He was up around 5:45. Not really fully awake as Carly came in and nursed him and he was close to going back to sleep and no hurry to get out of bed. He followed Carly around a bit, but then got upset when she needed to go downstairs and get ready. I tried to distract him, but ended up having to calm him on the couch. He was able to do that and waited for her to nurse again. I then got Wizard School set up on his iPad and he finally accepted it and we made a picture of a dog. He said “Let’s buy the 1 and the 0 because 10 is the dog’s favorite number.”
Carly left and we read some Plumdog. I tried turning on the heater and after awhile realized it wasn’t heating. Someone had turned the temperature down to 17 yesterday. But then when I turned it up it didn’t seem to be working either. Spent some time tinkering around with that, comparing to the one upstairs and going outside. August enjoyed following me. Eventually we went back to Plumdog and it started working after a couple minutes. In Plumdog the dog is left alone at one point and August started acting it out: “I’m a baby mouse…can you leave the baby mouse alone…can you be a dada mouse going to work?” In the evening I realized that August is almost always pretending to be quiet animals: squirrels, cats, mice, shrews, hedgehogs…probably because he dislikes loud dogs so much.
There was a lot more acting out of Plumdog, then he played Sound Rebound and other music apps and I exercised. The leaving games continued with squirrels: “Could you be Dada squirrel going to the grocery store?” And pretending to get a toy though the mail slot (which happens in the book). We read four chapters of Magic Treehouse #11. We collected acorns and other nuts, then he played the toy piano and said “If you press the keys the acorns fly out…up to our pile.”
We went up and I took a shower while he watched Sarah and Duck. His bath went well again, playing mainly with the squirt cars and cups today, and a little letter spelling. He was grumpy at the end though as I washed a bit of his hair. Out in the play area he played with the drying rack, knocking it over, moving it around a bunch, and putting it back up. He came over and said “Splat! I splatted my bad mood on you.” I asked “From your bath?” He had been playing quietly and I didn’t realize he was really being grumpy. “Yep.”
I loaded laundry and he saw an iHerb box with a QR code on it. He said “Go to that website. Is that a QR code?” He reminded me the bad mood was on me, then when I was pretending to be grumpy he said “Do you like me? It seems like you don’t like me…Do you still have mad?”
We had had cheese and crackers and vegenaise before his bath, so I didn’t know how hungry he would be for lunch. We went downstairs and made a smoothie: banana, mango, and mixed fruit. As he waited he wanted mango, so I thawed four bites for him. Then four more. Then two more. After that and the smoothie I figured he definitely didn’t need pizza right away so we held off on that.
We drank our smoothie and listened to the Smithereen’s Especislly for You. He went and played toy piano, then used the keyboard on GarageBand. He was humming along to his improv, then playing with long notes and sustain: “I was doing whole notes.”
I went outside to put the glass in the door of the bookshelves, but didn’t make it far at all. August came out, picked up the screwdriver, and scratched the side of the cabinet. I got upset and took him inside. He was mainly upset when I said we couldn’t play any more iPad, etc. until the evening. We finally sorted all that out and calmed down and he picked Berenstain Bears and the New Baby and he had me read it in both Spanish and English. Realized that like Peppa Pig there are two different stories about how they get their house. In this book it says that Papa Bear made the house in the tree. In a different book they move into it and it is already a house that needs to be fixed up. Then read some Clementine. There was mention of gummy worms and August sang a “Yeah gummi worms” chant/song and was a gummy worm machine.
Had a little more mango, the read Berenstain Bears and the Double Dare. We finally left at 2:25. We got in the car and he requested the song “Constellations”, which we found from one of those Skype videos, then he yelled “One! I spotted a cat right there.” He had spotted a cat up on a fence. We drove to school, but as we got close he was enjoying listening to music and I asked if he wanted to keep driving. He said yes and we drove up through Even Yehuda a ways. Found an odd park/play area composed of painted tires and a house with an unseemly number of Greek/Roman-inspired statues and vases around it. He said he wanted to head to school, and we made it just in time as he almost fell asleep.
We got there a little before 3 and so it was starting to get busy in the courtyard area. We saw Celeste and a student that knows August. But August said “No time!” and claimed a sucking thing was pulling us away. It pulled us down through the elementary school, then downstairs, then back to the kindergarten rooms where we looked at fish they had in various containers outside.
Then to the library, where the “pulling” took him to the to computers. Distracted him from that though and we got a big stack of Berenstain Bears books and Magic Treehouse books. He grabbed one that was about polar bears – it was number 31 or something like that – and we got that as well. We went and found a couple girls in the winter wonderland area, so went to the aisle over and sat on beanbags. Over in the kids area he had spotted something: “A menorah!” He knew it from the Peg + Cat Hanukkah episode. Next to it were three dreidels. We took one back with it and he was figuring out how to spin it. I was taking a video when suddenly something fell on him. It was a black piece of cloth that was dropped through the shelves by a girl we would learn was named Rosie and in 1st grade (her sister was in 3rd grade and reading a book called Amulet).
They started playing by throwing/passing it through the shelves. She came over and we talked to her and they started playing with pillows. They gathered pillows from the benches and other beanbag areas. Luckily almost no one else in the library (and school is over before break – tomorrow is a half day that is basically a party day), although I reminded them of library voices several times. As they gathered pillows he said “Wherever you go, I will go!”
They made a chair out of the beanbag chairs and pillows and took turns sitting in it. He said “we’re going to live here forever!” While he was sitting in the chair she sat on the ‘arm’ of it and sort of hugged him and said “You are a good friend.” They kept playing for quite awhile. While looking at the beanbags August read the tag and said “It has the same Hebrew word like Ilana’s house.”
Rosie took him over to the kids room and showed him the big elephant. She was about to climb the shelves to get it down but I got it down for them. They were playing with it and a pillow, carrying them on their shoulders and Carly came and spied on them, Rosie’s mom, Sunita, came and got Rosie and we all headed out. We put the pillows away together, then checked out a good pile of extra books for the winter break.
August was kind of sad to stop playing with Rosie, but happy to see Carly in her room. We carried our iHerb order and the box with August’s Christmas present in it out to the car and were home at 4:15.
They nursed, and he asked Carly “Did you have a good day at school?” He had some dinner, then Carly walked over to the store. We kept eating, then played Wizard School, Carly came home. We said something about Hanukkah and joked about it, Seinfeld-style. August copied me: Five more days!” With his hands apart like me, Carly had gotten a chunkier kind of hummus and August liked it. She cooked beet greens and he ate it, He says he really lik
es them.
I was spinning him around and getting us dizzy, then we read Berenstain Bearskin books: Junk Food, Blame Game, part of Too Much Pressure. He wanted to send messages to Korea Megan, After a couple minutes he said”I’m not going to send her keys anymore. It will get boring if I just send keys.”
I saw on Facebook that Gaynelle Derr, who had taught English at MTHS when I was there, had passed away. She’s dealt with severe diabetes for a long time, so shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but still a tough one. Jon Ummel had already passed away a couple years ago. Breysse has retired, Kinnear and Franklin are at different schools, Isakson is in New York, and Falk has moved on to admin. So White, Ellinger, and DeMiero are the only English teachers still there from when I was there.
Carly took him upstairs and got him to brush his teeth and go to the bathroom. I went up and helped put on pajamas. I tried to get him to kiss me instead of vice versa and he said “I don’t like kisses. I never do kisses. Even when I’m a grown up. Kisses are icky.” So hilarious. I asked what he would dream about and he said “castles”. I left them by 6:45 and he was asleep by 7.
Licking me:
Fish:
Dreidel:
Chair:
Trying to get the elephant:
