At some point in the night when he woke up to nurse he was talking about “just a little poop.”
He was up at 7:13. He walked out and curled up on the reading area. I went back to typing on my iPad, hoping he would fall back to sleep. He came out to the living room about 8 minutes later and said “Go to bed a little bit”. So we went in on the bed and laid down. He said “Hi dada” and something else, then “Let’s play with Duplos.” He got off the bed and whispered “Dada come.”
We read Snoozers. He then wanted to do art on the iPad. He really wanted my iPad, but settled for his. He did some drawing while I typed. Then, of course, he decided he wanted to type on mine. He had seen me type the date before, and wanted to do that. So he ended up typing dates. He got the slashes and general format down. He was typing things like “11/77/99” and saying “That’s mama’s day.” Or “That’s Derek’s day.” He then just started doing art.
He was doing art when I went in to take a shower. He stopped his art and spent most of the time singing and reading the zoo map and other things. We then wrote several words from the zoo map in Korean on the paper. He wanted to know what ‘snot’ is in Korean, so we looked it up and learned that it is ‘콧물’ – nose water. Back out in the living room we read the Alphabet book we hadn’t read last night. He kept mentioning going to Uijeongbu.
I had music from 2016 playing. He kept saying he changed the words singers sang on songs. And at the start of a New Order song he said of the bass sound “I changed it to Buzzerbass!” He said “808 Bass” for another song. Those are bass sounds from Figure.
We changed him and he started playing in the basket. It tipped over and he kept hiding, pretending to be George and Peppa. That game extended over much of the house, and he was pretending to be George as I put him in the backpack.
We headed out and took the trains north to Uijeongbu. On our way there there was a woman who was calling him a ‘doll’ in Korean. We both recognized it, as we had learned the words in one of the books yesterday at the Cafe Dream. A stuffed bear is a ‘bear doll’ in Korean. I noticed that the stick in the backpack was gone, having probably fallen out in the last couple of days. I said we had lost Sticky 3 (we had just named it a couple weeks ago). He said “I liked sticky 3.” The first stick in the backpack he lost at Dongdaemun last year. The second one was probably left at a park a couple months ago.
We got some kimbap and a sandwich and headed up to the roof of the department store. There were three other kids up there, and the boy was really interested in August. August first wanted to play, and was climbing on the rubbery hills, pretending to be George. They kids came and talked to him and ran off. August ran after them a bit and said “I chased them” He was climbing all over the hills and I missed a “snort snort” as I took a video. He read the 새둥지 – birds nest – sign. The other kids left and we ate went to eat lunch. But we decided it was now too windy and went inside and sat on a bench and eat.
He wanted to go back outside after that, but stopped before going out. So we went downstairs to the toy store. First, he found the keyboard. He stood at that, and played with it for 10 minutes or so, playing along to the backing tracks and dancing back and forth. Then, he found the magnets on magnetic boards. There were only 4 sad Hangeul magnets (the rest were Magformers). He really wanted to find more: “let me find the Hangeul magnets.” He spotted the play area, and wanted to go. I said we could do it after his nap, and he started to lose it: “I’ll go in the play area.” He said repeatedly.
Changed him and took off and he fell asleep right away, at 12:24. Had headed west to our usual coffee shop, but stopped a few blocks short and found a new one. At the coffee shop he woke up at 1:06 and started requesting we go outside. I told him to go back to sleep. And he did. He woke up at 1:36, waving his arm as it had fallen asleep. He quieted down and sat there for five minutes before asking to leave again. He wanted out of the backpack, so we walked around the block to 의서어린이공완 – a children’s park we’d played at once before. Along the way there was a restaurant with one of those chalk-type boards out front. August wanted to erase letters with his finger.
At the park he walked on the bench, chanting “all the way to this 7, boop” and turning the ‘boop’ part into more of a melodic line. He noticed part of the bench was coming apart, and wanted to know why. So I was teaching him ‘rot’ and ‘rotten’ and explaining why it rotted. He then picked up little pieces of rotten wood and was “sorting” them into the cracks. He was hungry so ate a banana, then was back to walking around and chanting numbers. He then started climbing the hill thing as George and Peppa. He saw some bigger boys and chased them when they came off the slide. Did that a few times. He spotted blue paint on the ground as George (“George found paint on the ground”). At first he needed my help getting up the hill, but soon he could do it on his own. The hill was different colors, but fading, so he was curious about the colors: “I thinked about colors mixing into grey…see what I know.” I said one color was a ‘pinkish grey’. Him: “a pinkely grey…I changed it.” “Peppa likes that smell.” From the guy sawing something in the nearby alley.
He sang a long song, with a tune he made up. Then he said “You made up a very big tune.” He saw a girl climbing the spider-looking thing and wanted to do it. So I helped him up. He then got down and was singing into the voice thing. He sang the 123 version of the ABC song, and the girl sang along singing “A B C…” He went back to the hill thing and was climbing it again – this time as George. Peppa could already climb it, but George needed my help. But then George could do it on his own and was very happy about that. We saw a fuzzy fly bye and he said “Bye fuzzy!” – a reference to our youth center playground experience. Suddenly, he was down on the ground and pretending to be a seagull, flapping its wings. More correctly, “George is pretending to be a seagull.” After that he said “You’re August again.”
He then was playing by the alley and said “What’s the yellow?” It was sparks from where the guy was working across the street. I picked him up and August watched him through the doorway for a couple minutes. He used the grinder once so August got a good view of the sparks. I was explaining what sparks were and teaching him how to spell it. When August was done I had him say thank you before we walked back to the park. He sat on the ground and made letters out of his fingers. He did a pretty good lowercase d and b and uppercase D and several other letters.
He sang and played around a bit more, then saw me reading on my phone and said he wanted to type on his iPad. I thought about it and said okay, and he got excited and ran off, saying “Let’s go to another bench! Let’s go! Let’s go!” Good timing, as then it started to rain. We sat on a covered bench and read and typed and did some art. But then he was upset, wanting my iPad, then we just worked together on his.
We changed his diaper, then ate a Larabar as we got ready to go. He said he wanted to go to home in Uijeongbu. I told him which trains we would take, and he said “Er sound” for the Uijeongbu line. He had mentioned this on the way up. As we walked to the train, he imagined letters everywhere, saying “l is walking over there, R is walking over there…Q is walking that way, S is walking that way…” and pointing.
On the train he did the ‘errrr’ sound when he heard it. Much of the way home he worked on a big piece of art on the iPad, zooming in on one part and drawing, then another. When walking he heard a car honk and said “that was a ng sound.”
At home he chose to put a
diaper on after I changed him. I talked to him about practicing to be a big kid, but he said he wanted to do that later. We read some Go Dog Go, with him reading lots of the words, and Carly got home. August saw she had bags: “you go to the store. What you get?” They nursed. He then played on the couch with me, casting spells and turning him into different animals: storks, etc. He was saying ‘Choi-chwon-i-cal’ again. To himself: “Is it from Puffin Rock? No. is it from imagination? No.” I started to say “You are…” and he finished with “confusing”.
He went and played with his magnets, and exclaimed “You wrote 귤!” He had. That’s the word for mandarin orange.
I changed him and was singing Cada Semilla. He asked what ‘something else’ means, so we were going through examples. He would then say “another sample”. I then changed to ‘someONE else’ and explained that. He was then listing people, saying “Torrey or Megan or Gramma or Rosie or Logan…” When we were done I told him he could do more art on the iPad but that later I wanted to do other things, and listed something. He said “No, I want to do iPad. I want something else.” We both then got excited that he had used the phrase in context.
He and Carly nursed again and ended up watching our videos on my phone for quite awhile. They then did coloring together. He came it and found me typing on my iPad and wanted to type, so I let him do that for a bit. Carly went and took a shower, and we went and made our fort on the bed and read some Smurfs. When she was done and came out we hid as quietly as he could until she found us. He went out and found his iPad and did some Hangeul magnets. Carly started his bath and he wanted to go it in the hall. So she put some shorts on him and they went out for a few minutes. Came back, took his bath, then went in on the bed and was asleep at 8:30.
Park art:
