He was up a little before 7, so we all were. We all got up about 7:10. He went in on the Zinnie bed and played synthesizer and then the math game for awhile on his own. We were in other parts of the house. Downstairs he watched StoryBots and I got him vitamins. He was outside with Carly for awhile, hitting things with his bolt. He came inside and Carly took recycling up to the cages. She brought him back bottle caps and some treasures she had found him. I went and took a shower. Using the chalkboard, he taught her about dividing squares into rectangles and rectangles into squares. She taught him about dividing squares into triangles. He was then lying on the floor and she was just sitting in one of the red chairs. She scared him when he forgot she was in the chair.
I got him scrambled eggs and shnitzel for breakfast. He asked, “Did you know spiders have 25 eyes?” I wished him a happy half-birthday. He ate little pieces of the three kinds of cake from the party yesterday to celebrate. He was trying to use his half-birthday as license to break the rules: “It’s my half-birthday, so I can sit on the table. I can do extra stuff.” August was excited about his half-birthday and didn’t think anyone in his class or the world would have a half-birthday. When I asked why, he said, “Because you’re special people!”
Carly drove to school to get notebooks she needed to grade. I made the rest of the pancakes. When she came back he was right in the doorway playing the synthesizer to surprise her. We all sat on the couch and played with the synthesizer. He can pretty precisely play the keys following the tempo of the arpeggios each key makes, which I hadn’t realized. When I tried playing he told me I was playing it wrong and had to wait for the pattern to go back to the original note and then he showed me.
He was then drawing on the chalkboard and driving Carly crazy with the carpets sound of the eraser. From all of that silliness ‘Looniness’ word of the day.
We finally left by 12:40. I had planned to take him to the pool while Carly did some work, but he nixed that plan, not wanting to go to the pool without mama. He wanted to go to the Snakes and Ladder playground instead. He said, “Where every last (something) will die.” It was clearly a quote from something, and he thought it was from the Erie Pirates book.
We made it up to the playground. He first headed to the climbing portion and he wanted to do the running in circles thing with me telling him how fast to run. He then rested in the hammock part while I rested on the ground. He took photos from up there, then got down and did more photos. We went on the spinning thing, where he was the sun in the middle of the solar system. We heard a guy blowing on the shofar horn for Rosh Hashanah and August was copying the sound. Awhile later the guy came through the park and started talking to us. He asked if we were Jewish and when we said no he quickly turned and walked away. Would have liked him to play it for us though. We rode on our spaceship for a bit, then somehow the playground was all made of pineapple. So running around and pretending to eat everything made of pineapple became the major game for the day. He eventually decided that things that swung were made of apple.
We sat and read some of Magic Tree House #28 and ate our snack. We then left by 2:10. We took a slightly longer route back, heading west a block to come down the other side of the pine tree park. He twice said something about how we would have been home already if we took a shorter route. Close to our playground he dropped the orange hair band thing he had found a few days ago. We walked back a bit to find it where he had dropped it.
At home he took all of his clothes off. He had some popcorn with Carly after we made him put some clothes on, then I took him up for his bath. At one point he had gone to the bathroom ll on his own, but came out laughing, saying his underwear was funny. He had gotten both legs in the same hole. He was pretty filthy from the runny nose and skipping a bath yesterday, etc. And it had been a week since washing his hair. He was playing with the hairdryer and convinced me to let him take it downstairs to play with. He was pretending to plug it into things to provide power: first a round metal disk (which was the end of a poster tube) and then downstairs the refrigerator. I had the refrigerator provide too much power and it blew up. He liked that and played it several times. He wasn’t happy though when, after he had made it fall on the ground and when he had hit me with the cord part, I took it way and retired it from being a toy.
He did a soup experiment, putting lots of things, but mainly old chili powder in a pot, then we boiled it on the stove.
We ate apples and honey, and then he helped me do all of the dishes. Carly had been making food and had made a carrot soup and rice with broccoli and tofu. We read the Erie Pirates, Hungry Fox and the Midnight Pies, and the Zach math book. He then watched Curious George Christmas, or part of it. He had said he was tired earlier, and yawned a few times.
We then went for an evening walk. To the southwest again, then back up
Vatikim and through the park and back home. Stopped along the way to smell some flowers.
Went for a walk
Back home we finished Magic Tree House #28. He quoted the math book “I can’t even grow mold on a sandwich” I made him peanut butter Toast. He climbed up on the counter, which normally I wouldn’t let him do, but he just sat there, all calm. He told me, “I want to see all the zookeeper’s in there.” His old joke bout the peanut butter. He used a butter knife to stir the peanut butter.
He played the synth a bit, then was negotiating the bedtime order. We compromised by reading the “Sneetches’ story first. We then brushed his teeth and then went down to say good night to Carly.
Back upstairs we read Will I have a Friend? We discussed the connections to his experience at preschool. He told me, “Did you know at preschool I’m just standing? To me that’s actually playing.” I then sang a bit and lay next to him until he was asleep about 9:15.
Surprising mama with the synth:
Controlling his running:
Being the sun:
The shofar:
Eating the pineapple playground:
His boiling soup:
Half-birthday cakes
Watching mama leave
Trying to hit the fan
He took 17 photos of what we call his adventure water bottle, so it is clearly important to him.
Their squares and triangles and rectangles
On the hammock
selfie
Being the sun
Eating the pineapple playground
How their latest batch of slime dried
Lazy on the floor
Smelling flowers
Chilling on the counter
