Carly was picked up by a taxi at 5:30. I managed to get up and say goodbye and crawl back in bed. I didn’t know how August would respond in the morning, so after I woke up I went back up and stayed in the bedroom until he woke up at 6:40. It turned out I had nothing to worry bout.
We went downstairs and he ate oatmeal and everything went smoothly. We walked to school and dropping him off went without a hitch. Marion was gone, and Ms. Rena was there for the morning, which I think was a nice surprise for him. As I left I heard Lydia or Eve saying “August is the best. I love him so much.”
I went to the library and worked from there for the day. Around 11:30 Andrea emailed me and sent me a couple photos and said that morning choice time was going really well. He had made something out of a stick and beads and pipe cleaners, and was painting a plastic bottle. At one point during the day I walked over and around the big field and found all the orange trees he’d told me were over there. Lots of oranges and I picked one and ate it.
When I picked him up he immediately told me he had had a good day. His nose/top lip had gotten pretty bad though and were all brown and starting to get scabby. He walked in circles on the grass and told me about how he could recombine DNA: “You can break it apart and recombine that code.” He sat on the bench and ate some cashews. Taya and Eve were hanging out with Grace and going to play on the playground, but he didn’t want to play with them, and instead wanted to get going.
We walked upstairs and he saw plants in pots outside the 3rd grade. He told me the pots were actually made from plastic, although it looked like fabric. He had learned this on Monday and showed me where the table was where they had learned about them. Must have been part of the earth day celebration. he tiptoed through some flowers that had been planted around trees, then told me how cheetahs are stupid because they can only run at top speed for bout 40 seconds. He told me that was their weakness, then talked about the weaknesses of other animals: “The weakness of the clam shells, dada, is that one creature of the sea can drill through the shell and make it a liquid and just eat.”
We went to the library and got The Return of Zita the Spacegirl. I asked Amanda if they could track down the 5th and 6th Amulet books, which were due back in early December. She looked it up and it said they were turned in. I then spotted them on the shelf waiting to be re-shelved behind her. They just came back today. We got those and left at 4:10. We saw these doors down below into the hillside, sort of, below the library with warnings about electronic equipment. He explained how he made the equipment in there.
Finally, as we started walking home I told him I had eaten an orange today, and mentioned that we have a juicer. He got really excited about juicing oranges and wanted me to find the juicer when we got home. He then started talking about “The robotic Dion I’m making…” Dion is the Playball teacher. He said it looks and feels just like Dion on the outside, but inside it has machines and space and everything. And it was huge. This was like Zita, where there ends up being a huge Zita robot. He said he had fun at Playball today, but that he still hates Playball. I asked why, and he replied, “Because I always hate playball, silly Billy.” And he told me he wants to travel more, and wanted to go to every country. Except for ones with tornadoes and hurricanes, of course.
We stopped at home and dropped off our stuff and took the car up to town and parked in the dirt lot. As we walked to VIPizza, he asked, “Where did we park?” I told him him we had just parked in the dirt lot. Without a pause, he told me, “I was talking to my invisible robotic tree trunk. I was asking it where I parked my invisible dog.”
At VIPizza they had cheese slices and anchovy slices. I asked if he wanted to try anchovies. He called back “Never!” As we ate he told me lions are picky eaters as they won’t eat anything that has been dead for awhile. We speculated on lions and scavengers would have different stomachs. We talked about how this was the best pizza ever, and I said I wished we could eat at Pizza School again so he could compare them. He didn’t remember Pizza School at first, but then I mentioned noodle pizza, and he perked up and I could tell he actually remembered that. He told me he could give me some noodle pizza from his lab, tied with a bow, “with perfect cheese.”
He had a cheese slice and I had one of their stuffed things, which they also put hard-boiled egg in and serve with ranch dressing. And then it happened: I had to get him a second piece. He had corn this time, and he ate most of it. He asked to go to the bathroom and as we walked back there I said I hadn’t thought to ask him at school. He said, “Don’t worry about it.” We left there at 5:25.
As I walked back I said something about having good Dada and Zinnie time. As we got in the car he sang “August loves Zinnie and Dada time. Just kidding!” Then he said it the other way and with “Just kidding!” again.
We were home at 5:45. I remembered how we used to say thank you to parks when we left them, and he asked, “Can we still do it?” we got a bag and walked over to the tree near the cloud bridge and picked a bunch of the small sour oranges. We went back and had a fun, and made a mess, squeezing them. It was really strong stuff. We kept adding more and more water and a bunch of sugar and fake sugar. Then, we finally got something drinkable by putting some of that (we had filled the glass water bottle) in a cup and and adding more water and sugar.
He watched a Wild Kratts and took the frozen treat out. Too frozen, so let it thaw. He wanted oatmeal, and I let him cut the mango all on his own. We then skyped with Carly. He gave her a hug on the iPad, but also got sad and told her he didn’t like her. Carly had had a good trip to Spain. August was grumpy, but softened when she offered to tell “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. He lay on the couch as she told him the story.
He ate the frozen treat and oatmeal. He broke off a big piece of the frozen stuff and gave it to me. We read a few chapters of The Return of Zita and skipped his bath. We started to talk about a word of the day. I proposed some word I had taught him today and he said no, that it should be ‘motherton’. He said it was from a song he’d heard at school; “Motherton can’t you live.” He said it was a song about nature. Couldn’t figure it out, but I thought it might be about Mother Nature, and I talked about ‘personification’ when he asked what Mother Nature is (and I also mentioned us saying thank you to parks). He said, “Personification, word of the day!”
We brushed his teeth and got in bed. We discussed wedding rings after he gave me his ring, as it is too big for his finger (he had made it at school). That discussion led to a discussion of living with someone. He told me he was never moving out, and flatly said, “And I won’t get a job. I refuse to get a job.” We had lights off at 9. He made some funny noises, then requested a visualization about a hair. He was asleep about 9:30.
Trying to tape the automatic doors:
Explaining an invention:
Discussing the pizza:
Squeezing oranges:
Slicing mango:
