Tomorrow is Adrian’s birthday. He’s been incredibly excited about it and has been counting down days since it was more than 40 days away.

It was very windy today.

Adrian has been going out cycling with his friends a few times. They gather and take their bikes and go looking for more friends to gather and then they sort of just cycle around. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them cycling in actual traffic, but the small neighbourhood streets around here are quiet and safe. And the boys (because they are all boys) are so many that they will be very visible for drivers. I just hope they are sensible when crossing the few larger roads nearby.

Anyway, today the gang of friends with bikes didn’t come by, and I guess Adrian missed them and was feeling restless. Usually when he’s been indoors most of the day I invite him to join me for a walk to the supermarket and back. Today he invited me out to cycle with him. The wind was fierce but other than that the weather was good, warm and dry, so we cycled first to Nälsta and then on to Vällingby, and back. Near Vällingby we saw this fallen tree blocking our road.

I heard a couple of women passing comment with shock on how scary this was. I can of course understand that it would be bad to be hit by a falling tree, and quite obviously this one has fallen in a place where it could have hit someone. But still it seems so unlikely. The thought of Adrian crossing busy roads scares me a lot more. But I don’t let it show.

By my nature, I worry. I do my best to quash the worrying when I notice it. And when I do worry, I do my best not to let it affect my actions and especially not to show it and spread it to others. Ingrid is also a worrier – probably I’ve infected her already. But Adrian is much more carefree and I hope he can stay that way.

When I mentally list the things that I like to do, gardening is one of them. And yet I’ve barely done anything in the garden this season. Just like I think of walking and hiking as one of my hobbies, and I’ve done almost no walking this past year. I don’t know where all my time and energy goes.

Today, in any case, I spent much of my free time in the garden. I cleared out a whole lot of weeds from the area I planted with bushes in June, and shovelled out all the soil from two of our planters with strawberries. Or rather, the planters that used to have strawberries but that have since been overrun with a particularly obnoxious weed that is impossible to get rid of because its stalks and roots near the surface are thread-thin and just break when you try to pull them out, leaving behind a well-buried rhizome that soon sends out new shoots. So I’m giving up on those two boxes and will start over with stronger geotextile, fresh soil and new plants.

I’m all sore from yesterday.

Ingrid has been eager to supplement her allowance by cooking dinner. On Thursdays she finishes school early enough to go grocery shopping first and then cook dinner as well. That gives me time to cycle home without thinking of the time all the time.

When I get home, the shadows are already long.

Waiting for Adrian’s parent-teacher meeting.

The meeting itself held no surprises. Adrian is happy at school and does well in all subjects. Only two subjects are really discussed in these meetings, the ones that matter, and that’s Swedish and maths. Adrian reads well and loves maths.

Eric and I started couples therapy today, to try and figure out some stuff together.

I learned a new technique for mending holes in an aesthetically pleasing way (from reddit) and tried it out on a knitted vest that some wool-eating bug had nibbled a hole in.

My umbrella is broken. It got caught on some door and one of the ribs broke, unrepairably.

Actually it broke already well over a year ago. I was going to buy a new one in Estonia last summer. There is an umbrella shop in Tartu that sells umbrellas that are colourful and pretty and fun to look at. Like this one. In Sweden the shops mostly sell black umbrellas, other single-color umbrellas, and umbrellas with tacky pictures such as palm trees or parrots or dollar bills.

Before I had bought a new one, Ingrid hinted that she might buy me one as a birthday present – since my birthday very conveniently comes a few weeks after our Estonia trip. She must have forgotten it or changed her mind, though, because I got other gifts instead.

So then I was going to buy an umbrella in Estonia this summer instead. Somehow our trip ended and I never found the time to go to that shop, so I came home without an umbrella again.

The funny thing is that during these sixteen months or so, the lack of a properly working umbrella hasn’t bothered me very much. I’ve used this broken one a handful of times. Sometimes I’ve worn my waterproof jacket and trousers instead. Sometimes I’ve simply gone without and hoped that the misting rain wouldn’t get any worse.

From my childhood I still remember my grandmother’s umbrella, mostly because I wasn’t allowed to use it because of the risk that I might break it. It was beige and lilac in colour, I believe, or maybe brown and purple. Like many things, umbrellas were “defitsiit” goods in Soviet Estonia: they were not produced in sufficient quantity and were not available in shops. You needed the right connections to get hold of one. Grandma’s umbrella was probably a gift from her emigrant friends in Germany rather than some cheap ugly Soviet thing.

The circles have turned and now I am abroad and making plans to buy an umbrella in Estonia. Although I probably won’t put it off for another year and will order something from the UK where, unlike Sweden, they do know how to make pretty umbrellas.

I’ve been knitting and crocheting most evenings recently, and both Ingrid and Adrian have been inspired to try out crocheting. Ingrid has undertaken to crochet a pouffe for her room.

Another school year, another invitation to a parent/teacher information meeting. The usual anodyne presentations of goals in Swedish and maths, and exhortations to read at home, etc.

Before the meeting we were invited to try and pick out our children’s self-portraits from a wall of unlabelled pictures. I went through all the drawings that I thought could possibly be Adrian’s, and then started over and went through the ones I really didn’t think were his and actually looked at the names on the reverse of each piece of paper, before I found it. Rather surprised to see that his drawing of human anatomy was on the level of a five-year-old, I mentioned this to the teacher. She then told me that Adrian had spent 15+ of their allotted 20 minutes on the Lego piece (drawn in isometric projection) and the PlayStation controller (in color and great detail) and only scribbled in a rough human figure when the teacher reminded him of the actual task. I guess he just didn’t find his body as interesting as his mind.