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.

Adrian, ready to leave for the first day of the new school year.

Both the kids enjoyed their summer break but in the last few days they’ve been getting impatient to get back to school. The in-between time between summer and school that is neither one nor the other has made them restless.

Summer break is nearing its end and Adrian’s friends are returning to town, and he is most happy to spend time together with them again.

His friend F has been hanging out in our house a lot. They play Minecraft together, build Legos, or go out playing Pokemon Go. When they run out of other activities, they bake. Both of them really like chocolatey things so they have baked a mud cake, chocolate muffins, and now chocolate cookies.

Friend F has nearly no experience of doing anything in the kitchen. Adrian, compared to him, is a pro baker. Adrian supervises, follows the recipe, weighs and measures, while F enjoys the more physical acts of breaking the eggs and stirring the batter.

The aftermath of their baking sessions is usually an astonishing mess. After the mud cake (or maybe it was the muffins) they cleaned the kitchen, then I cleaned the kitchen one more time, and still I kept finding small splodges of batter in various parts of the kitchen for more than a day.

This time the mess was more contained but still quite impressive. One step in the recipe suggested working the dough together with your hands. The boys did this using all four of their hands. Before long they had more dough on their hands than in the bowl. They were wise enough to call for help at that point, and I managed to scrape most of the dough back into the bowl.

The cookies came out delicious.

Since Adrian’s and my last camping trip was not entirely satisfactory, we went out again today. Eric and Ingrid were less interested and stayed at home.

(I heard afterwards that they had spent the evening watching a horror movie. Mother-son bonding: camping in the woods. Father-daughter bonding: watching a horror movie.)

This time I made a focused effort to avoid crowds. Firstly, we’re going on a Friday evening instead of Saturday. Hopefully most people will do their camping during the weekend itself.

We went to the Paradiset nature reserve instead of Tyresta – it’s less well known and generally less crowded (though no harder to reach). Plus the rules about where you can put up your tent are less strict in Paradiset, so we won’t be all crowded into a single small spot. And since we’re not actually putting up a tent nor making a fire, we could technically stop and sleep just about anywhere we like!

We got a late start and didn’t get to Paradiset until close to half past six in the evening, so we kept the walking to a minimum and aimed for the east side of lake Trehörningen. It’s a lovely little lake with pleasant views and evening sun. There were some tents there but, to my relief, no big crowds and no loud groups.

We picked a flattish spot off to one side and set up camp.

First things first. Bathing! The day was hot and even though we had walked no more than maybe a kilometre and a half, we needed cooling. The lake water was wonderful – cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough so that I could swim without getting cold. The surface layer was warmer than I remember swimming pools being. I swam a few turns back and forth while Adrian splashed near the shore.

When we were done bathing it was quite late already and we had a lot left to do. Get the hammock up for Adrian, cook dinner, eat… It still takes me a while to get the hammock properly adjusted. After dinner it was bedtime for Adrian, while I stayed up reading for a while.

Now that nearly two months have passed since midsummer, it actually gets properly dark at night so you can see the stars. I thought I’d lie there and look at them but I could only see a very small patch of the sky so it stopped being interesting quite quickly.

Ingrid is at a “Hack camp” all this week, learning game programming with Unity. She started out with Scratch, then moved on to experimenting with Python (which I think they started with at school) and now to learning Unity. (The camp is organized by Nox Academy and Ingrid has been really satisfied with her week. She’s had fun, learned a lot, and made several new friends.)

This has inspired Adrian to pick up Scratch as well. He’s dabbled before but not with any kind of persistence. It’s more fun with a friend to keep him company and help him come up with ideas. Levels! And bosses! And different backgrounds!

Any kind of overt encouragement from me has shown itself to be pointless, even counter-productive. All I can do is set an example and show that programming is enjoyable – and be there to answer questions and help them get unstuck when needed.

One thing that both Ingrid and Adrian are learning is that much of programming is about really understanding what you want to do, and breaking a project down into smaller tasks.

Adrian wanted “levels” in his game, and asked me how he can do that. It seemed hard, and he didn’t even know how to get started. But then we started untangling that concept. What does it mean for your game to have “levels”? When does the player advance to the next level? What happens then? And suddenly it wasn’t so impossibly hard any more.

Both Adrian and I slept really, really well. Adrian didn’t wake until eight o’clock, which is about an hour later than he normally gets up at home. He said the hammock was great. I think we might need to get another one so that he and Ingrid won’t have to argue about who gets to sleep in it.

I always wake several times per night when I am not in my own bed. That’s normal and expected by now. I’m happy, though, when we’ve been camping and I don’t wake up all stiff and sore. The combination of inflatable mattress, extra wide sleeping bag, and nobody poking me with their elbows (which often tends to happen in tents) made for a good night’s sleep.

Breakfast was pancakes of sorts, fried in plenty of butter. They were more delicious than they look in the photo. Why did I photograph them before flipping them?

After breakfast we had a swim in the lake. Or rather, I swam while Adrian just sort of was in the water. He likes bathing but not swimming, and very much prefers to do it in shallow water, with predictable footing and in the company of friends.

Then we walked back to the car.

Walking home was apparently not much more fun than walking out. We took several breaks again. At the last one, Adrian borrowed my camera.

Ingrid gets a week of corona-adjusted scout camp, because her age group (“Upptäckarna”) can pretty much manage themselves, cook their own food, etc. But the youngest scouts, “Spårarna” like Adrian, don’t get any summer camp this year. Adrian likes camps and camping, and is a bit disappointed by this. So he and I went camping on our own, while Eric stayed at home and got some peace and quiet.

We aimed for the camping spot next to Årsjön in Tyresta. That’s about a 3 km hike from the parking lot. That’s nothing for Adrian, really, but today he really wasn’t in much of a walking mood and seemed to struggle with every single step. We took plenty of water and snack breaks on the way.

Part of the problem is his rucksack. At about 140 cm, he’s too short for most junior rucksacks. He uses the shortest large rucksack I could find, back when Ingrid was preparing for her first scout camp. It’s a decent pack, but it lacks a proper padded hip belt, so all the weight rests on his shoulders.

No, he doesn’t walk bent over as he is in the photos – he was demonstrating for me just how unbearably heavy his pack was, especially when the path went uphill over rocks and roots. All it contained was his sleeping bag and mattress, a few small items of clothing, our toiletries and his water bottle…

When we got to the camping site, we were surprised to find it incredibly crowded. This is not an organized camping ground with flat ground and amenities like water and electricity – it’s simply one of the few spots in the Tyresta national park where tenting is allowed. Today, there were at least thirty tents here. I’ve never seen anything like it.

This was not at all what we had been hoping for. But it is what it is, so we just wandered as far as possible from the other people and the lake and the loo (this place now has a loo!) while still staying within the allowed area – and put up our hammock. Last time we were out camping and Ingrid waxed lyrical about the pleasures of sleeping in a hammock, I promised Adrian that it would be his turn in the hammock next time. Which was today. He flopped down in the hammock as soon as it was up.

Once the packs were down and the hammock was up, we made dinner: a potato, chickpea and coconut curry. This is what Adrian called “shovel time”: when the food has cooled enough that he can shovel it into his mouth at a constant pace with barely any breaks for chewing.

Dessert was diced apples fried in butter, with almonds and melted dark chocolate.

We had some concerns about the noise level at the camp site: there were some larger groups there, and a band of young children who were still running around shouting quite late. But it did quiet down just when Adrian wanted to go to sleep.

I myself had hoped to sleep in the shelter here at Årsjön, and the shelter was also my plan B for Adrian in case he didn’t like the hammock. (He did like it.) But with the amount of people here, the shelter was out of the question. I fell back to plan C which was simply sleeping on the ground. The nights are warm and cloudless right now, so the only potential problem was mosquitoes.

This was my “bedside table” for the night: phone, insect repellent, head torch, and a little bag with earplugs and a sleeping mask. I am a light sleeper and those last two are my lifesavers (sleepsavers?) when I sleep away from home.