We celebrated end of school with a buffet dinner at Ri Cora, which is becoming something of a tradition.

At the end of the evening I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo, although I’d gone there with a firm plan to take some. Especially since I get so few photos of Ingrid and Adrian these days, when they’re mostly doing their own things in their own rooms. We were almost home by this time, so I asked them to slow down to give me time to get out the camera. Their interpretation of “slowing down” was a slow-motion walk.

And then posing for the camera, with hair-smoothing and twisted bodies. (For Adrian’s last school photo earlier this year, the photographer had him twist this and turn that and put his hand there, and he said it had felt incredibly awkward.)


Eric biked home so I didn’t get any of him at all. But we do have a summer vacation coming up so I’ll get more chances.

End of school, and Solhemsskolan’s usual ceremony. After 10 year’s it’s becoming a bit old, but I guess the kids appreciate the tradition.

In all the ten-plus years we’ve never had bad weather. There was one year when we brought our umbrellas but ended up not needing them. And it’s not like June is always sunny – there was that one year when we had such horrible weather on midsummer (I think it was only 15°C) that we celebrated indoors. We’ve been lucky.

One part of the tradition is that the youngest pupils give roses to the oldest ones, leaving school at the end of grade 6. I remember when Ingrid was giving a rose, how old and big the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds looked. And in a way they still do, but also not.

Adrian proudly finished the year with eight A grades.

Adrian needs hiking sandals for our upcoming summer adventures, so we measured his feet. 25.5 centimetres from heel to toe, size 41 – which is a full two sizes up in just half a year.

The sweet spot, with him and Ingrid and me all having the same size, didn’t last long at all.

Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.

It’s a few degrees below zero outside and I’m wrapping myself in a scarf and buttoning up my wool coat. Adrian, meanwhile, has a thin windproof jacket over his sweater and doesn’t even close it because he likes the feeling of freedom. Just looking at him makes me shiver.

I tried photographing him while we were walking, but it was hard to get any distance. Naturally, as we walk together and talk together, he quickly gravitates closer to me.

Birthday fika for Eric’s sister who turned 50.

The adults sat and talked and ate semla. Those too young to appreciate sitting and talking had a Lego Masters competition. Those too young for Legos hung around and explored the world.

Here’s a rhinoceros that Adrian built.

Adrian bought this pair of socks in Amsterdam, in early November. That’s three months ago. Say he has enough socks to last him two weeks between doing laundry. He’d then have worn these six days at most. How can he already have a fingertip-sized hole in them? Does he walk on sandpaper? Have small piles of gravel in his shoes?

I haven’t been out walking since September. As these things tend to go during the dark and gray months of November and December (with Christmas also distracting). But today was forecast to be a rare bright and sunny day so Adrian and I went out walking on Järvafältet.

The weather has been wet for some time and it rained a lot during the night, so we mostly stuck to wide, well-maintained paths. The smaller, wilder trails are usually more fun, but they were very muddy today.


We did get sunshine for most of our walk. Later when the clouds came, Adrian was a rare speck of colour in an otherwise pretty dull-coloured landscape.

We had to give up on our shortcut path across one of the fields halfway, when we realized it was flooded and impassable.

Lake Säbysjön, which our walk circled around, was still all iced over, even though we’ve had quite a lot of above-zero days recently.

There were some brave skaters on the ice, and a short time later an entire group of them passed us, more than a dozen people. I guess the ice is more solid than it looks, all wet and watery though it is.

For our lunch break we stopped at the birding tower on the southwest shore of the lake. We couldn’t spot any birds, but there was a lonely ice fisher. That’s that little black and white dot to the right of the middle. He was quite interesting to watch. I thought he’d just sit at his hole all the time, but he had multiple holes that he moved between, and even drilled a new one.