Happy early birthday to me! Adrian will be away at scout camp on my actual birthday, so we celebrated today. A summery salad, the traditional redcurrant cake, and board games.

I’m not an expert baker but the cake came out exactly as it should. Even with the additional challenge of trying to bake it in 28-degree heat. The dough went from “so chilled it’s hard to roll out” to “so warm that it melts” before I managed to fully roll it out. I ended up pressing it in place with my fingers, and then putting it in the fridge again to keep it from melting before it could be baked.

The cake rose like a souffle in the oven, above the edges of the cake tin, but sank down within its walls again as it cooled.

A full day. In the morning, a picnic outing to Taevaskoda. Then bathing at Kiidjärve lakeside beach. In the evening all the children participated in a charity run.

Taevaskoda is mostly as it has always been. A bit more people, I guess – at one point it felt like a whole busload arrived. And it all feels smaller than it used to, when I was a child.

I crossed the river and climbed to the top of the cliff to look down on our picnic site. The wear and tear on the grassy meadow was striking.

The river is shallow but fast-flowing and rather cold.

It’s a very scenic spot, but we’ve been here enough times that most of us barely look around us. Get there, eat picnic, get back. I kind of wish I could spend a bit more time just looking at the surroundings.

After the picnic, we drove to Kiidjärve for bathing. There’s a nice grassy slope down to the water, and it never feels crowded, although there are always people here. The water gets deep quickly, which works out great now that the kids are older and comfortable in deep water.

Somehow they ended up doing yoga poses in water. First just while standing, and then Ingrid and Adrian wanted to do the same also while jumping. The timing was most tricky – both for the two of them to jump at the same moment, and for me to press the trigger at the appropriate time.

In the evening there was a charity run where the audience threw colourful powder at the runners. Adrian and Ingrid came back bright green and pink.

Buying Estonian candy is a necessary part of a trip to Estonia.

Likewise, eating Estonian cake. This was a sea buckthorn cake with cream cheese and chocolate.

We spent the day at Kapsta with my father and his wife.

Made our traditional home-made sushi lunch.

Enjoyed lunch out in the gazebo tent since the weather remains horribly hot.

Went for a walk in the early evening when the temperature had cooled a bit. Still 25 degrees but at least it’s not 29 any more.

My father’s back is in a bad enough shape that he’s probably not going to be taking any more walks in his life.

There are no pea fields this year. Beans and wheat instead.

A hot and rainy day. Had the weather been better, we might have gone to the adventure park in Otepää, like we do must summers. Now we chose indoor climbing instead – or bouldering, to be more precise. “We” here being the next generation (Ingrid, Adrian, and my Estonian friends’ kids) and me. The rest of the older generation were all either working, or not the climbing kind of people. Occasionally I feel a bit weird, being the only mum in a group that’s otherwise mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings and one brave nine-year-old. But I’m young at heart, eh?

The first room had the traditional kind of bouldering wall with colour-coded routes going crossways and sideways. Then we found the other room, which had a series of twenty-odd competition routes. The first couple were easy, the next few were doable, and beyond that they got more and more bizarre. It’s hard to even picture someone climbing some of them.

In the evening we went paddleboarding. Or “SUP riding”, which in Estonian sounds identical to “soup riding”.

There were heavy showers earlier in the day and heavy clouds even now; even some warnings of thunder. Thunder would have forced us to cancel; heavy rain would have been unpleasant. In the end we were lucky to get neither.

We had a safety and technique lecture on the shore, and then we were allowed on the boards and the water. Initially we were all wobbly and stayed on our knees, while swarming in the little bay we started in.

We left the bay and started paddling our way up the Emajõgi river. When we had worked up a little bit of speed, it didn’t take long for us to find our balance and stand up, like the name suggests you’re supposed to. It took longer for the knees and legs to stop shaking slightly from all the balancing that was going on.

The stand-up paddling was OK, but most of us concluded after a while that the standing-up part was rather unnecessary. You get much more leverage and control when you’re closer to the water. Canoes just make sense. Some of us went back to kneeling; many sat cross-legged.

I was all set to be camera-less during this activity, but the life jackets turned out to have a zippered chest pocket which fit my phone, and I had a little waterproof bag that also fit my phone, so I could take photos after all. I struggle to get the exposure right on the phone – in many non-standard lighting situations the photos come out way too dark and I need to adjust them a lot afterwards. But I’m glad I have these.

Adrian’s most recent project from crafts lessons at school – a wooden lamp. A really cool design, and very precisely executed.

We celebrated the end of the school year – today for Adrian, tomorrow for Ingrid – with a dinner at Sushi Sukai. Both of them finish their years with excellent grades.

Sushi Sukai was also excellent, with interesting and delicious food. Everything from crab tacos to spicy fried popcorn shrimp, salmon tartar to tuna tataki.

Active Solution celebrated the start of summer with a day at Gröna Lund amusement park for all the employees, with families. I haven’t been there for ages and was very happy for this opportunity.

We were offered armbands for unlimited rides, or a bundle of tickets for the various competitions. I’ve always been fond of roller coasters, and absolutely chose the armband. So did both Ingrid and Adrian, of course.

We were ready to enter when the park opened. Even a bit before – the gates opened before the rides started, so we were literally on the first round of the first ride. The park was nearly empty, almost spookily so. Teenagers sleep late, of course, and the chilly, windy weather was also on our side. (I was properly layered up but was still cold most of the day. Some poor folks in their t-shirts must have been freezing.)

We went straight for the roller coasters. For the first hour or so, we could go on the most popular roller coasters with barely any queueing at all. Twister was one of our favourites – a classical roller coaster with wooden tracks.

Monster was another favourite. On a busy day, the queues to Monster are 30 to 40 minutes, according to Ingrid, who’s been coming here regularly every season. Now they were next to nothing, so we waited a few extra minutes to get front-row seats.

Three or four back-to-back roller coaster rides later, I was actually feeling a tad queasy. Am I getting too old for this? Probably not – mostly it was the abrupt braking at the end of Monster that shook up my stomach. The rides themselves were no problem. We calmed down with less challenging attractions like the “funny house” and “tunnel of love” and the “scary train”.

After lunch, the kids convinced me to try the Catapult. It’s like a free-fall ride, but goes both up and down. I was afraid it would be too much for me but said I’d try it once – and it was my favourite ride of the day. No shaking, just flying! And with wonderful views.

More roller coasters. Monster sitting at the back instead of the front (less wind, less view, more surprise, more swoosh). Häxkvasten, like Monster but tamer, which used to be my favourite. Vilda musen, which I remembered not liking, and also did not like this time, because it was all rattling side-to-side (to the point where I was afraid I’d end up with bruises from being thrown into the side of the cart) and no soaring at all.

We had planned to go on the Eclipse, a giant star flyer, way up high, but were turned away at the entrance – it was closed due to the evening’s concert. Which we had been informed about, kind of, but the info just said “closed during the concert” – not that it would close two and a half hours before the concert started. Bummer.

The old-school wave swinger was nice, but not quite same.

The park was getting crowded now, and there were actual queues. (Many visitors probably came in the afternoon for this evening’s concert with KAJ, the Melodifestivalen winner.) One last ride, we said, and went back to the Catapult.

After that we all felt we needed some sugar to boost our flagging energy levels. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for Adrian and myself; candy floss for Ingrid.

Today Ingrid finished the last exam in the last subject of her last school year, which we celebrated with ice cream at Spånga Konditori. She’s been studying so hard that she deserves all the ice cream.

Adrian still has more tests to get through tomorrow, and we’ll be celebrating that with all the fresh raspberries, blueberries and strawberries that we can eat.