He was up at 7:30. Derek made pancakes for breakfast, then he played iPad with Thatcher and the other kids: Slice Fractions and Dragonbox Numbers. He FINALLY went to the bathroom at 8:30. It had been 13 hours.
I took a shower, and everyone started getting ready for the beach. He screamed to get down from bunk bed once. I heard him screaming in our bedroom at one point and was about to go in when I realized Carly was putting sunscreen on him. I decided to stay out of that. He found a rock in the pocket of his swimsuit. He was then doing magic with it, rotating it in circles and going “Zap!” When he was done doing magic with it later he threw it on the ground. He was then with Cherie in their room. I heard him ask “What’s that?” I heard her responding “It’s a Sanskrit symbol…” They were then discussing the right to a lawyer writ of habeas corpus. I don’t know how that came up.
We left at 9:50. He sang “Open the door, get on the floor…” He had me carry him and he whispered it to me in my ear.
We got to the beach and helped haul the stuff and paddle boards down to the beach below the wood fort. It was close to low tide. The kids headed down the beach, looking for animals, and I went with them this time. We spent close to two hours on the beach. August and I made dams and canals for the draining water. Carly floated in a floaty, then tried a paddle board. Andrea brought down a chair and was reading Simplicity Parenting, which I’m reading on the iPad.
We stopped for a snack at 11:45. Right at low tide. Hank had shown up and he and Cherie had gone over on the other side of the spit where Brad, Tristan, Chuck, and Derek were digging for geoducks. I told the story about the one time I remember digging for clams when I was a kid and the weather was awful. I finished with something like “I wondered why we weren’t at the playground.” August told me “You shouldn’t have gone to the playground, cuz the playground isn’t likely to have clams.”
Andrea had little snack mix bags for the kids. August picked the M and Ms out of his, and shared with Colin and Kayla when there were issues over colors.
We slowly got headed out to see how the clam hunting was going. We hauled stuff up to the truck, and spent some time at the swings. I then carried August across the outlet stream and along the spit. August told me of something he had been thinking, and said “You know what? Sometimes I think of things just in my head.” August asked about oysters, and we talked about pearls. I said something about how pearls are valuable and used for jewelry, and August then outlined, on his own, the whole process of people finding the pearls, selling them to stores, being made into jewelry, and people buying them to wear.
We got over there about 12:45. He saw someone laying on the ground, arm in the ground. August asked “Are they burying that person?” We watched the process for a few minutes until they called it a day, then we headed back.
At the house, Colin played with August’s robot. He started a game where he handed me the robot, then he went and lay on the edge of the rug and I released the robot and it rolled towards his head. I was surprised when August wanted a fake chicken burger for lunch. He ate a chunk of Carly’s, then part of one she made for him. He and Thatcher went in to Cherie’s room and played on her tablet with her. I went in and did some reading and rested.
When I came out, he was playing Jenga with Brad and Tristan. He did a few rounds, pulling out blocks. When it started to get shaky he declared “I’m going to stop playing.” Brad and Tristan kept playing, and as it got bigger he said “Oh, that’s so impressive.” There was a big potty word discussion between the kids and Cherie until that was ended.
Carly, Cassie, and I then took our three and Thatcher to the playground. We all piled into Cherie’s car, and the kids got to not have their seatbelts on. As we walked to the playground he held Cassie’s hand. Went on the swings first, and when I was pushing him he said “I’m getting an underdog, Tia Cassie.” When he wanted to slow down he said he had to “Defeat the momentum”.
Brad and Tristan left, stopping by to say bye to us. August told Cassie all about germs and bacteria and included “Because I’m a scientist.” He said “I have a DNA changer. Right now I have boy DNA now I have girl DNA.” Carly tried to get him to ask Cassie about RNA or something. Instead he said “Remember in Israel you told me to ask uncle Jeff about his guns?” Carly joked about how we don’t like guns, but Jeff can have them. He asked “Does that mean he’ll say nah nah nah nah I have guns and you don’t.” And “I won’t do any thing with the guns…I’ll just leave her and we’ll ship them on airplanes. Wait, can you ship guns on airplanes?”
He then got into a big investigation over how many swings the playground had. He declared that things like shaky bridges he would also count as swings. He went and declared the rope ladder and a chain thing swings. He decided there were 7 in total.
Cassie went and asked about opening hours of the pool. She and Vivian went to play ping pong. August and Thatcher played together for a long time, sitting first on the bench swing together and talking, then moving to the tire swing. August got sad when Thatcher said he had written on the tire swing and August wanted to do the same thing. But it turned out Thatcher was kidding. It was something someone else clearly older had written.
We all went in and they played checkers and with the pool table. On the walk to the car, August made up “Diaper miper…a game where you shoot diapers at trees.”
We were back at 5:10. The three oldest kids played with the Jenga pieces. They were knocking down towers and I showed them how to use Jenga pieces as dominoes.
Dinner was fish and a great dish from Derek. The secret that Chuck was going to make milkshakes leaked out, and the kids got hyper. Carly took them downstairs and they played games downstairs for a few minutes. He had some difficulty letting Thatcher and Vivian being in control of red light, green light, or some such game.
They came back up when Chuck had finished making their chocolate milkshakes, and they all loved that. There was some general craziness and the possibility of more red light, green light. And Colin started calling me ‘Ryan’ for the first time, and not ‘John’ or ‘August’.
Just after 7 we took the kids all down to the water. It was high tide, so we got to see it all the way up to the seawall. We went over by the tire swing, and they found a bucket and filled it with stuff for the crabs they found. I was able to sit and do some reading. A couple of bigger kids came and were jumping off the tree with the rope swing. Jeff tried it and almost crashed into the tree. Vivian and Thatcher both climbed up and thought about it, but couldn’t quite make the jump. Very brave of them to even consider it.
August had some troubles on the way back, including yelling in my ear right after he promised not to. No surprise when he fell asleep soon after we got back, by 9:20.