It’s sportlov and we’re taking the night train to Åre for a week of skiing.

We’ve “always” travelled to the fells by car. The closest ski resorts are about 5 or 6 hours from Stockholm by car, which in practice means a whole day of driving. That’s about as much time as we/I are willing to spend just sitting locked up in a car, so this limits our options quite a bit. Åre, for example, is one of the most popular ski resorts, but is too far from Stockholm by car (for my taste).

This time we thought we’d try something different and take the train instead. We travel in a more climate-friendly way, get back that lost day – and get to try out a new resort.

On the downside, we get a very short night of sleep. The train was supposed to be ready for boarding at 23:00 and leave at 23:20. Now it’s delayed until 23:30. We’re tired and bored.

Adrian made things with polymer clay: an infinity gauntlet, and a rainbow of tiny rosettes.

I love photographing him doing things. He goes all in and his face is so expressive. And there all these colours!

(I borrowed these photos from a recent weekend. We do not have quite this much light on weekday afternoons yet.)

Ingrid suddenly went on a smoothie making spree, with smoothies for both breakfast and an afternoon snack. Adrian realized that he can also make smoothies on his own and doesn’t have to wait for me to make one. Here they both are with a smoothie breakfast.

Adrian is reading Kalle Anka as usual. He never tires of them.

Ingrid is reading her notes for her upcoming physics test. She totally does tire of them. (Forces, levers, action and reaction, acceleration and all that.)

We were in town. The way home took us to Södra station, Stockholm’s South station, with its colourful platform floors. Between each pair of pillars is a field of yellow. Between the fields of yellow the floor is made up of regular curved shapes coloured either red, green or gray.

At some point years ago we made up a game. (Probably one of the kids was tired or cranky or bored and needed entertaining.) Each player has a colour and can only step on fields of that colour. The yellow fields are “home” for everyone. The shapes are just wide enough, and the colours distributed just evenly enough, that it’s doable but slightly challenging – especially but not only for those with short legs. Sometimes, if you don’t plan ahead, you may have to back track and choose another path.

Ingrid and I have outgrown the game and Eric was never a fan but Adrian still enjoys the challenge.

Quintessential Adrian. Dressed in colourful, loose, comfy clothes, slouched in his favourite corner in the sofa, feet on the table, reading Kalle Anka.

Parent-teacher meeting for Adrian at school. As usual, the meeting starts with Adrian showing us some of his work: pictures he’s drawn, stories he’s written.

He’s doing great in all the core subjects – reading, writing, math. In math he’s practicing his times tables for six to eight (feeling confident already with all the others) and paying extra attention to reading the problems carefully so he answers the right question. In English he asked for more challenging materials; he gets so much practice at home from YouTube and Netflix that the basic fare (colours, fruits, etc) is boring him.

Monday’s are still Adrian’s days to cook dinner with me. Today we’re doing his favourite pasta with mature, hard goat’s cheese and pureed peas.

There are two tasks that he particularly enjoys. One is peeling garlic. He likes doing it with just his fingers, with no knife or anything.

The other is weighing. When he measures pasta for the four of us, it has to be 360 grams, no more, no less. He’s always a little bit peeved when the pasta weighs 359 grams and adding one piece takes the weight to 361.

Adrian’s weekly homework consists of reading a chapter in a book out loud, writing answers to questions about the chapter, and finally drawing something related to the chapter.

He doesn’t mind the reading, is not at all happy about the writing, but really enjoys the drawing. His drawing for this week’s theme of “blue lights and sirens” started out as just that police car in the middle of the left page. He could have left it at that and be done with the homework, but he just couldn’t stop. The car got all sorts of futuristic features – jet propulsion, a heat-seeking camera, lasers, some other kind of waves that I’ve forgotten – and then a city underneath it. The city then got a monster, a headquarters for the local superheroes, an aggressive vine, and purple waves of internet. Then another, larger monster outside the city, accompanied by further disasters in the form of a volcano, a meteor shower, and Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet. Luckily the city then got a force field shield to protect it. Then the larger monster got nail polish and rainbow colours. And had Adrian not run out of space on the page, he would have continued. (He was going to expand to the next page but then you couldn’t see the whole scene at the same time any more and that wasn’t as much fun.)

I remember being at school, at roughly his age. A couple of boys sat at the desk behind me. And I remember them drawing equally advanced scenarios in their exercise books at school, and describing it all to each other, just like Adrian did to me: guys with cool weapons fighting large monsters. Although they only had blue ballpoint pens so their scenes were not as colourful.

Today was a beautiful day with sunlight and bright blue skies, so I wanted out. Eric is away on a business trip but Ingrid and Adrian came with me when I said I was going.

We drove to Hellasgården and walked along some of the trails there. The morning was chilly but by lunchtime I was sweating underneath all my layers.

Plenty of other people had had the same idea: as time passed, the paths got more and more crowded. I added some detours to our planned path to get away from the main routes, because it was getting to the point where I felt like I was on a city street, with people and prams and dogs everywhere. I’m glad we went out early(ish) and I’m glad I didn’t listen to the kids’ mild grumbling when I suggested the detours.

Adrian on the skating rink, with a friend.

Surprisingly often he’s sitting or kneeling on the ice. It’s not that he can’t skate, or won’t skate. He does. But he doesn’t seem to see any particular need to be standing up all the time.

The same is true off the ice, which is why there are holes in all his trousers.

I’m too adult to be so unbothered by holes and stains. Which is almost a little bit sad.