Up at 7:25. Soon out on the couch and drawing Ks, then working on our mosaic. We got out a new pad of paper and started a new mosaic and kept working on K: “Got the line down, sideways V, turns to K.” For breakfast he ate green pancakes, left over from yesterday. At first he wanted them cold, but then agreed to warm them. I made the mistake of asking if he wanted syrup, to which he replied “Honey!” So he ate them with honey. He then turned to the iPad for awhile, watching YouTube videos. I had mentioned getting the Elmo Loves ABC app, and after awhile he wanted that. It was being slow to download, however, so we put the iPad aside and got ready to go. While doing so, he found the elephant on a wire book in Korean, and we read that 3 times, with me reading the Korean. He looked up at the wall and saw the mandala and asked “This is a?” I told him, and then asked him if he knew who made it and he said “Oma”. We were then doing a little “Answer me questions of letters” game and I was asking him names and got to Glecy. When I helped him spell it, I said the ‘c’ makes an ‘s’ sound, and he said “Glecy…like juice!”
We left the house at 10. Walked down to the bus stop for the 172 again. He was spotting bus numbers and having fun climbing on the bench while we waited. On the ride down we started playing with the Elmo ABC app, then moved to the Elmo and Cookie Monster cookie/word app. In that app you make cookies with vowels or letters on them, then feed them to Cookie Monster or Elmo. When he was done feeding them to CM, he would excitedly say “All gone cookies! Bye cookies!” When doing the vowel option with Elmo I noticed that every time he was making 3 of the 5 cookies ‘i’. I pointed this out, and then he started saying “Like ‘I’s” every time he did it. Finally, we read all of Green Eggs and Ham.
We got off at Anguk and walked up behind the MMCA. We ate lunch behind the MMCA, although in a different spot, at the top of a little hill. We heard a rooster off in the distance, which he kept calling “Hard to see” (because we couldn’t). We also saw a magpie, butterflies, flies, ants, and a ladybug that landed on me. He was asking about the trees, which was easy to answer as they were Japanese maples. I got one leaf for him to look at, and he played with it for quite awhile. We then got out the tennis ball and played with that, mainly with him throwing it off the bench and me retrieving it. Next, he wanted to take photos. So we did that, taking a lot of photos of things on the ground and our shoes. He liked just sitting next to me on the ground, on the path or on the grass, and would get upset if I tried to get up. He saw 3 Chinese characters on the building behind the museum and thought the one on the right looked like a face.
Eventually it was time to take a nap. The museum was closed as it was Monday, so we walked across the street and into the Folk Museum to change him. Did that, then got walking north. He was half asleep when we got to a soldier who asked where we were going. I told her I was putting him to sleep and she didn’t understand, so I just said we were going to see the Blue House. That worked and we kept walking. I crossed the street a minute later and walked back to the book cafe I had planned to go to, only to find it was closed. It is right in the ‘Y’ of that main street and the fancy street we walked up with Chuck and Cherie. So prime real estate. Surprised they could afford to be closed a day each week. So I kept walking. A street with 20 coffee shops, but the first one I came to was small and loud, then I found one that looked promising, but a latte was close to 7 bucks. I walked a little further, then saw a church that had some picnic tables and benches next to some trees to the left of the entrance. They seemed to be open to anyone (there was a ‘No smoking’ sign, but that was it), so we sat on a bench and he slept there. He slept from 1:15 to 2:07.
After he woke up we walked back to the Folk Museum. We went into the lower play area (the one with the tiger story) and played there. There was a little girl (16 months or so), at first sitting by the fake stacking rocks, that was very interested in August. They interacted a lot. She is at the touching-everyone’s-face stage, so was touching August’s cheek and nose, which he found funny. She beeped my nose, and I told August to beep her nose, but he beeped his own instead. At one point she gave him a big hug, and touched her shirt. August was excited that she liked his shirt (the alphabet shirt from Myanmar) and said “My shirt!” They also played with the big leaf/stick wall puzzle together – she would hand me or August a piece and we would figure out where it went. We also played with the tangrams and ramps a bit, then he wrote on paper and took it under the black light. He also just climbed on the play area in the middle a bit, and we looked at the horoscope wheel. I had let him take his shoes off on the play area, and then let him keep them off while doing the black light thing. One worker, right as we were going back to the backpack and shoes to leave, was very concerned about this for reasons that will remain a mystery.
He was getting hungry, so we went outside to eat. This was his real lunch, as he had barely eaten anything earlier. We ate both eggs, string cheese, grapes, and some other stuff. It was getting windy out, but he was just in short sleeves. It was supposed to rain today, but kept getting pushed back, but clearly something was coming. We also sang the tongue twister song and he danced around a lot. He spotted a magpie and said “One magpie. Supposed to be two. Just one.” I have no idea why.
It was now close to 4 and we hadn’t been upstairs. I talked him into going back in and we went up there. Went straight to the big rubber stamp area and started doing that. A worker swept in and wanted to show him how to do it. Unfortunately, she was the controlling type. When our first stamp was blurry, she grabbed the stamp and did it for him. He then asked what it was, and I turned the stamp over and we looked at it. August reached out and barely touched it with a finger, at which point she reached out and grabbed his hand away. There was a little ink on his finger. I told her it was okay, but she reached into a pocket and pulled out a random tissue, grabbed his hand again and started rubbing off the ink, at no point asking either him or me if it was okay. He got upset, and I pushed her hand away. He started screaming and when she still stood there, still trying to engage with him and laughing, I shooed her away.
When he calmed down we went to the other end, where he wanted to get into the round block play area. In there we made letters and towers. There was one other boy, I believe Russian, a couple years older. August knocked over a block on his tower, but after that I kept him apart and he just watched the older boy and marveled at the tower, which August kept calling a “Mookah Mookah tower”. August also made eye contact with the boy’s mother, who waved. He was then having fun hiding from her behind the wall of the play area. Also from the block area, August spotted video playing with three monsters that were sad, then happy. August pointed them out and called them “sad monsters”. When I asked how he knew they were sad, he said “the face” and pointed to his own face.
We left, and so did the Russian family. We parted ways, as we went out the back, and they went the other direction. I then took August back to the changing room and changed him. Outside, August didn’t want to leave. He got down to look at the flowers, then did some running around. He wanted to take a photo of one of the monsters (the same ones from the videos) so we did that. He also talked about taking photos of the bus and of a “rectangle” (paving stone), but we didn’t do that. Finally, I picked him up and took him out to the street entrance, where we sat on a bench to put him in the backpack. We saw the Russian family again,
the boy playing on the bizarre sculpture thing of boys with their pants falling down sort of bending over doing leap frog, with the front boy’s head between the legs of a standing boy facing him…I should have just taken a photo of it. Anyway, we said bye to them again, then as I was putting August in the backpack a tour bus pulled up. I looked up from putting him in to see cameras pointed at us, a woman grabbing his hand, and a guy standing right up against the bench so I couldn’t get in the backpack. He gave me the thumbs up as I pushed my way in and we got out of there.
We crossed the street only to find ourselves walking with the Russian family. So one more goodbye as we walked across from Chicago. We took the subway home. Carly Skpyed, hoping we weren’t stuck in the rain. When we came out of the tunnel it was indeed raining. We took the train to Kwangwoon, where we only had about 10 feet from the station door to the bus stop. Bus came a few minutes later. Really raining by the time we got home, but just had to hurry from the curb into the building.
Don’t think he ate much for dinner due to the late lunch. Carly gave him a bath. Spent a long time playing with the letters. They then nursed and read books in the parlor. He was reading a lot, particularly the Y page of Kipper A to Z. It was mainly a Mom and August evening – Carly went to the bathroom once and August walked past me and said “No dada!” But later, when Carly went to take a shower, he had had enough mama time to let her go, saying “Bye, mama!” as we started to do some more mosaic and writing of K. At one point I was sitting by the desk and he was by the couch and he wanted water. There were two water bottles on the table and he wanted me to get him water. He was actually standing, so I made him do it. At first he wanted the one farthest from him, as it was closer to me. But eventually he did it. A bit later he ended up on the couch with both “Two wawas!” Soon after that Carly took him in and he was asleep about 9.
New words/phrases: maple leaf, what do you see?, saw the bear inside with the animals, answer me questions of letters
Lunch behind the museum:
Some of his photos:
This is a HDR photo as the camera moved. Check out the people and building:
Chinese. He thought the one on the right looked like a face:
Walking out of the art museum…
And flying to the folk museum:
Folk museum:
Play area 2. The monsters’ faces:
On our way out:
Home. Two wawas:
