He and I were up just before 7:30. We went down together and he lay on the couch for a couple minutes, then went outside to find Carly. She tried to read The One and Only Ivan to him but that one was rejected. So she read more of the Fox book.
He watched a couple things, ending with the rain episode of StoryBots. At one point he turned to me and said, “Dada, you know that wind-powered car? You did it totally wrong…” That was something he talked about last night. It was a kit involving iron rods and other things that I could put together.
Lots of cleaning and deciding what to keep or throw away. He collects a lot, but also throws stuff away pretty easily. He vacuumed for a digital coin. For reading we said he knew The Old Truck well enough that he should read a different book to us. He took it and sat on the couch and read it out loud all to himself. The first time he has ever read anything just for himself. He then read Frog Sat to me and had no problem with it. I suggested we put them over in his calm area, and that he now had books he could read to himself during alone time. He eventually was excited by the idea and said that when he had 5 or 6 books that he could read for an entire alone time.
We then went upstairs and he helped me make the beds. As we went back downstairs he told us, “I like how you set up the star thing…I get more control of myself…to do the chores.” We got him changed and he and Carly were about to do recycling, when Jill and Grace showed up at our gate at 10:30. Carly had been texting Gabby about babysitting, but she said she had a paper to write, but her sisters could do it. A time hadn’t been set, but here they were.
We were surprised, but took advantage. They stayed from 10:30 to 12:15. They did origami with him (making him ninja stars), played Candy Land, and played store by making paper money and he sold hamburgers. They went outside and played in the Zinnie house. Inside they played GarageBand and Dragonbox Big Numbers and Endless Arcade on the iPad. He had made them an arcade level that they were trying to play when I went down.
Carly and I were able to work upstairs the full time. We had soup for lunch—we had realized that August had only eaten banana bread this morning—and we read part of Hilo 5. He and Carly then went to do recycling. He got his coin for that, and we planned to go get a Rebar smoothie with it later.
The two of them then drove to Gaby’s for their 2pm appointment. They played Connect 4 and August made up something called ‘health points’ (from Endless Arcade?) that Carly never fully understood. They then played Monopoly, and he turned it into a building game. Carly was the boss and he was the worker building buildings. He then sort of became the owner of the town, buying things like a power plant, school, and grocery store. He liked how Gaby wrote things down. On the way home they stopped at the school to drop off printer parts.
He was kind of hyper at home. He ate thawed mango, then oatmeal. He asked for the difference between light year and a galactic year. I tried to explain how they are different types of measurement (distance and time, respectively). He asked what does “not particularly” mean?
He wanted to make paper money, like the Kerns had done. So we cut bills and coins while listening to Death Cab remixes. He said he made the really electronic one and got “1800 shekels for this…it’s crazy, right?” Making music, “That’s one of my jobs, man.” He wrote the numbers on all the coins and bills. And there was a lot of them. We then used the new money so I could buy things from his store. He had me play chess against myself. He almost decided to not go to the mall today, as he wanted to use the car to go to the Poleg Mall sometime and get a smoothie at that rebar. But eventually he decided the walk was worth it.
He was outside with Carly for awhile, then we were walking at 5:45. He saw an ant carrying something interesting and took it from the ant. He told us, “I ant stealed.” He did a lot of running on the way there, and we stopped to look at the poop flowers. It was hard to convince him that it wasn’t actually beetle poop in the middle of them. Since we didn’t have the bike we could take the shortcut on the other end.
We got a chocolate hazelnut smoothie, large so that he and I could share it. Carly didn’t want any. They looked at the plant shop while I ordered. He saw a big dog and screamed and took off running, way past the playground. We sat on a bench by the playground and drank the smoothie.
He went in on the playground, to the airplane, with Carly for a few minutes. We were then walking back at 6:30. He told us that a “megamile” is 1000 miles. He was annoyed to learn that a ton is 2000 pounds. He’s said a few times that it should be a 1000 pounds. He understands the simplicity of the metric system.
Right across the street he found a metal rod thing with some electronics on it. Maybe some sort of light controller. We took it apart inside. The circuit board in it is pretty cool. He and Carly then painted on the big sheet of styrofoam he’d brought back from recycling earlier. He was then outside watering plants with her.
For dinner we ate pasta and broccoli. We discussed all of his various coins, and ‘denomination’ was a word of the day. He then played the shopping game with Carly.
Carly took him up and gave him a bath. I heard him singing a long song about people taking some sort of trip. I went up, and we read Plants Versus Zombies Timepocalypse. At some point he told me about some machine he made that allowed you to extract someone’s DNA and then it would turn you into a clone of that person. I questioned how this would work, as it seemed to also give you their memories. I didn’t get a good explanation of how it would work. He asked me, “Are there superheros in this world?” He had a look on his face like he knew the answer was no, but he was a little hopeful they were real. When I said they weren’t, he said, “If you were being attacked by a bad guy you’d pick a hair off…put it in the DNA extractor…to fight it off…but I use it to be scientific.”
We had planned to have me put him to sleep. Carly was tired though and came in around 9:30 and I left them a few minutes later.
Reading to himself for the first time:
Writing numbers for the money:
Running a challenge:
Discussing Plants Versus Zombies:
His story song:
