He got up at 6:30 to use the bathroom. He came back in and cuddled on the bed with Carly, but he was awake and acting like a rabbit so they went downstairs. He watched the groundhogs episode of Wild Kratts again. And had just sent art to Mikaela when I came down, to thank her for her present. He then made more art and sent it down with my help. For the card he made he dictated to Carly what to write: “I love you Mikaela. I’m so happy you like our drawings. Love, August.” It was a bit different when he repeated it. He then kept asking “Does Mikaela know what our insurance is?” When I didn’t know what he was asking he said, “I’m back in my shell.” And he told me, “I’d like you to answer some questions.” In the end he settled on our phone number. He seemed to think it was a code of sorts that would let her know who sent it. I wrote it out, then he copied it onto his card. He tied on another string to the window screen and delivered the bag down.
He finished watching a show, then did one story of Berenstain Bears. It was one where Sister pretended to be a doctor. He was then my doctor and ordered me to rest. He brought me water and wrote down my symptoms. Eventually, he was a baby groundhog who climbed into bed with me and cuddled for quite awhile.
I went upstairs to take a shower.
They were going to go to the plant store and I went upstairs to do some work. It took them quite awhile to get going. At one point, as they were about to leave, he asked her if she was bringing snacks, because he might get hungry. So she made him oatmeal and he ate a full bowl of oatmeal before they left. He did quite well at the plant store even though Carly rejected several of his ideas.
They came back and he watched some of a Formula 3 race with me. He went outside and they planted plants together. I went out and he asked for a bamboo stick from the storage area. I got the key and got a bamboo stick for him and dumped out water from random buckets in there and turned them over. Looked like perfect mosquito habitat. Carly made a strawberry smoothie out of some of the strawberries they bought at the stand. August was working on a wiring system so that he could blast lasers from the roof of the house. It involved using the twine to tie up the plants to their sticks or the fence.
He looked at the remains of his slime from a couple months go. it has gone through quite a transformation every time it rains and dries out. It is now completely black and slimy at the edge: “It looks like honey but it is NOT honey. So don’t eat it.”
Carly had brought home a stack of Highlights magazines for him. I tried to read one with him. There was a questions area and I tried to ask him a couple:
Me: Do you know more about taking care of a bird or a fish?
Him: I know everything, so…
Me: what three words would you use to describe a carrot?
Him: I don’t want to tell you.
And then he headed back outside. We were out there a bit more, then came in and finished reading Amulet 4. He was then a groul (a monster from the book) for an imagining game. He had venom and ‘paralyze’ became the word of the day. That shifted into games where he was a snake.
Finally, he and I headed to the park near us a little before 4. He said, “Let’s play spaceman. That’s when you go in space and pee in your pants and go back to the space stion and change your pants…but there’s no more changes of clothes and you get upset.” I ended up singing all 20 verses of The Ants Go Marching. He helped at the end. Don’t know when the last time was that we sang that. We went on the exercise equipment. He sat on me eating Cheerios. I sang the “Dada loves you a ton of Qs” song. Of mama he asked “What if she doesn’t?” I asked why he questions her love so much. He said, “I like to make her squeak.”
He got one foot stuck on the machine as he got off my lap and fell, spilling most of the Cheerios. He said he wanted to head home, but first he found a small candle. He wanted to light it, and thought it might work like a match. I had to explain the difference. He broke the candle a bit, and that changed his mind. I told him it would still work, but be decided he wanted to light one of our emergency candles at home instead and we never did.
We headed home. I told him he was saying “poopy” too much and said, “Remember when you used to sing all the time on the bike?” He replied, “I sing songs in my head.”
We were home at 4:40. He took some of the pieces off of his Cheerios box art, then sat with Carly for awhile. He went over and got his iPad and played with the synth app.
We headed to Sushi Ishimoto for dinner. Carly had had the idea of going out for dinner, and August suggested the noodle place. He was loud and hyper at first. I looked up jokes on my phone and was telling him jokes. We ordered our “usual”, the pad thai and shrimp, the mushroom noodles, and two orders of sushi.
August ate a few of the sushi rolls, then noodles and shrimp. When we headed home I said it was nice enough to walk. They took the car home and I walked, listening to the start of Forward the Foundation.
At home, Carly read We’re All Wonders, then I read The Book that Eats People twice, After the Fall, and The Invisible Boy. He got mean, pretending to be mean to Brian. Usually when he acts things out there is a reason for it, but this time it seemed he was just having fun pretending to be mean, so we stopped playing. Carly gave him a bath and I think they read some of the First Book of Why.
I went up and took over to put him to sleep. He wanted a visualization in which Joon, from PKC, got lost and didn’t come back. He was talking about Juon being mean but wouldn’t say how. I was trying to make the story happy, with him getting help getting home, but August protested, arguing that it broke the logic of our ‘Path between worlds’ stories, where you could only find new worlds, but not your way back. I solved the dilemma by having Juon come across Blanka, who was now older, and collected children she found wandering the path and took them to a world where they could live together while she tried to figure out how to get them home. August said the story was scary at first, but it was exactly what he had requested. Then, he talked about how he didn’t want the lamp off at all because he’s afraid of the dark. I said he hasn’t mentioned that to us during the night, but he said he hasn’t wanted to tell us. He has seemed more concerned about the dark though. Carly said he hid his head when they walked through the dark hallways at school, and he’s done a couple other things like that.
I was trying to get him to sleep a bit earlier, since he was up earlier, but there was too much going on in his head. I mentioned that, and he said it wasn’t a brain, but a computer. I reminded him of the ‘positronic brain’. He asked, “Do we have a histern?” I figured out he meant ‘cistern’. We discussed the water system, and cisterns versus reservoirs, and what would happen if the water system stopped working He explained how we ran out of water on Earth and he put in a system that gets water from other galaxies. “I connect pipes to other universes because Earth is out of water.”
He then talked about how he wanted Dada-Zinnie adventures over winter break and suggested we go to the science center that was far away, that he went to with Gramma and Grampa.
Finally, I sang a couple songs. I was singing “Idaho” and he was quiet, then he loudly sang, in tune, “nobody can trap my nose” instead of “that he belongs in Idaho” when I got to that line. He was pretty proud of that one, and it was pretty funny. Finally, he said, “Warning power low” in a robot voice. He fell asleep a few minutes later at 9:10.
Speaking of being a robot, Judson also knew that August is a robot, as I heard him telling Heather that at the party.
Sending art to Mikaela:
Tying up the vine:
Adding to his tea party picture:
Riding across the playground:
Ants go marching 20 by 20:
Synth slo-mo:
His inter-universe water system:
