Today was the first day of noticeably below-freezing temperatures for this season, and thus the first day of snow suits. Adrian loved his. “Yay! Snow suit! I will put it on right now!”
In the evening he climbed out of it but left the boots still attached to it, so it’s all ready and waiting for him tomorrow morning.
Another month of mood swings and frustration. Adrian really wants to decide, decide everything, and finds it immensely frustrating that there are all these things that he cannot decide. He wants everybody to do things his way.
“No, don’t hold the fork like that! No you can’t sit here, you have to sit there! I want to have that! No, emme must blow on the porridge!”
I am heartily tired of being yelled at. And when I get angry because of this, he’s all tears – and while he may then grudgingly let me hold the fork my way, he still doesn’t understand that I want to decide over my own doings.
Sometimes he gets so angry that he doesn’t even want to be with us. He goes and hides behind a door and sulks.
Sometimes he just moans vaaarfööör (“whyyyyy”) like a frustrated teenager.
He’s so verbal and can express himself so well in most situations that it’s easy for me to think of him as older than he is. But then he does something that reminds me how little he understands about the world, even the simple physical aspects of it.
Things he does not understand or know yet:
That you cannot roll up a napkin around a fork if the fork is at a right angle to the edge you’re rolling from.
How to make an A from three sticks. (He could make an H, or a very very flat “roof” so the middle bar didn’t reach from side to side, but couldn’t adjust either of those to a real A.)
That the water will fall out if you hold a bottle sideways, or shake it without a lid.
He likes certain things to be done the same way every day. Every day as we leave the nursery, he wants to walk on the same two benches the same way. Then we always go to Konsum for groceries. There he always sits in the trolley and eats a fruit. For a long time that was always a banana, but recently he’s been having an apple instead.
He gets carsick more easily than he used to, I think. He cannot say that he’s carsick but when he starts sounding really miserable and says that he wants to sleep, or wants his dummy, or to go home, then we know that he’s about to get sick.
He likes mirrors, and very easily gets stuck in front of one, so occupied with what he sees that he cannot move on. Eric’s sunglasses are very fascinating that way: he gets very close, with his nose almost touching the sunglasses, and looks at his reflection. When he is upset and then sees himself in the mirror, he gets in a feedback loop of upsetness: the harder he sees himself cry, the worse it gets.
Favourite movie: Despicable me. Adrian loves the minions! Papoy! and Bee doo bee doo…
The movie is called Dumma mig in Swedish, i.e. roughly “Stupid me”. Since this summer, when Ingrid first started speaking about “Stupid me”, Adrian has insisted on calling this movie “Stupid Ingrid”, or possibly “Stupid you” – not as a joke but because he simply and naturally converted Ingrid’s “me” to his “you”. Only very recently did he understand that “Stupid me” is actually the name of the movie, regardless of who is talking.
Favourite books: Alfons Åberg. Also he’s asked me to read several mildly scary books: some with ghosts, and also Underbara familjen Kanin. Halfway through he gets scared and hides his eyes and gets really really close to me, but he still wants to hear the rest.
Favourite clothes: a new dress, green, with pockets. Woollen mittens.
If he could choose, he’d probably wear more purple, more glitter, and more dresses. Unfortunately we don’t have many purple clothes in his size.
Favourite food: porridge. He eats a large portion every morning, with jam or chopped apples, banana, kiwi, etc.
A turbulent month full of stormy feelings. Adrian is angry, upset, distressed, frustrated… Not all the time, not at all, but frequently enough for these feelings to dominate my impressions of this past month.
Life just doesn’t seem to be the way he wants it to be. The world does not cooperate. Nobody does things the way he wants them to be, because nobody can read his mind.
I set the table for breakfast and bring a saucepan with porridge to him. “No! Not here! On the stove! I want to get it myself!” he cries. He doesn’t even try talking to me – he goes straight to yelling or angry crying. As if this was the umpteenth frustrating experience that makes his cup run over – and the poor boy only awoke half an hour ago. He is so frustrated and he doesn’t really know how to cope with it.
And there is an awful lot of things that can go wrong in just a day, an awful lot of setbacks to cope with. Sometimes he is upset that I offer to help him; other times he is upset that I don’t. Sometimes he is angry that I talk to him. Sometimes he cries because we only have the wrong mittens at nursery and the right ones are at home. Sometimes he cries because we have mittens at all. At times I feel like I’m walking in a minefield: whatever I choose, whatever I do or say (or don’t do, or don’t say) might set off an explosion. There is no safe path.
Not being first is generally a very frustrating experience. Other people going out through the door before him is bad. Other people going up the stairs before him is bad. Other people serving food before him, opening the fridge before him, getting an apple before him – bad.
Sharing is difficult. Not just sharing toys but in general accepting other people’s right to do things, decide, hold and use objects. Sharing the world with other people. Not being allowed to grab the Bamse that Ingrid just took. The fact that I want to sit on the chair next to his.
At nursery when his will collides with the other kids’, he doesn’t really understand what’s happening. Say some kid makes a sand cake, and Adrian stomps on it – because he likes stomping on sand cakes, not because he wants to destroy it. The other kid gets upset, and the teacher tells him so. Adrian understands that people are not happy with him but does not quite understand why, or what to do about it, so he cries. He wants to get along, and he really does his best, but especially with other kids it’s not so easy.
Well, luckily there are also happier moments.
When Adrian is in a happy mood, he is sweet and talkative and funny. He speaks very well now, with long sentences. He is working on figuring out irregular verbs: this evening he tried to say “I haven’t drunk anything” and tried Jag har inte drack… Jag har inte drickit… and then gave up and just said Jag ska dricka.
He makes jokes. He pretends to be things (a rabbit, or a horse, or a tiger). He pretends his food is things (boats, shoes, trains). He pretends that he is a baby and walks around saying “dadda gaggu gaggu” etc.
He talks about days of the week quite a lot, and asks me almost every day what day it is. Also he is still working on the concepts of “yesterday” and “today” and “tomorrow”.
He is interested in letters – or perhaps names? He points out the other kids’ boxes in the hallway at nursery, and is especially interested in the ones that begin with the same letter. Duru’s name begins with Darin’s letter. Elin, Erik och Elias all have E. Not all words that begin with A say “Adrian”. Etc.
He can count up to 5 things, I think. He doesn’t do it very often.
He likes playing with whatever Ingrid plays with, or the other kids at nursery. He likes our train track, and Lego. He has adopted Ingrid’s soft Sipsik doll, tells me that Sipsik is his baby, and likes to carry Sipsik with him from room to room.
He likes sticks. Preferably about as long as his leg, and the thickness of a finger.
We stopped (or rather, I stopped) nursing completely. It took him a long while to accept this, and sometimes he still tells me he would like to nurse. But I felt done.
This didn’t lead to him sleeping any better. He kept waking at around 5, pretty much every night, and then tossing and turning and half-sleeping for an hour or so before sinking back into deeper sleep. And while he was “seeking” that sleep, he kept kicking me, pushing me with his feet or legs, head-butting me, lying on top of me…
So I moved out of our bedroom. Adrian and Eric now have the big 3-bed combo to themselves, and I sleep on a mattress in Ingrid’s room. For the first few nights it looked like this made no difference, but after a while he actually started sleeping through the night, more or less. Maybe waking a bit in the early hours of the morning, cuddling up closer to Eric, and then just going straight back to sleep.
He has been quite tired recently and going to bed early, some evenings as early as 19:00. Usually he’s pretty good at realising that he is tired and saying so.
He has also been hungry. He eats a large portion of porridge at breakfast. I don’t know what he does at nursery, but the first thing we do after nursery is go to the supermarket, where he gets a banana. (He likes eating it while he’s sitting inside the trolley, with all the food piled up around him.) Then we get home and he wants to eat straight away, lots. I’ve now started cutting his snack short and making dinner earlier again (aiming at 18:00), otherwise he can snack on bananas and bread and yogurt for an hour, and then have no appetite for dinner.
Favourite food: fish fingers. And dark chocolate. But he now tries the veggies I serve to him, almost without argument, and sometimes actually eats some (broccoli, sugar snap peas, raw carrots, raw bell peppers).
Favourite clothes: pyjamas. Sometimes he spends all day in pyjamas, and occasionally I think he’s gone to nursery in pyjamas. We bought three new one-piece pyjamas for him because he keeps sticking his hands inside his nappy at night, which leads to leakage. The pyjamas block that very effectively. But it was hard to find any one-piece pyjamas in his size – only one shop had anything larger than size 92.
He does not like wearing socks, and his favourite footwear is a pair of rubber boots lined with wool. He says his shoes are “hard”. He likes woollen mittens, too.
Favourite song: Kalle Theodor.
Adrian is now three years old. He is so big and so small at the same time.
It’s been a lively, changeable month. On some days Adrian is happy and active. On other days, mostly tired. On yet others he is angry and frustrated, yells and cries.
The anger and frustration mostly come out when he is tired. The trigger is often Ingrid getting something before him, or something better than him. I buy two new toothbrushes – and he wants the one that Ingrid got. Dinner is ready – and he is so angry that Ingrid got to the potatoes first.
The Estonian playgroup’s autumn season began this month. Adrian and Ingrid both came. It struck me how active he is and how intensely he participates compared to absolutely all the other kids. Most sit passively; some become restless and wander around or start fighting to get away. But only Adrian has always been fully present – and Ingrid was the same when she was there with me. (Now she’s in another group with older kids, without parents, so I don’t really know what she does.) He points out the pictures of the songs he knows; shouts out the name of the animal we’re about to sing about; cheers when we’re about to sing a riding song. Infectious joy!
Often the teachers at the nursery also tells me how much he loves taking part of all the activities. So much so that he gets stressed because he cannot be everywhere and do everything that the others are doing. By the time it’s time to go home, he is often quite tired.
At home he likes playing with the iPad. For several weeks he played Pettson’s Inventions all the time. I thought that the game would be way too hard for him, but he persevered. At first it was only guesswork and he asked for help a lot, but after a while he figured out some of the “rules” and managed to put the inventions together on his own.
He likes board games but doesn’t understand how to play them. When Ingrid and I play, he likes to join us and move the pieces around, or just play with them. Luckily most games have enough pieces that he can play with some of the pieces while we can play the game our way. Otherwise we take one game and he gets another, right next to us. Sometimes he does it on his own as well: takes a board game, spreads out all the parts, and then plays with them.
We’ve also been doing some jigsaw puzzles together, after a long time of no interest in puzzles. But already it looks like he’s lost interest.
Adrian has noticed that Ingrid brings home crafts projects from school and has now started doing the same. He has made two “surprises” out of small pieces of cardboard and colourful tissue paper, glued or taped together. He says Ingrid should “put them on her arm and then put water on them and then count”, as with fake tattoos.
We don’t have much time for art or crafts at home (which I think is really unfortunate but that’s another topic). He might do it if I suggested it, but left to his own devices it’s not something he asks for. But in the few drawings he has done, he’s moved on from susapusa (tangles) to individual roughly circle-shaped things, usually quite large.
He likes listening to music. For quite a while he mostly chose Sõit-sõit-sõit külla, a CD with Estonian folk musicians singing with and for their kids. Now it’s mostly Barnkammarboken CDs. He listens more to the lyrics than he used to, and joins in. He likes listening with Eric’s large headphones.
The songs he loves best are all by Astrid Lindgren. Which is quite fascinating: they are from different CDs and different movies, and I don’t think he knows that they “belong” together, but still there is something in them that speaks to him.
Those are also the songs he asks for when I sing for him at bedtime. Här kommer Pippi Långstrump, Pippis sommarvisa, Idas sommarvisa (aka den andra sommarvisan, “the other summer song”), Mors lilla lathund, Kalle Teodor… The iPad comes in handy: I can look up the lyrics in the dark bedroom. The lyrics for some of those songs are not easy to remember.
We also read a bedtime story every night. His current favourite bedtime books are Disney Princess: Pretty Please and Pippi Kurrunurruvuti saarel.
He’s been going to bed much earlier than he did a few months ago. Usually we brush his teeth and put on pyjamas at 8:15 and after that it’s bedtime, but sometimes he asks to go to bed even earlier.
Most mornings he still half-wakes around 5:15 or 5:30 and then has trouble falling asleep again. Sometimes it takes an hour before he is fully asleep again, rather than tossing and turning and whimpering. I actually think get fewer hours of good sleep now than when we nursed at night. (We now nurse a teeny-tiny bit at bedtime, and that’s it.)
Breakfast normally consists of porridge. Lots of it. On weekends he often asks for French toast instead, or sometimes ordinary toast. Sometimes he eats cereal as well (corn flakes and oat squares).
At lunch and dinner I have started insisting that he try some vegetables. He does not like the idea but almost always takes at least a little bite nevertheless. Very rarely he asks for another piece. I think he has only done that with raw carrots and bell peppers, and once with chickpeas.
He likes topping off his dinner with a piece of dark chocolate.
He uses the word “yesterday” to refer to any time in the past.
He mixes up ljud and ljus, “sound” and “light” in Swedish. In the dark bedroom he asks for more sound; when the iPad is too quiet he says he wants more light.
Favourite movie: Disney’s Funny Little Bunnies (a Silly Symphony from 1934).
At the three-year checkup today he was officially recorded at 15.2 kg and 94 cm. The nurse also evaluated his speech, his ability to understand and follow spoken instructions, and to draw scribbles. Then she mentioned child-proofing and I steered the conversation in another direction, keeping quiet about letting Adrian cut with a sharp knife.
This month’s big news: Adrian speaks Estonian! Half of this past month we spent in Estonia, and it made a huge difference for him.
For the first few days he only spoke to us, in Swedish, and effectively didn’t open his mouth in the company of strangers. Slowly he began to find his words, and then gradually he became more and more comfortable with speaking Estonian. By the end of our two-week stay he had no trouble at all, playing with the other kids in Estonian without me participating at all.
Much of that remained after we got home. He speaks more Estonian than he has ever done. Often he reminds me, cheerfully: Räägin sinuga eesti keelt! – “I’m speaking Estonian with you!” In fact he speaks more Estonian than Ingrid does, and more freely. He doesn’t yet worry about not getting it completely right, unlike Ingrid.
Somehow I was expecting him to begin at zero, as if he was a baby learning Estonian from scratch, speaking in simple sentences of a few words. But of course it was nothing like that – his Estonian is at the same level of maturity as his Swedish. It was all in there and he just needed to let it out.
His Estonian vocabulary is a bit more limited than Swedish, and he struggles with some of the idiosyncrasies of Estonian grammar. But he uses words and grammatical forms that I had no idea he knew. He translated “favorit” (Swedish) to “lemmik” (Estonian) without batting an eye; he is familiar with both the -ma and -da infinitive forms, etc.
During our stay in Estonia Adrian also learned something completely different: to love playing in water. He’s been to the beach with us, and to the paddling pool at our local playground, but always been cautious, always at a distance from the water, never really enjoying the splashing much.
Now he was in there, running around, sitting in the water, digging holes in the sand and mud, carrying water in buckets and pouring it around – you name it. And happy about it!
In other news, Adrian has tried eating new things. Vegetables, even! He has eaten bell peppers, when Ingrid offers them to him, and carrots, too (both raw) and once some string beans. Progress.
I have also started to insist that he tastes the cooked food that the rest of us eat, at least one proper bite. To my surprise he has accepted this and not protested much at all. Afterwards he politely says Det var jättegott, “it was really good”, but he almost never asks for a second piece. The string beans were an exception.
Meanwhile I have cut down a lot on breastfeeding. Once just after he wakes, and once before he falls asleep – and once at 5:30 or 6:00 so we can all sleep another hour or two. He doesn’t like this and tells me almost every day that he would really like to nurse more, but usually he is not too upset about it either.
He has rediscovered the iPad, after losing interest in it for a while. He explores new apps, games that Ingrid played years ago, pokes around, investigates. But unlike Ingrid he doesn’t get absorbed for hours, neither in iPad games nor in movies. After a short while he usually wanders off and does something else instead, preferably in the company of other people.
He has lost some of his interest in Pippi and Bamse and doesn’t always go straight for the Pippi shirt when choosing clothes in the morning.
He likes shopping. The best thing each afternoon is our trip to the supermarket and the veggie stand at Spånga torg.
He hates it when somebody gets ahead of him, outruns him, goes up or down the stairs ahead of him. He absolutely needs to be first.
Du får inte prata med mig!, “you mustn’t talk to me!” is still his usual way of telling us that he is angry with us.
Recently we started experimenting with exposing Adrian to dairy products again. I started eating dairy of various sorts, and he had some butter on his bread.
For a while it looked like everything was OK. But after a week or two it was pretty clear to us that he was still affected. He was hyperactive, restless and had difficulty focusing on any activity. His bowel movements were weird. So it seems he still doesn’t tolerate cow milk protein.
This counts as progress, still, because the effects came later and were much more diffuse than after previous attempts.
But for now will keep his food dairy-free and limit dairy in my diet (for as long as I continue to breastfeed him, which is probably not very long). But perhaps we don’t need to be quite as strict about products that contain small amounts of milk. And I think I will allow myself to use cream and cheese when I’m cooking, and maybe the occasional piece of kohupiimakook.
Because those are the things I have missed. To put cream or crème fraîche in my soups and sauces, and cheese on oven-baked things.
Yes, I have tasted ice cream, and I have tried yoghurt again. I have put cheese on a few sandwiches. I have eaten pancakes made with cow milk instead of oat milk.
But all of these were merely nice rather than awesome. Ice cream is creamy, true, but sorbet is more flavourful. And oat milk pancakes are in no way inferior to the traditional ones.
Life continues in its usual tracks. Even the bits that I want to change are hard to change. Adrian resists change.
A month ago, in fact already before my thirty-three-month post, I decided to wean him off nursing at night. He was by that time half-waking once at about 5:30 every morning for a quick nurse, after which he would easily fall back asleep. Now he still wakes at about the same time, cries, yells at me, kicks, pulls at my t-shirt, and communicates in all other possible ways that he really does NOT agree with this new policy. It is obvious that he does not wake because he is done sleeping: he is tired and bleary-eyed, and does actually fall asleep again after 10 or 15 minutes or so. And when he next wakes, about an hour and a half later, he is in a completely different mood. But his sleep is restless for about an hour so I actually get less quality sleep than before.
I thought he would get used to this new deal after a while, and maybe he will. Since it’s already been over a month, I’m beginning to suspect that it might not happen until we stop nursing completely. Which he is also very unwilling to do. But I have now had enough (believe it or not) so I am saying no to him more often than I used to.
Sometimes he nurses for comfort, but often plain cuddles and hugs work as well. Sometimes he tells me that he doesn’t want a hug, he just wants to cry, or to be angry.
Many times he asks to nurse just because he can. He has nothing important to do, I am sitting down and – to his eyes – looking like I’m just waiting for him to nurse. So he asks to nurse – sort of like some adults drink coffee I guess. In those situation the solution is to find something for me to do, something that is incompatible with me sitting down. We go and empty the dishwasher, prepare lunch, go grocery shopping etc.
Adrian doesn’t join me in my chores as often as he used to, except when it comes to grocery shopping, which he is always up for. He likes shopping, and he likes outings. One game that he has played several times (while I was watering in the garden I think) is that he pretended to be out driving. He had some random toy that marked the store, and then he drove there. First he drove to Erikshjälpen, which is a large charity shop in Spånga. Then he drove to Bauhaus, he said, which is a DIY/construction materials store.
Another area where I am not making much progress is potty training. I ask him to sit on the potty; he usually refuses, or sits for 20 seconds and then runs off. And then he pees in his nappy two minutes later.
He pretty much only speaks Swedish, although he has no trouble understanding my Estonian. There are some words that he insists in saying in Estonian even when the rest of the sentence is in Swedish. sülle (“[to be] in your lap”) and magustoit (“dessert”) he almost always says in Estonian.
The most memorable ones are the ones that also exist in Swedish but mean something completely different. Torka in Estonian means “to spear”, such as to spear something on your fork. That is how Adrian uses it, except he uses it in a Swedish context and in Swedish torka means “to dry”. Jag ska torka den med gaffeln, “I will dry it with my fork”. Likewise sega in Estonian means “to stir, to mix” whereas in Swedish seg means “rubbery, tough”. Emme kan du sega min gröt – “can you rubbery my porridge”.
A language construct that he likes and often uses mostly correctly is när/då, “when/then”. “When it rains, we get wet.” Sometimes he broadens its meaning to just “things that belong together”, and sometimes he reverses the connection: “when we go to the kitchen, we eat”.
Favourite new activities: He likes balancing on things, and jumping down from them.
I am so happy that our kids love each other and get along so well.
Adrian can wake up in the morning and declare, first thing, “I love Ingrid” (jag gillar Ingrid). Ingrid likewise says “I love Adrian, he is so cute”.
When Adrian needs waking from a nap, I send Ingrid. Both of them love it best this way. If I wake Adrian, there’s a good chance that he awakes grumpy and whiny, whereas if Ingrid does it, he’s always happy. And Ingrid much prefers Adrian to wake her in the morning rather than us. “He does it better,” she told me.
Sometimes Ingrid helps dress him and even change a wet nappy. It ususally involves lots of giggling from both.
Adrian idolizes Ingrid. Anything she does, he wants to do. He tries on her skirts and headbands; he “reads” her Bamse and Kalle Anka pocket cartoon magazines, he wants to join her in all her games and activities. Vänta på mig (“wait for me!”) and jag vill också! (“I want [to do this], too!”) are heard in the house throughout the day.
Adrian is very much in a deciding mood right now. It is important for him to decide about all kinds of things. Primarily he decides about his own life, of course, the small things that a child can decide. But he also wants to decide what other people should do, and how. Things should be done just so and not any other way!
I used my fingers to hold a potato I was cutting up for him, instead of holding it with a fork, and this was so totally wrong that he was in tears. Du ska göra så, inte så! And the corn flakes need to be poured in his bowl before the oat squares, not after. (Or was it the other way round? I’m not sure any more…) It is also important to him do do things on his own, nej inte du, bara jag! just like last month. So now I usually confirm with him before I do anything that I think might affect him.
This has led to him offering me choices about all sorts of things, too. It’s always either-or choices. “Do you like this stone or this one?” Vill du ha den eller den? Do I want a small piece of bread or a large one? Do I want a skirt or trousers?
Of course there are also the things that don’t really affect him, but that he cares strongly about nevertheless. I want to change out of my office clothes when I get home; Adrian doesn’t think I should. Adrian doesn’t think Ingrid should stand where she is standing. Adrian doesn’t think others should talk funny, only he is allowed to do that. Sometimes I humour him; sometimes I really want to make my own decisions. Lots of drama and tears.
When he wants to get me to do something, and the first attempt does not work, he tries different strategies. Sometimes he does it the Ingrid way and asks with exagerrated politeness: snälla kan du göra det. Sometimes he shouts orders: du SKA göra det! Sometimes he just yells: GÖR DET! Sometimes he simply screeches.
He likes talking funny and making funny noises. Also he likes talking like a baby. Jag är bäbis, he tells us. They play mum and dad and baby at nursery, and I guess he is usually the baby.
He seems to enjoy this kind of pretending, but mostly in company with other kids. Sometimes he is a baby. Other times he is a tiger that roars. Sometimes he is a pirate who says “hah-haa!” like Pippi Longstocking does in the movie. Then he asks me if it was too scary and if I say yes, he does it more quietly and gently the next time.
But these things should be done the right way. Only he talks funny; he doesn’t like us mimicking him. When he serves us toy food, we should pretend to eat it the right way, with the right pretend sounds. Not too realistically! “Only pretend” he admonishes when our mouth goes too near the toy corn cob.
He is interested in sizes. He talks about things being big or small, or medium (litemellan) or just right (lagom).
Adrian is also interested in names. Whenever he decides to talk to some stranger (such as the cashier at the supermarket, or some mom at the playground, or the man sitting next to us on the train) he asks for their name. Quite often they reply and then ask him the same. Usually he answers Adrian, but sometimes he also says he is lillebror, “little brother”.
He also asks me about others’ names: people we pass in the street, people in newspaper photos, in ads, and so on. And he often asks me about who lives in what house. Of course we pass a number of houses where we know the people: his friends, our neighbours, and so on. Some of them he knows perfectly well but he still likes to ask me. But he also asks me about strangers’ houses, and when I say I don’t know, he sometimes informs me that people live there, or a man, or a woman.
When someone asks him how old he is, he says he is two, and holds up two fingers. Now he has also sort of understood three: he knows that the older kids at nursery are now three years old, and he can hold up three fingers. Sometimes he can correctly say when there are three of something, such as potatoes on his plate, but sometimes he also says three when it’s really four.
On two occasions recently he has surprised me by trying new food. Once he ate sugar snap peas. And once he actually ate real cooked food with several ingredients: a tomato soup with macaroni and sweetcorn. Otherwise he still subsists on carbs (bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, cereal), meatballs and fish fingers, fruit, and sweetcorn and peas.
Favourite activities:
Favourite things:
Adrian has discovered face painting. He likes being painted, and he likes to paint. Sometimes Adrian and Ingrid paint each other. Ingrid paints flowers, strawberries, hearts, or just colours that Adrian chooses. Adrian also very kindly asks which colours Ingrid or I want, and then applies them with great care, concentration and tenderness.
Yes, I am wearing the same fleece jacket as in my previous self-portrait, AND the one before that. I do own other clothes, and even other fleece jackets, but this one is a favourite.
| « Older posts | Newer posts » |
