Carly was driving to work so stayed later. She woke him up about 6:45. August told her all about another planet with humans. They can’t use soap so they take longer baths. They don’t have the material for toilets so either holes in the ground. And they have cats that you aren’t allergic to.
He watched the StoryBots episode about how computers work (Snoop Dogg is the special guest) and I got his lunch ready. We were walking just after 7:30.
I was able to leave him at 8:20. There were a couple of sobs as I did so though. But by the time I was up on the sidewalk I listened and I didn’t hear anything, and Marion was talking to Andrea, so he must have been okay.
We had read a chapter of Magic Tree House and then August and I were talking about how long check-ins needed to last (he brought it up and said that he didn’t think they should stop until kindergarten). Hector came over and asked why August wasn’t playing. I tried to get August to answer him, and August said he’d tell me and I could tell Hector. It was his explanation that he was thinking about how to play with the kids. Of course, by then Hector had moved on. And my attempt to talk to him about things he could do went nowhere. he did say he built a machine out of the window blocks yesterday. But he didn’t like any of the outside things to do. I thought he would like the painting with chalk in water on the bricks, but he said he could paint at home. He was picking the old glue off of the art pieces made out of bottle caps glued on wood and enjoying that, at least.
Instead of audiobooks I listened to Cloud Cult’s Feel Good Ghosts on the way home.
Well, I am sitting on the bench outside PKA. We will see how this goes. I arrived after they came out for lunch today. Also, he had dropped a couple of treasures he had found and was mourning their loss, so he was crying when I got here.
He calmed down and ate, but as I made talk at the table I said that Playball was after rest time. Ms. Mini said he was on vacation. So, the not knowing what was happening next really bothered him. We sat on the bench and his teachers finally got back before 1:15. We found out they were just going to have more exploratory time. But August said, “Rest time is the problem!”
As the teachers took them in for rest time August was insisting I had a choice between taking him home, or staying with him. “So what is your choice?” When I said I’d stay until he calmed down, he took that to mean I’d stay here. He instantly calmed down and went in for rest time, telling me to do my work on the bench.
So I hung around school. Didn’t have my iPad to work, but listened to an audiobook and finished it, wrote some emails, and walked around a bit.
When he spotted me after school, about 2:50, he came running, very excited. I had moved over to the bench in the covered are through the elementary school. He had done fine for the rest of the day. Andrea said that when he got restless on his mat she brought him his timer and he was fine. The kids that weren’t napping went into the art room and made things out of natural materials: sticks and rocks and things. He told me a little about it and it sounded like he had fun.
Andrea asked to meet with us. I suggested right now, with August there. She was waiting for Marion to come back from the busses. August and I, and Candy, started to read a book about patterns in nature. But then the announcement for the all-staff meeting came on and there wasn’t going to be time. August and I moved out to the PKA bench and he ate his after-school meal while I read the rest of Magic Tree House #25. We dropped the book off at the library and then headed home.
On the way home I sang a couple Sesame Street songs for the first time in quite awhile: “What’s the name of that song?” And “We all sing with the same voice”. He then told me I and everyone else was wrong about the metric system. He claimed that the centimeter was the longest unit of measurement. I had apparently fed him some magic for for dinner last year that let him know this.
We were home before 4. He demanded, “I’ll play on my iPad and you’ll make me some water drink. Okay, dada?” We did a few things on the iPad and Carly got home. I went upstairs and did about an hour of work. When I came down she was making him a smoothie.
They read I See Kitty and a Bob Book. Carly offered him a lollipop if he helped her read, and suddenly he was reading everything. They did a second Bob Book. He chose cherry, and said “It tastes just like medicine.” I saw pigeon right outside our kitchen window, in the dirt of the planter box, and August named it “Porken”. He then sang part of the “Goodbye everybody, have a superduper day” song from school. We read Go Dog Go together. For much of it he red one page and I’d read the next. In Skybrary we read the Jeremy Jackrabbit book. Words of the day are journey and jittery. Carly made popcorn and he had much of the bowl and we read another Skybrary book – the Gorilla book from the same series.
He brought the piano up on the couch with my help and made up songs on it, gradually taking all the keys out. I then took him up to his bath. That was going fine until he wanted to drink out of Carly’s spray bottle. I told him he couldn’t put it in the bath water, but then I stopped him when he tried to. He had a meltdown over that and that ended with Carly about to put him to sleep and I said good night. But he argued we hadn’t brushed his teeth. So I brushed his teeth. We discussed his stopwatch and how long to 1000 hours
He wanted a story, and gave a premise of a story. The three of us re on a walk and he plays in some trees and finds a door and we go through it and a bunch of other doors and we find a bunch of gold. It was put there by a kind person who ends up sharing the gold with us. He wanted the light on during story telling, so I brought the lamp in and plugged it in. I then told a full version of his story.
I then sang songs and he was going to sleep. He was facing away from me, then suddenly rolled over once and asked, “Dada. That bead that I founded: do you think we could paint it with blank paint?”. I said yes and he immediately rolled back over. He rolled back towards me one more time, putting his hand on my watch. He was clearly asleep a few minutes later, about 8:45.