Carly had just said to me “I’m leaving now” at 7:07 when we heard the door and August call “Mama!” So she went up with him for awhile before she headed to work. He was coughing a lot this morning and then threw up in my hands at one point. Just seemed to be gag reflex, and he later told me he had a bit of zucchini bread stuck in his throat. He watched Magic School Bus and one Ollie and Moon. He remembered that claw toy form yesterday and requested a claw toy sometime. May a robotic claw… Carly suggested some Gatorade, so we got some. At first he was disappointed there was no blue, and we talked about going to Tiv Taam on our way to Ra’anana Park to get blue Gatorade. Eventually though he decided to have lemon, and the topic was dropped. We discussed when it is okay and not okay to say ‘poop’ and other such words, and he said it was “Still confusing.” But we ended up playing the poop tea game, from Vivian and Colin last summer, and he was laughing a lot. I ended up being dung beetles so they would like the tea. At one point he said “I have any time of disgusting tea, so I definitely have throw up tea. And I have stomach mucus tea!”
As we got ready to go he asked “Are there monsters in the house? That’s why I always go to the couch…every day.” Kind of odd. He then ended up playing with Green Monster and the friends. First holding all of them, then wrapping himself and them with stuff, and eventually pillows. He dropped his water bottle on his foot. Ended up doing a couple of time outs as he was in a bad mood. He told me “You’re just a stupid dumb old potato.”
We talked about getting to Ra’anana Park so we could go to the small zoo when it was open. Then he basically asked why we weren’t just going to the big zoo. So we upgraded our plans. On the way he fell asleep, from 10:50 until getting to the zoo at 11. I woke him up for the driving part.
The first animal he really studied was the eland, which was close to the car. He spotted the fur hanging from its throat, the fuzzy part on the back of its head, the black patches on its knees. We kept going, taking our time. At the zoo we walked in, got water, then headed straight. He drove us to the food stand for lunch. No hotdogs, so we got two pastry things. A rectangle with mashed potatoes in it, and a triangle with cheese. And we got an orange juice.
We sat on our usual bench by the pond and ate. Lots of crumbs from the pastries and the chickens were attracted. He had fun feeding them with the crumbs and bread. He noticed that one was chasing away other chickens, and that another chicken jumped on the bench as soon as we left. We ended up discussing the word ‘aggressive’ . He got upset when I talked about people pushing in lines sometime, and said he doesn’t like that.
From there he headed back and to the right. He stopped at a cage where we first spotted a sloth. Then he spotted a big turtle and a small turtle, then a really big lizard. No signs for any of them except the sloth though. He called it a mama turtle and baby turtle, but then we spotted even smaller turtles. And several more of the lizards, some eating some leaves. And we watched the big turtle drink from the water. He was then being the baby animals: “I’m the little baby turtle.”
We were there for quite awhile, and as we left I lamented the lack of signs for the animals. He had some invention that would solve that and tell us what they were, but it kept going and going: “It can tell you why there’s no oxygen in space…how the multiverse forms…everything!” We stopped to look at the Cape Hunting Dog, then went over to where the emus and kangaroos are. He said “Dada, I’m pretending to be something that eats bark. There’s bark there. Can I pretend to eat it?” He then wondered what ate bark and we looked it up, and came up with deer and squirrels in the late winter. We looked at the bats and watched them, then kept going.
Got back to the playground where he wanted to play the hungry squirrel game. Sometimes the squirrels would need to eat some bark at the end of winter, other times he would have enough nuts to make it. In our game I would be the cells complaining that we needed food, then his brain would decide to eat bark. The taste buds and stomach would complain though. Later he extended it to a human eating all sorts of things when they were starving.
He went to go climb on a structure, but realized he had a scratch on the back of his knee. No idea where it came from. But he wasn’t happy. He ended up sitting on/with me. We discussed preparing for nap time next year, and he liked the ideas of learning to read better so he could read books by himself, and also practicing listening to music and podcasts on his own using headphones. He gave a thumbs up to both.
We left at 1. He asked what “Jingle jingle with the keys” means. It is from Magic School Bus, when Ms. Frizzle suggests they can take the bus. So then he was repeating it and trying to use it.
We got in the car, and he was concerned when I didn’t buckle him. He buckled himself, clicking the big buckle for the first time, just to be sure until we got to animals. We stopped and watched Thompson gazelle under a big lovely tree with flowers. He spotted an even smaller gazell and said it was a gazelle “in PKB”. We got a call from Carly and talked to her for a minute, pretending he was out riding the animals, etc. Could tell she was amused. We stopped and looked at addax, then did the lion part. After that we discussed ‘aggressive’ more, then left and got to Ramat Gan Park at 2.
We started riding his bike through the park to the playground. Suddenly, the right handle came off. He must have been leaning on it, because he went flying off of it. A little scrape on his left elbow. Not bad for how it looked. He held the left hand awkwardly for quite awhile, but it went away as he played.
He asked how, when he coasts on the bike, pushing on the pedals slowed it down. He thought it had something to do with helping gravity. I tried to show him how he was applying a force in the opposite direction of how the tire spun.
At the playground he went straight to playing with the sand with a couple of small boys. There were plastic cups to use with the sand. He wanted me to go get more sand a couple times, but I was able to do a little reading and work. He road the motorcycle thing with another boy for awhile. Had to threaten leaving as he was saying his ‘bad words’ and joked about throwing a cup at a little kid. He was then singing a wonderful “I don’t want to go to Ace” song after I mentioned we were too late to go anyway. He kept developing the tune and starting again.
He opened a little shop for me for a bit. Selling leaves, a pacifier we found on the ground, etc. He was then asking “How many seconds in a year?” And how many minutes, hours, etc. We then looked up how many Mercury years in a Earth year, Neptune years, etc. He bit his tongue on an apple. Not bad, but it was time to go anyway. Left at 3:15.
He told me about Buttman, and that that is always the villain in the games that Emmitt and Leonard play.
As we got near the entrance, he pointed and shouted “Look! It’s that plant to make tea!” And it really was the scented geranium that they used for their tea. In the bathroom August decided to pee standing up, something he did once at home a few days ago.
On the drive home he started falling asleep, but then I started the poop tea game and that woke him right up. As we got close to home, having not spoken about the speed of light at all, he said “Dada, I know light is on fastest thing in the universe, but the universe is smaller than the multiverse. So there could be something out there that’s faster than the speed of light.” Which was some really cool logical thinking, and I explained that to him.
Then, he said he was faster than the speed of light, and from another universe. But I pointed out that he was now in this universe,
so his point about the fastest thing in the universe being light really wasn’t true. Eventually, he realized that he still had to be the fastest thing, and said “I’m faster than the thing that’s faster than the speed of light.”
To add to the paradoxes, he was then talking about how he had everything inside him, including tornadoes, and that a tornado sucked the car that he was in into him. We admired that one for a bit, then went inside.
Inisde Carly showed him a new app on her school iPad. Puppet Pals, I think it was. He made a ballerina and Abraham Lincoln say some funny things.
When she said she didn’t have students today he told a story about how he flew to her classroom and found her keys on the ground and unlocked the door and used his tornado power to suck her in. Then he used his tornado power to suck in her students and said “Okay, now it’s class time!” He also sucked in students from elementary school. Sounded like she had a pretty big class she suddenly had to teach.
Carly then took him with her to school to drop off our potted plants from inside. It sounds like the custodians will water the plants in her room over the summer, so they’re better off there. I went upstairs to do Sabeel work. They were gone for a good amount of time. Carly had leftover art supplies, including big tongue depressors sticks and thick stickers, and he made a big structure out of them. They got home, then went over to Holly’s as she had some plants to give away. Unfortunately, Carly saw the message a bit too late, as we now had more plants to drop off at school. August went with her, then they came back.
I was still working and Carly gave him a bath. When I came down he had eaten a variety of things for dinner. He showed me the structure he had made. He called it a giraffe. It was pretty cool. I taught him about 2-D and 3-D figures.
Carly went to take a shower. I asked him if he had ever met the other PKA teacher listed in the yearbook and we agreed we’d never met her. We looked at the preschool section, and he said “I think Ms. Amelia is the nicest teacher in the school…Because she has a smile.”
I took him up. We brushed his teeth and finished reading Cam Jenson and the Mystery of the UFO. He insisted he was falling asleep with mama tonight. I left them at 8:50. It took awhile though, and he was asleep around 9:10.
Car part of the zoo:
