Adrian needs to practise his times tables. He knows them, mostly, but not fast enough, and sometimes he still gets some of them wrong.

So we do some maths every day around dinnertime. At first we did it orally – I came up with problems one by one and he told me the answer. The talking slowed both of us down, though, so recently we switched to written practice. I fill a sheet of paper with problems and he then does them as fast as he can.

Initially I made up problems more or less randomly but with extra focus on the ones I knew he knew less well. But now he wants to see if he gets faster, so I need to make the exercises more consistent. I make sure to cover the entire table from 2×2 to 9×9 evenly. But I also want each day’s sheet to have a different order so he doesn’t just learn them by heart by order – “18, 24, 25, …”

My algorithm for making up his worksheet has evolved. The first iteration was a simple one. I drew up a 10×10 square on a piece of scrap paper, randomly picked an unused square (such as 4×5) and put a dot in it when I wrote down “4×5” on Adrian’s sheet.

This was time-consuming and fiddly. My second algorithm was to take the previous day’s sheet and shuffle it. Take three problems from the top of the first column, then three from the bottom, then from the top of the second column, etc. I was hoping this would be faster because I can just follow along, but it was easy to lose my place and forget which row I had just copied and where I should continue.

My third algorithm was the opposite of the first one. Instead of filling the sheet top to bottom with exercises in random order, I went through the table top to bottom (2×2, 2×3, …) and wrote each combination in a random place on Adrian’s sheet.

At this point I noticed that I must have made mistakes in my first algorithm. When I was done with a sheet using the third algorithm, I noticed that the finished sheet had fewer problems than the previous sheets. I double-checked, and apparently I had previously inadvertently included some duplicates. To keep the worksheets consistent in length, I now have to repeat my previous mistakes intentionally and add some random duplicates.

This task is of course just crying out for automation. But then the results would need to get from computer to paper somehow and I don’t have access to a printer. Perhaps at some point I’ll get sufficiently fed up to automate it anyway and cycle to the office and print out a few dozen variations.

I cycled to the recycling station with Adrian and got rid of stuff. He was somewhat less happy about it than I. Too many hills, he said, while I thought the route was as flat as anything you can possibly get in Stockholm. I think he’s getting out of shape. His afternoons at after-school care are no longer filled with running around but with Minecraft.

Adrian made chocolate chip cookies, all on his own.

He likes both baking and cooking. Baking, I think, suits him a bit better, because there is less multi-tasking involved. You just follow the steps in order at your own pace, and then you’re done. With cooking, there’s often more time pressure – you need to keep an eye on whatever is on the stove while working on the next thing, and you can’t always queue them up after each other.

A friend/neighbour found out about our woeful lack of pumpkin carving and generously gave us one of their pumpkins. It had done its Halloween duty already, but been painted rather than carved. So Adrian turned the other side and gave it a second life.

Usually I also carve, but this time with my hands free I could focus on photography.

Adrian had a small birthday party.

He’s been pondering for awhile now whether to have a party or not, and if yes, what kind? Now he decided to have a sleepover and Minecraft party with a few of his classmates.

He really is very undemanding when it comes to parties these days. All he asked for from us was pancakes for dinner. The rest he took care of himself, including messaging his friends to agree on times and get RSVPs.

They spent all afternoon playing Minecraft together. After the pancake dinner they went up to his room where they did I don’t know what.

For some reason they barely slept all night. A couple of his friends “couldn’t sleep” and also couldn’t shut up and let the others sleep. Still, they were surprisingly perky in the morning. After breakfast and some more gaming, they baked a mud cake together – Adrian’s favourite kind of cake.

In the evening he fell asleep on the sofa shortly after dinner. After I prodded him to move to his own bed, he slept like a log for nearly twelve hours.

Today we made chestnut creatures, as is our tradition. Adrian provided the chestnuts.

Intense concentration.

When we were poking around among the chestnuts in the bowl and commenting on the lack of choice, Adrian went off and came back with his school backpack, which contained at least another kilogram of chestnuts. Small, large, flattish or round – now we have lots of all sorts. They filled not just another bowl, but an entire large dish.

I was glad when Ingrid joined us. She’s been less interested in family activities recently. Teenagers, you know.

The naturalistic ones: camel, rabbit, hedgehog, pigeon, caterpillar.

The more fantastical ones: a sheep that can walk on water; a man with a triple jetpack.

And two space aliens.

Birthday boy opening his birthday presents, early in the morning, before school.

A much needed “new” phone to replace his old one which is not working so well any more. A Lego Ninjago set, a Sorgenfresser plushie, and socks with food patterns.

No, he did not get a bottle Glenlivet. We have a family tradition of reusing good-quality boxes for wrapping completely unrelated presents, especially hard-to-wrap ones. The Glenlivet box held the phone; the Sorgenfresser came in a box made for an iPad Air.

You have to be a little bit careful with this so you don’t send out misleading signals that lead to disappointment and tears instead of joy. A plushie in an iPad box only works if you’re quite sure that the giftee does not actually expect that box to hold an iPad.

4th grade brought a lot more homework for Adrian. Now he has extra work to do, to catch up after being at home for a week. He dutifully gets it done but I can see the effort it takes him to sit and focus on something so boring as pages and pages of multiplication.

He loves company for the most boring parts. Shared boredom, like shared sorrow, is half boredom.

Adrian decided to do some cleaning and arranging in his room. His collection of Funko Pop figures gets pride of place but they are unstable and keep falling over, so now he put them all in place with sticky putty under their feet.

Groot, Gandalf, Drift, and Mugman – and Cuppet out of view. An eclectic collection.

Adrian, tired of all the washing and combing, decided to cut his hair short again. He looks equally sweet with or without the hair, perhaps a bit younger without? It took him a week to get used to seeing me without my hair, he says, so perhaps in a week’s time he will no longer look strange to me.