On his way home from a birthday party.

Adrian rarely builds with the Legos he has, but the one thing he really wished for as a birthday present was a Lego Chima set. The Chima series is my favourite as well. The zoomorphic shapes are interesting and intricately constructed. If they didn’t get all dusty, I’d be happy to have them as room decorations.

Adrian had his birthday party today. Outdoors, in the Ursvik recreation area. Games, an adventure trail, grilled hot dogs, cake, treasure hunt and all that.

We joined forces with the family of Adrian’s friend H, whose birthday is just two days before his, so all in all we had about a dozen six- and seven-year-olds running around, plus a couple of younger siblings. On the other hand, Ingrid helped out as game leader and kid wrangler. Surprisingly we managed to not lose any of them in the forest.

It’s Adrian’s birthday tomorrow. The presents are waiting for him, when he wakes up tomorrow morning, first of us all.

I’m forty years old today. Happy birthday me!

Birthdays are intrinsically not particularly interesting. But they are a good excuse for cake. Ingrid and I picked cherries and baked a cherry and ricotta cake for my birthday.

We have a nifty little cherry de-stoning tool which makes the job incredibly easy, but it’s still very, very messy. Cherry juice splatters all over everything nearby. So we try and do this job outdoors if possible.

Ingrid is working on a secret project of some sort, that requires buying pieces of wood and screws. I suspect it might be related to my upcoming birthday, so I am taking care to not pay any attention to it, so as to allow her to surprise me.

Helium balloons at a birthday party.

People have birthday parties. People who have “round number” birthdays tend to have especially large or elaborate parties. I will turn 40 this summer and I feel no need whatsoever to have a party. So if you don’t get invited, you shouldn’t feel left out.

My birthdays are fundamentally uninteresting to me to begin with. And having a birthday party does not appeal to me the least. First there would be all this arranging and preparing, and then all these people, and there more of them I invite the less I have time to speak to them. No, not for me.

I wouldn’t turn down a cake, though.

Ingrid and I are making preparations for her birthday party next weekend (yeah, just a little bit late). Invitations, cakes and ice cream, decorations, games, and all that.

This is Ingrid preparing for “pin the tail on the donkey” except in Sweden the donkey is a pig, and the kids draw a tail rather than pinning a ready-made tail.

Celebrating Ingrid’s birthday with family lunch at a conveyor belt sushi place.

Don’t these Apfelstrudel just look like two grubs or worms of some kind, cuddling up to each other and wondering who shall eat whom? (They looked much more appetizing and less wormlike after baking, but I kind of liked this look.)

Today was the day for the annual gathering of family and relatives to celebrate the kids’ birthdays. Presents for the kids; a chance to chat for the parents; cake and snacks for everyone.

Both Eric and I have cut down on sugar and the kids usually prefer sweets to cake anyway, so there is rarely a reason in our household to bake a cake. Several of our guests have moved in the same direction and some eat no sugar at all. Most of the Apfelstrudel got eaten, but we still have an entire half left of the cheesecake we made. They’ll probably last me a week at least.

Some of the guests also eat almost no carbs, which made snacks into a bit of a challenge. I wanted the snacks to be finger food, vegetarian (for our own sakes), low carb (for the guests) and child-friendly (the party was for the kids after all) and yet something more interesting than just cubed cheese and fruit. Now I can sort of imagine what it must feel like for non-vegetarians to try and cook for vegetarians. You sit there and ask yourself – how can they possibly come up with meal ideas every day with these limitations? But if you’ve been vegetarian for a while it’s just normal and takes no extra effort.

(For the record, the snacks I came up with were cheese crisps, baked cauliflower and cheese balls, and devilled eggs. But when we added the cakes, we thought we had way too much food, so we totally bypassed the guests and ate the eggs for lunch before the guests arrived.)