Fine, warm weather again, so we’re having dinner outside.

Setting the table is Adrian’s job around the house. He doesn’t like having to carry all the tableware from the kitchen to the deck, so on evenings like this, he grumbles more than usual about having to do all this hard work. But he likes eating outside on the deck.

After who knows how many months of setting the table, he still struggles with where the knife and fork are supposed to go. Sometimes he sets half the places the right way and the other half the other way. Telling him that the knife goes on the right doesn’t help, because how are you supposed to remember that? It’s just random, and could equally well be the other way round. Recently I thought of telling him to think of the knife as a mini-sword, and think about which hand he would hold a sword with, and then put the knife on that side. I think this might work better.

Today was the first day that felt like summer. We celebrated with ice cream in the garden in the afternoon.

Adrian’s favourite is Dumle, a cone of vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce and milk chocolate.
Ingrid had a Skruven, a multi-coloured screw-shaped ice lolly with flavours of passion fruit, mango, pineapple and peach.
I had a Kina Wafer, a chocolate ice cream with pieces of wafer and hazelnuts.
Eric was at work and missed the ice cream picnic.

Current themes:

• Talking. Adrian talks ALL. THE. TIME. Every thought that comes into his head, comes right out through his mouth.
• Losing baby teeth. One is out and another one is loose and is irritating Adrian a lot.
• Having to wash his hands, which he hates for some reason. He is grimy when he comes home from school, and somehow his hands always end up in his food to a greater or lesser extent, so I make him wash his hands several times a day. With soap, which makes it even more of an ordeal.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars. It’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Adrian got a haircut. Eric suggested a mohawk. (A mohawk is called a “coxcomb” in Swedish, by the way.) Adrian obligingly had a look in the mirror, but didn’t hesitate when it came to deciding – he wants hair just like daddy, no coxcomb.

Stacks of sacks of fertilizer make a perfect playground for kids with too much energy and no fear of getting dirty.

We went shopping for clothes for the kids. Mainly for Ingrid, because when we sorted through her wardrobe the other week, we discarded almost all of its contents. Too small, too small, too colourful, too small, too many flowers. Our friends’ 6-year-old daughter will be getting a massive delivery of clothes. Ingrid, meanwhile, now has almost no summer clothes. Two pairs of shorts and three t-shirts, I think the total was, and maybe one or two dresses which she doesn’t wear very often.

While Ingrid tried on clothes, Adrian and I waited.

April barely felt like spring. It was truly “April weather” all the way, with repeated snowfalls and temperatures barely above freezing. Today it’s May, and it’s like spring suddenly arrived at full blast, with brilliant sunshine and balmy temperature. We brought out the deck furniture and had both breakfast and lunch outside. During all of April we hadn’t considered sitting outside even once.

In the afternoon Adrian and I got busy in the garden. (Who knows how long this weather will stay!) We did all of Adrian’s favourite things in the garden, which coincidentally happened to be useful as well.

First we spread cow manure in all the planting boxes. I carted sacks of manure in the wheelbarrow, with Adrian sitting on top and shouting that he’s the “king of cow manure!”. He then killed the bags with a pair of scissors (after checking with the bag if it wanted to be killed, and the bag said yes) and we spread it out together.

Then Adrian asked if we could also assemble the frames for the netting over the strawberries. That’s his favourite project in the whole gardening season. So we did that as well, even though we’re nowhere near needing them yet.

The next coolest task in the garden is cutting things – any things – with pruning shears. So we did a bit of that as well and culled the raspberry bushes.

The whole family joined me for a walk along a circular route based on Sörmlandsleden, stage 15:2 and part of 15, between the old mine at Skottvång and lake Marviken.

The weather was cloudy and cool but otherwise fine. We saw hepatica flowers everywhere. White anemones were just starting to bloom, but they were camouflaged since their flowers only open in sunshine. I also saw a very early marsh marigold.

The kids did not enjoy the actual walking part too much, which was pretty much as expected. Luckily there was stuff for them to do and to look at.

At the beginning and end of the trail, near Skottvång, there were numerous works of art in the forest along the trail – odd constructions, plastic plants in unexpected places, funny road signs (pointing towards “tree”, “path”, “air”, “water”, “berries” etc), coffee cups hanging on trees, a modern rune stone, etc.

We stopped for lunch at a picnic spot just off lake Marviken, roughly at the halfway point, and made a fire to heat and cook our food.

There was no firewood at the picnic spot, but there was no shortage of dry branches in the forest nearby. I guess not many people had stopped there recently. The fireplace was a small one and we had no proper tools with us to cut the branches to size. I couldn’t find my camping knife when packing so I only had a little pocket knife with me, but that turned out to be enough for whittling down the thicker branches until I could snap them in two.

Our standard campfire food is “hike bombs”, a recipe I learned from Ingrid’s scout hikes: foil packages containing diced pre-cooked potatoes, vegetables etc. Easy to prepare, easy to pack, quick to cook, and delicious. Our version consists of potatoes, salmon, and broccoli. For dessert, we had “hike bananas”, which is also a traditional outdoor recipe in Sweden: bananas, slit and stuffed with pieces of chocolate, and then grilled.

Both kids enjoyed poking in the fire and putting on more branches, but Adrian was quite cautious about getting close to it. Somehow he nevertheless managed to get soot marks on his forehead, which Ingrid then turned into a war painting.

After lunch we passed and climbed a viewing tower. The tower was more fun than the viewing – the surrounding area is quite flat and all we could see was forest, looking the same in all directions.

The walk back felt shorter than the way out, because we made slingshots for the kids. Shooting and looking for projectiles kept them happily occupied almost all the way to the car.

We only had pieces of ordinary sewing elastic to work with, so the slingshots were neither powerful nor easy to use, but kids were happy as long as their stones flew a few metres. We’ll probably make new ones next time we’re out walking, so I’ll have to do some research to find a better material to use next time.