At 4am August tried to get up: “It’s 4 o’clock. Time to get up.” Carly miraculously got him back to sleep. Carly got him up before she headed to work. When she left he was choosing a show to watch on Netflix but was a machine breaking down and couldn’t choose. He seemed to be thinking about choosing Max and Ruby. So I chose it for him. He liked Max and Ruby. Some good laughter at first. The stories are really repetitive though. He watched a few stories before being done. He wanted crackers and had a few. I made him a pancake with jam but he wouldn’t touch it. He asked to play Piano Maestro. I finished learning “Just the Way You Are” and we started on another song. He watched another couple of Max and Ruby stories. I exercised. I had made a pancake for him for breakfast but he had rejected that, wanting only crackers and the occasional strawberry.
He played with the tape measure and I was teaching him how to measure things. We went upstairs and played some of the Monster design game together. I then took a shower.
While playing monsters or something he said “I’m smashing you with 19000 hammers, 1 (something), 3 guns, 2 cutlass…like a pirate…2 mechanical arms…” The guns and cutlasses like a pirate was a reference to Captain Woodenhead in The 26-Story Treehouse.
Then it was his bath. He actually played for awhile today, spelling and reading words with the letters and bouncing the bouncy ball around.
Went down stairs and he watched the Marble Machine music video and ate his leftover honey and peanut butter sandwich. He stacked the chair full of pillows and called it the “pile chair”. It was a machine. Good until he tried pulling off the cushion.
He went to the bathroom and saw the vacuum cleaner and asked if I had tried to fix it in Korea. Been rather awhile since we’ve discussed the two vacuums and how the other one was loud and I moved the bag-holding clip from that one to this one. We made a strawberry and mango smoothie and drank that, then played with the kaleidoscope cards for long time. I did dishes and explained we needed to clean before we left so the house would be clean when we got home. Instead, he took out the keys to the piano. He wanted me to play more Piano Maestro but I made him clean up the keys first. We found the last key back under the couch and I used his ‘bassoon’ to get it out. He said “Thank you bassoonie.”
Worked on the Bridal March in Piano Maestro. He made me pause when he went to bathroom. He turned on the option so I could see the notes and explained “Dada, I wanted to turn on the note thing cuz it will make it a little easier.”
We got outside and he did some of his music machine. In the car I introduced him to podcasts. Carly had sent me an article with podcasts for kids and I had subscribed to most of them. We started listening to Tumble Science podcast episode called “Meow of the Misunderstood Cat”. August was hooked and after a minute asked me to add it to his playlist. I explained podcasts were different from songs (different app, for one) and we realized we could star them instead. The episode debated whether cats are evil or misunderstood and explained the science of their behavior along the way. August predicted ‘misunderstood’ and was excited when that was what the kid judges decided.
We then listened to a Story Pirates episode (“How Do You Play Day/Samantha”) and he wanted that starred too. The first story was particularly funny, too.
We got to Winter Lake Park. Parked on the west side this time by the wooden playground. He first wanted the one with his spiderweb (where he first started the buying things from stores game) so we walked over there, about 2:45. He first talked about his shopping list at one store. He asked “Do you have your equipment on?” That would be the equipment needed to climb on his spider web. When he bought stuff he asked “How long’s the receipt?” At Tiv Taam he always likes to see how long the receipt is.
We wandered around from toy structure to toy structure. Each was a different store. One had appliances (August informed me that he had to restock his web each time – the stuff from last time wasn’t there anymore), another had comfy things, another had fruits and vegetables. At the web he asked “Do you want to sit inter chair that has water in it? It will be fun. Cuz you will get your bottom wet.” And “I baked a cake. You can have some if you eat healthy food.” He said something had “your favorite trumpet in it”. I said “Miles Davis?” He replied “Oh! That’s my favorite band!…We should listen to Miles Davis.” He climbed over the web and was doing things he hasn’t done before. He realized this and said “That means I’m a better spider than last time…it’s because I’ve grown more…yeah, because I practiced.” He then made fruit salad and vegetable salad, then we ate those before eating the chocolate and peanut butter cakes he had baked.
We went over to tree-shaped spinning thing. This place had a movie theater in it showing a monster movie. We had rockets and “firelocks” and were apparently sucked into the movie theater and had to fight monsters.
That lasted a good time then we ended up back at his web. We did some Drops and he said “It doesn’t matter if a boy is called a yeled (girl). Can you call me a yeled?” I said I could, to which he replied “then you’ll turn me into a girl?” I said I don’t think my words are that magical. We then talked about heading over to the wooden playground. August said he the ground was wood, too. I said the ground wasn’t wood. He said he had turned it wood: “I did. I suppose my words are that magic.”
We walked to the wooden playground. On the swings for a bit, then he wanted to climb on the big structure. He helped push the stroller across the sand: “There’s our tracks. We can follow it on the way back…see where we go-to”. We did two big laps of the big wooden structure. There was a part I couldn’t really crawl through with the backpack so I went down and met him father along and he went through the net bridge on his own. He played railings like instruments (“Harps” he said a few times). He requested I take a video of it, but a worked started sawing something at the same time.
Earlier we had joked about going into the wood, and during our second lap he suddenly remembered his “wood power” and we were termites in the wood.
Finally, we were getting ready to go. On the way to the bathroom a boy on a skateboard calmly rolled by. August said “He should be careful on the skateboard.” We used the bathroom and he said “Thank you!” when I turned off the water. When I flushed he said “Oh! That’s a nice toilet.” Then “I WONDER how that flushes down to where the pee and poop goes…I wonder where…It has to go somewhere, dada.”
The sun was setting and we were close to the big pedestrian bridge, so we walked up on that. He got out of the stroller, and somehow, right there in the middle of the bridge, it turned into a big imagining session: “I turn posts into people…you run the posts through it and…it just rains people…watch this! Aargh! People coming down!” And “The people that are sick or dead go into the turbine and it shoots them up into space…to the sun…and when the sun is full it turns the dead people into NEW People!” The sun then came down and went into the ocean. And kept going and going. And was cooling down. And then he was just lying on the floor, looking down through the boards at the lights and cars below. He said “Yum! This wood is edible!…I licked it…I’ll justick it one more time!” And then he was a machine – a disappearing turbine, actually – that when you put food in it made the bridge disappear. We then fell down onto the cars, and were actually in a car, and the cars disappeared.
The sun was down and it was getting cooler so we put on his second coat. On the way back to the car we walked by the skatepark. I
asked if he saw the skateboarders. He said “I HATE skateboarding…because it’s so dangerous. I’m not gonna skateboard until I’m 100.” Hilarious. And I don’t know where this strong opinion of skateboarding came from. He was then pointing out all the kids not wearing helmets.
We went back to the car and left at 5:25. We listened to another episode of Tumble Science called “Voyage of the Ocean Trash”. Starred that as well. During the intro August spoke up and asked if we could ever clean all the plastic out of the ocean – right before the girl they were talking to on the podcast asked the exact same thing. At the end of the episode he out of nowhere asked if I remembered the words to “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” He has had slight exposure to that song (I think we may have watched the video once, but months ago – perhaps Korea) but no idea why it came to mind. I didn’t, but I asked if he wanted to hear it. We don’t have it, but asking Siri to play it worked. We finished listening to it as we got home at 5:50.
They nursed and we got mac and cheese for dinner and he watched one episode of Max and Ruby. He and I then read half of Max Axiom Electricty. At which point he got up and started chanting in a robot voice “electricity” over and over. At one point hiding his head under the blanket while he did so. He got back up on the couch and we listened to “Do you want to build a snowman” and “Electricty” on my phone. He wanted me to play more Dust Buster but GarageBand wasn’t working. We read the rest of the Electricity book, then Carly took him up to get ready for bed. He said “I’ll dream about toothpaste and brushing my teeth.” I left them about 7:45.
Listening to podcasts:
Winter Lake Park:
Shadow:
