Carly had parent conferences until noon. August woke up, groggy but happy, a little after 8. We played Endless Reader, Alphabet, and Wordplay on the iPad and ate banana bread for breakfast and took down recycling.
Around 11 we headed over to Home Plus. Looked at animals, then went down to do grocery shopping. Did most of it with August down, walking, but put him up in the carrier for the last couple of items, then back down once we’d paid.
We stopped in the park on the way back, first playing in the dirt by the fountain, then on our usual hill by the dinosaurs and playground. I had dressed him in grey pants and a grey long sleeve shirt, which is a little big, and his brown sandals. I decided he looked like buddhist August in that outfit. At 12:30 we headed home and met Carly.
August fell asleep about 1:20 and slept a little past 2:30. In the afternoon, we realized the cardboard bricks that we ordered had arrived, so Carly went down and picked them up. We spent the next hour or so putting together the bricks, while August played around us.
Carly was going to Home Plus, so we all went. In the park, I gave August the option of playground or Home Plus, and he chose Home Plus, pointing excitedly in the direction of it. Again at the other side of the park he had the choice between art museum and Home Plus. This time he chose art museum. He initially said bye bye to Carly, but as he saw her walking away across the street he changed his mind and started saying “Home Plus, Home Plus” and pointing. So we went to Home Plus. We helped a little with the shopping, but mainly looked at pets and got samples (pineapple, mandarin, and a little sausage – earlier he had apple).
We came home and there was a lot more playing – art, books (Kipper stories, Snoozers mainly), sweeping, rolling on the bed. He was also into looking out the window a lot (“people down there”, “hear tweet tweet”) and ‘helping’ sweep up the little cardboard waste pieces – whereby ‘helping’ meant sweeping them out of the pile I was trying to make.
In the evening, I read him the Leo Lionni book, Let’s Play. I paused before turning the page, and he said “pick flowers”, which was the thing the mice do on the next page. I was surprised, because we hadn’t read the book in quite awhile, and I’d never had him say any of the words in it. So I tested him, and found he could say many of the phrases in the book, like ‘read book’, ‘go swimming’, ‘play ball’, and ‘climb a tree’.
He took a nice long bath. He is totally comfortable sitting on the bottom now. In fact, today he was rolling onto his stomach and lying on the bottom. holding his head up by holding onto the side of the tub.
In hindsight, he probably didn’t have enough outside time today, as he was rather hyper inside. Ultimately stayed up until 10, or a little past, which is a long time after waking up at 2:30. Carly had gone to sleep, at least for a few minutes, and August was playing with the new cardboard bricks, naming off the animals on them, and looking out the window. He turned to me and said ‘ko-gee-lee’, and got a big grin on his face because he knew he said it correctly. That’s Korean for elephant. He also started making the elephant sound/trunk motion today. Funny how he has sort of ignored elephants all this time. The change seems to have started with the Korean book we got last week (we were reading that more today as well), and really changed yesterday when he saw the elephants at the zoo.
We were happily playing there when suddenly August had the great poop emergency of 2015. Less said about it the better, but I woke Carly up as I took August to the changing room and she helped clean up the floor while I dealt with August.
He continues to work on plurals, and has also really been emphasizing the possessive ’s’ noise. He decided the little cardboard scrap pieces belonged to me or Carly. He would pick one up and say “mama’s” or “dada’s”.
After changing him the last time, he was saying a bunch of things that I couldn’t figure out. This happens pretty regularly now, but this was 5 or 6 things in a row.
Go outside, all the letters, help with pen, shoe came off, zip dada’s zipper, feel water, have ideaS, home plus, hot sausage, ko-gee-lee
Going out:
Home:
Home Plus:
Evening: