Tuesday, April 23: school and store with mama

He was kicking me a lot in the night. Once, when I was fending him off, he told me to stop touching him. Think he was dreaming.

He and I were both up at 7:25. We went downstairs and he went to Carly. She told him about ideas she had bout finding stuff to take apart. When he needed to go to the bathroom she tried to get him to do it without her having to go watch him. He’s pretty insistent about it since we got back, even wanting to see our eyes. When I asked why yesterday, he said he wanted to ask what I wanted him to make in his laboratory. He said the same to Carly.

He and I got a lot of fish in Dragonbox Big Numbers, then while he waited for a tree to be made in the game we started Captain Underpants #10. We read a few chapters, and Carly, having received an email from Ofir, saying he’d like to help with getting stuff to take apart, etc., walked up to the school to talk to him. We read a little more, then August wanted me to tell the counterfeiting story again. This time it was a kid buying a watch instead of ice cream.

I did that, then he played with the circuit set on his own for awhile. We then worked on it together, then started another of the actual projects. We had strawberries and cereal for breakfast, and as I got it I heard cats fighting outside. We went outside and saw them staring each other down, down in Mikaela’s yard. He has, over time, made a spaceship out of the two dead D batteries that he got at the library. He first had Carly glue them together, then added a small circuit board from one of our projects. Yesterday, he had her add the nut he found across the street and the dreidel that he had found under the couch. Now, he took the headphones that he found on a walk and had me glue them, trailing out the back of the spaceship. He was calling it his “old fashion rocket ship.” He was talking about wireless and non-wireless, and I think that was part of what made it old-fashioned was because it was wired headphones, not wireless.

Carly got home and we opened the package and looked at the new tools. I had ordered a 90-piece set for working on electronics. He looked at them for a few minutes, then they went back to school using the car and brought back a monitor and two printers.

They started taking apart a printer. When they used one of the new tools to take out a part he brought the tool over to me and told me all about it. I went up to take a shower. Carly then headed to the nursery. She went over to the one to the east, only to find it closed. That is the second one that has closed. So she drove north to the one on highway 4. And she also bought a big container of beautiful strawberries while she was there.

August and I took apart the printer a little more, then he went and watched Hilda. We then took apart the monitor. He was remembering the first monitor and how we didn’t take it all the way apart because of a warning on it about electricity. I couldn’t quite remember what we had decided, and August said, “I swear you said it.” Carly had been looking into electrical experiments, and suggested they make a battery out of coins, saying that the agorot are copper. I doubted they were, and August defended her, saying, “Mama said we’d try it. So don’t be fussy.”

They walked to the store to get vinegar for their experiment, and were back at 3. August had been insistent that he would only walk to the store with her if they only got vinegar. I think she also managed to get milk and one other thing. They then made their batteries. They found they’d get a high voltage (like 2.2) but it still wasn’t lighting up the bulbs, etc. So we started to learn and speculate about amps and volts. When I came down Carly told me that he was a little afraid of one spot on the floor, where they had put their batteries together, because one of the snap circuit pieces had been wobbling funny and they didn’t know why, and he thought it was scary. They figured out that it rocks back and forth longer than you would expect if you bump it. He finally got over it later in the day.

I had finished an essay for work, and now made a shopping list. August got hyper, and Carly headed to the store at 4:45. He was hyper, so we went upstairs and played a brother and sister game with a seal. ‘Blubber’ was a word of the day. The game had the brother and sister (always both played by me now, with him being the animal) getting stranded on an island and befriending a seal, which they first intended to eat, but then changed their mind. It then helps them catch fish. When they are eventually rescued, after island hopping and finding ways to stay safe from a tiger, they refuse to go on the ship until the seal can come with them. Carly had gotten back, but we kept playing for several minutes.

Eventually, I wanted to go downstairs and make dinner—the coconut and ginger curry. I had found the bag of pennies, and they now made a battery out of them. As we ate, we talked about how August wanted to move someplace where it snows. We then talked about just taking a vacation to see snow. August got upset when Carly said she didn’t want to go to a snowy country over winter break, just someplace in Israel with snow. She took him up for a timeout.

She took a shower, and August finished his dinner, then ate three of the strawberries. We talked about them tasting like candy. Finally, he had toast and we read more of Amulet #7. We then Curious George Goes to the Bookstore, and ‘tier’ was another word of the day. Finally, we read more of Captain Underpants #10.

We went up for his bath, and he made up a really cool tune on the toilet. I gave him a bath and washed his hair. Tootsie Roll was his treat. In the bedroom he told me he had made a slicing machine that was totally safe for babies to use. And he talked about how he wanted to do sticker charts again, because he thought they would help him do better. He asked if there were yellow stickers, and said they could be for things that were between green and red. All his own ideas. The air conditioner isn’t working, and we were trying to figure out why. The plug worked, and so did the remote control. Might be a problem.

He was then jumping around and doing math problems on the bed and asked about counting by 11s. I helped him with it, then he did it on his own. He was then counting by 5s, figuring that out on his own. We brushed his teeth, Carly came in, and I left them around 9:15.

Making music with his noise circuit: