He was up at 5:30. When I got up he told me he and Carly had read the elephant book (Five Minutes Peace), Alexander…, and Curious George Cleans Up. We read The Hole in the King’s Sock. Then he wanted to be a doctor, so we played with the doctor equipment a bit. He then just turned that into a game where he was fitting as much stuff into the animal carrier as possible. That went on for quite awhile, then he wanted to go play with the sink. When he was done with that he said “I’m done with water notes.”
He was then getting upset when Carly wouldn’t nurse right away, and being clingy. I had gotten recycling ready, and said she could take recycling down to get a couple minutes break. But he got really upset when she was gone. Almost seemed panicky by the time she got back. So I did the rest of recycling. She made him carrot coins, an egg, strawberrries, and banana bread for breakfast. He saw it and said “This your yummy finger food?”
After he ate he was singing and playing with the Monster Drum. He changed our helmet in the spaceship song to “I lost my chipmunk at the zookeeper store.” He then helped Carly put away Duplos. He and I did stickers in Poli books and he pushed the books with his feet under the rug.
Carly tried to call Cherie but she didn’t answer, so he did some typing instead. He was talking about his favorite letters and said “My favorite letters is Q and Z.” I took a shower, and they talked to Cherie. He then had naked time, and locked me out of the parlor for fun. Carly took a nap, and he played in the sink. We then read books. We read much of Mayzie, but then he jumped to the end and so I read the whole book backwards. We read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (the correct direction), then he played with one of the music apps on his iPad. For a snack we ate some crab, a leftover hasbrown, and grapes.
Carly got up and went to the store. He lay on the reading area and rolled around naked on the floor. He ate some peanut butter from a spoon, then was turning lights and the fan on and off in the hallway bathroom and the hall. He turned the light off in the bathroom and said “I turned it off cuz no one’s using it.” In the changing room he started pulling clothes from his drawers and putting them in an empty box. He said “I’m packing for Israel.” He said he wanted to go outside, so we got ready and left at 12:50.
Over by the pagoda, he pedaled on his own – mainly backwards at first, but then forwards. It got really windy and we talked about how our lunch could blow away, if we had one. At one point he got off the bike and it started to roll away. Carly came saw us for a minute, but then headed home to put groceries away and make coleslaw.
He rode around for several more minutes, then wanted me to push him to the dinosaur playground. Went on swings for a minute, then he found a big stick, which he said was a Y, then he used it as a vacuum cleaner and started walking around the north end of the park: “It sucked up the ants…it sucked up those people.” At one point he realized we didn’t have the bike with us and said “Where’s the bike…go get it.” He kept playing with the stick, then decided at 1:30 that he was done with it.
At that point he got on the bike and we just kept walking in laps around our side of the park – 4 or so total laps. We were singing songs, We All Sing the Same Voice, Ants Go Marching, etc. It got really windy a few times, but would then die back down.
We headed home, and I made pasta salad. They did some drawing together.
We all went back outside at 4:45. The big duststorm, which was effecting the west of Seoul, never made it over to us. We walked up to Starbucks where we each got a drink, August with his usual white yogurt drink. We took our drinks to Sarang Children’s Park and drank them there.
He went up on the play structure for a minute, and Carly sat in the sun. He and I went over to play in the sand. I ended up scooping sand into the chute, then I would open it and he would closely watch, from the top, the sand empty from the chute. He needed to use the bathroom, so we went across the street to the building. We had looked at the bathroom here once and it wasn’t to his liking so we had left and gone somewhere else. Not really an option this time. He really didn’t want to use a squat toilet, so he reluctantly used a urinal with a sensor on it. It even flushed while he was standing there, but he did it. Quite an accomplishment.
Back at the sand, at one point he demanded “Give me the shovel.” I asked “Can you rephrase that?” then explained what ‘rephrase’ meant. He thought about it, and asked, much nicer, “Can I have the shovel?” Finally, he was helping to scoop sand into the chute, and he got down and opened it himself a couple times. When filling it once he said “Pretty darn full.” Pretty sure I must have said that. Carly was ready to go, so we did it one last time. But then he said “One very, very last time.” – a reference to Frog and Toad when they eat one very, very last cookie.
As we left I taught him a sandal dance to get out sand. That didn’t work, so he took his sandals off to shake the sand out, and he almost got his sandal on in his own. As we started walking, he started saying “A told B and B told C…” from the Chicka Chicka ABC book.
At Brownstone Carly ran to GS25 and August wanted to go home. In the elevator he picked up a wrapper to a cookie sort of thing. I looked up at the elevator floors, then realized he had tried to take a bite out of something in it. He was rather excited by this action, even as we got of the elevator and he dropped it. I asked if he ate elevator garbage and what it was, and he said “I’m not sure.”
We were home at 6:10. He tried to not take off his shoes again, which has become a minor thing. He had some banana bread, then we were reading and cuddling. We read Loch Mess Monster (which he found really funny because he had all sorts of funny Scottish words) and Red.
We then watched Sesame Street songs, mainly the old ones we’ve seen, plus ones with B.B. King and Patti Labelle. We kept watching during naked time after his bath. He made it clear when he was tired, and he went in and was asleep at 7:40.
Photos:
Lazy iPad:
Outside:
The chute:
