He was up at 7:15. Upset when he found Carly gone, and sat on the floor in the parlor. He didn’t want consoling today, so I just sat next to him. I started playing with the Duplos and he initially rejected the zookeeper. But then when I picked up the alligator and had it chomp something he said “Want alligator chomp dada.” He then made a joke, calling the zebra the “Giant Pacific zebra”, which is a play on ‘Giant Pacific octopus’, which we saw yesterday. Traded a couple messages with Carly – August found the letters for and typed one of them – and she liked the joke, so he made up a couple others like it.
He ended up on his iPad, playing the Hangeul app. On the one hand, he is starting to actually read some of them. On the other, the music group thing is bugging me. So I spent time looking for better Korean apps. Hadn’t found anything in the past, and today was no exception. Just horrible, horrible programs. Either ones that don’t teach anything, try to teach the wrong thing (one app started with ‘one piece’), or are so poorly programmed that they are basically unusable.
We skyped with my parents for awhile, but then Skype was having issues, so we gave up on that. My dad has a birthday next week, so I was telling August to ask him how old he will be. My mom was joking about how they didn’t have enough fingers to count that high. Anyway, I felt like a translator, as August kept asking what she said, and I had to explain. Of course, there is a lot of explaining the other direction as well. But later in the day, when I told Carly about it, he definitely remembered the discussion about not having enough fingers.
I eventually found one app that wasn’t a complete waste: it is a magnet board, where you can put up magnets with letters on it. Korean is included. Kind of redundant when we have the actual magnets a few feet away, but could be good on the subway.
Before we left he developed one big ice cream game, using the crayons that look like ice cream cones. It turned into something like this: “Let me make more ice cream for you then dada will be happy. Here you go dada. Mama will be sad about it if dada drops ice cream. Want dada to drop it on the carpet.“ I would then say I wasn’t going to drop it, then drop it, and he would laugh. He would then clean off the cone, wipe the floor (and sometimes me), and then make me some more ice cream. Repeat.
Also before we left he wanted to do some matching with the animal dominoes. And he wanted me to use the Cookie Monster voice to decide if the matches were correct.
We headed to Home Plus a little before 11. August had finished off the banana bread this morning, then was sad when he wanted more but it was gone. So we had talked about making more. He also hadn’t eaten much else, and as we left he started asking about food. So we did our shopping first, getting bananas and carrots for bread, and he picked out kimbap. We walked outside and sat on a bench on the south side of Home Plus and ate the kimbap. He was hungry, and we ate it all. When we had walked into Home Plus I was carrying him, and he started giggling. I asked what was funny and he said “Home Plus is funny”. In Home Plus he found one of those hopscotch-looking tape figures on the ground and wanted me to do hopscotch a few times. He then started pretending to write letters in them, like he did last year (from doing it with the stick in the actual hopscotch figures down at Children’s Grand Park). He switched to his language, then was totally walking and pointing around as he sang in the produce section for a few minutes.
Up to class just as it was starting. August clinging to me at the beginning. As the teacher came around to do the lifting thing, I told August he could tell the teacher ‘no’. As he came up, August said “No, no, no, no.” And it worked. I then congratulated August on using his words, and that made him smile. He still was afraid of the walking path/forward roll part, and that one is odd, since he loved that part last spring. Anyway, after that things were fine: August was sitting with the teacher, was fine with the teacher riding a camel toy with him, and got into a ball fight with him in the ball pit. August’s favorite part was the big jump down to the mat – about a 3 foot jump, or a bit higher. He did it several times, just holding one of my hands. At the end of class they got their first Teuni toy of the session: a Monster Cannon. You squeeze a ball to shoot a foam ball. And August said ‘kamsamnida’ really well when I asked him to after he got his treat at the end.
On our way home we started singing the Spanish ABC song, which reminded me of the backwards ABC song and the counting ones. So we brought those back through the day. A lot of songs were forgotten by both of us over the summer. Oh, and we invented a new ‘Sleepy little nautilus’ song today, starting in the morning when he was pretending to be a sleeping nautilus again (he had shown my parents some of the animals we had seen in the aquarium yesterday, using the Oceans app).
Anyway, we got home and dropped off groceries and the Monster Cannon, and were going to get in the stroller and go for a walk. He was clearly sleepy and started to get upset. But then he started to make actual syllables out of Hangeul and pronounce them using the door magnets and I let him do that for awhile. Missed my window to get him in the stroller though, as he then wanted something and got upset when we couldn’t do it. Wiping his eyes and yawning, but didn’t want to get in the stroller. So I had to force him in. We rarely have to force him to do anything, so this was a definite exception. But once he was buckled in he calmed down. Fell asleep after 10 or 15 minutes of walking.
Went to Sarang Bbang Cafe and he slept from 1:33 to 2:22. A short nap, and very slow to wake up. So I pushed him north, to an area with two parks, just southwest of Nowon Station. I believe they are the last two children’s parks within two stops any direction that we hadn’t been to and documented on Google Maps. Went to the east one first. He didn’t want to play, still waking up, but liked the idea of reading. We read Rain, Not a Box, and then a couple of Bob Books. Been awhile since he had done that, so it was like he needed reminding about how to sound out words. But then he was doing it on his own.
Eventually he wanted to head home, no playing at the park. We swung by the second park, but it was closed anyway, with backhoes and other trucks working on it. Watched them for a couple minutes and kept going. He started singing, and sang pretty much the entire way home. As we went past Madeul Stadium and through the apartment complex there, he was really singing, singing a “2, 1 and 0” song and then “That’s a funny diamond, that’s a funny rhombus…funny star right there, funny star right there…” The whole time he was drawing in the air. He would finish a song, and I would ask what the song was about, and he’d say something like “Sopadoo and chimamoo go to work…they get some money…mockamoo stayed home…”
We got home a little after 4 and I started making banana bread. Carly got home at 5:20 and they nursed, then did math with the zookeeper. He did more of the annoying Korean app, but when I told him it was time to put it away he did. I got out the monster cannon and we played with that. Carly made stir fry for dinner and he had some of that, then he had some banana bread when it was ready. Carly took a shower, and he and I read the Pete the Cat Old MacDonald book. He did a lot of reading and singing of that.
I gave him a bath, then he and Carly read Curious George Goes to the Aquarium. For some reason they got on the subject of our names, and he was saying “Carly Althauser”, which was fun to hear him say, and my name at least once.
We got him in to bed, and it went pretty smoothly. He had a big long monologue all about polygons before he settled down to nurse, and they were asleep about 10.
Morning:
Home Plus:
Class:
Home:
Park:
Headed home:
Home. The Monster Cannon:
