Carly wasn’t sleeping well due to being stuffy and was out in the parlor part of the night. During the night, I heard August talking about foxes – at first I thought I heard him say Firefox, but I thinking he was saying “Fennec Fox”, which we see at the zoo. Then, when Carly wasn’t in the room, he woke up and was over by me saying “Get up” – he was trying to wake me up.
He woke up at 6:44, right after Carly left. I heard him say “Where’s dada?” I went in and he was upset that mama was gone. I lay down next to him. He started saying “Wait…wait…wait…” I asked what he wanted to wait, and he said “Wait…want mama to wait.” He calmed down a little but wasn’t quite ready. He said “Walk…dada out.” so I went out to the living room and he came out a couple minutes later. He wanted the iPad and the new tracing app. I added and recorded myself saying a variety of animals, and he traced those. He activated Siri, then we spent awhile asking Siri to show us photos of different animals. He then wanted “mooka mooks”, which Siri didn’t understand. I told him he had invented mooka mooks so he was the only one that knew what they looked like. We did letter stickers for a bit, then he noticed the reading area was gone, and asked for it. I told him he had to talk to mama, so he was saying “Talk to mama.”
We ate the last of the carrot pancakes for breakfast, then he played in the water, standing on the stool. We then Skyped with my parents before they left for Everett tomorrow. August was still playing in the sink at first, then stopped and was playing all over the place. He sang the ABC tongue twister song for them, and when we were talking about this later with Carly that is what he remembered. His shirt was a bit wet, so he wanted to change it. I took him in and gave him the drawer of short-sleeved shirts and told him to choose and he chose the Teenage Mutant Ninjas Turtles shirt.
After the Skype call, he wanted the new video from class. So we watched that and brushed his teeth. As we were getting ready I heard a sound from the and looked out: they were polishing the floors and had just started ours. So we skipped class. He’s been wanting to learn songs in Hangeul, so we watched more of the new video, following along with the words, and then the video from his first 5-Touch class. Been quite awhile since we’ve watched that, so he kept saying “Remember this one” when a new song started. I used Google Translate to capture the lyrics of some of the new songs, so we could practice them for class. Finally, the hallway was clear and we could head out. In asking him what he now wanted to do he said, totally unprompted: “Go in the forest…see trees, please.”
So we headed out. The closest forest-y place is the little corner between the stream and the power plant. But when we got to the stream August wanted to go down and walk along it. I tried to coax him over that way, but he wanted to go back to the stream. He also didn’t want to play in the playground. So stream it was. It was about 5 hours since he woke up, so I figured he was tired. But he didn’t fall asleep. We ended up walking 2 miles total, going about a mile up the stream. We saw all the float/sculpture things for the festival on the stream. He liked the Mt. Rushmore one, the one with people playing music, and the traditional Korean one that he thought looked like people “making sand castle”.
He fell asleep as we came back and got to Cafe Tolerance. He slept there from 12:38 to 1:55. He woke up and immediately said “Zinnie’s got eyes…got eyes right here. Zinnie’s got green. Turn the eyes. Turn the eyes here. See eyes.” He had leaked, so I took him downstairs and changed him on a bench outside the door. He looked at the diaper and said “See Huggies”, pointing to the word. On the way back up he was looking at all the signs and saw one with a balloon on it: “See the b a l l o o n on the sign,” spelling out ‘balloon’. Finally, as we walked back into the coffee shop he pointed at the coffee grinder full of beans and said “See beans.” We sat there, looking out at the stream, and played on the iPad and shared a strawberry smoothie. When we had the smoothie he said “Mama here,” making me think he was remembering when we came here with her. But then he was pointing into the smoothie and joking “Mama in here.” He spotted several egrets and a crane working their way down the stream. There was music playing, and the one song that caught his attention that he wanted me to look up was Lenka’s “The Show”. Finally, we were spelling words, and he wanted ‘teeth’. Then he said “What about teething?”, adding the -ing. I told him that was actually a word and he was excited: “Zinnie made up a word!”
Soon after we headed out. Didn’t make it any farther than the playground right there by the youth center. Spent the next hour and a half there. He was looking at the garbage can and saw the ㅆ: “see the double S!” The blue thing next to it “See that blue thing!” I had to change him again, then he was supposedly hungry. Instead, he simply held the egg and played around with it for 5 or 10 minutes. Didn’t actually eat anything. Got Smokey out and played “What do you see?” for a long, long time, just from the covered platform area, then standing on the ledge by the bushes. Finally, he went over to the play structure and dropped Smokey down the straight slide several times. He observed that Smokey made a “zigzag” as he went down. Smokey was taunting him through the cracks of the play structure, and August wanted him to do the Bluie dance and the “Missed me, missed me…” thing. Back down at different bushes doing more What do you see? and observed that the shape of the wall looked like a “Z…zigzag.” Finally, he wanted to read Bob books. So we took our stuff over to a picnic table and sat on the picnic mat on the ground and did some reading. We got swarmed by a group of curious kids for a few minutes. August wanted to sit on the low railing of the fence, but there was a drop behind it and he wasn’t happy when I wouldn’t let him.
We headed home a little before 5. Figured we had time to go to the book store in the pink building to look for Korean beginner books. He liked the idea until we were there and he realized we could just be going home to mama. So we left. Wondered if Carly was walking home, so we stood outside the building for a few seconds and indeed we saw her crossing the street. I had told her and Megan that the chicken man was parked up the street, so we went up there to get chickens, but it was a 10 minute wait. We headed home, then I went down a little later and got two of them for dinner. I shared my sandwich with him, then Carly prepared some rice, peanut sauce, and zucchini for him and he ate all of that. I gave him a bath (he played with the cups, mainly), he helped me make the bed, then he read several pages (10 or so) of Go, Dog, Go! He and Carly fell asleep about 8:30.
New words/phrases: spelling ‘saw’, 또라란스 (tolerance), 쓰레기, smokestack, reading Mainz Dom
Awake:
Getting used to the new couch:
Watching the Korean video:
Followin along:
On our walk:
Cafe Tolerance. Note his hands:
Bird spotting:
Playground:
Home: