He was up about 6. I was up a few minutes later and heard him asking “Where’s dada?” Came out to find him lying face down on the rug in the play area. Downstairs he played Metamorphabet and of course had us look at ‘kaleidoscope’, which is one of his favorites and I helped him with the Q quilt puzzle. When Carly left it was tough on him and I twice had to haul him upstairs as he started stomping on the floor, and taking him upstairs just made things harder. Got calmed down and we played Sesame Street Play games.
He didn’t want to play Ankle Detector because from the description he could tell it would be “Too ticklish”. So we settled on one where you use towels as rock to get you across lava. We went upstairs to play it. We played for several minutes (good jumping with two feet practice, which they were working on in the class yesterday), then he was counting by 5s. He got up to 100 on his own, then needed a little help getting going on the 100s, then made it to around 200 before saying “Counting by 5 machine broke down”. I realized that he didn’t really know what lava looks like, so asked if he wanted to see a video. He had also been calling it guava (not clear if it was intentional or not), so then he asked for “a video of people getting burned up in guava”. We watched a few videos of lava destroying cans of Coke and ravioli and an iPhone, and a volcanologist getting close to lava then developed a game where he was lava and I was random things that the lava would burn. It started with me being things like Coke cans, but then went to houses and trees and stacks of paper and more trees and shelves and anything else he could think of. I had music playing and a Nine Inch Nails song came on and he started doing a fast dance to it and called it the lava dance.
We went downstairs at 9:50 and ate some of the bars we had bought and listened to the”I’m scared” song from StoryBots. He talked about it, telling me what was going on in the video, I think. He then had me act out someone being scared of sounds at a zoo. He was a dinosaur, lizard, snake.
Then back upstairs where I took a shower. He had watched the Bermuda Triangle problem on Peg + Cat and told me about it. We were then taking care of animals on his bed: spider, lizard, snake. Our getting sick scenario for a whale involved islands that were polluting the ocean. August’s solution? “Beep. I turned on a machine that destroys islands that pollute too much.” And then “Turned on a machine that kills germs cuz anyone doesn’t sell antibiotics.”
Next up: “Now the salamander.” “I live here and the foxes live right here…the foxes’ door is right next door…” The Fox was allergic to things: “something made my den fill with water and now mold is growing in there.” “One machine kills all the mold and another machine sucks up all the water and another machine cuts all the fur…it’s power is apples and it needs 100 apples.” It went on from there, which I got on video. Then he was bees: “And the tigers don’t like me so they sent fur to me to make me allergic all the time.” And scorpions. It was quite a selection of animals.
We went downstairs for an early lunch. I had pita and hummus while he had peanut butter and jelly on pita. We listened to Hebrew together and he would repeat and ask about words. Then some TodoMath. He worked on the 100 board puzzle. Which is a good challenge for him as spatial reasoning seems to be a challenge for him as he gets into puzzles. From there it was to the paper: “Could you draw objects and I’ll connect them to make a machine?” He drew a machine then: “Dada. Could you write math in the spaces?” He said it was a walrus machine and explained how it worked. We worked on counting by 3s, then he started a new picture on a new piece of paper and said it was a whale machine. We then did more acting out lava burning things.
We read some Hilo, then I got him outside. We did watering and played. I had the ipad set up outside playing Peg + Cat songs. He explained one song to me: “This is from where Flat Woman is flattening Bany Fox’s exercise ball…because Flat Woman likes flat things.”
We got out on a walk with no real goal or agenda. We went up through downtown, taking some of the last little streets in the south half of Even Yehuda that we haven’t walked on before. We went to the ‘Roller Skating Grounds’ to find out what that was. Unlike most of the possibly-interesting things listed in Even Yehuda, this place actually existed. Not too impressive though. It was a small outdoor concrete roller hockey arena. August played on the concrete bleachers, saying he was a machine that was supposed to know all of Beethoven’s songs but it only knew Ode to Joy. We went in on the court a bit, but he bonked his head on the metal railing a bit and wanted to go.
We walked into town, stopping briefly at a basic outdoor stage area in a grass triangle, then finding the dentist’s office and taking a photo of its sign. As we walked by the pizza place (it and the restaurant next to it are about the only things open) they had music playing loudly, and we said hi to the guy when we saw him outside.
We continued on towards home and stopped at the park to play. Planned to stay there until Carly shower up, but then August needed to go to the bathroom. So we headed home and were here at 4:30. I mixed up my water drink, which we haven’t had since Korea. When August saw the bottle he said “Huh? What are you doing? Water’s supposed to be clear. That’s red.”
Carly showed up a few minutes later as he was finishing in the bathroom. They went outside and I did the dishes. They came back in and discovered that the green mangoes are actually good. So Carly made the mango lassee. We drank that, then he was chanting and reciting all sorts of numbers. He wanted to play TodoMath. Eventually I said yes, saying “You are bursting with numbers.” which he found funny. I asked how long he wanted to play, and he said for a really long time. I asked if he could quantify that, and he replied “QUANTIFY it?” I explained, and he said 2077 minutes. 2077 is a new favorite number it seems as he uses it all the time when trying to come up with a big number.
Then a rough spell. While eating he bit his tongue. Then I took him up to a shower. He was really upset there was no mama. I got him to ask her to come up. Once he was in the shower she snuck off, but he realized and got upset and she had to come back up. Then, when I let him go get the bed wet he was disappointed by his rockets on the bed. I tried to get them to fly but he said they wouldn’t: “Broken…someone cut the pieces.” He sulked for a minute, but then went back to the shower, got wet again, and made better rockets.
After that we went downstairs as he wanted to play the Space app. He talked Carly into doing the distance thing all the way out to Voyager 1. He taught Carly that Uranus is tilted, Voyager 1 exists, and there was something else.
Before bed Carly talked to him about doing a child sponsorship to help someone else out. He was, at first, opposed: “But then we’ll have less stuff!” He chose an older girl named Josephine in Zambia. As we tried to get registered he got too tired and was ready to head to bed. Up in bed we got ready and I said that tomorrow we could learn about lava and Zambia (and pointed out that they rhyme). He said “Learn about lava first.” He was asleep by 7:20.
His serious explaining face:
Knuckle he scraped in the dirt:
At the roller skating grounds:
Watching the blender:
