7:35. A long, long sleep. And straight to a warm spot on the floor. A little piano, then some Word Wagon, then to the bathroom, then a lot of music: first GarageBand, then working on holding the mandolin and then piano. He played a slow version of Johnny Comes Marching. We played mandolin a couple times. He wanted to hold it standing up, so I shortened the strap. I got him banana bread, banana, and a couple yogurt pretzels for breakfast. We did some exercise together, then he wanted to do yoga, and wanted to do as many yoga positions as possible. At the end he was trying to twist around and see his back, and got a little sad that he couldn’t.
To the iPad, where he played Elmo Loves ABCs and Metamorphabet a bit, then he remembered instruments he didn’t know, and we watched videos of harpsichord and autoharp. When I went to take a shower he was watching a trombone video. He came into the bathroom at the end of my shower and asked “What’s a tuba sound like?” So then we watched tuba and sousaphone videos.
He saw me typing an email to Carly, and asked why I was using two hands. He then said “I want to type with two hands so it’s FAST!” So I showed him home row and all that, and he figured out making capital letters with shift. He said “I want to type Qs because Q is my favorite letter.” We had just talked about what to do for the day, and he wanted to type “We are going to a park.” Which he then did, with help, and added in punctuation park. He wanted to type ‘Sinnaedong Park’ and I started to tell him how to do that, but he insisted “I want to do it in Korean.” So I showed it to him on the map, and he typed it, then (because the full name is Sinnaedong Community Park), he typed ‘park’ and ‘community’ in English.
We spent a lot of time making instrument sounds and he sang Baa Baa black sheep in the different sounds. I mentioned singing Baa Baa to him and he said “When you were a little baby?” We sang both versions of the song. We were talking about learning music in Israel, and I asked him if he would like a music sangsaengnim in Israel. He said yes, and when I asked what his instrument choices were, he concluded “I want harpsichord first choice, guitar second choice.”
In playing his made up instruments they would get quite elaborate: “I have a thousand frets and a million strings.” It was a thousand keys when playing tuba. He asked for more instruments, and I remembered accordion. For that I pulled up a video of Jason Webley playing “Last Song” at the 11.11.11 concert that Carly and I went to. He loved that, and watched all of it. As he was playing accordion he said “I’m pushing a lot of buttons. I have a quadrillion buttons.”
Back on GarageBand he made a discovery: “Ooh! I didn’t know they had that one!” When he found instruments like flute and glockenspiel he could play.
We got headed to the park. Walked down to across from the hospital (I asked if he remembered what the building across the street was – he had once called it “mama’s work” because she had gone there a few times – this time he said “Is it the doctor’s office?”) and caught the 1221 bus. Got to the park and sat on an orange bench and ate lunch. I got him to eat the carrots by having them say “Don’t eat me!” and then the others said “He ate Bob!” He had fun giving them names after that. I got out my ‘real’ camera to take some official three-years-old photos, and we played around with that. He wanted to use it, and took some photos of me while I helped hold it.
We then went across to the playgrounds, where August was initially disappointed to find no swings (two playgrounds and no swings? Didn’t remember until much later that there is actually a third playground up the hill we could have checked). But then he found a big stick and was playing with that. He drew shapes in the sand, including one he said was a bear. There was a girl making sand mountains like he does, but she didn’t seem interested in August joining. August wanted to play right by her though, and make similar sand mountains. He kept wanting to crush hers though, and when she crushed it herself he joined in. He then wanted to pretend to crush strangers’ stuff, a game which I wouldn’t participate in. He then switched it, and pretended to be a stranger himself and told me not to erase what he was making.
We walked over to the weird stage area. Or whatever it is. He wanted a bunch of theories on what it is. He found a broken piece of the plastic floor stuff and played with that. He then stood in it and directed himself as he made music. He found found a maple seed, and I showed him how they fall. We found a bunch of tiny maple seeds, and he stood on some rocks and dropped them. I also held him up in the air so he could drop them.
From there we went to the slides. He wanted me to go down first, but then he went down the little wavy slide a bunch of times. The first time he needed help up the ladder, but he had it after that. His game was that we would hit the slide to make noise as the other person went down.
Then we drew geometrical shapes, and he learned to draw a pentagon and a kite. And he’s drawing really good hearts now. We started to go, and I had Smoky, who was in the backpack, say something. August wanted him to say something about fires, then August pretend to spray fire everywhere, like with a flamethrower. No idea. He said “I blew fire!”
We headed to the bathrooms, and he saw a sign with different stretches on it. He spent quite awhile trying to do the stretches. We went to the bathroom, then got going. We ate some of the pretzels. August said “I ate Bob…the pieces of Bob Are in my esophagus.” He invented an instrument: “it is like a piano, but it has frets.”
We went up to a park I’d found on Naver Maps in the middle of an apartment complex. On the way, we found some bushes with little purple berries on them. He pretended to eat them and get sick as we walked. They had swings here. Getting windy and chilly, but he went on the swings for 15 minutes or so. Got his swing time in. We had talked about going to a coffee shop to get out of the cold, and there was one a couple blocks away that looked promising. He really wanted to go. Started to walk that way, but the wind was in our face, and for a second he said he wanted to head home. But then when he realized we weren’t going towards the coffee shop he wanted to turn around.
We turned around and made it to Coffee So. There, it was either a choice between a shake to share, or a small hot cocoa on the kids menu. August heard us talking about ‘cocoa’ and decided on that. He was tuned to the word ‘cocoa’, because he had just been talking about the name ‘coco’ (or ‘koko’ as was his preferred spelling), which is the name of the bird in Word Wagon, and I was explaining was different from ‘cocoa’. Anyway, we got that, and he loved the cocoa. He said it looked like coffee. He counted all of his sips, getting up around 30. He also pretended it was making him sick – like the berries. And he gave a lesson in how to drink cocoa. He did a little Word Wagon, and I read one page of my book before he wanted to head home. But I also spent some time using Shazam to identify songs playing. I liked “Down” Marian Hill and “Vals Bebel” A Mar.
We walked up and found a bus stop and headed home. On the walk from the hospital I hummed the Addams Family song, which he wanted to know the words of. Will have to look that up. He was spelling things with random letters as we walked through the park, and spelled ‘Mack’. I told him it was a name, and reminded him of Yertle the Turtle. Will have to read that.
Home a bit after 5:30. He told Carly about the cocoa right away, and said “I tried to get sick because I had extra drinks!” He had the curry rice for dinner, and we got out the chopsticks for him. I helped him at first, but he got the hang of it, and was pretty soon eating with them.
He played more GarageBand, and showed Carly the instruments. Carly put on t
he Jason Webley video, and he watched a few minutes of that, but then he wanted it quiet so he could play GarageBand on his iPad again.
Carly gave him a bath and I did dishes. He was having fun in the bath, but I think when the washing started he was done. He was ready for bed, and was asleep at 7:30.
Photos. He wanted to use the changing pad for funsies:
Mandolin:
Yoga:
Bus:
Lunch. Eating Bob the carrot:
Juice:
Taking photos:
Hearts:
Coffee shop:
