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.

Trying on new trousers. Adrian has three pairs of old trousers that he likes, all with holes in their knees and at least one size too small. Now he also has three pairs of new trousers that fit him and have no holes!

There has barely been any winter weather this year. It’s all just been gray since early November. We’re so far from having a white Christmas that there hasn’t even been talk of a chance of one.

But today was at least a brighter day, with even some weak sunshine, so we went out skating.

Adrian took the skates that Ingrid used last year (size 36) and Ingrid took mine (size 38) and I stayed on the sidelines and took photos. And walked in circles around the skating rink when I felt done with that.

Usually the large bandy rink at Spånga sports field is fully booked for various organized activities and the general public has to make do with the small field. This December though there was a leak in the refrigeration unit so all scheduled activities were cancelled or moved to other ice rinks. The leak was recently fixed but the schedule remained clear, and according to the web site the place was still closed, so we had the luxury of a large and nearly empty ice rink.

The Christmas thing is in full swing.

Cookies were made, gifts were opened, plenty of food was eaten.

For the past few Christmases, I’ve had to make more and more of an effort to enjoy this circus at least somewhat. I used to be able to. Now it’s just a chore.