7:56. He ran out and I held him for five or six minutes. He got down and was making shapes with his fingers. He wanted to start with letter tracing on his iPad. Lately, part of what he has been doing on it is replacing the default sounds for the letters with his own voice. So when you choose ‘A’, for example, it says “A, ahhh” in his voice. He was hungry, and asked for a couple of crackers first, so I let him have that, then we had cereal and bananas, then we worked on Itsy Bitsy Spider on the piano. And then he surprised me by now being able to stretch his fingers to play chords like C and G. We listened to A Hawk and a Hacksaw through the morning until he wanted to watch orchestra and wanted the kids. He watched several pieces from them, including Prince of Egypt, Let it Go, and part of Swan Lake.
We did some TodoMath together. Today we were making progress on starting from the lower number when adding. That is, when adding 7+2, instead of having to count “1, 2, 3, 4…” just starting with 7 and then saying “8, 9”. He seemed to have a decent grasp on this by the end of the day.
At some point he was asking about Carly, or simply what day it was. I said “it’s Monday. Mama had to go back to work.” He replied “I don’t like that. I can’t handle that… Now I can.” Ate more cereal and banana. He wanted some surgery, and I tried to say no; I was trying to take a shower. He immediately got upset and started crying. Held him and waited until he calmed down, then asked if we could talk about it. He said yes, and we made a deal where we’d do the surgery, but then I would go take a shower. So that worked. He did Simple Machines while I took a shower.
I was then getting our snacks and lunch together, and when I mentioned that I had bought the crab at the store the other day he asked “Lucky mart?” Which kind of surprised me as we rarely call it that, referring to it just as the pink building. When we brushed his teeth, I asked which flavor of toothpaste he wanted. He asked “Why not the orange and zucchini one?” Not sure if that was intentional or not. The flavor is orange and mango.
We did math with Duplos, and were working on counting by 3s and 5s. I was trying to get him to go, and he said “I want to do this for a couple minutes.” I sat down in the desk chair (he pointed out I was sitting in “Mama’s chair”) and he came and climbed on my lap for a few minutes. We finished getting ready to go. He wanted to do X in Metamorphabet so did that, and he snuck a few extra letters.
We left at 12:40. We stopped at 7-11 to get some stuff for lunch, since we never go there. Got a ham kimbap and a triangle tuna one. We hopped the 1144 bus right next to the building headed north. Took it up past Madeul and got off right after it crossed the river. We walked a couple blocks further, to the west, going under the line 1 subway tracks. Carly and I had been in this spot exactly once, when we then turned south again and walked by the dump area. Today, we continued west one more block to the north end of the big park area north of APIS. I had spotted some potential park sites on Google Maps. The first was just a little sitting and exercise area, but there was also a bus that had been converted into a library. Unfortunately, it was closed for the winter until March 1st, but August was intrigued by the idea, and went and investigated after we ate lunch. During lunch, he ‘stole’ my half of the sandwich, and said “I’m a stealing machine.” (A reference to ‘Hug Machine’). We added the library to Google Maps, and he walked up a path to a little marshy area, then did part of the walking around a little loop.
He said he was sleepy, but when I asked him about it he claimed he wasn’t, and said “I’m not ticklish and I’m not sleepy…I’m not broken…”
We could see a playground to the west, across an apartment complex parking lot. We walked over there. It wasn’t a park playground, but an apartment complex one, but we stopped to go on the swings. Did that for quite awhile, and he was being pretty imaginative: “squirrel police” “I’m playing a pretend skinny guitar.” He got down and was singing the If I Go song we made up, by himself. He remembered a lot of the lines, and made a few up. Back on the swings he was really getting the hang of pumping, leaning back and forward in addition to moving his legs. He got off, and was twisting the swing up and letting it go, but made it clear he doesn’t like being on it when it is twisted. When he wanted back on the swing, he said “Hey. I want to go on here. And no twisting cuz I don’t like twisting.”
When done there we went into the park area, which here is called 초안산세대공감공원. He found little seed pods from trees and we talked about how those work. There’s a little stream area, and we went up and used the bathroom. We then found some bushes with thorns, and he investigated those, then found another bush with kind of interesting seeds on it, so we talked about those.
Got him in the backpack, and started walking up to the environmental education center. But down a path to our left we spotted playgrounds and stuff, so went down to investigate. It was another park, a children’s park, on the edge of the large park area. He didn’t want to stop, but we checked it out and added it (and the other park) to Google Maps, then got walking to Cafe Tolerance.
Along the way he was singing his standard walking song – the nonsense word song that he’s been singing for a long, long time. Then he invented a new tune.
We got to Café Tolerance at 3:40. There were some kids bikes out front and he investigated. He wanted to know about the bike lock and how it works. I explained it needed a number to open it:
“What the right number?”
“Only the owner knows.”
“Why not Zinnie?”
He got podo and mango juices. He was a little perturbed they were out of pineapple juice boxes. He chose seats by the window again and we sat and played/worked. Near the end he needed to go to the bathroom. Did that, then he tried on the different pairs of flip flops. As we left, he spent a couple minutes singing the notes on the wall in the stairway.
We got home a bit before Carly. Sometime after she got home and they nursed, he was playing on the piano and playing a few notes (C to E chromatically, then back down) that sounded just like the organ in Phantom of the Opera. So I showed it to him on YouTube. He wasn’t too fond of that one, but ended up watching other orchestra pieces (mainly the kids again). When I was in the kitchen he came up and asked me why “no more”. Took me awhile to figure out what he was talking about – he had read it off the back of my shirt. So I had to explain that to him (the front says ‘strangers’). Carly gave him a bath, and he was soon to bed after that, at 7:20.
Photos. On my shoulder:
Riding the bus:
Bus library:
Swinging together:
Seeds:
Thorns:
Singing:
Bike lock:
View:
Slippers:
Singing the wall notes:
