A full day, with a lot of imaginative play, and a lot of building and doing new stuff at the children’s museum – stuff that was beyond him a few months ago. And he made sculptures out of his Teuni gym pieces.
He was up at 6:20. A bit later they were in the reading area and she was wiggling her toes and he was laughing hysterically. They had a nice goodbye, and after she left we ended up listening to Spanish music on the iPad. We had started by listening to Basho, but August saw all the related albums and kept clicking on them to play them. Ended up finding a couple other albums of children’s music we listened to several times. Later, he was in my bathroom and standing on the scale, trying to use the sink, and dropped his water bottle on his foot. Think he thought it was my fault somehow, as he kept refusing my help, and knocking my hand away. Eventually he calmed down and started playing with his Teuni gym cubes, but wanted them taken apart. We took apart everything except the square at the bottom, and he started building, putting pieces on and taking them off. At first it would start to fall over, and I taught him about ‘balance’ and after that he would figure it out on his own. When he had all the pieces used up, he said “This is a sculpture” I asked “What house is it?” And he responded with “What house?…Gramma and grampa’s house.” We played some more play dough before we left, then got ready to go. But he got sidetracked and ended up playing with his noisy toys: the plane and the tractor. He then decided he was hungry, so we had some Cheerios. He then asked for a cracker, but asked so nicely that I had to say yes. At one point he said “Soup is cooking. Oma’s yummy green soup is cooking.” A few minutes later: “It’s ready now.” He then expanded his pretend stove with buttons: “What the red button for?” We decided blue set a timer, green told you if the food was done, red shot off the stove, and yellow subtracted time. And at some point he asked me to talk: “Talk…about trees.” So we talked about how we were going to walk in the trees in Children’s Grand Park.
We read the Seuss birthday book on the subway, and at Children’s Grand Park bought kimbap at one of the stands in front of the entrance. Hadn’t done that before, so didn’t know what it was. I called it ‘magic kimbap’ and August liked the name so it stuck. We ate near the stream, then he wanted to find cicadas, so we walked around and found a couple and watched them. I got him to go in the shallow stream (it doesn’t fully turn on until 12) and he played the milkshake game, with the same sort of script as last time. One he came up with was “popsicle flavored”. I had set the bucket in the shallow water at the edge, and a minute later he saw it. He said “Don’t like that there.” and went and moved it up to the bench. After awhile I said “Now I’ll make a milkshak for Zinnie.” He tasted it and said “Ooh, yeah. That’s a candy milkshake. Thank you dada!”
When he was done there we went and saw animals. We stopped to look at the zoo map, and he chose the wild birds. Saw some of them, then he heard something from the cats area. We went and saw the tiger, leopards, and lion and went upstairs to push the buttons. Then went and saw the water birds. When we had walked by the big square there, he had pointed and said he remembered mama there. He also talked about wanting to throw a ball in the bicycle wheels sculpture, but her telling him no (because once you throw something in you couldn’t get in to get it out). Both those were true, but I think the ball thing was with me. Oh, also, when we walked by the conservatory he wanted to go in and spray water to the fishes, but we had forgotten the spray bottle today.
He was tired, so we stopped at a bench and changed him. He then spent several minutes studying the ground next to the bench: started by spotting a cicada cocoon thing, then a couple of moths on the ground, then some ants, and a hole that he speculated was for a snake (he kept wanting to see what was in it, but eventually I convinced him we couldn’t look in it). Walked our normal path, and he fell asleep within 10 minutes. Went to the upstairs coffee shop, and he had a short nap: 12:35 to 1:05. After he woke up he had some of my ice, then wanted a juice. We went up and got a fresh strawberry juice and shared that.
After that, we went to the children’s museum. He played around on the first floor, the usual stuff, for awhile: blackboard, shapes on the windows, etc. But he was carrying Smokey around this time. There was an announcement, and it was rather loud and long. August decided it was too loud and wanted to at first leave. I talked about the book room being quieter, and he liked that idea, so I was going to take him upstairs, but then he saw the ramp to downstairs and changed his mind. That worked out well, because once he was downstairs we stayed over another hour. First, he jumped on the jump pad things, holding Smokey. Then, he headed over to the blue blocks and took his own shoes off and started playing. He played there for just over 40 minutes. Four main activities: First, he was building towers for Smokey and knocking them over. Then, he was trying to play with the big kids, setting smaller pieces on top of the forts they were building (often to their chagrin). Third, he started to make sculptures, much like he had with the pieces at home earlier. For a couple minutes, he and another boy worked together on this, randomly putting together all these shapes. Finally, he held my hand and walked all over them like a walking course.
When he was done there, I thought he’d be ready to go soon, but not so fast. “Let’s do something else.” He did the Tesla coil, then found the wheels controlling all the gears around the robot thing, and worked at turning those. Oh, and there were the faces where you turn the different parts to put together expressions of different emotions. We had a pretty good talk about those. Then he found the airport luggage scanner. I taught him how to turn the wheel to send the bags through, and their are four bags you can put through. He did them over and over, and found them pretty funny: one has fish, another a bunny, etc. Finally, there are the colorful gears you can put down on a grid to turn a music box sort of thing. It was still a task to convince him to leave at the end of that, but he went out happy. It is clear that a lot of this stuff suddenly clicks for him in a way it didn’t before, and now that he can turn things with his hands, he is much more able to do them.
We headed home, which was pretty non-eventful until we got to Hagye and were walking through. For some reason he started chanting “This is a woman. This is a guy.” and sort of pointing to other people he saw. It went back and forth like that for awhile until it didn’t, and he caught his mistake, chanting the whole thing: “This is a woman. Nope. It’s a guy.” And as we walked past the pink building I pointed out the sculpture of people dancing/flying and told him he used to really like it. He said “Zinnie can fly! Zinnie fly in the backamapack!” He then put his arms out as if flying and chanted “Fly in the backamapack” several times.
When Carly got home, he and I were sitting at the table eating our pretend soup. He turned to her as she entered and asked “How are you doing?” They nursed and read some Kipper together. He then made a game of rolling the bouncy ball under the couch and seeing if it would roll back out. We played that several times. I gave him a bath, which went well. We washed Sophie and Ducky again. Left him naked for some time after that, and he stood in front of the fan again and said it tickled. He was okay when Carly started her shower, and was in there with her, but then he started trying to play with everything on the counter, and Carly took it away from him. He wouldn’t recover from that, and I had to go in and get him. I took him out and he cried until she got out. She took him in and he went straight to slee
p, about 8:30.
Teuni sculpture:
Children’s Grand Park:
Children’s museum:
Lotus pond:
Headed home: