Every summer in Estonia we buy fresh peas in the pod and then stuff ourselves. I can buy a whole kilo, and when I put them in a bowl on the table, they’re gone in less than a half hour.

Here in Stockholm there aren’t many places that sell them. But the local produce stand at Spånga torg sells Finnish peas, among other exotic non-standard fruits and veggies that you cannot buy in normal supermarkets. (Such as persimmons and mangoes that are actually ripe, unlike the hard inedible things you get in supermarkets, and Swedish plums, and small Turkish apricots, and other such delicacies.) I bought peas today, and it was like a flashback to summer. Peas are like a concentrated essence of our summers in Estonia.

Ingrid’s latest selection from the school library nicely illustrate the in-betweenness of her age. On the one hand, a manga book with cute cats on its pink cover, titled Mjau – and on the other, The Hunger Games. In English, no less. She says her friends have been allowed to watch the movie as well. I’m of the opinion that both the book and the movie are too bloody and violent for her, but we’ll see. At least it’ll be easy for her to stop and put the book down if it turns too bloody – you can’t really do that easily with a movie, where you can find yourself in the middle of a murder scene without much advance warning, and by the time you want to get out it’s already too late.

Summer is over and the evenings are dark already.

At shared meals such as lunch and dinner, books and magazines and phones and other such entertainment are banned from the table. But our weekday breakfasts are more split-up. I normally eat at work, while Eric has a quick sandwich and is done well before the kids. So the kids eat mostly on their own. They don’t really enjoy each other’s company much, so each one sits with a comic book instead.

There probably won’t be many more summer-warm, sunny days this year. We grabbed this one like the last chance that it probably is, and cycled to the beach at Kanaanbadet. Well, I mostly thought we would cycle to the garden café and eat there, and only packed swimming clothes just in case. But the kids went straight into the water. Ingrid tried out the diving platform and later even convinced me to jump from it together with her. At about 3 metres it’s near the limit of what I’m comfortable with, but having just convinced her that she could do it, I couldn’t really say no.

Adrian meanwhile cannot really swim yet and doesn’t like even semi-deep water so he climbed around on the cliffs.

The lunch and cakes at the garden café were excellent but the wait for getting our food felt like an eternity.

Girly and tough.

• The centrepiece and highlight of this month was scout camp. And it wasn’t just any old camp this time – this year’s camp was a giant week-long jamboree with scouts from all across the country, and even many groups from abroad. Eleven thousand scouts in total! Ingrid was, from what I can understand, totally unfazed by the crowds and the scale of the event.
• She has a knife permit and was therefore allowed to take a knife to camp. She last used her knife in Cornwall to pry off seashells from a rock, and forgot to dry and clean it afterwards. So when she took it out after the Cornwall trip, the blade had dark marks from corrosion. That was unacceptable for Ingrid, so she hurried to do all kinds of chores to earn enough money for a new knife before leaving for camp.
• Ingrid is enjoying Pokemon Go. She isn’t pokemon-obsessed like Adrian: she doesn’t walk around talking about what evolves to what and which one has which attack, but she does enjoy catching new ones and perfecting her throwing technique.
• She is still reading and enjoying the Warriors books. It’s the first time in a long while that she has found books to really, really enjoy, books that she devours and can’t get enough of.
• Last month’s Harry Potter posters are out; white walls and clutter-free surfaces are in. And a new charcoal carpet. Ingrid spent almost two full days sorting through all her stuff and packing away things and toys she no longer uses, so we could put them down in the basement.
• She still eats like a little bird. It’s hard to believe that she can survive on the portions she’s eating. They’re like a third or a fourth of what the rest of us eat. In restaurants she is now occasionally more interested in the adult menu than the kids’ one, but whatever she orders from it, she’ll eat no more than half of it, and then feel bad about throwing so much food away.
• This summer’s must-have clothing item is super short shorts.
• During our very windy Cornwall stay she put up her hair in plaits or a ponytail every day, with my help. Back at home, it’s back to loose and lank. She likes the way she looks in plaits but probably just doesn’t remember to ask me. Or maybe it’s just not important enough for her.
• She’s quite looking forward to going back to school and meeting all her friends again.

Ingrid is home after spending a week at scout camp. Tanned, tired and hoarse, but very happy with the whole experience.

She’s been to camp before but this one was larger in scale than any of the previous camps. This was a country-wide Jamboree, with eleven thousand scouts attending from all over Sweden and even from abroad. (Interesting fact: I read that the Spånga scout group made up one per cent of them.) Ingrid got to meet scouts from all sorts of places ranging from England to Hong Kong.

Among other scouts, she also met the King of Sweden – he’s a patron of the scouting movement and takes a very active interest in scouting. Well, she didn’t personally meet and greet him, but she said she got to see him from just a few metres’ distance.

Even more memorable than meeting the king, according to Ingrid, was swimming in the sea. (The beaches around here are all lakeside beaches.)

We went shopping at Bromma Blocks – a scout knife for Ingrid, and part 3 in the Warriors series of books.

There’s this rubber hill outside the mall there, and it’s just the right size for a bit of climbing before the drive home. Even for Ingrid, apparently.

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.