Somehow it has become tradition for us to go for fika at Spånga Konditori on the weekends the kids are with me.

Their fancy pastries are delicious, beautiful, interesting, and come in new flavours every week.

Ingrid continues to learn to drive. (Have I posted about that? I think so.) Just plain driving on relatively quiet streets is not much of a challenge any more, so we have started spicing things up. Larger roads (with 60 km/h speed limits), driving late in the day when it’s getting dark (although this just happens because that’s when we have time), roads with lots of roundabouts and traffic lights. And today: parking in tight spots. Nine o’clock at night the parking lot at Coop Vinsta was rather empty, but we managed to find a place where we could pretend that there were cars everywhere and we just had to squeeze into the last free spot.

The traditional end-of-year visit to RiCora.

(Us and a few dozen other groups of families with teens.)

There’s more and more dinnertime conversation and much less kid-wrangling when they are so grown.

When it’s just Ingrid and me for a meal (and sometimes with Adrian) we tend to watch Robinson, which is a Swedish version of Survivor. A bunch of people on an empty tropical island, with very little in the way of equipment – surviving, competing, and voting each other out, until only one remains. We’re not invested enough to watch it outside of mealtimes, so it’s taking us far longer to watch it than it took for the actual events to take place.

Today we had strawberry cake to go with the entertainment, because Ingrid felt like baking.

Ingrid and Adrian have both had their last test of this school year. School may not be over, but what’s left is just coasting downhill.

Ingrid has been practising driving, off and on since autumn. Started on a parking lot with stopping, starting, basic manoeuvering and shifting gears; then moved on to an industrial area that was mostly abandoned during weekends. Today we went out into actual traffic and drove first to Vällingby and back, and then to Råcksta and back. Both times on roads that Ingrid is well familiar with from all her moped trips. The moped driving has been a very practical way of warming up to driving a car – she’s used to traffic, speed limits and all that, and all she needs to get used to now is handling the car.

Every spring, for about a week or two, we get ants in the house. They wake up because it’s spring, but don’t quite find enough food outside yet, so they come in to look for more. As soon as the ground comes to life with whatever they eat, they leave our kitchen alone again.

During that week or two, though, they can be quite annoying. We have to make sure to not leave any overripe fruit in the fruit bowl, and to keep the food compost inaccessible.

I’m pretty inured to the ants and just squish them when I find them and flush them down the drain. The kids both find the ants kind of disgusting, and complain a bit. And then one of them leaves half an apple on the kitchen counter, and is surprised when there are more ants the next morning. It’s like they sometimes just turn off their logical thinking abilities.

Adrian bought this pair of socks in Amsterdam, in early November. That’s three months ago. Say he has enough socks to last him two weeks between doing laundry. He’d then have worn these six days at most. How can he already have a fingertip-sized hole in them? Does he walk on sandpaper? Have small piles of gravel in his shoes?

The crinkling and crackling wrapping paper was an excellent cat toy. Nysse got half a roll of cheap wrapping paper, left over from some scouting activity, all for himself. That paper was kind of ugly to begin with so this was a good use for it.

Adrian of course evaluated all the larger parcels by weight and size and proportions, and tried to deduce which of the Lego sets on his wish list might be in there.

The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.