Adrian in the bathtub with a pirate ship. It takes up about as much space as he does.
Nowadays he can mostly be convinced to take a bath at least once a week, without arguing. Someday maybe we’ll get him to wash his hair as well…

Ingrid’s class had a picnic/outing/thing. Grilled hot dogs, cake, dozens of kids running around in the woods and playgrounds.

I barely saw Ingrid during our two hours there and we had to search for her when it was time to go home.

Adrian hung out with us. He has some sort of a stomach bug and was not feeling too well. And running around with dozens of big kids is not his idea of fun anyway. He explored quietly, climbed a bit. Fell asleep in the car on the way home and then slept 13 hours straight.

Adrian likes dark chocolate. We always have a stash of Lindt Excellence at home for both baking and snacking. Currently there were two open packages, one of 70% and one 85%. Adrian was unsure which to choose (his real favourite is their Madagascar variety) so we had a mini chocolate tasting. The 70% version won.

Adrian playing with Geomag. He tends to build these really tall, thin, spindly things, and then be really angry when they collapse under their own weight.

We went out in the garden after dinner.

I found so many slugs that I lost count, several of them in flagrante delicto eating my hostas and day lilies. Obviously my reactive approach is not sufficient; it is time to switch to a proactive approach and remove the conditions that allow them to thrive and multiply. The scrappy area in front of the earth cellar is where the slugs have their safe haven and operating base: it’s slightly shady, and there are lots of hiding places for them among the rocks and nettles. I will clear all that out until the slugs have no place to hide.

Adrian meanwhile played on the swing, talked to the neighbour boy, and watered the slope.

Adrian drawing a dinosaur.

We finally hung up Ingrid’s bed curtains last weekend. (It only took three months…) Now Adrian naturally wants a bed curtain, too. Today I started working on his.

Ingrid’s has stars and a full moon. Adrian wants dinosaurs on his. This morning we prepared a first draft of the design together: he told me what he wanted and I drew it. The curtain will have a red Tyrannosaurus, a yellow Stegosaurus, a purple Pterosaurus and a pink Diplodocus. Oh, and a volcano. With lava.

On our way home from preschool.

If I stop by the supermarket on my way home, I often buy bananas even when we already have a bunch of them at home. Adrian is likely to be tired and hungry.

Ingrid is also often hungry after school. And yet both of them have had an afternoon snack less than two hours earlier. They tell me they don’t get enough to eat during that afternoon meal: there is not enough time, or they are only allowed to take one sandwich, etc. I wonder if there is some specific policy in place that leads the school and the preschool to keep the kids hungry in the afternoon. It doesn’t seem normal that both are so hungry that they need food right then and there: even waiting until we get home is a struggle.

Adrian is in a negative phase again, like he was around his birthday in September. It feels like he complains about everything all the time. It feels like I am always hearing “I don’t like doing this”, “I never get to” and “Why do I always have to”. He has no nice way of expressing dissatisfaction, he goes from zero straight to whining. It is tiring to be with him.

Maybe it is because he is tired. He has been saying that he wishes it was weekend all the time and he didn’t have to go to preschool. Perhaps his mood will improve with summer holidays.

And just like in September, he is quite clingy and does not want to be on his own at all. He wants to know what room I am in. When I go out, he must come; when I go in, he must go in. When we are out walking, he walks within two steps of me, ideally holding my hand all the time. When he does let go of my hand, he walks so close to me that I almost step on his feet.

Adrian has become interested in geography. We have been reading Världens djur, a book about animals, as our bedtime story. He likes the animals but also likes to hear about all the different places where they live. (The book is organised by habitat: the polar regions, desert, forest etc.) And while everything in that book is exciting, one of the most important facts about each animal is what part of the world it lives in. And for each place I mention, he asks if we could go there sometime. Can we go to Madagascar? And Antarctica? And the Middle East? And a desert? But maybe not a desert because there are scorpions there.

He also wants to go to a place where we can find dinosaur fossils. And to Japan, where there are ninjas! And robots! (Which we learned from the book of maps, Kartor.)

Pirates are also cool. He loved the pirate-themed sticker book I gave him and worked on it almost daily until it was all done.

He also likes reading about the Earth and its climate, things like earthquakes and tsunamis and hail.

He enjoys consciously breaking clothing rules. Mostly he is quite norm-conscious and usually wears jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt. (He doesn’t think twice about wearing a pink t-shirt, though, or wearing a dress to a party. Because dresses are pretty and comfortable.)

But now and again he comes up with something mildly crazy, such as going to preschool in pyjamas, or walking around at home with no trousers. He is very aware that what he is doing is slightly odd, and that’s what makes it fun.

He now likes baths, and has graduated from the small tub (which he barely fit into) to the large one that Ingrid uses. Well, what he likes is sitting in the bath. He is still not at all fond of actually washing himself. Washing hands is sort of OK, but not when I tell him he has to use soap as well. He also doesn’t like washing his neck and ears or wiping his nose, but he’d rather do it himself than let me scrub him. It’s a good thing he likes having his hair so short – I cannot imagine making him comb his hair every day.

Last week when I flew to Malmö I found a pirate-themed sticker book at the airport. Adrian loves it more than I had expected.

Sticker books did not exist when I was a kid. We barely had stickers in fact. We had water slide decals, though. I remember how careful you had to be to get them where you wanted them and how easily they tore.

So sticker books to me are kind of a lazy thing. Today’s children have it too easy, “when I was young we had to …” and so on.

But Adrian is taking this one very seriously. He is really set on getting the stickers positioned just so, so the pirate’s boots properly cover his feet and the hat sits just right. And it is trickier than I would have expected: the pirates have fancy coats with curved sleeves which take some work to get right.