I started waking him up at 8. Took until close to 8:20. Took quite awhile for him to get going. He went downstairs, then leaned against me as he woke up and ate his vitamins.
He ate a couple strawberries and played Dragonbox Big Numbers, then had oatmeal with brown sugar. I sat next to him at the table and worked and helped him with his math and number writing. He was totally singing, mainly about the game. He then started the copying game. He asked, “Could you please copy me? Even when I say esophagus?” I asked, “How will I know when to stop.” He replied, “Oh, when I say refrigerator.”
He asked what is class was doing right now. I said it was likely literacy group. “Do you think Ms. Vicky is saying ‘What about the E?’” He was done with iPad, and asked for the macro lens. He took a couple photos of crumbs with it, then asked me to add the Billy Bragg song that was playing to his playlist. He asked me to blow up a balloon with the bicycle pump. I blew one up, but it doesn’t work too well. He found a permanent marker in the drawer and when I read the label it included Instant drying.” “Instant? What’s that mean?” First word of the day.
He then had me help him create a balloon creation, taping them together, then adding a paper cup. He colored dots on the balloons and wrote in the cup with the permanent marker, and would eventually add the circuit board and switches from the light thing we had taken apart. He liked the idea of his balloon creation floating and got a little grumpy when I said we couldn’t get a canister of helium. “What’s a canister?”
I started a project of organizing his art kitchen and putting signs on things. I would get him to read the signs. He wanted to put hot glue on a balloon as an experiment. I did it as he watched from across the room and took a video in slo-mo of it popping. He also did a water mixture of sorts, using the drill to mix it.
For lunch we made soft-boiled eggs. It turned out what he had been wanting was hard-boiled eggs, like we used to have, but soft-boiled was a good discovery:
“Remember those adventures in Korea when we’d eat those soft-boiled eggs?…I liked cracking them.” “We had them here too.” As we ate (I used a plastic lid as a egg holder and showed him how to break it open with a spoon. We dipped crackers in it, since we didn’t have toast) he asked, “What did we mostly eat in Korea?” We talked about Korean food and what we ate. He then was asking a lot of questions about whether he would have been able to use a hot glue gun when he was three or a baby.
He’s asked about the living room windows, which aren’t clear, a couple times recently, and today asked, “How is it blurry like that when you look through the living room window? How? How? How?” As we ate we also were discussing aardvarks and what and how they ate (he stuck his tongue in the egg and pretended to be an aardvark). He says he makes paper out of ant larvae.
We watched a little more of the race and he said he liked the rainy race. As he went to the bathroom he asked, “Do you think to a snail my poop would be giant?” He remembered the civilization building game we had played on my phone and wanted to play it sometime. I told him I could put some building games on his iPad. I found a couple of free Lego games and a couple others and installed those, and he played one of the Lego ones while I took a shower.
Back downstairs we glued a cable to a speaker and I finished signs. He started talking about short bits of times and invented the “Infinitit…way bigger than the other numbers I’ve made up.”
We finally got going outside when he went out at 2 to release the insects. He took them across to the fallen cactus, to the little safe spot in it and released them there. We then spent the next hour looking for insects in that area. Studied a couple of ant nests, and found a lot of new insects. He had 6 or 7 in the bug catcher by the time we were done. “That’s a cool rolly Polly.”
Taya was being watched by Grace after school and we planned to go play with them. We were already running late when August was playing around with the hammer outside and somehow hit one of his fingers. I picked him up and comforted him for a couple minutes, and noticed he was pressing his eyes tightly shut. I tried to get him to use the calm space. He sort of did, crawling under the chair next to it for a minute.
We finally got walking after 3. To school by 3:30. He was humming music on the way. We searched the campus for Grace and Taya. Not on the playgrounds. August suggested Cassie’s room. Not there, and not in the library or cafeteria. We were intrigued by the elevator not working; the door was stuck open at the top. We ended up at the nature reserve and I thought about looking for a tortoise. August found one after a few seconds. We looked at it and picked it up, then let it go.
August asked, “Where on Earth do you think Taya is on campus?” He found a couple little treasures. We headed back to Cassie’s room and found them. He excitedly showed Grace and Taya the bugs and then we captured a crane fly that Taya spotted. Just a couple more minutes, then Cassie showed up. We stayed with them and walked them to the exit.
August wanted to head home as well, so we got the iHerb box and I balanced it on the handlebars. August suggested putting it on the seat, and he was hanging off the front of the bike. We tried that for a few feet for fun. He was asking a lot of questions on the way home and I had to keep stopping to hear him. Near the end of the walk he was asking about trucks and cars and their heights and we discussed the concept of ‘aerodynamic’. We were home at 4:50.
We fixed and revised his Lego ship and were going to start on a new circuit when Carly got home. I went up to work for an hour. August came in once to check in and Carly came and got him. I was getting weird withdrawal notices from the Washington college savings plan account and had to call my dad to get the code to let me into the account. It turned out to be nothing, and later in the night they sent out an email about problems with their email system. While I was upstairs I heard them making a lot of noise, in fun I think.
When I came down he was making a big structure out of string throughout the kitchen. He as so into it he didn’t want dinner. He said, “It’s like a maze of duckings.” As in, ducking to avoid it. Carly headed upstairs. He kept adding and playing, taping things to it and expanding it to reach the coffee table. He started to hug me from behind. Sweet at first. Then rougher. Finally, I asked him what he wanted to say, and he said, “Im hungry.”
For dinner we both had chicken soup and shared the last of the focaccia. He said answering the question for cotton candy was like when he had to do dance move for something at the Halloween thing. He said it was like money, and I explained ’barter’ to him, and another new one was ‘in advance’ when I said we should have defrosted his frozen treat in advance. He ate some of that and talked about a class of kid elves that were on a field trip. He took down all of the beige strings from his big creation and stuffed them all into a little bottle that Eve had given him.
I took him up for his bath and we got that done pretty quickly. He had been asking to watch a video about how popsicles are made, so we watched that on the bed (https://youtu.be/jW1O1XTjgMA). I read I Will Take a Nap! and had him brush his teeth. Carly came in and I left them at 8:30. Took her awhile, as I still heard them at 9:15.
Balloon creation:
Balloon popping slo-mo:
Soft-boiled egg:
Today’s insect collection:
Music on the way to school:
Tortoise time:
Showing off his insects:
Web creation:
