Saturday, September 8: rest day and an evening walk

He was up by 6:20. Carly and I were still sleeping, or trying to, so he just sat in bed for awhile. Then he started talking: “Mama, I’m gonna tell you something you don’t know. You can tell your students. Ten days is when you get to hundreds of hours…can you tell that to your students?” He was then a wake up machine, sitting on the edge of the bed: “I’m supposed to be sitting chose to the edge, silly….” He said that would be his job “for the rest of the time I’m a kid.” He was also a weather detector after he looked out the window and said it had been raining. We went downstairs at 6:40 as he ‘helped’ us get up by pulling us out of bed.

He played on his iPad and I rested on the couch. It started raining and Carly went out in it. August went out after awhile to catch rain in a cup. He was then soaking it up from the table and putting it in his cup. He then drank that. He kept trying to catch rain, but it wasn’t falling fast enough. He talked about leaving a cup out so it might fill up.

We went back inside and he played the Sarah and Duck Sleepover app. Then went back out to Carly. They came back in after awhile, with him saying, “Mama, can we do yoga cuz your shirt says yoga?” They watched a video and did yoga. When I tried to take a video of him doing it he stopped because he was wiping his nose. Stopped the video right before Carly said “That’s the snot pose.” They did yoga and I made pancakes for breakfast. Those were a big hit. We had frozen blueberries in the freezer. “Maybe we could give this to other people, like Mikaela.” “Mama, we have four days for the weekend. So we have time to make a bracelet for Mikaela.”

After breakfast he was on the couch with me as I filled out a contact form for the school. They had questions about who they could share your contact info with and would give lists, but then you could write in an additional option, which didn’t make sense. So for what information they could share I also included “hat size”. For who they could share August’s information with I added “elves and wizards”. And for our information it was “tugboat captains’. He was making up instrument machines: “Every time you play it you see the note over there and a tube sucks it up over to there and plays it.” He typed a lot of crazy stuff to Cassie on Skype, then he and I did some reading but only read two chapters of Magic Tree House #28, High Tide in Hawaii. He then wanted to do math games with Carly and they did TodoMath. She was teaching him the American coins.

I took a shower, then came down and they were still doing a lot of math. I went up and cleaned the bedroom, listening to Nevermind. We have the small bed slid under the big bed now. Back downstairs they were reading Skybrary. They had read the Erie Canal Pirates and Zachery Zormer and made Möbius strips out of paper. Rosie’s Rock and Roll Raft. When we finished he went to Carly and asked, “Mama, do you think I could make something like that by myself?” They talked about making a toy one first. We then read Mr. Mouse’s Motel and The Problem with Sisters and Robots. He played Sound Rebound for awhile, then he wanted to build things out of cardboard. He got cardboard from recycling and had me cut shapes and he was gluing them together in an abstract shape. He later would call his shapes “oars”, by which he meant rafts.

I was making baked salmon for lunch for August and me and I asked Siri to convert a temperature for me. He then asked, “Hey Siri, what’s the air pressure outside.” Siri said she couldn’t do that that on the HomePod, but then I figured out it actually works on the phone.

He helped me wash dishes (his idea) and then I baked the salmon fillets. He helped a bit with that, helping put the olive oil mixture on them. He and Carly went back to the cardboard and were making rafts. He ws hungry, so we got out the blue chips and ate those with hummus. He opened the fridge and sort of closed it on himself: “Oh, well I’m a polar bear and want to feel the cold.” We ate our salmon, then he watched Max and Ruby. He was still hungry so we had apples and honey. He ate almost a whole apple.

Still hungry, so I got him a pie crust cookie. When the honey was gone he was spinning the bowl with his finger and told me, “I’m practicing. So I can do that gear thing, remember? The writing gear thing.”

He wanted to do an experiment to see how soap would soak into a towel. We ended up testing soap on a variety of things, like a tissue, white cardboard, glossy cardboard, brown cardboard, and a rag. Worked really well as an experiment as we ended up talking about it a lot, and led to the words of the day being ‘glossy’ and ‘saturated’. He then did some bead math with Carly, but he wanted to do math with her on TodoMath. He was doing greater than and less than understanding that just fine. Carly and I were remembering doing that in elementary math.

Carly went upstairs to Skype with Cherie. He was then a robot cat with me, he’s been one with Carly a few times, and was cuddling with me on the couch. It became a game where I would be someone that found the homeless robot cat and agreed to take it home. We added a little to the mosaic on the floor and took photos of our progress. He took photos inside, then went outside. He was swinging my hat at the speed of light. He hit the swing with the bolt thing he found the other day over on Vatikim and said “That’s because it’s the loud instrument shop.” We went upstairs to the bedroom with the macro lens and took photos. He was then giving out tickets, and I was asking funny questions like, “What happens if you teach an elephant to play cards?” Then more of the robocat adoption game again.

We came back downstairs and played some Math Tango on the couch. Carly made popcorn and they ate popcorn. Lots of yummy noises. I let him download the Tiggly Chef Subtraction game. August told me, “I love you tons, but I love you extra when you buy me things.” Carly made a mango smoothie and we played the subtraction game. He had the rest of the salmon for dinner, but he had had too much popcorn though and only ate about half of it.

We all went for a walk. We walked to the southwest, towards the strawberry fields. August stopped to take photos a couple times, and he found a white bit of tubing that he called a treasure. It fell out of the bike, but we found it again on the walk back. He took photos of a metal bench to show how dirty it was.

We got home and I went out for a run. Carly gave him a bath, and when I got back they were reading the fossil book from the book exchange last year. He was asleep at 8:30.

Gathering rain water: