A loaf of bread and an iPad is all you need for contentment. Maybe some butter as well.

Adrian reading a puzzle book (in English, no less) while perched on top of a garbage can.

How can that possibly be comfortable?

Adrian, inspired by Ingrid’s weekly dinners, now also wants to start cooking. For now he doesn’t quite have the skills to do it on his own – he can peel potatoes and chop things but that’s about it – so we’ll be cooking together once a week.

It’s not so much the cooking process that appeals to him. It’s the power to decide the meal.

Today we made mashed potatoes, and chicken nuggets for him and some store-bought veggie burgers for the rest of us.

What better place for a pedicure than a south-facing kitchen table?

The Gandalf hat, this time on the right head.

For a few years already, Ingrid’s chore has been cooking dinner once a week. Adrian now also wants to start cooking – mostly because he gets to choose the dish, if and when he cooks. He thinks I make his favourite dishes way too rarely. Today we made stuffed peppers.

He really wanted to do this on his own, but for now we’re working together. Just like when Ingrid started cooking, I am caught out by facts and concepts that are totally obvious to me but not at all obvious to a beginner chef. Like, why do you need to rinse vegetables? On what heat setting do you fry things? How finely do you dice the mushrooms for the filling?

Since the family birthday party, Adrian has been playing almost every day with the Gravitrax marble run. Even Ingrid has been joining him at times.

The Gravitrax is much easier to re-configure than older, more traditional marble runs, because the pieces are only loosely connected, so it’s very open for experimentation and “what if I move this here”. And that experimentation is is quite necessary. Instead of traditional glass marbles, this one uses small metal balls, and instead of straight paths where the marble has no choice but to end up in the right place, this one has curved pieces and magnetic cannons and track switches – which make for exciting runs, but also a lot of derailments.

Playing Ticket to Ride.

The long, weird city names and the European geography no longer pose a challenge to Adrian, so we’ve advanced from the kids’ version to the full game. But we mostly skip the extra rules that have been added to this European-map version.

Sweden has adopted Halloween with enthusiasm, but some parts are more popular than others. Trick-or-treating is very widespread; carving jack-o-lanterns not so much. The kids and I really enjoy it though, so we do it every year.

The supermarket has “Halloween pumpkins” but the choice this year was unusually narrow, and we had to make do with weird pumpkins. Mine was oval; Ingrid’s had a hole in it.

Every year I’m somewhat surprised that the kids come through the carving process without cutting themselves or anything else (apart from the pumpkin).

Pre-Halloween face painting – Adrian wanted to be Frankenstein’s monster.