He came down at 6:43. Took several minutes waking up on the couch, then ate his vitamin and the last of the zucchini bread. He then watched a Llama Llama episode. He paused to tell me he had a machine with a wheel on it that measured things: “I can measure size, weight, wind, speed of wind, water weight, sound…” Then back to the episode.
We left the house right at 7:40. Talked about preschool and the meetings and schedule along the way. He said something about learning at school without realizing he is learning. I listed some things I’ve seen him learn recently, like standing on one foot, walking on the cup things, using scissors, how to work with clay, and about bees.
On the way to school we talked about how he didn’t have school on Monday and it would be a Dada and Zinnie adventure day. He was excited about that. When I asked what he wanted to do he immediately said “Coffee shop!” We settled on going to Tel Aviv and playing at the beach and finding a coffee shop.
We got to class at 8:05. Before we went in he asked to look at the schedule. But when we went in the door he immediately saw the set of blocks with gears. Boom, hooked. Marion and I asked if he wanted to set up the schedule, but he just wandered back to the gears and started playing.
I worked in the library until 9:30, mainly on Sabeel stuff. At 9:30 I went to the gym where Carly’s meetup event with students from the Even Yehuda middle school and two middle schools in Tira was happening. I took photos and videos there, then followed them back to Carly’s classroom where they did some circle discussions and I took more photos. I helped get the pizza at the gate, then stayed for lunch. Told Fatin that August said he wants to go back to her house again.
I left about 11:30 to head home. As I walked towards the library I saw August exiting it with Marion and Maaian. I thought they may have been looking for me, but didn’t know if I should let him see me. The custodian who always hangs out by the library, and who doesn’t speak English, started talking to me and had me hide behind a post as August stopped to throw leaves or something down through the railing. My interpretation of what she said was that he had been crying but was okay now.
After he went around the corner I followed a bit and could hear them going down the stairs and he was okay. So I headed to the car but texted Maaian to see if everything was okay. Turned out they had been delivering a tea party invitation to Alex the fix-it man (that’s what August called him later) in the library. August hadn’t been upset. So maybe the custodian was actually telling me she thought he would cry if he saw me.
Anyway, I went home, then came to pick him up at 2:50. I first sat down on the bench outside PKA and started studying some Hebrew. But then I heard August crying in the PKB classroom. I went in and Marion and Myriam (Anna was gone again) told me that he’d just had had enough school and had been sad for the last half hour our so. When he saw me he ran to me and the first thing he said was “You weren’t in the library! Where were you?” So I think he hadn’t gotten upset at the time, but had obviously been thinking about how I wasn’t in the place where I was supposed to be. That combined with basically his first full week of preschool made it too much.
He calmed right down though and he went to the bathroom. He played with his hair in the mirror, and told me “I want my hair to grow until I die!” Or until it reached the ground, at least. I had brought the swim bag, but even after he calmed down he just wanted to walk home. We saw Marion as we walked up the stairs and she was impressed that he was singing the school bell. She then told me about how they delivered the invite, and I told her my funny story about hiding behind a post. She then told me that earlier August and Reia had been holding hands and fell and he scraped his knees (and apparently the inside of his left elbow, although we didn’t realize that until later). He acted just like he had with me on Monday. Would let her even look at it and was upset for a long time, sitting in her lap. Finally, he calmed down a little and she asked what would make it better. He said “sugary stuff”. She offered him a spoon of honey. He asked “How big?” So he and Reia both got half a teaspoon of honey.
We walked home. Stopped at the bushes on the street side of our park when he saw spider webs in the bushes. He spent several minutes picking bits of weeds and putting them in the webs, “feeding” the spiders. I saw Carly driving by and he said “Skoda mama!” He then said she was driving really fast. She wasn’t, but this morning on the way to school we had seen a car actually pass another car and speed right through the crosswalk. I hadn’t said anything, and he asked “Is this a highway?” He had clearly noticed that the car was traveling too fast.
We headed home and met Carly at the gate at 3:40. He asked her “What did you teach your students?” She told him she had taught them the words ‘monotonous’ and ‘evasive’. So she taught him what they meant as well, and for monotonous he said “Like Max and Ruby?” That was a good connection, as he knows I’ve called it ‘repetitive’. We then discussed the nuance between ‘repetitive’ and ‘monotonous’.
Carly had brought home a bunch of the leftover cheese pizza. We all ate some, and we asked him about school. He talked about playing with the gears, which apparently wasn’t too great as some kids didn’t want them takin things apart or something: “Mean kids” He said he responded: “I jumped on the table and sitted on it and crushed it.” They had carrot cookies at the tea party and Ms. Ilana came. Carly told us that there was a new middle school bench swing, but that the email that announced it then immediately said that no swinging was allowed. August and I found that funny and he had her make up other announcements, like a slide you couldn’t slide down, and a playground you couldn’t play on.
He played with the highwire, figuring out how to spin it like a jump rope. For some reason flour came up, and August said he liked plain flour. So Carly got him a little bowl with four in it and a spoon and he ate some. Went outside and made mud where he wasn’t supposed to. Carly brought him in the house and he was upset. He tripped on the kitchen rug, which was kind of rolled up, and fell down. On his own. He accused Carly: “You threw me…why did you drop me?” When he calmed down they learned about how stars are born. He was a nebula. Carly asked if he knew how black holes are made. He said “When stars die…I knowed that!” He and I did rubber stamps and I did names of his teachers, other students, etc. Carly was outside in the yard. He started playing with the vacuum cleaner and pretended to suck things up with it: tables, pillows, etc. He wanted to suck things up outside so I carried it behind him and he sucked up plants and trees and everything else.
Carly took him up for bath. We switched and I finished it. We talked about preschool in the play area and he told me that his favorite part is yoga class. We went downstairs. Carly had gotten a photo from the art teacher of August making his plate. It was the art room that he had gone to to do that.
He wanted a popsicle and first we got out one that we had made. He tasted it and said it just tasted like water. We got it to thaw a bit so it would actually come out, and it was indeed jut a water popsicle. I then remembered that last time he had had one of our popsicles he had wanted to just try a water one. He was disappointed until I told him we also had a berry popsicle from the store. He actually ate a few bites of the ice one and then of course devoured the beer one.
We had talked about the schedule and how he didn’t have school for three days. He said “Mama, let’s go to sleep, wait until the morning, and have three days off!” He and I read Big Dog, Little Dog a
nd a couple chapters of The 78-Story Treehouse. We took him up and got him ready for bed. I left them at 8:50 and he was asleep after a few minutes.