Thursday: Teuni Teuni and still sick

He was up at 6, so a short night. They nursed in the parlor, then Carly came out and was in the kitchen and he lay in the reading area for a couple minutes. The drawer thing by the door is now mostly empty, and August opened all the drawers and it tipped forward on him a bit. He just made a couple of his noises like he needs his nose wiped or something, so it took a few seconds for us to realize he was actually having a problem. While Carly got ready, I distracted him with Alice in Wonderland, starting where he let off at the end of the tea party. He kept humming and moving his finger along, and said things like “I have a frog keyboard…a creature keyboard…a mole rat keyboard…” and “It’s nonsense.” Carly left for work and we finished Alice in Wonderland, then made French toast and smoothie for breakfast. I cut the french toast in eighths, so there was a lot of math around that. He ate 1 and 6/8ths pieces of french toast. He played Big Numbers for awhile, then was singing songs and asking what the notes were. So we used paper to write out the rhythms so he could see the notes. He did some GarageBand and I took a shower.

When I came out he had knocked down a bunch of the cardboard blocks and wanted to count them. We talked about skyping with Gramma and Grampa and he said something about Grampa. I didn’t quite catch it, and asked what he had said. His reply:

“Nothing, zero. That means I’m not going to tell you.” While picking out clothes for him, I asked if he wanted long or short sleeves. He chose long, but then said “soft” as well and said “I’m picky about shirts.” We then tried to skype with my parents, but they weren’t online. So we left a video message instead.

We went down to the Lee Toast and Coffee (used to be King Kong Juice). August chose a. Mango yoghurt smoothie and I got blueberry, and we got two sandwiches: a ham and cheese and a tuna. We went and sat on the bench. with raccoon tracks on it over close to Home Plus in the park. August mainly had smoothie, but not a ton of it, and wouldn’t touch the sandwiches. The tuna egg and relish on it. That’s a new combination.

We went to class and it was all about cups and buckets. August did great – it was definitely the high point of his day. He did eleven forward rolls, by my count, then caught on to stacking 10 cups in a pyramid. After that there was hammering of cups, then filling buckets with balls and pouring them in big cup-shapes (i.e. decorated garbage cans) on wheels. The teacher picked up August and put him in one of the cups and rolled him around. August started to protest, but mainly, I think, because he had just filled up his smaller bucket and wanted to pour it out. When August got out he spent the rest of his time filling buckets and pouring them into the big ones that the other kids were now riding around in.

From class we went downstairs to the grocery store and did some shopping. Went well, except at one point I let go of the bike to look at something. I had left the basket on the handles. It wasn’t very heavy, but I think August stood up, and the weight was enough to tip the bike backwards. August was hanging in the air for a few seconds until I could get the bike level again.

We got home at 2:20. The idea was to skype with my parents and then go out for a walk and see if he wanted a nap. But he stumbled on my feet and had a slight fall, and was quite upset. Clearly tired, so we got ready to go out. He was calm again and so as he sat in the stroller I skyped with my parents. He joked “I have a gramma keyboard”. Fine for a couple minutes, but then he wanted to start typing to them and got upset when I said no.

So we said goodbye and headed out, now 3:15. If he wasn’t going to sleep, we’d go to class at 4. We walked over behind See and Me, singing songs. He didn’t fall asleep at first, but when I suggested stopping or going to class he wanted to keep walking. He fell asleep at 3:37, and I went to the Coffee House (where I once had bingsu with Meg) and had a grapefruit tea. Didn’t want to let him sleep long, so got walking at 4:10, trying to wake him up. Got to the dinosaur playground and woke him up there, finally getting him up at 4:20. He really did not want to wake up, and took several minutes. I tempted him awake with crackers. I kept pulling it away from him and he smiled, and he said “Cracker chase”.

He didn’t want to play though, so we headed home. He played a few minutes of Big Numbers, then Carly got home. They nursed, and he did more spreadsheet math. I had bought a zucchini and cooked that, but August didn’t like it. Apparently the other kind of zucchini they sell is sweeter. So he had hotdog and noodles for dinner. He and Carly invented the “Mama game”, where he ran/pushed/crawled his way past Carly’s leg to get into/out of the kitchen. I then played it with him, and we did a lot of lifting him “Up to the sky!”

Carly got his bath ready and I gave him his bath. He watched Pirates of the Caribbean, then joked about an “Electric viola…That doesn’t make sense?” But it reminded me that in fact he hasn’t seen an electric violin yet, and so we found that and also an electric 5-string viola. We then watched videos of “Be our guest”, “Under the Sea”, another Little Mermaid song, then started watching parts of Fantasia. He really liked parts of that, and was playing crash cymbals along to it as he stood in the bath. We watched more of it on the bed – the parts about the dancing ostriches and hippos.

Carly tried to put him to sleep, but he came back out. We read Elmo ABC, Would You Feed It to the Monkey?, Red, Persian instruments, and two Frog and Toad stories. We read the one about things blowing away (“The List”), and I realized that his concern for this blowing away is entirely justified based on the stories we have read and seen: there’s that entire book The Wind Blew, then this story, and the Kipper cartoon episode, the Winnie the Pooh video about rhyming, the Wizard of Oz (which I’ve told him several times, but we haven’t read/seen at all)…and it seems like I’m forgetting a couple.

Anyway, we then read Moo Baa La La La – he read it he second time, and much of Berenstain Bears No Girls Allowed before he tried to go back to bed at 8:50. But he was back out at 9. He looked at his dictionary and found pictures of instruments, and we found videos of them. Balalaika (another new instrument for him), sitar, and fiddle. I got ready for bed while he watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and we went in together at 9:30.

But I had to take him back out at 9:45. We finished No Girls Allowed, then read Gaston and 1-2-3 Peas. We went back to bed at 10:05. He still had difficulty getting to sleep, taking off his socks and rolling around between me and Carly, but at some point we both drifted off. Obviously the short nap was still too long, or maybe we should just be done with naps for good.