![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Adrian_autumn.jpg\")
\nA turbulent month full of stormy feelings. Adrian is angry, upset, distressed, frustrated… Not all the time, not at all, but frequently enough for these feelings to dominate my impressions of this past month.<\/p>\n
\nA turbulent month full of stormy feelings. Adrian is angry, upset, distressed, frustrated… Not all the time, not at all, but frequently enough for these feelings to dominate my impressions of this past month.<\/p>\n
Life just doesn’t seem to be the way he wants it to be. The world does not cooperate. Nobody does things the way he wants them to be, because nobody can read his mind.<\/p>\n
I set the table for breakfast and bring a saucepan with porridge to him. “No! Not here! On the stove! I want to get it myself!” he cries. He doesn’t even try talking to me – he goes straight to yelling or angry crying. As if this was the umpteenth frustrating experience that makes his cup run over – and the poor boy only awoke half an hour ago. He is so frustrated and he doesn’t really know how to cope with it.<\/p>\n
And there is an awful lot of things that can go wrong in just a day, an awful lot of setbacks to cope with. Sometimes he is upset that I offer to help him; other times he is upset that I don’t. Sometimes he is angry that I talk to him. Sometimes he cries because we only have the wrong mittens at nursery and the right ones are at home. Sometimes he cries because we have mittens at all. At times I feel like I’m walking in a minefield: whatever I choose, whatever I do or say (or don’t do, or don’t say) might set off an explosion. There is no safe path.<\/p>\n
Not being first is generally a very frustrating experience. Other people going out through the door before him is bad. Other people going up the stairs before him is bad. Other people serving food before him, opening the fridge before him, getting an apple before him – bad.<\/p>\n
Sharing is difficult. Not just sharing toys but in general accepting other people’s right to do things, decide, hold and use objects. Sharing the world with other people. Not being allowed to grab the Bamse<\/i> that Ingrid just took. The fact that I want to sit on the chair next to his.<\/p>\n
At nursery when his will collides with the other kids’, he doesn’t really understand what’s happening. Say some kid makes a sand cake, and Adrian stomps on it – because he likes stomping on sand cakes, not because he wants to destroy it. The other kid gets upset, and the teacher tells him so. Adrian understands that people are not happy with him but does not quite understand why, or what to do about it, so he cries. He wants to get along, and he really does his best, but especially with other kids it’s not so easy.<\/p>\n
Well, luckily there are also happier moments.
\n![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Adrian_photobombing.jpg\")
\nWhen Adrian is in a happy mood, he is sweet and talkative and funny. He speaks very well now, with long sentences. He is working on figuring out irregular verbs: this evening he tried to say “I haven’t drunk anything” and tried Jag har inte drack… Jag har inte drickit…<\/i> and then gave up and just said Jag ska dricka<\/i>.<\/p>\n
He makes jokes. He pretends to be things (a rabbit, or a horse, or a tiger). He pretends his food is things (boats, shoes, trains). He pretends that he is a baby and walks around saying “dadda gaggu gaggu” etc.<\/p>\n
He talks about days of the week quite a lot, and asks me almost every day what day it is. Also he is still working on the concepts of “yesterday” and “today” and “tomorrow”.<\/p>\n
He is interested in letters – or perhaps names? He points out the other kids’ boxes in the hallway at nursery, and is especially interested in the ones that begin with the same letter. Duru’s name begins with Darin’s letter. Elin, Erik och Elias all have E. Not all words that begin with A say “Adrian”. Etc.<\/p>\n
He can count up to 5 things, I think. He doesn’t do it very often.<\/p>\n
He likes playing with whatever Ingrid plays with, or the other kids at nursery. He likes our train track, and Lego. He has adopted Ingrid’s soft Sipsik<\/i> doll, tells me that Sipsik is his baby, and likes to carry Sipsik with him from room to room.<\/p>\n
He likes sticks. Preferably about as long as his leg, and the thickness of a finger.<\/p>\n
We stopped (or rather, I stopped) nursing completely. It took him a long while to accept this, and sometimes he still tells me he would like to nurse. But I felt done.<\/p>\n
This didn’t lead to him sleeping any better. He kept waking at around 5, pretty much every night, and then tossing and turning and half-sleeping for an hour or so before sinking back into deeper sleep. And while he was “seeking” that sleep, he kept kicking me, pushing me with his feet or legs, head-butting me, lying on top of me…<\/p>\n
So I moved out of our bedroom. Adrian and Eric now have the big 3-bed combo to themselves, and I sleep on a mattress in Ingrid’s room. For the first few nights it looked like this made no difference, but after a while he actually started sleeping through the night, more or less. Maybe waking a bit in the early hours of the morning, cuddling up closer to Eric, and then just going straight back to sleep.
\n![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Adrian_with_pliers.jpg\")
\nHe has been quite tired recently and going to bed early, some evenings as early as 19:00. Usually he’s pretty good at realising that he is tired and saying so.<\/p>\n
He has also been hungry. He eats a large portion of porridge at breakfast. I don’t know what he does at nursery, but the first thing we do after nursery is go to the supermarket, where he gets a banana. (He likes eating it while he’s sitting inside the trolley, with all the food piled up around him.) Then we get home and he wants to eat straight away, lots. I’ve now started cutting his snack short and making dinner earlier again (aiming at 18:00), otherwise he can snack on bananas and bread and yogurt for an hour, and then have no appetite for dinner.<\/p>\n
Favourite food: fish fingers. And dark chocolate. But he now tries the veggies I serve to him, almost without argument, and sometimes actually eats some (broccoli, sugar snap peas, raw carrots, raw bell peppers).<\/p>\n
Favourite clothes: pyjamas. Sometimes he spends all day in pyjamas, and occasionally I think he’s gone to nursery in pyjamas. We bought three new one-piece pyjamas for him because he keeps sticking his hands inside his nappy at night, which leads to leakage. The pyjamas block that very effectively. But it was hard to find any one-piece pyjamas in his size – only one shop had anything larger than size 92.<\/p>\n
He does not like wearing socks, and his favourite footwear is a pair of rubber boots lined with wool. He says his shoes are “hard”. He likes woollen mittens, too.<\/p>\n
Favourite song: Kalle Theodor<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A turbulent month full of stormy feelings. Adrian is angry, upset, distressed, frustrated… Not all the time, not at all, but frequently enough for these feelings to dominate my impressions of this past month. Life just doesn’t seem to be the way he wants it to be. The world does not cooperate. Nobody does things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[633,665],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrian","category-adrian_monthly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17619,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/17619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}