He got up and went to the bathroom at 4:45. Luckily, he came and fell back to sleep. At 6:45 he woke up and made a big point of having me keep resting. They got up and went out and played with Taya’s magnet blocks until I got up at 7:30. When I came out they growled at me. They were wolves. August then pretended I was a boy and ate me. He then wanted me to be the parents. He asked Carly, “Mama wolf, do you want to help me finish that boy’s parents.” He repeated basically the same process as tigers. “Do you want to take a bite or his brain? It’s really good. The thinking part.”
I got him vitamins and cheerios and he ate next to me at the counter. He went and cuddled on Carly, then they got ready to go on a walk together. I heard him say “It smells like elephant butt.” A Hilo reference.
He was all sorts of hyper. He had his own that he found yesterday. He came up to me and was demanding “Get me winter clothes now!” Carly said something about leaving before he got in trouble. As they went out the door he told me, “You can’t get me now.” But was very sweet in saying goodbye. They left just after 8:30.
They walked around and wrote on leaves and hid them. They went to the grocery store and got several little pastries, sweet and savory. They then stopped at a coffee shop and Carly got a coffee. He wasn’t too patient about this, as he wanted to eat the pastries. They walked down by the river a bit and then were back at 9:45. He came in with a stick with a leaf at the end of it. Carly had written on both sides of the leaf—one side had writing about the multiverse, while the other was pictures. He was asking me how we could hang it up, sticking out from the wall.
He was distracted from that though when Carly mentioned the pastries for me. He tried to appropriate them, but eventually patiently sat next to me and shared the sweet one with me.
At 10 the air raid sirens went off. They are louder here than at our home. I quickly checked Twitter and found they were a drill. August was in the process of watching Berenstain Bears and Max and Ruby. Meanwhile, I was figuring out the coffee machine, starting with an espresso and eventually making a latte.
Carly went outside to read in the sun. After Max and Ruby, August wanted me to be his patient. He had me lay on the big red cushion, after first asking me if I was allergic to dogs (there is dog fur on it). He asked me my symptoms and I said a few things. He said, “You have five symptoms. That’s pretty bad.” to fix one the would require “a bandaid and then two pills every day for three weeks.” He was writing the symptoms on a piece of paper with his pen, then we went and got some toys from Taya’s bed to be doctor tools. He got a pretend laptop, and said he was using it to gather “more data” on me.
We finally got ready and left on a walk at 11:35. We got to the corner of the block and Carly went back to change into sandals. He had been carrying the mallet from sand toys and worked on his bike with the mallet while we waited for her. He realized he could put leaves on the metal and hammer them and they left a green color. He said he had learned about that at school. We continued walking and he he kept humming/singing an Erasure song. He spotted a sign about not peeing on the sidewalk. It had a humorous picture on it, of a toilet telling a dog it couldn’t pee. He turned this into a game, with me being kids needing to pee and him being a toilet and wagging his finger at me and saying no. And he stopped at one place to hang up a sign for some art show that had fallen on the ground.
We got to the beach just south of the port, close to the Sheraton, where Jeff stayed, just before 12:30. August got out the sand toys and started playing. He said, “This is so satisfying.” The two of them mainly played while I finished reading Beowulf. They buried one of his ‘treasures’ and he said, “Maybe Taya can find it when she digs here.” They were then pirates, and she was the captain: “O captain! O crew! I see a treasure…an X!” When I was done I played pirates with him, and I said something about how he must have done well on the test to become a pirate. He said he had, he’d gotten the best score. Then a few seconds later he said, “Just kidding. I’m a pirate so I skipped the test.” It turned into a pirates and tigers game where he was a tiger eating me, the pirate.
We left just before 2. We had seen a little pizza place but it was closed. August needed a bathroom so we found one. They went and I found another pizza place a few blocks away. On the way August was singing “Beautiful” loudly. We got to Pizza Domino Frishman at 2:20. Carly ordered three slices and a salad for us while we claimed a table outside. Perhaps the last time we’ll be dining outside for awhile, as rain is supposed to come tomorrow. He got napkins out for everyone. We ate, sharing pizza, and Carly and I also having a salad. August was still hungry so we got a fourth slice.
We paid and looped around to the south, stopping to look in at an art gallery and also seeing some metal robot sculptures. I said it reminded me of the robot sculptures at Children’s Grand Park in Seoul and asked if he remembered them. He said he did and that, “I have a picture of it in my poidyronic brain.” He found a business card on the ground, and he stopped at a table and how he had a passcode that worked with the card when he scanned it and it allowed him to do things.
Then, as we passed near the embassy, he saw a dog, on its own, wearing clothes. He pointed it out and was pretty excited. He then said it was dog, and that he had made special clothes that he put on dogs to control them so that they would deliver mail. He had then cancelled all the mail trucks and people because he had made something better. Furthermore, the clothes ran on moon rocks, and he had some machine mining moon rocks for him. It was a pretty amazing story.
As we waited to cross the road back to the beach, he picked some leaves off an interesting plant and called it a “coral plant.” He then picked up a magazine on the ground. It was called Torah Box. He was pretty excited about it though, and had it open on the handle bars in front of him as he steered us long the beach path.
We found a playground with a water pump on the beach and stopped to play. About 3:30. Carly sat and read on the bench things and I sat on the edge of the playground and read a little. He played with the pump and sand stuff with two other girls, one older than him and one younger. He would call me over occasionally to help out with something. He had me finding shells and pieces of garbage for him and he made a island and decorated it in one of the water basins that fills up with the water from the pump.
He finished with the water area and played on the little play structure for the last few minutes. He called us over and had me walking on the shaky bridge as he shook it back and forth. As we were about to leave he found zip-ties on the rope climbing part and asked us wait until he was done winding them up. We left at 4:40, just as the sun was about to set.
Stopped at the bathrooms again. As we walked we discussed getting a light dinner. He at first said we had to go just to the house, but then decided, “We can get a light dinner as long as I read my magazine.” Carly laughed at that and he told her not to laugh. She protested, saying it was adorable. He said, “You can find me adorable, but don’t laugh.”
He was then asking her “Uh, what’s you’re favorite color?” Repeatedly, which is what she does to him to get him to say something cute. They were saying back and forth, but he wouldn’t actually answer. Then he said, “brown.” He thought it was hilarious when we responded by stopping and looking shocked.
He was then humming “Better not wake the baby,” which we haven’t done for awhile. I talked about how we could actually subscribe to a magazine for him, and ‘subscribe/subscription’ became the word of the day.
We stopped at a hardware store for fly swatters for our real house and he got a scrubbing pad for art projects. He did a good job of staying calm and using his words to convince Carly to get it. We then stopped at the grocery store to look for coffee beans, but no luck.
We got back to the house. He remembered a tea candle he had found earlier. I got it, and we lit it. I made myself an espresso. He was then having us sing “Happy Birthday” to him and he’d blow out the candle.
August and I then went to read. I remembered there were a couple of Chemical Brother videos with robots/androids I’d been meaning to show August so we watched those. We then read Tallulah’s Tutu. He ate nutty noodles for dinner, then was plying mama/baby games with Carly. He finally convinced her to be mosquitoes. I found a couple of videos about mosquitoes that August and I then watched.
We read the book Chrysanthemum, which I bought awhile ago. And also Papasaurus. He was still hungry, so he ate the last of a slice of pizza from lunch. We then read The Bad Seed
More candle. Played with the candle more, then I took him in for a bath.
He stood in the empty bathtub, playing for a few minutes. I went to get the iPad so we could listen to music. He got out, and said he was itchy. He wouldn’t get back in the bathtub. When I asked why he wouldn’t, he said “It’s different.” Carly took over and convinced him to submit to a bath by being birds.
He was then telling me “You’re the baddest dada ever.” We sat on the couch and read a couple chapters of Nimona, then got him ready for bed.
He was exhausted from a day on the beach and being in a new place. He requested to go to sleep with Carly tonight, which doesn’t happen often. I left them at 8:50 and he was asleep less than ten minutes later.
Singing the Erasure song and seeing a sign:
Playing at the beach 1:
Playing at the beach 2:
Humming “Beautiful” and asking about his volume:
Pumping water:
Waves:
Waves slo-mo:
Blowing out the candle for his ‘birthday’:
Taking care of me
His magazine