At shared meals such as lunch and dinner, books and magazines and phones and other such entertainment are banned from the table. But our weekday breakfasts are more split-up. I normally eat at work, while Eric has a quick sandwich and is done well before the kids. So the kids eat mostly on their own. They don’t really enjoy each other’s company much, so each one sits with a comic book instead.

Adrian learning chess moves with Eric.

There probably won’t be many more summer-warm, sunny days this year. We grabbed this one like the last chance that it probably is, and cycled to the beach at Kanaanbadet. Well, I mostly thought we would cycle to the garden café and eat there, and only packed swimming clothes just in case. But the kids went straight into the water. Ingrid tried out the diving platform and later even convinced me to jump from it together with her. At about 3 metres it’s near the limit of what I’m comfortable with, but having just convinced her that she could do it, I couldn’t really say no.

Adrian meanwhile cannot really swim yet and doesn’t like even semi-deep water so he climbed around on the cliffs.

The lunch and cakes at the garden café were excellent but the wait for getting our food felt like an eternity.

• Adrian likes doing things together with me. Some things, at least. When I started solving crossword puzzles, he also rediscovered crosswords. When I go out to work in the garden, he puts on his rubber boots and climbs around in the trenches and heaps of earth.
• Household chores such as cooking and laundry, on the other hand, are not among those activities.
• He is seriously learning English. During our week in Cornwall he read all kinds of signs, with sort of random Swenglish pronunciation, and made sense of many of them. Texts that come up in iPad games are no longer random gibberish to him. He used to say no to watching movies in English, because he couldn’t understand anything, but now doesn’t mind because it seems he understands more and more.
• Adrian now eats eggs, which until recently he wouldn’t do. Boiled or scrambled or fried, any kind goes.
• He likes adventurous climbing. The rope bridge at the Lost Gardens of Heligan was truly disappointing. It barely swayed. He’s suggested that we plant more trees so that he can climb from one tree to another, and then we can hang up rope bridges between them, too.
• He is looking forward to the start of swim school, and to our winter skiing trip.
• He can stay up much later in the evening than he used to. Bedtime now happens some time around eight, or even half past. He used to get cranky and hyperactive when he stayed up too late. Now he just sits quietly in the reading nook and reads one Bamse after another, until someone tells him to go to bed. Which we sometimes forget. The only effect is that he’s a bit tired the morning after.
• He likes to play all kinds of role-playing games on the iPad. Anything with fighters, goblins and wizards, equipment and special attacks and power-ups and so on. But Kingdom Rush remains his favourite.

I really, really want to finish the hedges this season, and I’m starting to feel a bit of time pressure. I intend to get the digging done by end of September, so I can plant in October.

This third and last section of the hedge has the hardest soil of them all. The first 20 centimetres is soft and light, partly because of the digging that was done last year for the wall. Below that, it’s all heavy clay. It’s slow going. Some parts feel like concrete, especially where it’s really dry. I aim to dig for about an hour every evening. This corner has been so hard that I’ve barely made any progress in the first days.

Almost every evening, Adrian is there to keep me company. Digging in this hard soil is no fun for him, so instead he just plays nearby. Currently he is building a small army from some plastic flowerpots. Each size is a different creature, strongly inspired by Kingdom Rush. There are goblins, and orcs, and some other thing… it may have been trolls; I forget the details. Some monster or other, in any case.

They all climb around on the wall and the mounds of earth and occasionally chase or attack each other. But their fighting appears to be good-natured: when a goblin fell off the bridge into the ravine, an orc quickly came to the rescue.

A quick trip to Ulriksdal garden centre to buy some plants. There are some gaps in the border in front of the house that I want to fill in. And the Bergenias at the top of the border, nearest the entry porch, were just not doing their job at all. When we came home and replaced them, I discovered that they hadn’t rooted themselves at all: I could almost lift out the original square clumps of soil from the surrounding earth.

We also took a walk in their self-pick fields and came home with a mixed bouquet of flowers. It was also nice to simply walk around in fields of beautiful flowers.

Adrian reading. Like Ingrid, he prefers comic books to “real” books.

Adrian and Eric, reading in the sofa.

We got a delivery of two cubic metres of fresh earth for the hedge. Adrian and I had great fun spreading it out.

When we moved here, some gardening tools became ours together with the house. (Others we bought ourselves.) One of them was a small spade which has now become Adrian’s. It’s smaller and shorter than standard spades, but it’s a real tool that can be used real work, unlike the plastic toys that are sold under the label of children’s tools in garden centres. Those are way too short and too flimsy – they might work for some pretend gardening for a three-year-old, but Adrian has outgrown that age.

In reality, though, he spent not so much time shovelling and more time climbing, sliding, crawling and rolling around in the soil.

When he tired, he used the spades to make catapults instead.

After dinner, Adrian wanted to go out cycling, to some place where he could just cycle and cycle and not worry about roads or pedestrians or anything else. I’m not one to say no when a child wants to go outside. So we cycled to Spånga sports field, where there is a bandy field in the winter and just a wide field of asphalt in the summer. Perfect for cycling.