Tuesday: Children’s Grand Park

8:06. He walked straight into the reading area. He heard me getting up from the couch and said “Stop! Stop!” He wants some alone time. I snuck in to take this photo and he waved me away. After a few minutes I heard him up and walking around, and singing his phone booth song from yesterday. At 8:13 he ran out to me, excited, and said “I want a new tower!” We made a tower, and he named it the Sambangi Tower. We ate breakfast, and he played GarageBand and Musyc. Then a grand game of hiding things, sort of, where he would throw something (like play dough) a few feet away and say it was hiding. A lot of laughing. We did Duplos, and he said “It’s a house. Essentially.” Second time he used ‘essentially’ today. We played with slime, then I wanted to take a shower.

I suggested he read while I showered. He asked me to choose a book for him. I started to look at the English books, but he said Korean. So I grabbed a few of the Korean books and went and took a shower. I came out to find him still flipping through the books and reading them. Lasted several more minutes after that. Very cool.

He came in my bathroom at one point and grabbed the soap by the sink and rinsed it for me. He told me it was so it wouldn’t stick in the tray. He has long been interested in why the soap by the sink is dry, but the soap in the shower is wet. At one point he impulsively knocked the Duplo tower over but wanted me to rebuild it the same.

I had held him up in the air and he said “Then let go…so I can fly.” I carried him around super man style and he flapped his arms and said “cheep, cheep”. We were talking about things people say (probably started with Carly saying ‘You’re making mama nervous’) and he kept asking about other people: “What’s another example of what Vivian used to say?” Finally, before we left he wanted some toast, and requested it soft. Then said “I like soft things…What quarters about? I like quarters, and I like counting.”

On the way down he did art on the iPad. At Children’s Grand Park we headed to the playground – he said he didn’t want lunch yet. He first wanted to do sidewalk chalk. Did they for maybe ten minutes, then he wanted to do other things. He first wanted to wash his hands, so we went to the water and did that. Then he followed a pigeon around without scaring it away. Next, it was putting sand in a pipe thing. But the pipe was packed full of sand, so we worked to fixed it. Did that together, but he lost interest and wandered off to the hill thing that he famously sang from last year. He climbed on and around it, and laid on it a bit. He then wanted sand castles, so we made little sand castles. He wanted to put something on top (like Kipper), so we used a leaf. He asked me what color the leaf as and I said tan. “Umm, that’s close. But it’s not. It’s brown.” He hid rocks in the sand for me to find. He ate some lunch, and spotted a sign that said ‘zoo’ in Korean. We played on the swings a bit, with him figuring out how to put his stomach on it and swing a bit.

Needed to change him, and maybe try for a nap, so took him up to the bathroom. Set him on the changing table, and he held a hand up in front of his face, at first a few inches away. Turned out that he was blocking his view of the toilets, afraid that they would flush (and he doesn’t like the noise). He made it through though. We went out to the seats in the outdoor stadium to have a snack and get in the backpack. The latter never happened. He played, pretending to be Spikey. He took one shoe and sock off and said “I know what you’re thinking: it’s uncomfortable…The shoe’s uncomfortable, dada.” He ended up taking both shoes off. With both shoes off he wandered around the stands. He walked in the water pigeons had just been in and kept saying “You’re walking in the pedulgis’ water.” Climbed on the benches and sat down next to a random guy. More climbing around and he went way up the stairs and sat next to a woman. He was fine sitting there while I went back down and got his shoes and the backpack. Put his shoes on, and he started wandering around on the top of the ridge: “You’re walking in a bunch of trees…you want to play in a bunch of trees.” It turned into a big walk, with him walking much of the path I usually use to put him to sleep – most of it I’ve walked hundreds of times, but always with him in the backpack. He was chatting as we walked: “We’re walking…that’s 90…I like people.”

He led us to the coffee shop. Just before we were there, he doubled back and walked on some leaves a second time, and said “I like all the colors.” He had me carry him up the stairs to the top floor, then he walked to the coffee shop and pushed the door open on his own. In the coffee shop he chose a table and his seat and told me to sit across from him “Let’s talk!” We got up to choose drinks: He got a pumpkin juice pouch (not as bad as you might think) and I got an apple juice. We sat across from each other and chatted about animals a bit, then I got his iPad out for him. He saw it and said “Oh! My iPad.” So he did art and I worked on mine for awhile. But then he wanted mine and got a little sad and laid on the floor. So I pulled up a chair next to him, and we did art together on his. While drinking his juice he wandered over to a table that had two other kids and casually leaned against a chair and watched them. They had asked his age, and he had done three with his fingers. On the way back to our table he was practicing his finger numbers, and I was horrified to see him do 3 the usual way (the 3 middle fingers), as opposed to his pinkie, ring, and middle.

He needed his diaper changed, and we went downstairs to do it. Same covering of the eyes and stressing out. But a guy came in and used both the urinal and hand dryer, and neither was loud like he was worried about. Good chat about things usually not being as bad as we fear.

We went by the rectangle pond (but on the opposite of our usual side, as we now need the sun) and ate more lunch. He ate much of the rice and finished off the sweet potato. He saw me pull out the pink spoon for the rice and wondered what that was about. He said “This spoon is for ice cream.” (Indeed, as it was from Baskin Robbins.)

From there we tried the backpack to see what would happen. We walked back behind the zoo. He smelled an odd smell and said “I smell a mooka moo”. I stopped to read a plaque by a statue and he said “I erased it…Dada’s not going to read it now.” A few more minutes, then he said “I want to get down. I want to walk with dada. I want to walk more leaves.” So we had another nice walk in the leaves. A couple times he just stopped to admire the leaves falling and the wind. At one point he noticed the wind in our hair. He then came over to me and asked “What the leaves fall about?” I explained (again), comparing it to animals hibernating, etc.

Had to change him again, so we went to the sometimes-heated infant room. Changed him, then he wanted to walk to the zoo. A boy sort of tried to say hi to August as he walked, but August wasn’t in the mood. We got to the animals, and first say the jaguar, which August said was a ‘pretend serval’. He heard a bird and wanted to find what it was. We went over there and realized it was the pheasant. He asked what it was and we had this discussion:

Me: “That’s an English Pheasant.”

Him: “What it not a French Pheasant about?”

Perhaps the fastest and funniest thing he’s said. He was starting to talk about heading home, but a group of students from Sejong University wanted to quickly interview us for a scavenger hunt. They asked us a few questions. August gave his name. As we finished, August was saying “wrong, wrong, wrong…dada do an oops 4…” I think I figured out that he had wanted me to say he was 4 years old as a joke. He had the joke planned, but they didn’t ask his age. He’s very used to that question, as it is a cultural thing, almost always the second question
asked after your name (or often before).

He saw the upstairs part by the leopard, with the board that plays the animals sounds, and wanted to go in there. First he climbed in the Jeep photo point place, where a few women were planning to take their photo. So they asked me to take the photo. I held both cameras and took the photos with August in them. We then spent a few minutes reading and translating a big sign about ‘Kinds of Tigers’ – He was reading the names of the tigers in Korean: Bengal, Siberian, etc.

Before we left, we stopped at the covered benches by the entrance of the zoo and had a snack, eating orange and finishing the rice. As we walked out, he sang “do, ra, me, fa, so…”

On the subway platform he sang a song using words he saw: “발빠짐 주의 (watch your step), Children’s Grand Park, Konkuk University…”

We were home at 5:20. I unzipped his coat, and he was on his knees, trying to take it off, but got it stuck on his arms and fell on his face. Not hurt though. Carly came home a bit later. They nursed. He was eating rice and tofu with his hands, which was fine at first. But when I gave him more he made a mess on the table. I had started to sing the nautilus song for some reason. He didn’t want me to sing it all, but did the ‘achoo’ at the end. That led to long game of him laughing hysterically while I pretended to sneeze. He then said “achoo…no, just say zero.” So then I was sneezing ‘zero’, which was equally funny.

Carly gave him a bath, and there was a lot of laughter. August and I read some Pooh while she showered, then started hiding August Jr. and finding him. August at one point said “it’s CLEVER. I found something clever.”

He hadn’t had a nap, and made it through quite well, but was quite tired. He was asleep at 7:40.

Also, he knew 잠바 (jacket), and 사자 (lion) all on his own today, bring them up in conversation.