Between 12 and 1 at night he got up and went to the door. Kind of stood there, then Carly called him back. She asked if he needed to go to the bathroom and he said yes. So she got up with him. When they came back she tried to put him back to sleep on the lower bed. He sat up and said “Sleep up with dada. I like him.” So he climbed up on the bed and promptly fell back to sleep between us. Later there was a huge peel of thunder that woke me for a minute.
He woke up at 6:30. When I sat up for a moment he came up on the bed and stole my pillow. Downstairs he played with the frog instrument and said “Dada, I love this frog thing.” He used the stick like a magic wand and made me disappear and reappear.
Carly almost had a window for walking to work, but then it was starting to rain harder and harder. So we drove her to work, which was a good decision as it was pretty hard for awhile. Finished the Story Pirates episode we had started yesterday. Back home he was a bit grumpy. Managed to read A Snowy Day. Then he watched Max and Ruby. I heated up some apple muffins and buttered them but he only ate half of one. As we put Monster Physics on his iPad he said “I want to put monster physics on her work iPad so she can show her students that game.” He played that for awhile.
He told me “Today we should go to science center at IKEA. The one mama went to. You know. You know. You said that.” Confusing until I realized he meant ‘Haifa’, not ‘IKEA’. He ate noodles and broccoli for breakfast, then we did some Piano Maestro. We went upstairs. He asked “Dada, could you be someone playing with a giraffe made out of fragile papier mache?” He was referring to the little wooden giraffe what we weren’t sure what it was made out of yesterday. He watched Kipper and I took a shower. Gave him a short shower. After his shower he asked “When you and mama have jobs could you stay with me?” We talked about it and how preschool was still 7 months away and we could prepare for it in the meantime. I asked if he’d like to visit the preschool classroom a few times to see what it was like. He liked that idea. I also said I’d be volunteering at the preschool so I’d be there sometimes. He said “But mama said they’re only the same age”. I told him that just applies to the students.
Back downstairs he remembered Toca Store and we played three rounds of that. He went and played his piano and made up a song and told me “It’s called ‘Changes Automatically’” He did another one and when I asked what that was he made up a word. I asked what it was again and he explained “Its a French word.”
We left for town at 11:30. Parked just behind the library, which was nice as it was raining pretty hard. I carried him to the entrance to the library. It was closed. Supposed to be open until 12:30, but a sign said it closed at 11:45 today. It was 11:46. We looked at the gutter pipes and other pipes for a minute, speculating what they were for.
Then we decided to walk to Gutale for lunch. As I carried him he made up a song to the tune of “Skip to My Lou”: “Down through the pipes, down through the ground…” I think it was about the water, at first at least. Then it turned into “Up into the air, up into the sky…” and got more fanciful as it was up into other things. Finally he switched to “Right into…” and was going to all sorts of things that he saw and thought of: solar system, etc.
And then another shock: Gutale was closed. Under renovation. We decided to walk back to the other coffee shop, Malkin. Got our usual table and ordered the alfredo pasta, hot chocolate for August, and a latte for me. While we were waiting we went and looked at the antique sewing machine in the corner. August really liked it and I explained how it worked. We could turn the handle and see it go up and down. Anyway, he went back to it a couple times. The food was good and August loved his hot chocolate. He used a spoon to eat the foam off the top, then scoop out the chocolate at the bottom. Then we used the straw from his water bottle to drink the rest. It was so much that he had enough and let me drink the rest of it. He wandered back to the sewing machine and I was watching him gently play with it, turning the wheel. A woman that worked there though saw him and started yelling at him. Another woman joined in. When I got him and brought him back over to the table he looked at them in shock and then the woman rather patronizingly told him it was sharp, like a knife, and showed him where the kid toys were, etc. Rather scared him and he was ready to leave. Of course, the ironic thing was that there was no actual needle in the sewing machine, and apparently the women didn’t notice that. Also, I had already noticed a difference from Korea, where in coffee shops after we bought something we were almost always left along. Here they are always checking in, and a total of four people interacted with us. Good for learning some Hebrew (I learned “Is everything okay?”, which is just ‘everything’ and ‘okay’ together as a question. Both words I know, but hadn’t heard them asked that way), but not so good for a quiet, private moment in a coffee shop.
Anyway, we walked back to the car. Still raining. By the library we watched the water running off the paved area by the playground and then going into a small tree area where it was actually absorbing into the ground after making a little stream. Talked about runoff and infiltration.
Got to the car at 1:25. There, he asked “Dada, why were the Berenstain Bears written back before there were iPads?” Then a cool question: “What did people first invent?” Followed by “How can people study volcanos?” Because volcanos are so hot. We discussed and tried to answer each the best we could.
We drove a bit and listened to Story Pirates. He was then being a donut machine. We stopped at the school at 1:45. He looked up at the screen and saw the Story Pirates logo, which is a skull and crossed pencils. He asked “Is the pirate flag to say ‘Aargh, we’re pirates’?” Which is an awesome question. As we walked with the umbrella he was being a sunflower. He said he got his water through his hands as he held them out to get the rain.
At the library we went back and got a few books. He wanted to play on the computer but a class was coming into that room. We went out to a bench. Kind of loud as there were high schoolers in the library. He said “Please” and wanted to be picked up for a minute. He looked out into the center of the building and started talking about a solar-powered marshmallow machine. We read a Cam Jansen book (Pizza Shop Mystery). Then we did the study-a-picture-then-answer-questions-game at the back. He really got into studying the picture and talking through what he saw: people, what they were doing, their clothes, what they carried, colors of things, objects. We then got a second book and just did the picture thing out of that one. We realized we hadn’t really studied their faces, so we started doing that as well.
Suddenly, there was a flash of lightning followed by a huge clap of thunder. Kids throughout the library started screaming. Figured it hit the school someplace, and turns out Carly saw sparks off the fence outside her window. School got out and put the books away and played with a toy spider, then went and found Carly. Along the way he sang a new mystery tune. He said “I’m pretty sure it’s from Kipper when Arnold goes up to the sky in his balloon. I’m pretty sure he has ice cream.”
With Carly he asked “What did you teach your students?” They then played school, taking turns being teacher. He got her gavel and put it on a chair, then started hitting it and said “Order in the court! Order in the court! You stole dada’s workbook!” We had a trial and both presented our sides. He eventually let her off.
They played more school and printed things.
We got home at 4:10. He said “I want you to put me to sleep. It’s my baby’
s naptimes, remember?” I went up and had some work time as I wanted to finish some stuff before going to Jerusalem tomorrow. They did dot painting and made a generator. I came down to him at 7. We went upstairs and played with the kaleidoscope cards. He was saying things like “Do you like how the pink and the square things go to get her?” “Mine’e gonna be a nice complex one.” In the bathroom he had noticed the toilet paper holder under the roll was empty so he went and got three rolls out and filled it.
He also tried to convince me to let him have a snack: “Could I have a little snacky snack? I ate-ed SOME dinner. Talk to mama, please.” Carly came up and he was asleep by 8.
Earlier in the car he had also asked “Can we eat stars?” That led to a discussion of black holes – a new concept for him. He asked “Can a black hole fill up?”