A mostly unorganized list of Adrian’s current favourites based on my interview with him.

• Book: Kalle Anka, both Pockets and the thin magazines
• Good night stories: Supilinna salaselts with me, His Dark Materials with Eric (although in Swedish and not English)
• Music: no absolute favourite, though he does like Queen, especially after we watched Bohemian Rhapsody
• Movies: Shaun the Sheep, and The Lord of the Rings
• Movie character: Legolas, because no matter what he does, he does it in a cool way
• TV series: Mandalorian, His Dark Materials
• YouTuber: CaptainSauce
• Video games: Subnautica. Blazing Beaks together with Eric. Horizon Zero Dawn he enjoys but paused because he arrived at a boss that looks hard to beat. Mostly he likes trying out new games and then loses interest after a week or two.
• Board games: Catan, Small World, Bondespelet
• Food to cook: making pasta
• Food to eat: pasta with a pea sauce; spring rolls and dumplings.
• Drink: Innocent’s apple and raspberry juice
• Fruit: raspberries, strawberries and paraguayo peaches
• Sweet: chocolate, mud cake and brownies
• Ice cream flavour: Adrian hasn’t eaten enough ice cream yet this year to have a favourite
• Friends: Elvira and Hanna. The best thing to do together with them is “just hanging out”.
• Subject at school: art, and woodworking. He likes building random things without instructions, and enjoys the wide range of materials and tools available at school.
• Activity at after-school care: building Legos, playing in the sandbox, drawing, and Ubongo, and “me and Elvira chase Silas”.
• Clothes: oversized t-shirts, soft socks with food patterns, and fluffy fleeces. He also loves the banana t-shirt we recently bought, and misses the cinnamon bun t-shirts he had as a baby.
• Body part: his big toes, “because they are big”
• Color: green
• Job when grown up: none. Adrian would instead like to be a pig when he grows up – one of those mini pigs who are kept as pets and don’t get eaten.
• Superpower: take out things from pictures and movies and make them real; and to be stretchy, because “I can’t reach and I don’t have the energy to walk”
• Season: summer, autumn, winter, spring
• Place in the house: sofas
• Animal: koalas and narwhals, like last year
• Coolest things, if only they existed: aliens with cool gadgets and zappers och UFOs and universal translators
• Thing he wishes we could do this summer: visit Estonia and go to Otepää adventure park
• Looking forward to in 4th grade: “the club” (which is the bigger kid version of after-school care) and meeting Kristian, his favourite after-school teacher
• Shoe size: 36
• Clothes size: 140

Here is last year’s list.

We played Cluedo.

The first round went quickly so we played a second round. In this round, all of us realized at about the same time that something was wrong. Just as Ingrid was saying “hm, that doesn’t add up” and Eric commented that he must have made a mistake in his note-taking, I was realizing that my notes didn’t allow for anyone to be the murderer. Somehow we had put two place cards and one murder weapon in the envelope (instead of one place, one murderer and one weapon).

Yesterday was really hot. The wooden deck gets so hot in the sun that it hurts my soles.

Cleaning the basement is an excellent activity for overly hot days! Our basement is pleasantly cool even on the hottest days – and it really needs some cleaning. Stuff just magically accumulates until it fills all available space.

Eric and I sorted through some of that stuff yesterday, throwing out all kinds of unused junk and organizing the things that we kept.

Among other things we rediscovered this pair of wooden stilts that haven’t been used for some years. They’re much more use out in the garden than in a corner of the basement.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

The magenta playhouse has done its job. Ingrid and Adrian have outgrown it and some parts are starting to rot.

I notice that I haven’t mentioned it much here on the blog, but here’s the playhouse being painted and here is Adrian serving me coffee and cake in the playhouse.

It’s not exactly in the way where it stands, but kind of, still. I’m thinking of maybe using that spot for a plum tree instead. A plum tree has been on my wish list for years; this summer I’m determined to plant one.

As a first step in making the plum tree happen, today we pushed down the playhouse and took it to pieces, with crowbar and saw.



Look at the difference between the north and south sides of the roof! The north face is covered with mosses and lichens, while the south side is completely clean.

School’s out and after-school care has a day off, so we were all at home today. Work didn’t get quite as much attention as it usually does.

I did my lunchtime workout as I try to do on most days, and I jumped rope as a warm-up exercise. Adrian was bored and got curious and gave it a try as well. He found it harder than it looked. I don’t think he quite understood that it’s not enough to just turn the rope and jump occasionally: that the timing is quite essential. And – just like Ingrid when she first learned to jump a rope – he puts an awful lot of unnecessary energy into the jumping. As if jumping higher and harder would compensate for the lack of coordination.

He got better and better, but never managed more than two jumps in a row.

Adrian’s class has been working with the theme of “Stockholm” for the past few months.

In a normal year, the class would have made several trips to various parts of Stockholm to see all the things they have been talking about: the Old Town, the City Hall, and so on. The coronavirus pandemic put a stop to all that, so the kids have been limited to theory.

Today Adrian and I made a trip to the city to at least see the Old Town. Old Town is normally so full of tourists that it’s no fun – all those families of five walking side by side, foreign tourists spreading cigarette smoke, etc. But today is a working day so there won’t be many locals walking around, and all the tourists are staying away anyway. So it should be really empty, I thought. Let’s seize the opportunity!

It turned out exactly as well as I had hoped. Beautiful sunshine, no people, clean streets… We almost had Old Town to ourselves. This was a great way to see Old Town.

We visited a few of the most famous sights: the royal palace, the Riksdag buildings, Stortorget (where a famous bloodbath took place five hundred years ago), and the narrowest alley in town. But also the street where the executioner used to live, as Adrian told me, and Slussen, which did not look like Adrian had expected at all.

There were lots of little shops to look at as well. Mostly souvenir shops with various kinds of viking- and moose-themed objects, and Pippi Longstocking – but also little odd crafts and design shops. This is the shop of HildaHilda, who make textile goods with quirky designs of pigs, dachshunds, daisies and other nice things. I really tried to find something we needed or at least could use but couldn’t think of anything, but I think we’ll be coming back here to buy presents for people.

We had excellent though expensive pizzas for lunch at Stortorget, at a nearly empty restaurant. (And within great hearing range of the church bells of Storkyrkan.) We’ll likely never get another chance at that!

The weather is warm enough to move the tomatoes outside.

Adrian is hanging around, literally, watching me re-pot them.

Last night’s sunshine was all gone this morning. Hot porridge and hot bread from leftover bread-on-a-stick dough went down quite well in the cool, cloudy morning.

The bread/cake/bannock things were not part of the meal plan at all, but were so delicious that I think we’ll plan for them next time.

After breakfast, Adrian tested the hammock – fired up by Ingrid’s talk about how wonderful it is to sleep in one. And during much of walk home, he was already planning the next hike, when it would be his turn to get the hammock. We’ll see.

Walking home is never as much fun as walking out. The distance that felt like nothing yesterday, was suddenly long for the kids’ legs. “Are we there soon?”

Had this been a normal spring without a coronavirus pandemic, there would have been various scout hikes and camps in May. With the pandemic, all larger scout events have been cancelled, along with so much else of society. Instead we went camping/hiking on our own.

There are several beautiful nature reserves around Stockholm, and Paradiset and Tyresta are the ones I like best. Adrian and I camped in Paradiset once before and it was such a nice spot that I thought we could go there again, this time with the whole family.

A closer look at the map showed that the shelter where we stayed last time, on the shore of lake Trehörningen, was just a kilometre from the parking lot. Back then Adrian was six, didn’t want to walk any long distances and left all the carrying to me… This time there’s four of us, all with strong legs and proper rucksacks, so we could walk a bit longer. The first scenic spot is likely to be the most popular one – further away we might find a spot with fewer people.


That was the plan. There were several tents in the woods around the first shelter, so we didn’t even turn that way. When we got to the second shelter on the shore of lake Långsjön, we found quite a crowd there as well. Eric spied a flat-looking place with what seemed to be a fire place on the other side of the lake, so we headed off there. There was no shelter there, but a good flat spot for a tent, and much more peace and quiet than at the shelter. Technically you’re really only allowed to camp at designated spots… but this spot had clearly been used for camping before, so we figured it would do no harm if we stayed here.

The original plan was for Eric to sleep in the shelter, me and Adrian in the tent, and Ingrid in a hammock. Everyone gets their preferred “roof” over their head. (Ingrid had tried sleeping in a hammock on her last scout hike and absolutely loved it, best thing ever.) Without the shelter, we were three in the tent, which was a bit cramped but OK for one night. I don’t really expect to get a good night’s sleep on a hike anyway.

Now that we had shelter, the next question was firewood. With all these people out in the woods, the nearest box of firewood was already empty when we passed it. I emptied my rucksack, and Adrian and I walked back to the first shelter to pick up firewood there. Luckily the box there still had some.


When we got back with the wood, it was definitely time for dinner: falafel wraps with salsa romesco and cucumbers.

The firewood wasn’t for the dinner (its easier to fry up falafel on a stove) but for even more important things: bread on a stick, and a grilled banana dessert!


After dinner – and before dinner, and during dinner – Ingrid and Adrian played with slingshots. I once tried to make some using some random elastic bands but those didn’t work too well at all. Now I had bought some proper slingshot bands, and they made a big difference.

Rocks flew best, but there were almost none in the forest around us. There were plenty of pine cones, though. Ingrid experimented with different techniques and angles and differently shaped cones, trying to shoot them as far as possible.


The weather was absolutely lovely, with blue skies and a hot sun, and barely any wind. And we were on the east side of the lake and thus had the evening sun shining on us until late. Only after the sun went down behind the trees on the other side of the lake did it get a bit cooler.