He was up about 7:40. He went out with Carly to the patio and sat on her lap and had a good talk while she had her coffee. He came in and talked about when he had looked at satellite pictures on Google Maps. He asked how to switch it to satellite images and I told him about ‘layers’ on a map. He built circuit #92 with Carly. One of the capacitors broke off its piece though, and he was upset about that. I made soft-boiled eggs. As he ate he questioned whether the eggs were chicken eggs, since they were brown.
I played in the bedroom with him. He closed one of the curtains in the door, and the other in the sliding door, making a sort of nest area. He called it, “The secret thinking spying room…so I’ll lay down this pillow so I can think about spying.” He decided we were aliens. He was a baby hatching from me, like seahorses. We were waiting to eat Carly as she came out of the bathroom. He played with her in the bedroom now for several minutes, the same sort of game.
He went to the bathroom, then was making stuff for us in his lab. I asked for a portable car that we could pack in the suitcase. We were planning on going up the funicular but Carly realized it was closed today.
We finally got going around 11:45. We walked to the subway and he was making food for us from flies along the way. We initially were going to take the tram, but the tracks are overgrown and it clearly wasn’t running. We later found it running farther south, but it now stops for some reason and doesn’t go any further north. So we took the subway, and got off at Evangelismos. We actually had a couple extra stops, as we went one stop in the wrong direction on the second line. He wanted to keep riding the subway though.
Outside the station he started playing along the edge of a path with an old piece of gum and a couple bugs. He ended up with a pillbug crawling on his hand. He took it with him as we walked, and let it go after a few minutes. We took the stroller today, and that made things easier. As we walked up the steps to the children’s museum he found some snails. We were in the museum right after 12.
It is free, which is nice. He was hesitant at first, thinking it looked like little kid stuff, but it turned out great. He started playing store with Carly, and I sat down and did some reading about homeschooling. They went through the grocery store area and wrapped up meat for each other and he weighed his groceries. Carly said there were a couple of English kids there but August wasn’t interested in playing with them. She often uses a British accent when playing with August, so had to be careful not to use it.
I caught up to them again in a room full of math stuff. He was playing with strings on a big geometric board thing. He said they were power lines. Carly was sitting and reading, and I did more. When he was done with that, I showed him the big compass with chalk on a blackboard floor. He drew curves, then was ready to get going for lunch.
We walked south to the restaurant Mavros Gatos. August was saying the phrase “Mind your own business, silly.” He learned it from Captain Underpants (they’re now on book nine, I think, and have also read book twelve, out of order), where it actually says ‘beeswax’. August insisted on going barefoot in the restaurant again.
We ordered the lamb chops, tzaziki, and a Greek salad. August tried the meat but found it too chewy. He mainly ate bread with a little tzaziki on it and french fries. He liked lemon squeezed on some of them. Not the healthiest meal, but he was really savoring it. Then, at the end, the waitress brought a little plate of free desserts, which August and I shared and Carly avoided due to nut reasons. We had played Polytopia while waiting.
It was raining lightly, so we put on our rain clothes. August was fine with it though, at least for a few blocks. We walked towards the Panathenaic Stadium, the stadium from the first modern Olympic Games. But the rain grew heavy as we got there. We stopped at the shelter of a newsstand across the corner. I ran across and looked at the stadium through the fence—at least a little history for today.
We waited several minutes as it seemed like a clear spot was coming, but it moved slowly, and the break in the clouds just filled with other clouds. We spent a few minutes trying to hail a cab, but they were all full. August was handling it well though. We decided to try to cross the street to catch a bus. We walked a block to a light, only to find there was no crossing. We tried to cross but got to the median and realized there was a fence on the other side. August wasn’t handling it quite so well now. We retreated across the street and got under cover of a building along with a bunch of guys waiting by their scooters. Carly was downloading the taxi app used here when I finally hailed a cab.
He took us home, where August went out on the patio with Carly for awhile as it had stopped raining, then played Polytopia with me. It started raining again, and August asked, “Is it duck and cover rain?” He’d gotten that from Carly. A bit later he asked, “It was a bad day, right?”
We discussed the phrase “mind your own business.” It is from Captain Underpants so I blamed it on Carly. He had different ideas: “Your fault actually. You’re the one that made it so I’m into learning words…word of the day and stuff.” He spent several minutes using his tape to make a spiderweb of it under the coffee table. He was then the spider and ate me, and sang “saving the rest for lunch. Saving the rest for dinner.” We worked on a circuit. For the next hour or so August had a tough time, getting stir crazy and hungry, probably. He had some cereal and milk (so his bones would be stronger, he said—and he had had carrot and strawberries when we got back) and we went for a walk at 7:25. Still nice and light out.
No stroller this time, and he did fine. He told us of his garbage car invention, which ran on garbage. We sort of did a random walk to the south, past the grocery store, then west to the main street. Saw some good graffiti, and the tram in operation. Went up on a little graffiti-covered pedestrian bridge then headed back. Stopped at the pizza place to get a medium pizza with meat and veggies and one of those sub-shaped cheese pizzas again. While we waited he counted pizza boxes. He counted 74 at first, then saw more. The other day he had counted to a hundred for the fun of it.
While we waited for the pizza we walked over to the grocery store. There’s a little park area so Carly gave him tree0-touching challenges on the way. He ran around a little in the store. While Carly finished up, I took him next door to the little shop to see about buying something with his 20 cents. I had him give a euro to the woman sitting outside. He had his money in one hand and the money for her in the other and was making sure he didn’t mix them up.
In the little shop he looked at his options, then bought a piece of gum for 10 cents. He was happy about that, then even happier when he realized there were two pieces of gum in it. We went back and found Carly and he chewed on on the way home. We went and got the pizz Nd headed home.
We got back at 8:25. He took the tower things from the pizza and put them together and said it looked like a temple. from the Polytopia game, that is. He had more strawberries, and eventually I was able to give him a bath and washed his hair with minimal fuss. Finally left them to go to sleep at 9:50.
Holding a roly poly:
Athens children’s museum 2:
Athens children’s museum 1:
Waiting out the rain:
Tape spider web:
