Adrian is programming a game in Scratch. You control a taco with the arrow keys, trying to catch apples and avoid the dreaded loaf of bread.

Adrian is thinking ahead to Halloween. He found that cloak I made years ago and thought he might want to use it to dress up as a wizard. A wizard needs a staff, of course, but he also wanted some spells. So he is now making a ball of ice and water magic from blue fleece.

He just started doing textile crafts at school this year so he’s had some practice with basic pinning and cutting and sewing. But not machine sewing, which he wants to use to sew the pieces together, so he’s doing that under close supervision.

Helping kids with their crafts projects is a tricky balancing act. If I help and meddle and guide too much, it’s not fun. But if I meddle too little and the final result comes out way too wonky, he will be disappointed in it and won’t want to sew again. He’s not so fast at it that he could just throw the first attempt away and make a new one. So I meddle just enough to help him avoid mistakes that would be hard to recover from – and also help him understand that the smaller mistakes that he does make are not the end of the world and can be recovered from.

Adrian likes oversized, loose, soft t-shirts and sweaters. And when I say “oversized”, I do truly mean oversized. This blue thing is his latest find from Myrorna. It’s a ladies sweater in size S. The ends of the sleeves reach past his fingertips, and the sweater itself is of course both very loose and quite long.

I suggested cutting off the ends of the sleeves (and refinishing them so they would still look all neat and tidy) but he explained that too-long sleeves really was the whole point of buying an oversized sweater, and this was just the way he liked it.

He is refreshingly unconcerned about social expectations about fashion and clothing.

Adrian is doing his homework. There’s a chapter from a book to read out loud, and a handful of questions about that chapter to answer in writing.

This is not his favourite pastime. He’s already halfway somewhere else, mentally as well as bodily.

It’s Monday, which means it’s me and Adrian cooking dinner together, and him setting the direction.

One thing that Adrian likes in his food, and that I’m gradually also coming to like, is not peeling the root vegetables. I think part of it might be convenience, but he says he prefers the taste of potatoes cooked in their skins, and of unpeeled carrots. Even when he isn’t the one doing the peeling, he asks me if I could not peel the potatoes. He also says that broccoli stems taste better than the florets.

I can’t feel much of a difference in flavour, to be honest, but it definitely saves time, so I rarely peel carrots or potatoes nowadays. Roast potatoes are great with skins on. I even tried making rårakor – they’re sort of like flat, thin hash browns or rösti – without peeling the potatoes before grating them and it worked surprisingly well.

Something that felt so natural and obvious for so many years, even decades – of course one peels one’s potatoes! – was just an arbitrary habit, that I did just because I was taught to do it.

Adrian carving stick figures. (There’s a tiny face carved into that stick.)

I leave early and have breakfast at work when I get there. Eric and the kids eat breakfast at home. And they all like to read while eating their breakfast.

Adrian opened his presents this morning.

We have a habit of reusing boxes for wrapping gifts, so Adrian got (among other things) Happy Socks in a box for a camera lens, and a plush fluffy cat loaf in a shoe box. Hence the initially sceptical face before the happy jumping around.

Waiting for Adrian’s parent-teacher meeting.

The meeting itself held no surprises. Adrian is happy at school and does well in all subjects. Only two subjects are really discussed in these meetings, the ones that matter, and that’s Swedish and maths. Adrian reads well and loves maths.

Another school year, another invitation to a parent/teacher information meeting. The usual anodyne presentations of goals in Swedish and maths, and exhortations to read at home, etc.

Before the meeting we were invited to try and pick out our children’s self-portraits from a wall of unlabelled pictures. I went through all the drawings that I thought could possibly be Adrian’s, and then started over and went through the ones I really didn’t think were his and actually looked at the names on the reverse of each piece of paper, before I found it. Rather surprised to see that his drawing of human anatomy was on the level of a five-year-old, I mentioned this to the teacher. She then told me that Adrian had spent 15+ of their allotted 20 minutes on the Lego piece (drawn in isometric projection) and the PlayStation controller (in color and great detail) and only scribbled in a rough human figure when the teacher reminded him of the actual task. I guess he just didn’t find his body as interesting as his mind.