He was up at 7:20. I got him vitamins and his allergy medicine, then he rested on the couch for a few minutes. I then read Creepy Pair of Underwear. He start d to look at his iPad, but then went to the bathroom. After that he ended up looking at some of this circuitry parts. He wanted to do the shopping game and I offered to sell him a blanket. He said, “I was thinking something on the electronics side.” I was then using fractions with him, asking for “3 and six-tenths shekels” and he had no problem figuring it out.
He played just a couple minutes of Dragonbox Big Numbers as I made him oatmeal, then he ate that, and sat at the table, first taking off one of the allen wrenches that we had glued on a circuit board, then analyzing the circuit board. He then shrunk us down, so we were 1000 times bigger than a germ, but still tiny on the circuit board, and we spent several minutes voyaging around the circuit board and through its parts. He then went over to the couch, and continued with the idea, telling me I could go inside his positronic brain, then his stomach, which could digest anything. When I pointed out that included me, he gave me a special suit. I then asked to see how his muscles and motors worked, and he described the motors pulling strings to make his arms move.
He then watched a few Pink Panther episodes. We started to head to table time, but he asked me to get his “musical sculpture” – the one made from pieces of wood with a straw on top of it. I brought it down and he plugged in the hot glue gun and we added several of the electronics parts and wires to it, and glued the straw on. A good alternative to table time. We eventually did head over, and I added to our odd/even charts. He wanted me to go to 100. I think we stopped at 50. He wouldn’t write any today, but he watched and helped me along the way. On the calculator he started at 95 and subtracted 5 over and over, getting to negative 1000.
We played the buying game and were working more on estimating. We went to the iPad and talked about his possible chores and rewards. He was excited by the idea. He then wanted to earn his first coins. He asked if he could tell me a story for one, so I let him do that for the ‘Other’ category. He told a story about a bug getting caught, then eventually released. He read a Bob Book to me for a second one, then we went upstairs and he made the beds for a third.
Downstairs we looked at the book about kites, then tried improving our plastic bag kite. we used a ring from a keychain to make it so we could attach the string to both handles. We took it outside and it worked a lot better. It wasn’t really getting lift, however, but was blowing well in the wind. We tried to address the lift issue by cutting 4 holes in it in + shapes, like August suggested. We tried it again. May have been on the right path, but they weren’t big enough.
He lost interest at that point though. We did lunch, him eating a bowl of the noodles and broccoli and sauce. He told me about his gum-diwsolving chemical: “Purealloy is actually edible, but it catches on fire really easily…if you drop it on wood. Cuz it makes a chemical reaction.” “Why doesn’t everything have a melting point? Wood doesn’t. It burns!” We didn’t answer that one, as he went on to tell me I was still in his positronic brain. This was all a simulation. He told me I was asleep, inisfe his simulation, and this was all a dream. It got pretty complicated and giggly.
We ended up upstairs, where we added up his Korean money. Back downstairs he danced to “Somethings are better than others.” We got ready, and headed out for a walk just up to our park to exercise and play. It had been his idea. He tracked his minutes on his watch as we went. It was mid-80s. We spent about 15 minutes in the exercise area, then he’d had enough and we were home about 1.
He asked what ‘million’ meant, as he knew that ‘bi’, ‘tri’, ‘quad’, and ‘quit’ mean things. I told him million literally means ‘thousand thousands.’ He was now practicing reading out large numbers on his calculator.
I tried to get him to do alone time, but he had a meltdown about the idea. He calmed down upstairs and was able to tell me that 19 minutes was too long. He agreed to 15, and we went down and did alone time. He was playing with the electronics set from his birthday. Right near the end he got shocked. I saw it happen and asked what happened and he said he got shocked. I thought he was okay, but a couple seconds later he jumped up and ran to me. He started crying, and eventually it turned into a reaction much like when he had been burned: a lot of screaming and hitting himself where he was hurt (his right hand) and rolling around on the couch and sliding off of it. Probably took ten minutes.
When he recovered we moved to nature time. I suggested we watch the first episode of Our Earth, the new series on Netflix with David Attenborough, and have some popcorn. We started watching it, and he was pretty hooked. When I went to make the popcorn he kept calling me back to see something. We watched most of the first episode and had popcorn and drank pineapple water.
When he tired of that we went up and did the Brother and Sister Seal game. I was getting tired and finding it hard to continue. We went downstairs, and he had me taking another voyage through him, seeing how his motors and muscles worked.
We then played Hey, That’s My Fish! on his iPad. We were starting to figure out the strategy involved and discuss it. August said we could start our filter experiment as one bottle was empty. So we cut the end off of it, and were starting by seeing if a paper towel would filter out any of the food coloring from green water. We were listening to electronic music, as we had been most of the day. Carly got home at 4:45 as we did that. We decided that nothing was filtered out, matching August’s hypothesis that the paper towel didn’t have small enough holes.
We then went outside and mixed up some dirty water. We moved our experiment outside, and concluded that a paper towel did, at least, filter out the visible chunks of dirt. He still questioned why he couldn’t drink the water, and didn’t entirely accept my explanation that bacteria etc. could still be in it.
I went upstairs to work. They did a bunch of the store game. They had also read some of _The Big Bad Fox _. I came back down as they were reading. I had lasagna. He had more pasta and broccoli for dinner, then I read some of the book to him. We ate the last of the digestives from Athens, then read part of Dogman. He was still hungry, so ate a lot of carrot strips, then had some Cheerios.
I took him up to the bathroom. He talked about transforming and teleporting me and sending me back in time. I couldn’t keep up with what was happening. He played with the soap, then sang a song about drain flies (“drain fly here, drain fly there, and there and there…”) that morphed into a song about shirts, then into a song about birds. He got the box to the magnetic blocks. It lists how many of each piece is in the box, and also that there are 110 pieces. So he said they should add up to 100 and wanted us to check. So he did most of the math and I helped him add them all up, and there are indeed 100.
Got him ready for bed, and Carly came in and I left them at 9:20. I still heard him at 9:40, but then it got quiet.
Trip to the circuit board 1:
Trip to the circuit board 2:
How his robot arms work:
The bag kite:
In a simulation inside his head:
Dancing to the music:
Exercising:
Traveling through his robot body:
Filter experiment:
Running to get his exercise:
Bird song:
