He woke me up with “Dada?” at 6:18. He went down with Carly and they started reading Hilo 3 a couple minutes later. They read about 40 pages before she headed to work. He watched a bit of a video on how candy is made, then I found one on a loom. Watched part of that. He requested toast and ate it on the floor, then typed on my iPad. He then became a millipede/centipede that wanted to fly (like on Julius Jr.) and had me inventing things for it, and then a caterpillar that was eating everything in the house.
He watched Julius Jr. and I exercised. He asked why Mars is named Mars and I explained the name, which ended with us discuss different gods and he liked the example of Atlas holding up the world. Played some Duplos and he told me “Dada, I was made inside a computer…The people that ran the computer made-ed me. So I have a computer inside me…do you think that is real?…Why can’t we go inside a computer?”
We went upstairs and was going to play GroRecycling on his iPad but suddenly his iPad had an activation lock on it, which I’ve never seen. Took a few minutes to figure that out, then we played the game together and he changed to one Timmy Time story and then the Wild Kratts worm episode. I took my shower. Remembering the Eretz museum he asked “What bellows mean?” “What they call it a blacksmith? Because he was black?”
Gave him a quick bath then we worked on our shopping list and had some peanut butter crackers. He asked “What wee bit mean? My battery will last a wee bit.” He chose the coconut chew Larabar to try today from our iHerb order and he spotted the bag of recycling I had set by the door earlier and said we should do recycling. I thanked him for reminding me and he said “I like it when I know things I need to remind you.”
Outside he hit the fence with his stick and asked “Is this what they used when they didn’t have electronic beat machines?” And he surprised me by asking “Dada, was there a time when there was one human on the Earth or not?” Apparently he had also asked Carly this question. We talked about evolution and how it doesn’t work that way.
He played in the yard and let me walk up the block to get his bike out of the car. We then walked over to the mall. In the grocery store he spotted strawberry yogurt and said it was funny that they had the thing we ate when we first moved into our house in Israel, and he asked why Ada left the food for us. So there’s one memory that’s sticking.
We stopped and got strawberries from the table in the Friday market on our way back and were home by 12:40. He asked “What does modify mean? Do you want to modify my battery?”
As I was putting away groceries he was being whiney for peach juice and he was playing with the broken cabinet door. It ended with having a timeout on the couch. When I was done I asked him to choose a cup for juice, but he spotted the popsicle makers instead. So we made a popsicle. We then had some juice, and he wanted to play Musyc. He said he was going to make me something boring. He made three circle dispensers that just dropped circles off the screen – so no music or sound. It was my punishment for giving him a timeout and not letting him do things.
We watched the Wild Kratts honey badger episode and learned a lot from that as he ate meatballs for lunch and I got us prepared to make cookie dough. We made the dough and I realized that I wouldn’t be able to knead it properly with my cast. Which was okay as we were going to refrigerate the dough and finish the cookies after dinner. He did a pretty good job of kneading it on his own though.
We cleaned up a bit and finally left at 2:15. Had thought we might see some of the Purim festivities at the school but we were later than I expected. Okay as we had had fun. In the car he had taken his stick, and he wanted a super music song. Found Bjork’s “Innocence” on his playlist and he was dancing to it with his stick. As we got to the school he talked about how he is good at music. I let him out of the car but then told him I wanted to back the car up a bit. He was a bit nervous as he stood on the sidewalk and watched me start up and move the car without him.
As we went in he told me all his powers. There were a lot of them including “Cactus power, breathing in smoke power…” He said “Now you know all my killing powers…” but assured me that they were just for killing monsters and animals that wanted to eat people. He then asked “Why do they call it the universe? Why is there that ‘uni’ in it?” Speaking of powers, earlier he had told me that his everything power doesn’t really exist because you always learn things.
We went to Carly’s classroom. We had brought the sewing kit and tape so Carly could further fix the beanbag. We were going to drop it off, then go up to the exercise equipment towards the studio as he had asked several times to go there so he could go faster than light again. But once in the classroom he wanted to watch her sew. And he played on the stool that can zoom up and down. He really liked the purple thread, but Carly wanted the red. Carly said she was going to see his shirt to his arm. He said “That’s funny.”
I went to the library on my own. Picked out a book on Greek mythology called Z for Zeus and found a graphic novel called Zita the Spacegirl, which might be a good followup to Hilo. When I returned they had the India board game that Carly had found under her sink. I did two notes of the Jaws song and he instantly said “I’m scared!” Haven’t even done it for months. Funny how much he reacts to it, and it’s not like I really traumatized him with it.
He said to Carly “Let’s learn more about people that use swords.” And he used the plastic sword to poke off my hat. He and I played with the India game and he stacked the game pieces on top of the globe. I offered to help, I think after I bumped the globe with my foot and knocked them off at one point and he said “And I want to do all of it myself. It’s kind of that thing.” He then really enjoyed wearing a crown from the costume box. He was asking constant questions of Carly – what she used things for, what she taught her students, etc. They got the crosses out of the box and did a parade and he wanted her to teach her about the Crusades. We left at 3:50. He said “I had so much fun in tour classroom.” So we had kind of planned to move more quickly today and get to school early enough to see some of the Purim stuff (it turned out the parade had been at 1), but we had a fun day nonetheless.
We drove home and Carly suggested cooking and eating the beet greens. She said “They’re magical.” To which August replied “But Dada said that magic doesn’t exist.” He was excited about doing the job of spinning the greens in the spinner. Then played Musyc. He asked “What definition mean?” Kinda some meta-etymology there, asking for meanings of words about the meanings of words. Ate the greens, then Carly found the popsicle he and I had made earlier. He got to eat it. His hands were cold though so he asked for the nursing mittens and wore those.
He helped Carly clean up duplos. I looked at Airbnb for places to stay in BC this summer. He used his headphones and watched Sarah and Duck and peanut butter crackers while she vacuumed. I tried to get him to read books but he went and got Carly to finish cookies. He told her “I have a health meter in my body and it is at half so I can eat cookies until it’s down to zero.” That is, the popsicle had taken it half down, but he could still eat more unhealthy food today.
Carly finished the kneading for us, then he and I used a cup as a cookie cutter and made the cookies. When I turned on the oven August went and asked Siri on the iPad “Siri, how long do snickerdoodles take to bake?” We also made the cream cheese and chocolate filling. We made most of the cookies into the traditional triangle shape. I did two with jam, the rest with chocolate since we made plenty of
filling and that was the preference of two-thirds of the family. August found the triangles difficult so started doing different shapes and made one cookie into a square and it ended up looking like a flower. He also made a sort of hotdog one.
When we were done and they were in the oven he said “I was helping you cuz your hand is broken. I was helping extra.” He was being a worm on the couch (from Wild Kratts – and he had me using a slime detector and spraying him with slime so he wouldn’t dry out during the day). We read some Hilo, then had a cookie. Then Skyped with my parents. He remembered that my mom really liked cinnamon rolls and snickerdoodles – when he was supposed to tell them what we made, those were the first things he said.
Carly took him up and I skyped with them for a few more minutes, discussing summer plans. When I went up he sang a cool song to Row Your Boat including words like “watchy, row your boat, brush your teeth”. I left them at 8:35. They nursed, but he asked Carly to tuck him in, then he fell asleep on his own.
He had also asked Carly to teach him about Palestinians earlier in the day.
Yesterday we picked the new Larabars up at school. He tried a peanut butter and chocolate chip yesterday, and a chocolate coconut chew one today.