Carly had the Compassionate Listening Seminar that she had set up at the school today with about 18 other teachers. She took the car in the morning, and August was up at 7:20. He was quiet on the couch for a few minutes, then asked me “Dada, can we play an imagining game? It will be a new idea. I think you’ll understand.” It was a beaver game with me and my brother playing in the kitchen. A beaver then came in the house, and we took care of it, then took it up to our bedroom. That involved us going upstairs and making a nest on the bed. We played up there for a long time, over an hour, and he was then a cat, and then a bat, all with similar games. We also came up with Gaston verses, like No one snores like Gaston/hunts wild boar like Gaston/No one adds two plus two equals four like Gaston. When I had the kids going to head to school when he was a bat, he told me “In some cultures they do school at night time. So the bat goes with them!”
He played his new music app for awhile, and he told me “Imagining games is my favorite!” He was a beaver again and the beaver hid iPad. As a bat he was flying around. I read The Night Before Preschool, then he wanted storytelling dice. The story was about a turtle ship and a pyramid. Still being an animal, he told me”So this imagining game is going to go on the entire day.” He then watched a Berenstain Bears where they helped Farmer Ben and waited for rain. I started to fall asleep.
He was then hungry and we went down and made and ate french toast. He then requested a visualization, although he gave it more of plot, telling me it was about a girl who goes out exploring and never finds her way home. It became a story called The Blanka Adventure. He played with the wine bottle opener and and his puffy “Hanako” stickers. He found that if he pushed the tip through the sticker he could take off the paper covering the back. He did this to all of them, sticking them on the table, my iPad, the kitchen door, and other things. He wanted more stickers and I found the ones up in his closet, including the Pororo, shapes, numbers, and little funny stickers from Korea. He put a lot of them on the fridge, then used the stencils to make art.
He then was drawing lengths of lines for me to measure with the measurement app. They were lines with dots on the ends, like line segments, and he said he saw someone drawing them on a commercial. We debated why Vicky wants him to hold his pencil differently. He said he would hold it one way at school, but his way at home. He drew lines on his catapult for me to measure. We were listening to my Sad Holidays playlist, which has all my favorite Christmas songs on it. August forgot Carly was at work and asked, “Can I see mama right no? Or is she at work?…I thought she was still in bed.”
August then got his 1kg weight and started exercising and made up some exercises for me. He then went back to drawing shapes. He said, “downright disturbed despondent and depressed” and reminded me it is from the Butter Battle Book. He did more stickers, then wanted to do more imagining games. I was finishing something up, and he did a great job of expressing his impatience: “Dada, please. I want to do the imagining game and you’re running me out or patience.” We ended up doing the cat game on the bed again.
At 12:30 I realized he hadn’t gone to the bathroom. He told me, “Dada! Don’t have that face!” It was me being shocked. A couple times during the day he thought my usual face was my angry face and I had to tell him I wasn’t upset. He finally used the bathroom a couple minutes later. He played with a piece of string and told me, “Dada, when you have a string tied around your big toe like this it only means one thing: you want to remember something.” Seems vaguely familiar from a book we read (Ramona, maybe?) but maybe something he picked up at school. And he told me, “I’m never going to die. Like a battery you can recharge me.”
He didn’t really eat any lunch, and requested the “Yoga app”. He listened/followed the mindfulness app for awhile, and realized it had a timer. He set the timer for three minutes and did art on my iPad–for longer than three minutes. Looking at Day One I realized that we had gone to Children’s Grand Park 3 years in a row on this date. The first one was when I took him to the restaurant for lunch and the women held him and he took a straw.
I got snacks ready and he played with a couple music apps and we left at 2:10. We had rather missed our sunny window, and it was a bit clouded over now, although still nice. Chilly though, and he decided to wear three layers of sweatshirts.
We just walked up to our park and got to playing. He told me “Here’s the rule: you always have to say sorry when you say something you’re not supposed to. Go it?” I asked “Will you follow the rule?” Him: “No.” He had some good hyper time, then wanted to sit on the little alligator bench for a snack. He wanted to sit on my lap and we did that for awhile, but then switched to a regular bench as that was more comfortable for me. He ate apple and Cheerios. He then developed a ‘game’ where he told me to listen to something in nature—the birds or trees—and then would start yelling to interrupt my listening. He had me tell the Blanka story again. He then had another imagining game. He said it took him a long time to think up and he could only do a couple each year.
He told me it was about me climbing on a mountain and finding a seal. So it turned into a story about a “place of forgetting” and saving a seal that was drawn there and returning it to the sea, where it was reunited with its parents. He had me repeat it, then he found a big snail next to a big puddle in the parking lot. He put it over by a push, then washed his hands in the drinking fountain.
He then took my watch to track steps. He saw a guy come and start exercising. And said, “That guy is not beautiful.” We then told stories about a bird and a beaver on the path between worlds—continuing the stories from the visualization of the girl that couldn’t find her way home.
When it was time to head home I convinced him to walk the Holly block. He stopped at the garbage area across from us and got a few treasures and we were home at 4:30.
He talked about working on his bridge, but then got busy with the stencils. He told me “No, I’m focused on this.” Carly was home from a very successful workshop at 5. He was working on his art and showed Carly his “geometric pictures.” He got a bit hyper, but then got her to work with him on the bridge. She got the black tape and they worked on it a bit, but then he went back to the regular paper and made a model for himself of what the bridge should look like. We tried to ask him something and he told me, “I need to be as focused as I can on the bridge.”
We ate spaghetti for dinner, and he was singing about his wormy noodles. He stepped on the tape dispenser and hurt his foot. He wanted a lollipop. Carly said he could have something better—ice cream—after his bath. August wanted it now and Carly offered a spoonful now. He insisted on all of it now, and got upset when she said no. She took him upstairs to calm down, then gave him a bath. She scrubbed his forehead to get off the marker. I straightened up downstairs so it looked respectable. Carly had started by doing the dishes.
They came down and had their brownie ice cream. As she scooped it up he danced in excitement to the T-Bone Burnett song that was playing.
We read Frances Frog’s Forever Friend on Skybrary, then headed upstairs. He spent a long time in the bathroom. Finally got him in the bedroom and brushed his teeth. He wanted a preschool story about dragons. It ended with the mama and baby dragon frying the school. He asked for a second pair of socks. I asked why, and he said, “I don’t want to tell you cuz you might feel bad for me.” I asked if his feet had been cold last night and he admitted yes. As I went to get a second pair he said, “Thank you. I’m well taken care of.”
We put on the second pair, then he told me when I could turn the lamp off. He took off his socks, one layer, then the next. As he tried to go to sleep he pressed his feet up against me, like I had suggested. He’s been sleeping sideways, with just his head pressed against Carly, and I suggested that he, and especially his feet, would be warmer if he was parallel. He tossed his head about and I was falling asleep. Right at nine he reached out and tapped me on the face. I started to sing another song but he was instantly asleep. Waited just a few more seconds and I was able to get up.
Putting Hanako stickers on the table:
Stickers on the fridge:
Drawing shapes with the stencils:
Teaching me an exercise:
Bouncing at the playground:
