Tartu’s “Hansa days” festival. The activities were fewer this year compared to when we last visited; the market appears to be the main thing now. So we browsed the market and bought some nice things, as well as craft bread and craft ice cream. The area we enjoyed the most was around the old observatory, where the kids did some rocketry-related crafts and we helped/watched a scientist build and fuel and launch a rocket. (It was very loud and very fast.)

The kids topped off the day with bungee cord trampoline jumping. Ingrid learned how to do backflips. I was miffed that I was wearing a skirt and couldn’t give it a try.

1. I’m pushing Adrian to go to the men’s room on his own, rather than to the ladies’ room with me.

2. He hates the hand dryers in public restrooms because of the noise they make, and shakes his hands dry instead.

The old school dryers weren’t too bad, but modern ones are often way too loud even for my ears. The Dyson Airblades are the worst ones I’ve encountered. We both flee when someone starts using one nearby. I understand that they are good for the environment but I truly wish they didn’t exist.

Our traditional annual visit to the Ahhaa science centre. In between other attractions, we attended a workshop about blood pressure (and tried measuring each other’s blood pressure, with varying results), and the kids saw a chick hatch. The most fun they had was, I think, the building area, just like last year. Adrian took it very, very seriously.

Ingrid joined her friend for her riding lesson, while Adrian and I waited and watched.

It rained.

Adrian found a bench to climb and balance on.

With friends in Tartu, playing Potion Explosion.

The kids like to do things together with us adults, naturally. But they are not too fond of the adult activities that feel too much like work (such as cooking) whereas I’m not too fond of playing with their toys. I can build with Legos or other construction toys for a while, but when the building turns into playing with what we built, I just feel like I’m going to die of boredom.

I’m glad that both kids are now of an age that we can play board games together. It’s an activity that we can do together and really enjoy, all of us. For some harder games, Adrian teams up with someone else, but quite often he can hold his own.

I recently bought a bunch of new games; Potion Explosion was one of them. It was easy to get started with (the age recommendation of 14 years is ludicrous) and quite a lot of fun, so we brought it with us to Estonia to play with friends here as well.

I sewed Poke balls for Adrian, so he can throw them at imaginary Pokemons to catch them all.

Meanwhile, Ingrid is looking for a new phone. The old one is sort of broken (she has to put it in loudspeaker mode to hear anything) but almost more importantly it’s too old for playing Pokemon Go.

First day of my summer vacation. Adrian and I are heading to town for some shopping. (Above all we need a proper hiking rucksack in his size.)

We were going to cycle straight home because Ingrid was on her own all day, probably bored to death, barely able to use her right hand… but we just couldn’t get past that climbing structure.

It is quite normal for grown-up women to lie down on the ground under playground structures to get better photos of their kids, isn’t it?

We made porridge in the morning and then hiked back to the car. Saw two grass snakes in the lake and one slow worm on the path.

I took a nap in the afternoon to catch up on lost sleep.

The sweetest thing he said all month: “I love it when I make you laugh.”

Some wonderfully interesting random thoughts that he has had:

• What if kissing made your teeth clean [so you wouldn’t need to brush them]?
• How come the clock’s hands don’t fall down when they are pointing at, say, eleven?
• Why is it called the Eiffel tower, and what is an Eiffel anyway?
• You cannot take back what you did, because you already did it. But you also cannot change what you will do, because it hasn’t happened yet.

All these ideas and questions are frantically spinning around in his head all the time. And they all need to come out, so he talks all the time, until I feel like my ears are going to fall off. Anything else he is doing – laying the table, eating dinner, getting ready for bedtime – can take forever because he has so much more interesting things to think about.

Bedtime in particular is something he struggles with. While I read and sing for him, he interrupts all the time, and climbs around in his bed. Then, after we turn off the light, he keeps talking and moving around – and then suddenly it’s like a switch is flicked and he’s asleep. Whereas I gradually drift off, he goes straight from talking to such deep sleep that a minute later I can walk around and drop things and loudly close the door, and he doesn’t notice anything.

Likes:

• Fidget spinners. (No surprise there.)
• Words that sound funny. Pikadoll. Puerto Rico.
• Pokemons. I think they occupy at least half his brain all the time, and all of his brain half of the time. The Pokemon animated series is all he watches on his iPad, and he can tell me endless facts about which type evolves into which other type, and what attacks they have. He is saving up his allowance to buy more Pokemon cards. He throws imaginary Pokeballs at real pigeons to pretend that he is catching a Pidgey.
• Maths. He now understands both multiplication and division, and can happily inform me that eight divided by four is two. He doesn’t know the actual times table by heart though, so he can only do it with small numbers. But he has a strong instinctive feel for how these things work. He asked me what nine times six is (because he had already calculated that a Rubik’s cube has nine tiles on each side, and six sides) and when I said that it’s ten times six, minus one six, he figured it in his head out straight away. He challenges himself to not use his fingers at all – he said that he sometimes doesn’t actually move them but thinks of moving them instead.
• Reading Bamse. It’s the first thing he does in the morning and the last thing he does at night. He finds it very frustrating that new issues only come out once every three week, while Ingrid’s Kalle Anka comes every week.
• Singing bits and pieces of his favourite songs even though he doesn’t understand the lyrics. Justin Timberlake’s Can’t stop the feeling, Sia’s Cheap thrills (“Hit the dance floor, hit the dance floor…”)