking a new one every week because “you get a Numbert book on Saturdays” was so much easier to explain than any alternative. But this might be a bit too much; we’ll see.

Adrian likes to compares things. This is bigger than that, and this one is even bigger. Pappa is taller than emme.

He has been curious about dying, and wanted me to name lots of ways of dying, and then added some more himself.

And he has wondered what comes after the sky, when you fly higher than the sky. Space is kind of hard to explain.

Our two weeks of intensive Estonian practice made a huge difference. From hardly speaking any Estonian at all, he has now pretty much gone over to speaking Estonian to me all the time. Sometimes when he asks me something and I respond in Swedish (to include Eric as well) he actually asks me to say that again in Estonian. Sometimes I’ve even heard the kids speak Estonian to each other. I’m sure that long days at preschool will put an end to this soon but I’m very pleased in the meantime.