Adrian helped me cook dinner. We made pasta with a carrot and hazelnut sauce.

Ingrid is leaving for scout camp tomorrow, and I’ll be joining this year as part of the kitchen crew. The theme for this camp is sort of fairy tale/medieval (forest spirits and trolls and such) and everybody is encouraged to bring medieval clothes, so I decided to make Ingrid a medieval-inspired cloak.

A 59 kr fleece blanket from IKEA and some silver ribbon and about an hour of work later, here’s the result, proudly modelled by Adrian. He loves the cloak and now wants one, too.

Adrian got a new scooter today. He’s been borrowing Ingrid’s, but of course that only works when Ingrid isn’t using it. So now he has his own.

At the playground in Kadriorg park, waiting for time to pass.

Today we take the ferry back to Stockholm. The drive from Tartu (where we stay) to Tallinn (which has all the connections to the rest of the world) is over 2 hours, plus city traffic in Tallinn, plus a lunch break of uncertain length, so I aim to arrive an hour before we really want to be at the ferry terminal.

Kadriorg is a large beautiful park very near the harbour and it’s become a tradition to kill that extra hour there. (Well, except for one year when we got stuck in a traffic jam due to a bike race in Tallinn and used up the hour, which is why we have it.)

No trip to Estonia is complete without a visit to one of the adventure parks with their treetop obstacle courses. This year Adrian joined us, and had more fun and got further than I had really dared to hope for. Ingrid on the other hand was super disappointed that she didn’t make the length limit for half of the tracks.

We’re taking a day off from activities and stuff and just walking around in Tartu. We kind of happened to run across a few geocaches, though.

Adrian is growing. He eats like a horse. Truly, some days he eats more than anyone else in this family. He is also a slow eater, often forgetting to eat and instead thinking about other things, so meals can take a long while. Sometimes the rest of us run out of patience and leave the table before he is done. (We can’t just sit there and talk to each other, because then he will join us in our conversation and make no progress at all with the eating, and we’ll all sit there forever.) But he doesn’t seem to mind.

He is growing stronger. The hikes of nearly 10 km that we did in Mercantour were hard but there was no question about whether he could do it.

He is also growing braver, bit by bit. He’s always been much more cautious than Ingrid, both physically and otherwise. Case in point: both learned to ride the balance bike at an early age, and were then offered the chance to try a pedal bike. Ingrid rode off on her bike after 30 seconds of practice (around her 4th birthday). Adrian has been afraid of falling and hasn’t really wanted to try even. He did learn to cycle this month – on a bike that is way too small for him, because on this one the ground wasn’t so far. He still prefers it to another bike we have that is actually in his size.

Here I am, describing how cautious he is… but he has become significantly braver, or perhaps more comfortable in the large and dangerous world around him. It used to be that whenever we went for a forest walk, he’d always stay really close by my side, ideally holding my hand all the time. I don’t mind holding hands, but on uneven ground or narrow paths it really makes walking uncomfortable, so I often asked him to let go. A minute later I’d notice he was holding my hand again.

But now when we’ve been walking, both in Mercantour and in Tyresta (the blog post about that one will come soon) I suddenly realized he wasn’t doing that any more. He was ranging ahead, no longer anxious about the situation.

I wonder if he isn’t mainly worried about getting lost or left behind. In restaurants for example, if it’s just me and him and I need to go to the toilet, he would never stay at the table and wait for me, he always wants to join me. He also trusts Ingrid: at the buffet on the ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn, Ingrid and I took turns going to get food so one of us could stay with Adrian. But now at least he doesn’t need me immediately next to me. He even felt OK going to get another drink for himself at the buffet, on his own. Today he was OK staying in the car while I went up to our apartment to get some stuff, for the first time ever, and in a strange city to boot. Baby steps…

Favourite fruit: raspberries and apples.

Current bedtime story: Harry Potter (inspired by Ingrid).

We went to the Ahhaa science centre. The kids mostly ran around on their own, with friends, but somehow towards the end of the day we all ended up in a construction play area with foam bricks. Adrian wanted to build a house with me.

We each brought different things to the process. Adrian decided the overall shape and size of the house. I made sure it stood up, by setting the bricks in a bond – on his own Adrian would have just piled them up in straight stacks. Together we decided where to put doors and windows. Finally Adrian added an element of randomness by adding odd pieces here and there when he felt like it.

Initially it was just us two in a corner of the construction area, while other groups of kids were building elsewhere. There was some competition for bricks and several times it looked like we would have to stop because we were out of materials. But over time kids left and new ones arrived. Whenever someone left, everyone who stayed had a new opportunity to grab more bricks from the ruins of their buildings, so we kept going. In the end we had an impressively-sized house, large enough for Adrian to walk in, incorporating all the bricks in the area.