Managed to get him up by 7:20 today. Still a slow wakeup though. As he was still lying down and avoiding opening his eyes, I asked if he wanted to go swimming. About a minute later he put up his arm and gave me a thumbs up. He watched one Pink Panther, then as we were getting ready to go asked “What’s the difference between ‘wear’ and ‘where’?” Of course, I didn’t know what he was saying at first, and didn’t know if he was saying ‘where’ or ‘whale’, so he had to clarify. I explained the difference and wrote them on the chalkboard so he could see how they were spelled. He then said “I’ll explain the difference” and recited how they were spelled as he followed along on the board.
We got going and he told me a joke: “Why did the eel not feel?…Because it’s dead!” We were walking at 7:42. About halfway he asked me if 5 squares could make a square. I told him how 4 could, or 5 could make a plus sign, but he was insistent and explained how he had done it out of the straw things, using his hands to demonstrate. Eventually, I realized he meant a cube and asked him if that was the case. He said it was, and then I described the 6 sides of the cube. That was what he had meant, forgetting that the square he would make on the top would also be the bottom.
At school we went and dropped off the hummus. Eve was there, and we caught Lillian right before she headed to class. So August was excited to put the hummus in the cooler and he gave Eve a high five.
They were already in a meeting in his class when we got there, but I was able to steer him over by Andrea and he joined the circle and I left.
I walked home, then drove back to school. When I picked him up he spotted me through the door (another parent was taking up the doorway) and was waving to me. The first thing he said to me was “Why didn’t you put a bar in my snack?” I said it was Friday and the preschool provides snack so I didn’t include as much. He said he hadn’t wanted the cereal they had provided. He went straight out to the bench to eat. He was surprised by the tuna sandwich in his lunch – he hadn’t even opened the container. I told him I was going to start putting the drawing inside the pink container so he’d have to at least open it up.
Carly came and said hi, then went and took the car home to do some grading there. He told me they had had tea party sometime before rest time today. And they had music time. After rest time he worked on patterns with things like seashells, rocks, woods, twigs, and leaves. He said there was no maker space. He ran over and asked Andrea why and she just said they don’t do that on Friday. She was busy so we didn’t ask more, so not sure what happened to the studio time that August said didn’t happen yesterday.
We started to walk over to the pool. We spotted a big black beetle at the foot of the preschool stairs and August gently played with it for a couple minutes, then said goodbye to it. We were about to the pool when Carly called and said the floaties were at home. We stopped to talk about it and he said he still wanted to swim but he wanted Carly to bring the floaties. I think we continued a preschool game we’d been doing, then quickly got changed and walked to meet her and got the floaties from her in the parking lot. She headed home and we headed to the pool. We saw Liz and Lillian along the way and Lillian told her mom that August had brought hummus in the morning. Then two women rode by on bicycles. They said hi to August. One was Rebecca, and I’m not sure who the other woman is – I think it is the woman August thought was Rebecca once.
We got to the pool little after 4. Only two other people there. We played in the pool. He was swimming around a lot on his own. He made up one imagining game where I was climbing a cliff and found him just lying half-way up, having glen from his dimension. He said the word of the day was ‘according to’, from Magic School Bus and the girl that’s always saying “According to my research…” He asked me what the biggest measure of liquid volume is and I couldn’t think of anything besides liters and gallons. He had me set a reminder on him to look it up later. He also asked which animal has the most babies. He thought about it and said, “I think seahorses maybe…seahorses can store up to 20,000 babies.”
We got out of the pool at 5 and sat over by the tables for a few minutes as he ate a little and we got ready to go. He really wanted Carly to pick us up, so I had him call her and ask. We then got walking, and I headed up the street to see how far we could get before we saw her. Somehow we missed her, and she ended up at the school but we had walked a few blocks. She came and got us. August then seemed to claim that he had seen her drive by the other way, but he hadn’t said anything. He said “I didn’t think you would care” or something like that.
We got home at 5:40. He watched some Max and Ruby. Ate two spinach pancakes for dinner. I made the first one, then Carly made him a second one. Playing on the couch he bonked my lip. He asked if submarines could go to the bottom of the ocean and said, “Remember water weight.” We read some Hilo, first reading the throw up part, then jumping ahead in Hilo 4 to where we were and finished the book for a second time. He got a bathroom treat and declared of the bag of new mall candies: “Hearts is medium, jelly beans is small, and M and Ms is extra small.” He Sid something about eating toilet paper, and said, “Actually, toilet paper can be eaten by beavers.”
Took him up to his bath. Played for a bit, then I washed his hair. We used the hair dryer, then Carly cut his hair. He told her, “Concrete’s not solid…it moves…I just know it. Cuz I have a computer as a brain.” I’m not quite sure what he was talking about, although he’s watched a few videos about concrete. I think he might be thinking about how cement actually hardens not by drying, but because it gets wet.
He got his lollipop, then asked to look at our old photos. He got me looking at old baby photos of him. He and I walked up to the bedroom. Carly was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. He popped in, said, “19 billion rotations per seconds” to her with no explanations, and came on into the bedroom.
We read the rest of the Beezus and Ramona chapter about checkers and Ribsy getting locked in the bathroom. He then played the preschool game and wanted to have a kid not like him until he builds things.
We turned the lights off at 9 and I tried singing. He wanted a Teegan and August story but I said it was too late. He got really sad about this. Instead, I started to make up a Teegan and August theme song, about how they were best friends and exploring the universe one door at a time. A lot of rolling around and thinking he was falling asleep. Then at close to 9:40 he rolled over and said, “Dada, when I see garbage I see a pile of parts and the trillion ways they go together.” That’s a reference to Hilo and the robot Izzy, who builds things. A minute later he asked about the alarm clock app on my phone and why it senses if you snore. He was then asleep at 9:45 or a bit after.
The beetle:
In the pool:
His map of Tel Aviv:
Dropping off the hummus
Explaining things
In the pool
His piece of pancake that looked like a bat
Lollipop after hair cutting
Map of the plan for our trip to Tel Aviv
