He was up at 5:43. He lay against me for 5 minutes, then headed downstairs. He was with Carly when I went downstairs. He wanted to save some watching time for later, so he watched the Marble Machine #70 video, then a Max and Ruby, then stopped. We then finished the circuit set we’d been working on.
We got walking to school, and he did a “Nice compact hatchback” chant along the way. His nose was already dirty halfway to school. Don’t know how. At school I took him into the bathroom to wash it, and he washed it himself.
I went home and worked and returned on my bike. As I got there, I saw him from the top of the stairs. He and a few other kids were playing on the side of the building, with a xylophone or something. They went inside after a few minutes and I sent a message this time letting them know I was there. Andrea brought him out after a couple minutes.
He had had a great day. A rather minor incident where he hit Millie but then apologized right away. It sounded like he’d spent most of the day with Eve. He sat with her at lunch and had a good conversation, then afterwards, Andrea said, they probably spent an hour and a half together, first in the weaving area, then inventing things in the makerspace. And Vicky had said it was another good literacy group.
He did some funny dancing in the classroom to the song that was playing, putting one arm on a book shelf and a foot on the overhead projector, before we left. Outside, he asked if we were returning for playbill. We then talked about the idea of returning for the specials in the afternoon, like yoga and playball. He liked the idea, and said he was ready for a “little more” school.
We walked home. At the trees in bloom in the entrance to the school he asked, “Dada, do you think these are fruit-making flowers?” He then spotted a newspaper on the sidewalk and jumped off the bike and grabbed it, saying, “Dada, we could use this newspaper for our compost.” He soon found a second newspaper.
He hummed some nice music on the way home. We snuck the newspapers under the gate, and continued on to the mall to celebrate his good day.
At the mall we went to the candy stand and August took a few minutes to decide, and he said it was hard to choose. He ended up with a colorful sugar stick thing. He said next time he’d get one of the red or green licorice sticks. He ate that, and then we ordered a small sweet potato pizza from Pizza Hut. He played in the little play area while we waited. He was a squirrel again, and when he fell over on his squirrel scooter (the rocking squirrel thing) I would see him at take him to the vet to get fixed.
We took the pizza outside and ate on a bench by the play area. He took a small piece of the sweet potato to try, and somehow choked on it. Like really choked. He was coughing the whole time, but was reaching out to me for help, clearly in distress, I turned him around in front of me on the bench, and just hit his back several times as he kept coughing. Took a few more seconds, then I could tell he had coughed it up. The whole thing was several seconds (15 to 20?) long: long enough for me to set down the pizza, decide to turn him around, do so, realize he was still coughing so didn’t need to do anything drastic, and then hit his back for awhile.
Luckily, he recovered his appetite and ate his half of the pizza. We then walked home, getting here at 2. On the way he chose to wear his hat backwards, then found a thing that he thought looked like a pom Pom.
He played with his butterfly: “I’m playing with my butterfly. I’m getting it to stay on the top for this many minutes.” Like his alone time. “It’s really tricky for the little butterfly.” He got a little frustrated when the butterfly kept getting off the top of the enclosure and I had to explain that the butterfly didn’t understand what was going on, and that it was earning sugar water.
We took the dying flowers out to the compost, then studied the dead little green beetle under the microscope. He pulled off the antennas and put them on tape on the floor to keep them still. We then studied the body, and realized he had also pulled off the head and we could see inside the hollow body. We also looked at a little nail. He spent some good time putting pieces of spaghetti noodle in his robot toy, getting them to stick in.
We were talking about something (Hilda episodes? Books?) and I used ‘penultimate’ and made it a word of the day. He found the box of the robot project we had gotten him for Christmas and we built that. It moves really strangely, like a combination of a rat and a frog, and he enjoyed watching it go around the house, and was also a bit terrified of it.
He accidentally pulled a leg off of the butterfly, so we put it under the microscope as well. We could see the little hairs, and pointy part at the end, but also realized it was still twitching.
We then walked up to do recycling. While I went and did the plastic recycling he studied a broken toy excavator. He then noticed ants carrying fuzzy things and followed them all around the edge of the parking lot to their nest close to the recycling bins.
He was looking at cars on the way home, and I taught him the idea of a ‘dream car’. Another word of the day.
Carly was already home when we got there. He ignored her t first, and wanted her to keep working. He had found a U-bolt with a nut on one end, and remembered he had a nut for the other end. That nut, however, was a little too big. So we wrapped it with duct tape and it worked. I could screw the nut on now.
He then went and cuddled with Carly, then they went out and put paper in the compost bin. I think they also took something across the street. He had also had me punch a hole in the top of a strawberry container so he could plug a pair of my headphones in. It was his new music machine, and more portable than just plugging into his bike. He had both me and Carly try it out. He also showed Carly the robot toy.
For dinner he ate some of the noodles and some asparagus that Carly cooked. He ate enough to earn some of his frozen treat. We read Fix It, Sam (his library book), then did the thing where he runs to us and I catch him. We did it the other direction this time, with me by the air conditioner. We went upstairs to wrestle for awhile, then came back downstairs.
Carly took him upstairs, but he came back down and wanted his tool belt. I went and got it, and he filled it with tools and went upstairs with it on and played in the sink. He made a floor cleaner and used it on the bathroom floor. She washed his hair.
I took over and he asked, “What’s a gondola?” Don’t know where that came from, but I explained and we watched a video of Venice. We read The Falcon’s Feathers. We then looked up photos of six pack holders and animals stuck in them as it was mentioned in the book.
Carly came up and I left them around 8:30.
Nice compact hatchback:
Music on the way home:
Hopping robot 1:
Hopping robot 2:
Twitching leg:
Following the ants:
