Saturday, December 22: Dada-Zinnie adventure in Even Yehuda

At 6:10 he woke me up, saying “I peed my pants.” It was just a drop, s he had caught himself. Carly took him in to the bathroom, then they came back. he lay next to me for while, trying to go back to sleep, then went down with Carly. Eventually they got up and went downstairs.

I slept until my alarm at 7:30 and went down. He was finishing a bowl of oatmeal. And they had read The Book that Eats People. August asked for a permanent pen and wrote on a few things, then he wanted me to write down the words of a song he would sing. It went “I miss you so much…” When he was done he asked, “Did I write a whole poem?” He added some more, then excitedly took it up to Carly to show her. She then hung it up upstairs. He came down and got four rings of masking tape from me to hang it up.

We Skyped with my parents for awhile. They showed us all of the Christmas decorations hanging up around the house.

After that he was back to art and wanting to make stuff for Mikaela. He asked to use something for his art and I said it was good for his multimedia projects. He asked what that meant and he said ‘multimedia’ was the word of the day.

We ended up sending two snickerdoodle cookies, and random recycling and his yellow rope to Mikaela. His original idea was to just send down recycling as a kind of joke. He did some art. He hung a couple pictures up on the wall that’s in front of you and to the left when you come in the front door, and decided he wanted to take down the art in the bathroom. Carly headed to the store.

He watched a Halloween Max and Ruby and that made him remember his big lollipop from Eve’s party. He got that and was licking it, and we read Amulet 4 again, starting where she goes to the test, and read much of it.

Carly got home, and I went up to a shower. When I came down he was outside tying up plants again. Inside, he hung one of the grocery bags around his neck and was collecting ‘garbage’ in it. He then delivered it to me, the garbage truck, and we dumped it into a pile that was the dump.

He talked again about wanting a Dada-Zinnie adventure. Carly had talked about going for a walk today, so we were all getting ready to go. But when August said he wanted it to be just me and him she didn’t object and stayed behind to work and make nutty noodles. We left just after 1. We stopped at our park as he wanted a snack. Realized we had forgotten the snack bag so went back and got it.

We then walked up to the Snakes and Ladders Park, stopping twice along the way. Once was to play with a branch with thorns on it, and another to pick up one of those ubiquitous Areon X air fresheners. Marc and I had discussed how all the cars have the exact same air freshener and asked Omar about it. Omar just said they’re everywhere, as if he didn’t understand why we thought that was odd. So I sent a photo of August holding this one to Marc, who is back in Scotland for Christmas. He was quite amused.

At the Snakes and Ladders Playground we first sat and ate more snack. He then wanted to play Drops, so we did ‘Fruits’ as we sat on the little rocking thing. I pointed out an ant carrying a big piece of food. August was wanting to mess around/pretend to squish the ants so I laid down a zero-tolerance policy on bothering the ants. He left them alone after that. He pushed it a little though, as we then went over to the spiderweb climbing area. He told me a joke like, “Why did the ant cross the road?” He then asked if that was okay, as I had said he couldn’t joke about the ants. I clarified that he couldn’t joke about hurting them. I then told a joke he really liked: How many ants does it take to change a light bulb? Aaaaagh There’s ants all over our house! He told several variations on the idea.

He then wanted to play “A imagining game”. He had me step on something that turned you into light and teleported you somewhere else. It ended up teleporting me to his own universe, to a planet that all the robots come from. He took me to his laboratory (the exercise equipment) and showed me how things work. He asked if I wanted to live on his planet and I said yes. So he then teleported my parents here as well. One machine gave us immunizations to protect against alien diseases. Eventually, he turned us all into robots as well. That was so that we could eat the seeds from the trees, which is what robots eat on his planet. We smashed some of the soft seed pods in the exercise equipment.

He needed to go to the bathroom, and we decided to walk up into town. We found the bathrooms at the new mall, then continued on towards the park at the library. He was now calling me “robot student” and teaching me things. We stopped at where Malkin, the coffee shop, used to be. They are remodeling it into something, and August found chunks of sheetrock that he played with. He told me that that’s the other thing that robots eat. We continued on, but stopped in front of the toy store when he saw a stump. He said, “Robot students” and taught me how to use my arm scanner and then how to shoot lasers out of my my hands.

We made it to the playground by the library at 2:45. He taught me more lessons: that sometimes robots eat bits of the puzzle bark on the pine trees. But that makes them sick and when a robot is sick it actually gets hungrier. He also taught me how to use my growing growing and shrinking power. We went to the merry-go-round. We used it as a Magic School Bus again and journeyed into the planet, first into the layers, but then he decided his planet was hollow. I told him that people used to speculate that the earth was hollow, and told him we should read Journey to the Center of the Earth sometime. He then invented a game where we just threw pine needles at each other, then he was tossing a rock around for me to find and retrieve, but basically it was fetch. Of course, he ended up putting them in the puddle at the base of the slide.

We headed home about 3:10. We stopped at Malkin again for more sheet rock, then we both contemplated going to the cafe in the new mall, but decided against it. We agreed we’d probably be eating out a lot in Tel Aviv.

He stopped on the side of the sidewalk to show me another robot power, which he had mentioned earlier: playing leaves like a musical instrument. He also showed me laser eye power. As he did that, I remembered that my parents had seen a pile of some sort of electronic part on the road over towards the highway.

We walked that direction, and stopped to pick some kumquats at a tree. We found a sand pile and August started playing in it. He asked, “Can we play ‘poor people’?” I don’t know where that idea came from, although later I asked at home and he said he was thinking of the photo of Josephine. His game mainly involved decorating the sand pile as our house, using rocks and garbage and bits of brick and tile. We also found the things that my parents had mentioned, like telephone cord boxes for inside houses. It would then be nighttime and he’d pretend to sleep, with me next to him. He would actually lie down on the sand, but I wouldn’t. When I said it rained one night we went across the street and up to the playground by the apartment buildings.

There, he asked me “Can you do a poor voice?” I had noticed that he’d been talking in a slightly sad voice, and that’s what he wanted me to do. He also found another treasure, part of a wind-up car. He wanted to go back to “our sand home” and said, “I really like playing. Sorry.” There, we studied the ant nest in among the bricks a bit more. Taking out the bricks had disturbed them and they were all over the place. I was now going to work during the day, which involved me sitting on the curb and reading Beowulf. He called me over once to see something, then told me “Go and do your work. Get money.”

We headed home when the sun dropped below the buildings. We were home by 4:40. The nutty noodles were done and he ate two bowls, then had a snickerdoodle. They did art and I started making dough for sourdough bread. August was letting her decided what to do with the art: “You’re in control.” Then he started calling her ‘boss’, and started every sentence with “Hey boss…” We also got August on video quickly saying his favorite colors: pink, purple, peach, lavender, silver.

Carly made popcorn, but then went upstairs to FaceTime with her parents when they called. We finished the popcorn, adding salt. August was insistent that we also put more oil on it, so we made a separate bowl for him and me and made what I told him was more of a movie theater style popcorn. Nice and greasy. I took Carly’s up to her.

We did more poor game, and August built a wall of stuff on the edge of our sand house (the kitchen rug). She took him up and gave him a bath. She then took a shower and I came up and read. We finished reading Amulet 4 and then read The Whingdingdilly, another Bill Peet book that I vaguely remember from when I was a kid. I left them at 8:20, and he was asleep by 8:30. He had told me, “She doesn’t like our routine.” Because he manages to stay up longer with me.

At some point during the day, probably when Carly was at the store, we were listening to my Sad Holidays playlist. I then found a Bummer Holidays playlist on Apple Music. We were listening to John Denver’s “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” and August sang along to the titular line.

Oh, and Carly trimmed his hair, I think after we got home when they were doing art. It was so that he would have more hair to use in gluing it to his artwork.

Singing his poem for mama: