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.

The floor guy has done his thing and left, and finally the building works here are done.

In the living room we opted for soap treatment only, like we have in the other rooms downstairs. I love the smell and feel of soap treated pine floors! The floor is getting its initial treatment here, with Adrian wetting the boards and Eric scrubbing in the soap. (I did the mopping up afterwards, when I wasn’t taking photos.)

The kitchen floor is going to get so many spills of all kinds that it needs more protection, so we went for a the most matte varnish available. The end result looks and feels much more pleasant than I had expected: very matte, quite different from all other varnished floors I have seen before. If varnished floors can be this discreet, maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad to varnish the floors in the other rooms as well? It will be really interesting to see how this ages.

Today was activity day. All days at camp are activity days, but this one has extra many, extra great activities. There was everything from a homemade scout-built carousel, and a homemade catapult, to a spa and a face painting station. I saw Adrian trying out the catapult with water balloons. Meanwhile Ingrid painted.

Tonight the scouts also got dessert their evening meal. Hotan totan is a traditional scout dessert – oatmeal fried with lots of butter and sugar and some cinnamon. When cooked for 200+ scouts, the pans we use are the size of wagon wheels and butter is added in chunks of half a kilogram each.

We are at scout camp. This first day ended with an inaugural camp fire with traditional (and non-traditional) scout songs.

This year’s camp is on Husarö island in the Stockholm archipelago. Instead of being stuck on a bus for four hours, we got a lovely cruise through the archipelago.

We’re on a permanent campground this time, and it comes with all kinds of nice conveniences, such as fireplaces, loos, some permanent tents, a root cellar and this little kitchen hut. (That white egg-shaped thing in the entrance into the root cellar.)

Adrian making pancakes for dinner.

The pool is a continued success. Endless amounts of splashing, making waves, and falling off things.

We awoke, very reluctantly, just after six in the morning because of some nutters who thought this was the best time to go out on the lake in a fishing boat. Car engine noise, repeated trips carrying equipment from car to boat, then plenty of rattling with chains and padlocks… it went on for long enough that there was no chance of staying asleep. When we met the nutters afterwards, they said they were from some environmental agency, inspecting the state of the fish population and thereby also the water quality. Great, I’m all for that, but I do not understand why they couldn’t take up their nets a few hours later.

Since we were up anyway, we might as well have breakfast. There were plenty of bilberry bushes everywhere around us, but the berries were few and small. It took quite a while to gather some to have with our porridge.


Afterwards we packed up our stuff and started the walk back. This trail was rougher than most marked hiking trails, with lots of fallen trees to get past. Sometimes over, sometimes under. And some, of course, just at that in-between height where it’s hard to fit under them, especially with a backpack, and hard to get over as well.


Just after halfway we passed a fireplace with nice views of another lake. Walking past this spot yesterday, the kids named this one “the fake lake” because at first glance it looked like it could be our tenting spot, but wasn’t. Since it looked so lovely yesterday, we planned a mid-morning stop here today, with a campfire and bread on a stick.


And whittling. Bread on a stick requires a good, smooth, clean stick, so Ingrid prepared one. Then the fire needed some time to burn, and what better way to pass the time than do some more whittling. When the breads had been eaten, the whittling continued. Adrian has no knife of his own yet so he borrowed mine, which left me with nothing much to do, other than taking photos. Both Ingrid and Adrian could probably have stayed there for much longer, but I got bored of waiting after some time, so we continued walking towards Brakmaren and the car.