I woke him up at 7:30. He stretched for a minute, then we headed downstairs. He got his shoes on, then went out and sat on Carly’s lap and they were talking about all sorts of things. I took him his vitamins. At one point he came back in and got the snack bag and took it out. He was disappointed to only find Cheerios. I took the bag inside and filled it with things like mixed fruit and a sliced apple and took it back out to him. He predicted spilling his Cheerios, saying to Carly, “Remember the time my Cheerios spilled all over the floor?” Five minutes later he spilled his Cheerios. I came out and sat at the table and did some typing next to him. He got the bucket and brought over the big bag of soil and he made a concoction, sweeping up some of the Cheerios (I got him the little broom from Korea) and putting them in. He added water from his water bottle, then mixed it and had me help him scoop it around some of the plants.
I went in and finished an email as he looked at a couple of music apps and an astronomy app. I went upstairs to take a shower. He borrowed my phone and macro lens and took photos, then switched to the Moments app and shot with the blue white balance. He really liked the photos and asked me to post some of them on the blog.
Carly had been going back and forth with Tessa, trying to schedule a family meetup today. We were headed (in theory) to Tel Aviv and the port when we learned that Ofir had fallen down an escalator at the mall and headed to the hospital in an ambulance. So she switched and was taking the kids to the Sporteque area across from Herzliya Park.
We got going and got to the park at 11. We’d never been there, as I didn’t know there were playgrounds in the middle of all the tennis courts, etc. August wasn’t a big fan of the play structures as they were kind of big. We played on them a bit though, and he showed me an exercise. He then got the macro lens and was taking photos. I sat and read and they shifted to the next ply structure. We moved over there and he paused for a snack as well. We decided to head back to their house and left at 11:50.
Carly was eating a snack bar and he asked, “Why do you like bars so much?” She replied that they are convenient. He sang “Convenient! Word of the day!” and asked what that meant.
We followed Tessa to her house, about a three minute drive, and got there at noon. He told me there was an underground passage from his laboratory at school to here. He was playing by the chair and tried to tell Liam about his secret laboratory. Liam said that wasn’t real, but started talking about the television instead. He showed us the Paw Patrol theme song. Tessa then got out the magnet blocks and we all played with those. Tessa got cucumber and cottage cheese out for a snack and we sat at the table for while. Lim had started the iPad time by wanting to show us a pizza making game. August got his out and they played TodoMath for awhile. Neva had fallen asleep for a nap on the way back and slept much of the time.
August really liked their fan and figured out how to use the different oscillation and timer controls. He and Liam also did some synth playing together but August yelled at Liam when he was changing the sound settings. August has a favorite sound that he likes and he was afraid he would lose it. I had to explain that it was a default setting and we could always go back to it.
We left at 1:30. We were going to look for a place to eat nearby, but realized that parking would be a pain. So I suggested we drive up to Udim, south of Ikea, where we’ve been talking about going. We found Cafe Muskat and got a table inside. August stood in front of the air conditioner and cooled off, lifting up his shirt and turning around. We ordered a mango smoothie, lattes, sweet potato raviolis, and risotto balls. Israeli portions (slightly small) and prices (slightly high) but very good. While we waited for the food, I took August back to the bathroom, which involves walking through a big home goods shop. Then the bathrooms are out back. There’s a little sitting area back there and August found all sorts of little plastic pieces as treasures. They sort of look like jacks.
We went back and ate, then he played a little iPad. Carly and I took turns looking at the shop. She took him to the bathroom as it was closing at 3. They took there time, as they found more treasures.
On the way home we stopped at the nursery. Took convincing to get August to agree to that. We let him pick out seeds and he chose bell peppers. I got a plant and pot for the desk upstairs, and Carly pondered her next purchase for the yard. August also convinced us to buy a meter that pokes into the dirt and shows the Ph, moisture, and sunlight levels.
At home he and I stayed outside and experimented with the plant meter. The sunlight and moisture meters at least work quite well. I took the plant up to the desk, then we finished the Magic Tree House book. I had downloaded a couple of science-related apps. One is a game called Blue Apprentice and he started playing that. Really cool, and is going to be something we play for quite awhile.
He played with Carly for awhile and she told him that her students call rhinos ‘chubby unicorns’ and he liked that. He was hungry and we cooked some mushrooms and added pesto and cheese to pasta and he made that. I then made a full pasta dish, adding a yellow pepper and feta and basil.
He played with Carly and they played school. They did math, and she explained the word ‘manipulative’ and that was a word of the day. They read a Bob Book and did some more writing. He was being a helper and helped her set up her classroom. He wrote ‘Welcome’ on the whiteboard and helped her clean up the classroom. For art time he showed the students how to draw a mechanical fish. He also showed them how to sit and put “fishies in the pond.” He said the next subject was Earth time and he got the globe. He explained what a country is and that land is a solid. I pointed out that the globe is a ‘model’, a word that had also been explained in the Blue Apprentice app. Another word of the day.
Carly did the rest of the dishes and I played the preschool game with him – the story he’s developing where he turns steel into gold with explosions and wakes up the preschoolers and they come down and see science.
He asked how many milliseconds are in 90 Pluto years. I asked him what the first piece of information was that we needed. He said how long a Pluto year is. So we then walked through the math together, with him pushing in all the numbers on the calculator. We got 703,883,520,000,000 milliseconds in 90 Pluto years.
August is doing well adapting to school, but in talking to other people at the school it was suggested that there is a good psychologist that we could talk to about testing for giftedness. She’s worked with the school a lot. We figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to her, so Carly scheduled an appointment with her for Tuesday.
August told me, “Bicep…they’re tiny microscopic animals that live on your skin – I know that’s confusing – but they live on your skin and make it itchy…if you use shaker cream it kills the things that make you itchy. It comes in a package that had a thousand for containers.” “Well you got it. I told you it.”
I went for a run. They found the other new app, Froggopedia, which teaches you the life cycle of a frog and lets you dissect a frog. He told her he didn’t want to do more reading because his brain was still sorting words from yesterday. Then he used all the stuff on top of the dresser to explain how there were things he remembered and here were the things he doesn’t remember.
I got back and took my shower and said good night and left them after 9:40. He was asleep before 10.
Explaining his science lab to Liam:
TodoMath together:
Testing out the plant meter:
Turning steel to gold:
