What is it about guns and weapons that fascinates boys of a certain age? Or maybe boys of all ages, I don’t know.

Adrian doesn’t have even a smidgen of violence in him. Even in his most angry periods he’s never hit or kicked or otherwise tried to hurt anyone. No sibling fights.

And still he loves guns, or rather the idea of guns. A vast majority of his Plus-Plus constructions are guns of various kinds. Handguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, hand cannons, grenade launchers… The terminology comes from computer games, mostly Fortnite. He doesn’t even really understand the differences between them all, apart from the looks, so he makes up unlikely hybrids such as “sniper pistol”.

Christmas break is over for all of us and we’re back to our usual routines. I went back to work last week. Eric started working this week, and Adrian’s school term started on Monday as well. Today Ingrid’s school term also started.

We get up shortly after 7, although I sometimes stretch it to 7:30 since I have no particular hurry in the morning. I’m winding down my engagement in my current project (this is my last week) so I have no urgent tasks. And with no commute, I can be at work by 8 even if I sleep to 7:30.

Ingrid and Adrian both leave just before 8. School starts at 8. Ingrid has a three-minute walk to school; for Adrian it takes less than 10 minutes. Eric cycles to work and would much rather do so in daylight, so he waits until sunrise which is happens around 8:30.

They all have breakfast before leaving. I’m not fond of early breakfasts, so I start working first and break for breakfast around 9-ish.

All of us read while eating breakfast. Eric reads Dagens Industri. Adrian read Kalle Anka Pocket. I read Dagens Nyheter. What Ingrid reads I don’t know but I’m guessing it’s Snapchat.

Another month, and the sun will be up when I get up.

The weather has finally gone from muddy to crisp so we went out geocaching again. Eric and I could and do walk for hours without any extra activities, but for Adrian geocaching makes all the difference. A boring walk turns into a game. This time we went to Järvafältet, near Akalla, and picked up eight caches there.

This part of Järvafältet is quite fun to walk around in, because it’s so scruffy and varied, but still easily walkable. There are paths everywhere, but the paths go up hills and over rocks and in between deadfalls and marshes and ditches. You have to be alert and look where you put your feet. It was a good thing the ground was frozen today – one of the caches was in the middle of a marshy area that would have been really muddy otherwise.

Adrian took care of navigation today, with only a minimum of help. He’s been learning map reading both at school (where they’ve done some basic orienteering in gym class) and with his scout group, so now he actually knows what he’s doing.

With a GPS it’s mostly enough to look at the blue track line and make sure the dark blue triangle moves towards the cache rather than away, which doesn’t take much in the way of map reading skills. But he could also use the GPS map to figure out whether we should turn left or right on the next track we hit, so he can clearly relate the map to reality. When I pointed out some contour lines on the map for him, he took a look around and concluded that the cache would be at the top of the hill.

It was good for all of us to get out of the house, but Adrian seemed to need it most. His friend M has been away during most of Christmas break so he’s been sitting around the house more than usual and really needed to move and run around for a while.

Had I been here on my own I would have stopped to take photos of the pretty patterns in the ice, but today was not a photo outing.

No, there is no bingo square to “read under the table”. I think this is for “read after dinner” – the spot under the table must simply have been cosy.

The bingo challenge requires 15 minutes of reading per day. Adrian has already finished the book they read for school and had to find something else to continue reading. He loves comic books but is otherwise not much of a reader – but halfway through the book he told me “this wasn’t so bad”.

Adrian enjoys both cooking and baking. When he bakes, it’s always something chocolate-based: a mud cake, brownies, or chocolate chip cookies. This time it was cookies.

Mixing the sugar and room-temperature butter took him over half an hour, but he didn’t give up and got it done all on his own.

The usual pattern repeats itself. After a week of hanging around at home and eating too much, we’re restless, so we go out walking. Eric and Adrian went geocaching in Ursvik for a few hours. It was all muddy and slippery and started raining towards the end of our walk, but it still felt pretty good.

The first gifts have materialized under the tree, and Adrian can barely contain his excitement. Or rather, he cannot. He can not shut up about the gifts, to the point that I am getting very fed up with it.

Two of the gifts have his name on them, and he is guessing at what might be in there. He set a rule for himself that he today can only look at the gifts, not pick them up to weigh them or shake them. That’s only allowed on Christmas Eve.

But he allowed himself to hold up other things to the wrapped packages to compare their sizes. Look, one is suspiciously similar in size to a Nintendo Switch game sleeve (and Pokemon Sword is at the top of his list), while another matches a series of comic books where we have books 1 and 2, and book 3 has recently been published.

We have mixed feelings about gingerbread houses. They are fun to make and decorate, but afterwards nobody really wants to eat them. They get dusty and stale. And the store-bought gingerbread doesn’t taste very good to begin with.

Well, we can just see this as a crafts project where the materials happen to be nearly edible. You wouldn’t eat paper crafts even though you technically can, right?

We may not get a proper Christmas celebration this year but we can at least enjoy making lussebullar.

Textile crafts class at school has progressed from weaving friendship bracelets to actual real sewing. Adrian has taken a “sewing machine license” which allows him to use the sewing machines at school without supervision. He loves it, and has already sewn a fleece hat that he is very pleased with.

The hardest part about sewing is finding a suitable project. Adrian wants to make a Pokemon plushie, but most of the photos he finds on the internet have no pattern, and they’re too full of complicated 3d shapes for him to wing it. Like Snom with all its spikes, for example. But Centiskorch, another of his favourite Pokemon, is fundamentally a relatively simple centipede shape that we thought we could figure out.

This is the first time Adrian’s sewing project is actually Adrian’s sewing project, rather than him designing and me executing the design. I provided some construction advice and helped him pin the design to the fabric, but he has been doing all the real work: designing, measuring, drawing, cutting, and sewing.