Summer is effectively here and the kids at preschool spend a lot of time outdoors. Adrian keeps coming home scratches and scraped knees, with and without sticky plasters. Their games seem to involve a lot of sand and stones – I always find sand and gravel in his pockets.
When we get home, he is usually not only dirty but also tired and hungry. The standard procedure is for me to first remind him to wash his hands (and now also his arms up to his elbows), then make “apple boats” for him. He eats a few apples and/or other fruit and watches stuff on the iPad. Then he tells me he is still hungry and asks whether dinner is done soon.
It is Adrian’s responsibility to set the table for dinner. He grumbles about it, almost daily, and says he is tired, but still does it. He has been doing it for weeks, but still asks me almost every time whether he has put each piece in the right place. Mostly he gets it right – fork on the left, knife and glass on the right. When he is really tired, he loses track halfway, and sets some places correctly while others end up mirrored.
Favourite activities: movies and Legos. He never asks for any other toys, only for Legos. We buy a new Lego model him roughly monthly, or bi-monthly if he wants a larger one. When he has enough pocket money saved up, he buys more for his own money. The latest one we bought was a Star Wars X-Wing fighter. Two favourites in one – Lego and Star Wars! He’s got his eyes on the Millennium Falcon model, which is unfortunately too large and too expensive.
He may like the cool, large models, but actually he seems to have more fun with smaller sets. With the big ones, he builds them once, then admires them, plays with the figures, and that’s it. Then we take them apart and put them away, and he is not very interested in rebuilding them. The larger the set, the less likely he is to rebuild it.
He spends much more time building random weird things from a smaller number of pieces, for example a part of a smaller model, or the leftover pieces of a larger one. He likes building with odd-shaped pieces in particular, that you can’t just put together any which way. The outcomes are always interesting to look at, and in his head they are even more interesting – he often has fanciful explanations for what they really are.
Favourite movies: Star Wars: Clone Wars and Lego: Justice League – naturally. He wants to see the actual Star Wars movies but we tell him he’s too young. Also, Batman.
Favourite clothes: sweatpants and sweat shorts. Crocs shoes, which give him blisters when he walks around in them all day, so he wears them with socks.
Favourite colours: blue, green and orange.
Odds and ends: for a few weeks he was waking really, really early in the morning – around 5:30. A year ago he would have woken us, because he couldn’t be on his own. Now he goes downstairs (as quietly as he can manage, which isn’t very quiet really – which is how I know when he wakes) and then watches something on the iPad. I think that has now passed; this morning he woke with us at around 7.
He can still comfortably squat like a kid
