Sunday, December 2: Tiv Taam, the school, and tie dye

He was up just after 7. I was already awake, but he told me “You can go back to sleep.” He came back in though, asking for help finding Carly. I went down with him. She was outside, so he put his shoes on and went out with her. I went back upstate for a few minutes, and when I came back down they were decorating Carly’s glasses, trying to make something for her meme costume for the middle school dress up day. They were trying surgery things, and he said, “Now that I think about it, they look like…” He really does like his transitions.

He went to the bathroom all on his own. But he didn’t pull up his pants. He says he doesn’t have to because his home is public. He for private and public backwards, but had the concept down, talking about how people can only come in if we invite them. Carly told him to push his hair behind his ears to keep it back, and said he’d been doing it, like when he came in from outside. But then he remembered that he was to just be able to doing his hair back (like Eve).

We skyped with my parents. He was playing with a tube of taped together toilet paper rolls, which were the start of a bridge. He told them he wouldn’t show them his bridge until it is done. When he saw Paul, the first time in a couple months, he said, “That’s not uncle Paul!” He said the muscles looked different. We decided he was an alien imposter. I told them about how he was building a lot of stuff at school, and I asked him what else he had built. He said he had also built a “germ sucker upper.” He was typing things back and forth with them, and after they sent a picture of an octopus he went over to Carly and was a baby octopus and she was the mama. I told them about how Carly had thought he had smelled like incense, and I asked him what his favorite scent was. He said, “fresh and rosy fingered like the dawn.” He learned that from Carly. I remembered how I had heard the phrase during the coverage of the 24 Hours of Le Man. When it came time to say goodbye he objected: “Octopuses don’t talk!” He wrote “I love you” with “sprayed ink letters” since he was still an octopus.

August them made puzzles for us. Totally his idea. The first was a black piece of paper that he cut up, mainly with square lines. I was not successful. He did a second one, but this time drew a picture on it, and i was successful. We talked about making boxes for them and taking them to preschool.

He ended up on the couch making mandalas and humming. I realized he was humming “Joy to the World.” We were then battling over controlling Apple Music. Siri played a couple random songs, based on mishearing August. He liked them though, and added “Dirty Window” by Metallica to his playlist, after dancing to it in the chair. He also added a second random song.

He was then pretending to be animals, and wanting me to take care of them. A little more difficult than the kinkajous and kittens and squirrels, as he was now being plankton and slug. He helped me in mixing the bread, then outside he had the idea of using the drill. We got it, and he had fun drilling holes in the mushrooms and old roots of the tree. Back inside, he played the animals game with Carly and they were yeast.

We all headed to Tiv Taam in the car. He told us how “Slowly slowly, by weather, the Earth is breaking apart.” He said there would be no more humans unless they figure out a different place to live. He used his blue light video projector to show me. We talked about this much of the way. But Carly had music playing and there was a Josh Ritter song, “Harbortown”, that he asked me to add to his playlist.

Carly parked behind Tiv Taam. We avoided the mud on our walk out. Carly went to Tiv Taam to get snacks for her Compassionate Listening training next Sunday. August and I made it as far as the playground. We were first cats, and the structure was our house. He sat and ate part of. Bar, but then he mainly looked around for treasures, as there was a lot of garbage on the playground. He found lots of little bits of wire. He found a couple of very sticky gummi worms, and got one on a piece of cardboard, then went and was hanging on the bench of the picnic table. He said, “Dada, I just discovered something. Ants are really attracted to this. And they get stuck on it.” He found more wire treasures, and twice, when his hands were dirty, he washed them off in the puddle at the bottom of the slide.

He then developed a game on the rocking horse thing. At first it was a business where I charged a thousand dollars per rock. He would then pay, but keep rocking past how much he paid for. So the business model changed, and the horse was attached to a generator, and people that rocked on it created power and got paid a little money for it. When I paid him for his first stint on it, he acted like he was throwing it and said, “Teleporting this to someone who doesn’t have much power…boom!”

Carly had finished at Tiv Taam, then gone to the art store to get tie dye materials, including blank shirts. When she was done she came to us. We left at 1:15. He was very excited to get to tie dying, but first we were going to the school. He offered to help her with her work “so you can get done faster.” While we were driving he told a story about how he planted a seed and it grew into a giant fan. It took 25 years. He then planted a seed that turned into one of his wave monitoring machine (I reminded him he had invented those when we were playing in the Mediterranean).

We got to the school. As we walked in he said, “When we get back, let’s get our house back on its feet…I added steel feet on it that can get to a different universe in ONE STEP. It’s giganticer than you think.” Which seemed to be a sort of play on words of ‘back on its feet’, and also a reference to both Amulet and Hilo, both of which have houses that are able to walk around on giant legs. He was also talking in his echo mode, which is a switch he can turn on and off.

Carly took some of the snacks to the staff lounge, where August helped her put them in the fridge, then we went to her classroom. Carly headed back to clean the popcorn maker, and he used tape to tape the stool that goes up and down. It is falling apart, but he doesn’t want her to get rid of it. “It’s kind of a puzzle, cuz I have a picture in my brain of it before” “Cuz I’m trying to fix Mama’s chair, and this is special for mama.” He fixed it with a lot of tape, then we went and found her.

We went back to the classroom and had a Ferrer Rocher chocolate, which someone had given to Carly, and I stayed there and read while August went with her to return the popcorn maker and to look at the costume room. Carly was looking for stuff for the dress up days. He tried on lots of stuff, like a pink wig, and lots of pink and purple stuff. When they came back he told me, “You missed some beautiful costumes.” And he asked Carly, “Tomorrow, can we go to costume room again?”

As we walked to the car, Carly said she needed to eat first when we get home. August said he wanted to do the tie dye first, “Because I’m interested in art!”

We were home after 3. He initially was frustrated that we wanted to eat first, instead of doing the tie dye. He decided to watch Berenstain Bears, and he ate two bowls of the pasta. They then did their tie dying, much to his relief. He was being quite grumpy about having to wait, and wasn’t being too patient with her. He told her his favorite colors: “pink, purple, peach, lavender, and silver.” He has that down. I heard him recite the exact same list to Eve the other day.

I worked on the bread, listening to Cargo by Men at Work. When they were done with the tie dye they played Dragon Box Big Numbers.

I then walked over to the mall to get a few things at Tiv Taam and more toothpaste for him. When I got back he was watching Magic School Bus while Carly vacuumed. He didn’t like us moving into evening routine, and was upset about something (not going outside, I think) and said, “I hate Mama’s brain…it doesn’t think of the right choices.” He got over it and played with tape. He asked, “Hey Siri, do you want me to put tape on you?” Siri replied, “I’m happy with what I’ve got.”

We at strawberries and read Shivers. I had to go cut more. We chose ‘grouchy’ as another word of the day, and talked about how he had been grouchy today. We had a few minutes, so I let him take the drill out and do some more drilling.

She took him up for a bath. He was playing in the sink and asked me to bring up the droppers. A long time playing. She washed him, then I took him up for bed time. He said he wanted to tell a story, and told a story about a superhero that went to fight a monster, but “Was never seen again.” We traded stories, all of which had to end with the ‘superhero’ getting killed. He requested I tell one about an alien doing the same thing.

We brushed his teeth and I turned on just the lamp. He insisted on a preschool story, and I started telling a story about an actual school building, and how it was getting old, but they decided to remodel it instead of building a new one. He insisted there should be him and and asteroid in it, so I was going to have it almost hit by the asteroid but he would stop it first. He disagreed, and just wanted the asteroid to hit the school. The end. Don’t know where his love of dark endings suddenly came from. Well, there was The Gingerbread Man.

I sang “Imaginary Bars”. He was curled up, but not falling asleep. At 8:45 he turned over and claimed that my hand tickled him in the process. Several minutes later, me basically asleep, he said, “Hey dada, I changed myself…” He was now running on magic, not science. A couple minutes later he asked, “What is magic?” We sort of discussed that, then he finally fell asleep right at 9.

Humming and mandalas: