Adrian’s class started the day with Christmas songs, followed by advent fika.

Every year it keeps surprising me that none of the teachers realizes that the singing would sound a lot better if someone stood in front of the kids and helped them all keep the same pace.

(Grumpy, yes. We still have too much to do at work and I am not even sure yet that I can get the day before Christmas off.)

Decorating the gingerbread houses that the were assembled yesterday.

Ingrid and Adrian decorated the Christmas tree today. This year’s tree is a fir again, which goes counter to tradition and instinct but looks better and sheds less.

In the evening, the kids made gingerbread houses with Eric’s help. There are ready-made kits you can buy, but this year they’re making them almost from scratch. (But using store-bought dough, because by the time we eat them they will be dry and dusty and using home-made dough would feel like a bit of a waste.) This way we can make much smaller houses, so it’s conceivable that we might actually eat them.

The supermarket had something called “baking glue” which I haven’t seen before. We’ve tried using melted sugar to assemble the houses, and icing, but neither has worked very well. This baking glue was much easier to use than sugar, and stronger than icing.

The side attic in Adrian’s room is still his “bedroom” and seems to suit him perfectly. The attic is a bit longer than his mattress, and he filled the empty space with all his soft toys. And the gap between the mattress and the threshold is apparently perfect for pokeball storage.

Adrian has a cold and is feeling tired and unwell, and he coughs all the time.

When I was a child, the home remedy for sore, scratchy throats was hot milk with honey. Adrian doesn’t like hot milk, but he does like hot chocolate.

I didn’t grow up with hot chocolate and never really missed it either. I think I had it on a few occasions in Belgium, but that’s about it. Up until a few years ago I barely knew how to make it. Scout camp has taught me, thought! This summer we set out to perfect and write down the ultimate recipe for scout chocolate. Which is not the same thing as cosy-Sunday-morning hot chocolate: scout chocolate should above all be warming and tasty but not too sweet so that the scouts guzzle it just for the sugar. The answer, and I’m not joking when I write this, turned out be 42. That is, 42 grams of cocoa powder and 42 grams of sugar per litre of milk. (To be fair, 43 might also work. But 40 was judged to be too weak, and 45 was too strong.)

Adrian’s preferred recipe for hot chocolate has 2 dl of milk, 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Which makes it slightly weaker and sweeter than the ultimate scout chocolate recipe.

Adrian has been trying out drums this term, and today was the end of term show. Just like Ingrid’s dance studio, Kulturskolan has shows for several groups together, so we heard a whole lot of drumming, and brass instruments. Adrian’s beginner group started it off with We Will Rock You. There were some Nirvana songs and Christmas music of course.

Already a few weeks ago Adrian said he wasn’t very interested in continuing, and the concert confirmed that for me. I didn’t see the kind of glow or enthusiasm or energy in him or his playing that inevitably shines when you really enjoy making music. And neither did he seem nervous, which might mask the enthusiasm. He just didn’t seem very interested.

I washed a load of medium-coloured laundry today. (We don’t sort ours by colour more specifically, other than separating out black and whites. Modern cotton clothes don’t get colour runs.)

Shortly after the wash program started, the machine started making very loud clanking noises. It sounded like there was a rock in there, or as if some part of the machinery itself had fallen off and was going round and round in the drum.

Nothing to do but wait for the programme to finish, and hope that the clanking thing didn’t wear any holes in any of the clothes.

When we emptied the washing machine afterwards, a literal stone fell out, together with a handful of miniature clothes pins. Apparently one of Adrian’s clothes was in our laundry basket. A bathrobe.

I’ve learned by now to carefully check all the pockets on Adrian’s clothes before washing them, and then checking again in case there was an inside pocket I missed. But I really didn’t expect a bathrobe to need this kind of treatment. Who the heck keeps stones and clothes pins in his bathrobe pockets?

We watch Robinson occasionally. Adrian and Ingrid find it more exciting than I do; I keep them company and usually knit at the same time.

Adrian’s pockets are always full of random things.

His jacket pockets tend to be full of chestnuts, above all. When I last emptied his winter jacket for washing, all the pockets together yielded about half a kilogram of chestnuts.

Trouser pockets and hoodie pockets tend to have smaller things. Screws. Pebbles. Bottle tops. Clumps of sticky putty.

This is his latest treasure: waste pieces of thick wire in various finishes, from the crafts room at school. (They’re doing wood and metal crafts this term.) Pocket-sized, shiny, endlessly fiddlable.

Adrian said he had a little catching up to do in his math workbook tonight.

When he brought out the workbook late at night, it turned out that the “a little catching up” was around 20 pages, which would take him at least an hour. He was quite tired by the end of it. I was quite annoyed that he had described this as “a little” and had just spent two hours playing board games in the evening instead of getting started on the homework.