Monday, October 1: Carly to Adit’s for Sukkot and a long Dada and Zinnie walk

He came down at 8:20. That was a nice big night of sleep. Close to 11 hours. They cuddled on the couch, then he had chocolate milk. August said, “Did you know the tallest you can grow is to 45 yers old? After 45 yrs old you don’t grow taller anymore. You just learn to do stuff more.” Carly found out he’s pretty good at staring contests. Carly asked how I was feeling, which is better, but August wanted me to take my temperature again. I did that, then he wrote my symptoms down on the chalkboard.

I took a shower and he watched Llama Llama and ate french toast. Carly headed to Adit’s house to go the synagogue with her and see her sukkah (hut). August did some exercising with me, then watched an episode of Julius Jr. When the time ran out on his iPad for the day he spent a few minutes making lots and lots of alarms in World Clock and checked his alarm clock.

We went outside and played around for a bit. August asked me to find an Easter egg that Carly had hidden for him yesterday but he hadn’t been able to find. I couldn’t find it either. Back inside he got his rope and had fun tying my foot to the chair. I asked why and he said “I’m tying you up so you’ll get distracted and I can play iPad.” And he told me “I need to learn how to make a knot.” I showed him how to loop the rope back through the loops he was making and he was starting to figure it out.

Carly got home at 11:30 and he excitedly showed her how he’d tied me up. She had brought back some plants from Adit’s garden to make tea for us, and a box full of candy that was from the synagogue. She said they dance around with them. August said, “I don’t know why they dance around with it, but I’ll try it anyway.”

August and I spent a lot of time doing stop motion videos. He was telling me he was in charge and I taught him the word ‘director’ and explained it. He said, “like in a concert,” thinking about ‘conductor’. We made two videos: The Dancing Flower and The Alien and the Snake.

Carly started making nachos. She asked if he ever had an imaginary friend. He asked what she meant. He then suggested she could be his imaginary friend. He said they could pretend she doesn’t exist. She thought that was some good divergent thinking. That was a term we’d talked about as we were doing stop motion videos, as I was suggesting that we have two objects moving at once. And August said he liked having people in his stop motion videos. He said the teacher had said they could only have one thing move at a time and couldn’t have people in them. Carly taught him the term ‘divergent thinking’.

August was pretending to be a baby but Carly said he didn’t really understand how little babies do. That they kind of just move around. I reminded her that she used to say that he looked like an alien moving around when he was a baby. She didn’t remember that at all. He was then pretending to be a baby that popped in the window of the preschool. This was a recurring thing today, although by the end he was always a 4-year old coming through the window.

We ate nachos, then he and I read more of Hilo 2. Then the pretending game where he was a four year old that was abandoned at the preschool. We worked in asking him his address, etc. He’s starting to get his address, full name, etc. down. We haven’t worked on that sort of stuff with him before. Carly was sitting outside, working, and said she felt a raindrop. He ran and got a cup to go catch water. He was a bit disappointed.

We played more imagining preschool games. He then used the macro lens. He fell and dropped the phone and it broke the case a bit. The lens was still fine, but it can’t be used on one of the lenses now. Still fine on the other one, and the phone is fine. He was pretty upset he broke it though. He then helped Carly make a card for Adit: “Kind of like a machine, but more powerful actually. Way more powerful than a wrecking ball…92 nonillion tons…it can destroy a planet.” And he drew a lot of computer code on it. He was then on Messenger on Carly’s computer and typing messages back and forth with me. He was doing a good job reading my messages, then I would give him options to answer a question and he would copy my spelling to type an answer back. He then managed to add Stephanie to a message. Carly was surprised when he did that and said he couldn’t use her messenger anymore. He went and hid on the couch and said, “I’m the worst person ever…I just think it’s actually true.” I assured him he wasn’t.

He watched Max and Ruby and ate peanut butter and crackers and apple, then he played with his jump rope. He had used the space ship to pick up a lot of the blocks from our stop motion set, but now used the jump rope like a whip to make a mess of the rest of them. He said, “My jump roping is fascinating.” And a minute later, “Mama, you’re a great mama.” He was then singing “scum and a tuna fish sandwich.” That’s from a Magic School Bus episode that he’s watched a few times.

He went to the bathroom and when he was getting dressed afterwards he said to Carly, “Little help here.” He got a treat from the candy bag, then was saying “Like Chunky says, “More flavors, gooder treats.’” He said Chunky was a friend that lived in the house across from us. And he asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a treat tree?” He then walked around the yard singing “I love chubby unicorns!”

He and I went out for a walk before 5. It was nice and cloudy and. Bit cooler. We walked to the southwest and he wanted to stop at that little unnamed park. The one that he would zap monsters at last year. He went on the swings for awhile (couple teenagers sitting on the merry-go-round, so that wasn’t an option today) and blasted some monsters. Then we played around the park, on the swings and with the swinging log thing, and played a lot of rounds of “You’re doing science class and a four year old pops through the window.” He was a left behind child and celebrated his birthday with the class. In most of the versions of the story his parents had been on a tour of the school, then left him there when they got on a plane to return home to their home in Europe. He would then hang out with the class and teach them something about science.

After 15 or 20 minutes we continued on our walk. We went down to the trail, as it was cool enough and shady enough. We walked west and I talked about coming back via the dirt road. When we got to the main road though he wanted to do an even longer route, all the way north to the corner of the school and back along our usual route from the school. It was a good 40 minutes, at least, of walking, during which we continued to play the game. It turned out he was actually a robot, not a kid, and then he started helping out at school, using his lasers to help the plants grow (a little Plants Versus Zombies Reference), using a huge vacuum cleaner to clean up, etc.

After turning left at the school, he found a couple of metal pieces that were part of some tool with a loop of wire on it. Looks familiar, but I can’t quite place what it is. Anyway, he said “It can make you hear really tiny sounds like ants sneezing.” You could also look through it. We saw a few more cats and were up to #118.

We got home, and he and I read rest of Hilo 2. Carly made mango smoothie and tea. He ate carrot after he asked Carly to cut it into coins and finally earned popcorn. I ate some of the carrot a bit later and apologized to him – it wasn’t a good carrot at all but had looked fine. She took him and popcorn up for his bath. When they were done, I came up and read the rest of the painting chapter to him in Beezus and Ramona and started the next. He knocked over the popcorn bowl jumping around and had to help me clean up.

Carly brushed his teeth at 8:50. Didn’t realize he would probably be up later and had suggested she could put him to sleep. I didn’t see that happening any time soon as he had slept so long and so late and was still bouncing off the walls. He actually did most of the teeth brushing.

Carly headed to bed and I came up and read all of Plants Versus Zombie Timepocalypse to him. We did one round of the preschool game, then turned the lamp off at 10:05. He got upset though as Carly was supposed to put him to sleep today. I said that had been the idea way back before he was staying up late, and that mama had said good night to him before we read the book. He told me that “I’m still recovering” and that he would sleep in in the morning and not see her in the morning and that she either had to put him to sleep, or we had to wake her up to tell her to wake him up in the morning. He also told me “I like mama a little better” and “I’m a little bored of you.” Totally calmed down thought when I told him I’d tell him an August and Teegan story. I told one of how they ran into each other on a hike in Washington during the summer and they use their magic nut keys to make a door in a tree and they meet a new character from the other side, a squirrel this time.

He was ready for sleep, but at 10:30 turned to me and asked, “Dada, why can’t you hear really soft sounds?” I talked about how there had to be an upper and lower limit of our sensitivity and that if we were more sensitive to really quiet sounds that louder sounds would be worse for us. He thought for a minute, then said there were little hairs for every frequency, so we just didn’t have hairs for those levels. It was confusing frequency with intensity, but given that he immediately rolled back over and was asleep before 10:35 I thought it was pretty interesting thinking.

Tying me up: