He slept a long time, but was rather restless. He said “blueberry brains” once in his sleep.
I woke him up at 7:25. 12 and a half hours of sleep. He went to the bathroom right away. Got his clothes off, and as we left the bathroom his first words of the morning were “I want some naked time.” Downstairs we took a photo of him with a vitamin on his head for mama. He then told me “You should count my yawns, too.” He watched one Ollie and Moon story (honey from Scotland) and then got ready to go.
Stepped outside to realize that Carly had accidentally taken his bike with her in the car when she drove to work (she was taking fruit for a party after school). Considered getting a stroller, but he wanted to walk, so off we went, at 7:57. Along the way we tried out some lemon breathe mints that we had bought some time ago. He liked them, and kept wanting more. August walked from home all the way to the end of Vatikim. I then carried him up the hill, then he walked down most of it. I picked him up when a dog was coming, then carried him a bit further across the street at the big roundabout. He then walked the last block into school.
The whole walk took 45 minutes, but only partly because of his walking speed. He also found and did things: he stopped at the little park (Tal Garden) and rode the motorcycle thing and talked about dog poop, dragged a big stick along the road, found a piece of garbage, found a flower (“best thing I found on our walk”), stopped for some Logan bread (“Can I have some Logan bread made from the friend Logan?”), played with a wire, made up a song about the wire (“what did you do, when I didn’t find you?…made that up. About the broken wire.”) and found various rocks which he then said were the hardest things in the universe until he blasted them with his laser rockets – he said he’d been blasting one of them for two years.
On campus we saw Airport Megan outside her classroom. She asked if August wanted to see her students – they were in practicing typing on computers. She opened the door for him and he was excited, but he was too nervous to get any closer.
We got to his classroom and I was able to leave at 9:15. We looked at the garden and it said library time in the morning and garden time in the afternoon. He asked to come back for garden time, saying “I love garden time.” He went and sat next to Ms. Anna in the pottery area and I was able to leave.
I worked in the library. At 10:30 they showed up for the final library time of the year. I got his “Come with us, dada!” on video this time. Ilana showed them a website called bookflix, then they watched a book called Scaredy Squirrel and a nonfiction book about squirrels. They then checked out books. No books about school this time, so he got It’s My Birthday.
Walked them back to the classroom and sat on the floor and read August’s book to him and some other kids, and then Selma’s (something like Black and White Bunny’s ABCs). Hanako was looking at her book and saw the word ‘A’ and pointed it out to August, as his name starts with A.
They didn’t need me to help with the Tea Party book, so assigned me the table with Zingo – a sort of Bingo game. Had 4 to 6 kids there constantly for an hour: August, Derin, Emmitt, Juhyeok, Reia, Omri, etc. August eventually lost interest and went and was making a ball track with Emmitt and Yaya when I left at noon. The kids had finished up a round of Zingo and Reia and Juhyeok, all on their own, cleaned up the entire game and put it in the box and put it away. I told Marion how helpful they had been.
I went and ate lunch and got a little work in (reading reports of mental health issues in Gaza) and picked him up at 12:50. He was already in the classroom, and he was being silly with Emmitt – they were talking about a potty, although I didn’t catch much. Later August told me he likes Emmitt except when he’s doing chasing games or being crazy in the treehouse.
We went up on the bench and kept eating. August eats really slowly at school. He was hungry at the library even though they had just had snack (and we had brought a loaf of the Logan bread to share for snack) and he’d barely touched his lunch. He now continued to very slowly eat more of it – mainly the granola and grapes. He refused to touch the apricot again. He didn’t like that it had been cut in half and the pit taken out. He wanted to be able to bite into it until he reached the pit, then have a teacher take it out.
He did some experiments, making “a new Mike” and a “nutting machine”. That is, a machine that made nuts. We saw Israel Cassie and I reminded him she had given us the lollipops. She was talking to someone else though, and when she was done a few minutes later he ran over to her and shouted “Thank you for the lollipops!” We talked about what he had done today and he said “This day I made that track with Yaya and Emmitt and I did that potty with Emmitt.”
He wanted to go inside to air conditioning, so we went inside the building doors, but he was still eating so we sat in the lobby. We discussed our day in Korea again, going to the children’s museum, then a coffee shop and getting a strawberry smoothie. We went inside for a little while and set up a chess set. He then used extra chess pieces and checkers pieces to fill up the whole board: “We’ll have extra pieces on here. Funny chess.”
We got to the yoga room a little early and sat outside and read his book again. He went in when his class got there. Ms. Stacy said he had the perfect shirt on (his sharks shirt) as they were going to be doing ocean stuff today. When class was over he ran out to me saying “I got a sticker cuz I did so well and I was a helper!” He wanted me to put the purple heart sticker on my shirt.
We went down to the preschool and to the Dion playground. He made rhythms on the instrument wall and then I would copy his rhythms. Maya came along and saw the sticker on my shirt and was in awe. She said that Ms. Stacy gives out those stickers for being a helper. I told her August had been the helper today.
Up at Hebrew I sat outside the room and did more reading. Hebrew class was fine. The second half they were making booklets with different pictures and words in them. He did some cutting on his own, then I helped him. He got a little upset when he had cut into one of his hats. He wanted to use the glue stick to fix it, but didn’t like my answer that it wasn’t possible that way.
Got that put away though and he rebounded. He wanted to go take a look at the PKC classroom. I was picking him up to see over a door into a storage area when Carly came along. He told her we were “Investigating” PKC.
We went to her classroom for awhile and they were acting out vocabulary words and having me guess them. Carly took him to the bathroom, then we walked to the car and got the bike. She drove home and we walked to his activity class.
He was the only kid for about 10 minutes, until Lavid showed up, along with his little sister. Before he showed up, August had heard the ice cream truck and started to get sad. I reminded him we had blueberry brains at home. Technically he had already chosen a strawberry taffy as we had walked through the middle school office with Carly. But I would have shared a berry brain with him, but we never got around to it.
At the end of activity class August saw the kids for the next class standing outside the door and he was saying things through the glass to them, like “Come in big boys and girls!”
We started walking home and stopped at the exercise area. He played a little there and we had more to eat. Then across to the busy playground for about 15 minutes. He went up to his space station area and played in there, and was impressed by the kids climbing on top of it. He was saying things like “Shalom!” through the window thing, and telling them to climb up again.
We left there, him reluctantly, at 6:10. I spotted the ice cream truck
outside the community center and I tried to be sneaky and walk around the back of the center. Almost worked, but the gates were locked on the other side. We had to walk back around, but I was able to walk close to the doorway of the building. August could have looked to the left and seen it, but he didn’t. As we walked by the treasure hunt playground he was working on remembering the number sequences: ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, etc. up to nonillions. He told me to correct him if he got it wrong.
At one point he asked me “What’s precious peace?” Later I figured out it was from Ollie and Moon and he meant ‘precious piece’ of something. By the Israeli school he found a pencil and took it home. At home he said something about the dog poop that had been by our gate for a few days. He had noticed yesterday that it was gone.
We were home at 6:45. Carly had started boiling eggs for us as we walked home, as he said that was what sounded good. He ate an egg and mushrooms and milk for dinner. He watched two stories of Ollie and Moon.
I got him in his bath then Carly took over. Carly had made him oatmeal before his bath as he said he was still hungry, and he had a little more after. He told me “Ms. Anna said she’s bored giving me challenges. Now I get challenges from Ms. Marion.” We read chapter 8 of the Magic Treehouse book.
He was tired and as I carried him upstairs he talked about having “Tapuz” – the first time he’s referred to ‘apple’ in Hebrew, I think. I left them at 8:55. She brushed his teeth and he was asleep in ten minutes.