Adrian came home with a gingerbread house from the Spånga Christmas market this Saturday. It collapsed under its own weight.

We made gingerbread cookies. Store-bought ones can’t compete, and I realize I need to copy Eric’s recipe because otherwise next Christmas in this household will be a sad affair.

Every year we tell ourselves that we will only bring out the most important cutters and that there is no need to dirty all of them. Our priorities overlap but only partially, and we end up using at least two thirds of all the cutters anyway. I like the traditional shapes, Ingrid wants the ones that are good for decorating, Adrian prefers the small ones that are best at using up the most dough. Eric is happy to just bake whatever we cut.

The dough gets smaller and smaller with each round, but there will be no wastage!

Eric got the keys for his new apartment today. I actually didn’t take any photos today, so I’m “borrowing” these from tomorrow, when we went to take a first look at it.

It’s got three bedrooms, two balconies, and a large living room with a very high ceiling and tall windows.

Eric and Adrian are planning out who gets what room, how to furnish the living room, and what will go where in the kitchen.

Look who came by and did not leave as soon as he’d checked Nysse’s food bowl! Cuddly Morris is back!

He did start by checking the food bowl, but then walked towards the sofa with a very goal-oriented mien, jumped up, and settled on Adrian’s chest. He stayed upright and alert for a while, but actually relaxed enough to lie down after some time.

The party preparations started several days ago, with three cakes baked over three days. We had an apple-pie cheesecake (Ingrid), a banana and chocolate cake (Adrian) and an almond cherry pie (Eric).

Today Ingrid decorated the house with golden balloons and serpentines.

Then there were guests – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – and presents.

The cakes and cheeses and snacks were eaten with much joy and appreciation.

There had been some concern that three cakes might be excessive, but it really wasn’t.

With no one to take pictures of me, here are two quick selfies to prove that I was also there.

Afterwards, we were tired.

Adrian usually joins me in my corner of the sofa when it’s time for him to do homework. If his homework is reading, we read side by side. If he’s doing something more active, like practising his French vocabulary, that tends to collide with my reading, and I knit instead. Today his homework was knitting, so we actually knitted together.

Adrian is doing homework; I am keeping him company.

He has struggled in the past with setting aside sufficient time for doing his homework, and has repeatedly ended up leaving way too much work for the last minute. He’s also been rather resistant to any kinds of suggestions for various alternative ways to schedule time for homework. After school he wants to rest; weekends he wants to game with his friends. But now he’s found a new routine, which – most importantly – involves planning ahead and figuring out how much time he will likely need to spend on homework, and making time for it. It’s way later in the evening than I would ever choose for myself, but whatever works for him!

He is much more productive and happier when he has study company. (So is Ingrid, for that matter.) I get to practice French vocabulary, learn obscure Estonian spelling rules that I had no idea about (the spelling just is that way in my head, without any rules) and hear about different types of sports injuries and how to treat them.

Meanwhile I am working on my black and white embroidery exercises. I added a layer of watered-down acrylic paint on the embroidery that wasn’t quite black enough, and I’m doing the groundwork for the next one by sponge-painting a newsprint-like pattern.

Adrian is now a mere 2 cm shy of Eric’s height. Given that he grew 10 cm in the past year and the same in the year before, he’s going to make that distance up soon.

Adrian, opening the giant Lego set he got for his birthday – the tower of Barad-dûr. Forty bags holding a total of 5471 pieces.

Adrian’s birthday isn’t until Tuesday, but baking a fancy layer cake is not something you just whip up after work, so we had the cake today instead.