I should be cooking dinner, and Adrian should be reading his homework, but we don’t really have the energy right this moment.

Ingrid is opening a “loot box” in Overwatch. Adrian watches and shares the excitement.

Apparently there was good stuff in this box.

He doesn’t like haircuts, or combing his hair. (Every time I make him wash it, he also reminds me that he really doesn’t like that either, but he’s now accepted that there’s no way around a twice-weekly shampooing.) Whenever he finds it lying too straight, especially after washing it, he musses it until it has just that right amount of mussedness.

Opening advent calendars.

We have a multitude of calendars. A bit too many, in my opinion, but hey, it’s not me who needs to keep up with them all.

We begin the day by listening to the radio calendar in bed. The alarms go off, Ingrid comes to our bedroom and pokes at Adrian, and they both come into our bed. The story this year (“Marvinter”, roughly “Nightmare Christmas”) is interesting and the voice acting is good, so we all enjoy it. Plus it’s a nice way to wake – I’m barely awake at the beginning, and mostly OK with getting up by the end of the 10 minutes it takes.

The TV calendar (“Jakten på tidskristallen”, “The hunt for the time crystal”) got good reviews but I really disliked it and didn’t even want to watch it to keep the kids company. The story is silly but I could live with that, but I cannot stand the mannered acting that makes several key characters come across as caricatures rather than actual people. Adrian watches it at school; Ingrid has given up on it.

Both the radio and TV calendars have an accompanying cardboard “open the flap” calendar. In addition, Ingrid drew “open the flap” calendars for both myself and Adrian. I got a Christmas-themed one, while Adrian’s had a Minecraft theme. Plus of course there is the calendar I made, with small gifts for the kids every day. Phew!

Sometimes he looks up a design in Google image search. (Good spelling practice.) Today he made his own design. It’s a TV with a large antenna, showing a video game with two figures fighting each other.

Adrian reading “Captain Underpants”. The book has butt jokes, people running around in their underpants, and a time machine made out of a portaloo. Absolutely perfect for a seven-year-old.

Beading. The dominant theme right now is Minecraft.

A selection of English words and phrases that Adrian has learned and practiced via Minecraft:
Dirt
Map
Pickaxe
Sword
Cobblestone
Zombie pigman

Ingrid gave super relaxing, gentle back rubs to me and Adrian.

Beading is back in fashion. Almost every day, Adrian brings home some new creation from school, and he makes more at home during weekends. Mostly Minecraft-themed objects.

The buckets of beads at school are mostly full of happy colours that kids are expected to like – pink, yellow, light green – and there is a permanent shortage of black, white, gray, brown etc. I actually went shopping for beads in darker and duller colours that I could then donate to the school. The next day the table was full of beaded black monsters etc.