We went for a walk in another bog, with my father and his wife (on the Riisa hiking trail in Soomaa bog).

The path passed right by several small pools with platforms that made it easy to climb into and out of the water, so we tried out the water.

Bog pool water is brown like Coca-Cola.

Given how small the pools were I had expected them to be warm from the sun, but the water was quite shockingly cold. Only a very thin layer at the top was warm. If I swam very carefully, almost gliding without moving my arms, I could keep in the warm layer. But then I turned back and swam through water that I had churned up with my legs, and it was cold again.

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 on the 12th floor with a fabulous view of half the city, including the river. Too bad the windows face east (and it’s summer so sunrise is way too early).

Living on the 12th floor is different from living at ground level: we are level with the birds. We often see huge flocks of birds flying past the building: sometimes thrushes I believe, sometimes jackdaws.

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.

Taevaskoda, “Heaven’s Hall”, one of the most scenic spots in Estonia with sandstone cliffs next to a winding river. Do the kids spend any time appreciating the view? No. They found a Pokestop.

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 took a dip in a lake. The water was cold; even the kids did not stay in water very long.

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.

Two views from the top of Estonia’s tallest “mountain”, Suur Munamägi. The name could be translated as Great Egg Mountain but it is neither particularly great nor really a mountain, more of a Big Egg Hill. It is all of 318 metres high, but only 60 metres relative to the land around it, and even those 60 are a really gentle slope. (It is called the Big Egg Hill because there is also a Little Egg Hill.)

We happened to be nearby so we drove there and climbed all those 60 metres to its top. The viewing tower adds another 30 metres so you can at least see past all the tree tops. Not that the view is particularly exciting, anyway.

It was more fun looking straight down. There was a cross-country cycling competition going on while we there and the route passed right across the top of the hill. In a way it should be kind of impressive for the race to pass the top of the country’s highest mountain but I am pretty sure that the cyclists had much tougher and steeper sections elsewhere.

We went for a bog/forest walk with our Estonian friends, in Meenikunno bog.

I wanted to take the kids to somewhere typically Estonian. We’ve seen enough forests in Sweden, but there are no bogs around Stockholm.

The first half of the walk went through a bog along a plank path. In the forest it was an ordinary path on the ground. The ground was waterlogged so funnily enough we got through the bog with completely dry feet but got them rather wet and muddy in the forest.