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.

Another trip to the recycling centre in Bromma with various old junk, cheap old plastic toys that not even a charity shop would want, worn-out clothes and broken electronics. Adrian always comes with me here and loves every part of the experience: from pushing the cart around (or sitting on the cart and being pushed around) to throwing our junk in the giant containers with a big clang, and especially watching our trash getting crushed.

Adrian and I cooked dinner. We made his favourite dish: pasta with pureed peas and goat’s cheese. It’s a Linas matkasse recipe originally and we keep coming back to it because Adrian loves it so much.

Adrian likes to cook but he is so distractible that he can barely do one task at a time, and let’s not even speak of having two tasks going on in parallel. When we cook together, he does a small fraction of the actual work. Today I cooked the pasta and the peas and grated the goat’s cheese and pureed the peas, while he toasted nuts and melted butter and sauteed garlic. But he learns the basic skills at least – and we enjoy it.

Weighing things is one of his favourite tasks. (And tasting!) If the recipe says 70 grams of pine nuts, and I suggest taking a 60-gram bag and then a bit more, he insists on weighing them, and being precise about it. 70 should be 70 and not 68!

We’ve spent most of today moving furniture and stuff in and out of Adrian’s and Ingrid’s rooms.

Adrian gets Ingrid’s old room, and with the room comes a small side attic. Initially used for storage, Ingrid at some point discovered that it was just large enough to fit a standard sized mattress, and made her bed in it. Her fancy loft bed was apparently nowhere near as cozy.

Adrian thinks the same. The loft bed stays, but mostly for its desk and armchair parts. For sleeping, Adrian chose the side attic.

He likes being on floor level. He likes sitting on the floor, and crawling and generally “worming” around on it, especially when he is bored. He’s now looking for a carpet for his floor, and his two criteria are that it needs to be a nice green colour, and soft and not scratchy so it works well for worming around on.

We celebrated “peak mess” with cake. Now we can start moving all furniture into its proper place, and will no longer have to walk sideways to get through the living room.