6:49. Closed door on me. When I got him out and changed him he wanted the Spider Man shirt off. Eventually chose the Chelan animal shirt. Lot of sitting in the floor in the changing room. We finally came out to the living room at 7:09 to write K. He led me by the hand to the parlor though and then went out to the paper in the living room, as if he was getting rid of me. Spent some time with the paper, then transitioned to the iPad. After some of that, he got up and went to the parlor. We got the painting sponges out and played with those on the reading area, stacking them and arranging the alphabet a few times. He then wanted to take photos and took several. We worked together to take photos of him holding out numbers with his fingers. We have a whole series from 1 to 5. We did a little Bob Book reading, then he played in the sink. Somewhere in there we had oatmeal and mango for breakfast.
We left the house a little after 10, headed north. 3 short train rides. Along the way I asked, as we were spelling words “Does Zinnie like big words?” To which he responded “Zinnie likes gargantuan.” When we got to the Uijeongbu elevated line, we traveled one stop east to Balgok and went to Balgok Neighborhood Park. No playground, but some nice tile walls, an open basketball court area, and plenty of garbage cans to look in. We played a little with some big pine cones, then sat on a bench and ate. We used the Pororo picnic mat, and he went crazy examining it: “Poby foot. No hands, just foot.” “Picnic mat in backpack.” “This is a robot dancing.” “Got a handstamp.” while pointing to Eddy and Krung, as he has gotten hand stamps of them at the end of his classes. “Eddy’s a fox.” We were also spelling words and singing, of course. While eating the egg we spelled ‘yolk’, and he asked “How bout ‘yolking’?” His first created -ing word of the day. We also spelled something with ‘e’ and he said “Write an ‘e’ in the air” and drew it.
There had been older kids playing on the basketball court area (watching them had been a source of amusement for him), but they left. We got out the tennis ball and played a few minutes. There was one point where he chased the ball rolling across the ground for several seconds. Sadly, I only got the last moment on video. We then changed him on a bench, he threw away our garbage, and we headed out.
Cross the river and walked up to a second park (Golden Children’s Park), which did have a playground. He fell asleep there, and we sat on a bench. A long nap, from 12:45 to 2:20. When he woke up he was very quiet and didn’t want to get out. He wanted me to walk. So we didn’t play in that park. We figured out how to get down on the stream path and walked upstream. We saw some duckies, which he liked, but besides telling me to “Walk” when I stood looking at them for too long, he was very quiet, up until about 3 when we got to our final park, Baekseokcheon Neighborhood Park.
This was the best of the 3. We gave it a tour, then he played with the water faucets for quite awhile, standing up on the ledge. A few of the faucets had hoses of varying length on them that he could play with. One came off a few times, getting his hand and arm wet, which he would then want immediately dried. He started saying “Enormous!” for wanting me to turn on the water full blast (he used to say “Big!”). We walked over to the playground and had a second lunch/snack. He then wanted to sing the tongue twister song over and over, so we did that and wrote the letters in the sand. We then drew shapes, with him observing “Oval has zero sides.” Another snack, and this time he started eating raisins. And a lot of them. When he was done, he started feeding them to me: “Get one for dada.” Next was the play structure, where he tried valiantly to climb the pole ladder thing. He wanted to do it himself but was getting frustrated. Finally, he let me help him up. He then sat on the top of it, then wanted to sit on the lower platforms, which didn’t work so well. While sitting on the top one we took a selfie and he saw the photo. He pointed to his own fingers in his mouth and said “Yummy!”, then joked “What you eating?” He stood up on the structure and talked and sang from there, but never went anywhere else.
We revisited our letters in the sand and said hi/bye to a couple of other kids before we left. He was reluctant to go, and was in full energy mode. As we left, he said “See diaper with poop” and we looked in the garbage can as we walked out. When I got him out of there he was constant chatter about the Hangeul and words he saw on buildings, pointing out any writing that looked “funny”. He had spotted ‘Lotte Super’ earlier and we had sounded it out. He was now reading it easily, and asked “How bout ‘suping’?” His second -ing word. At some point during the day he also wanted to turn “Mooka” (his made-up word) into ‘mooking’.
We passed a construction site and he said “Ooh. What is it? Workers.” We made our way home, missing connecting trains just barely each time, and were home 5:30ish. Dinner, nursing, etc. then Carly gave him a bath. I had been emptying out some old spices, etc. we didn’t want, and he came out and played in the sink and used the empty lids and containers to play with. Carly took a shower and I tried to get him to other things. Instead, he started chewing on the counter and just wanted the water back on. He kind of melted down, and when Carly came out she took him in and he went to sleep at 8, but as soon as she left the room he was calling for her. Happened again. The third time he got up and wanted water. Now he was really up. He came out and spotted the Korean language book I had gotten out and placed in the reading area. He sounded out/read the entire cover, in English (Korean Made Easy for Beginners) then wanted to “Read Hangeul”. Not the most amazing connection, but still a bit surprising as he hand’t actually seen any Hangeul on the book yet. We spent the next 40 minutes or so finding Korean words and learning them. At one point I tried to go hang up laundry, but he said “Dada do sit. One more time” So Carly went and did laundry instead. I was also teaching him some of the finer points about Korean vowels that he didn’t yet know (like the ‘A’ sounds and the ‘Y’ sounds – “Where the Y?” he would say – “There…the second dot” I would answer.) His favorite part was ‘leaf’ (eep) and ‘mouth’ (eeb). I said “Don’t put the eep in your eep.” and he loved the sentence, so he wanted me to repeat it over and over, and was saying it himself. I was then getting tired and pretending to sleep, so he brought back the sleeping elephant game and would pretend to put a leaf in my mouth (we’d been listing animals that ear leaves).
Carly took over and they nursed and read Moby Dick. We then played fort on the bed and Dada be Frozen. At 9:26 he declared he wanted “More pine cones”, remembering the pine cones we had briefly played with earlier. He nursed again, but started singing the ABC song loudly on his own. After a few more minutes I left the room and Carly wrangled him to sleep, although it took awhile, a bit after 10.
New words/phrases: spelling ‘not’ and ‘snot’, mirror, hear pedulgi, reading Lotte Super, reading ‘juice’
Taking the wrapper off the pastel:
Sponges:
Some Zinniegraphs:
Sink:
Subway:
Park 1:
Park 2:
Park 3:
Home:
