He used the bathroom at 6:00, but headed back to the bedroom and went back to sleep. He then woke up at 6:42. Took a few minutes on the couch, then, when I asked if I could read a Winnie-the-Pooh story he said “phone” instead. Turned out he remembered Carly texting me last night about his watch syncing. We looked at the messages, then his health stats from yesterday to make sure they’d synced. We played our 5 minutes of Green Planet, then he wanted me to add to my song from yesterday. We figured out how to connect the different music apps, so we could play the AudioKit synth into Tabletop, for example. We worked on that, but lost some additions to my song as it was glitchy, and he just played with the synth. He was playing with the arpeggios. He got music playing on the HomePod. It had misheard him though and ended up playing some random country song, which he danced to.
We went back to making songs and we finished two ‘songs’ — basically nice little loops. He showed me what he made during alone time yesterday. It was an elf building with their ship that came out of the side of it. Those Duplos were at a 90 degree angle and slotted into a hole—a new feature of his making.
We made two more songs. By the fourth I had figured out how to duplicated loops and build on them, so it was more like a start of. Song. We had some banana bred, then played chess. He asked “What does ‘promote’ mean?” A word of the day. We discussed it in terms of grocery store jobs and working up to manager. He also asked what ‘general’ and ‘military plane’ meant. His Crater is a battleship now, not a cruise ship: “It shoots explosive asteroids…that makes earthquakes.”
We played some Polytopia, and I explained why it is exciting when it is close and we discussed ‘adrenaline’.
We went outside and he ate some broccoli from the plant. He played with the hose. We have a plastic hanging pot that I was hanging in the tree for him, and he was trying to shoot the hose through it. When we were done with that we went in and I made a strawberry smoothie. We went upstairs and did a Brother and Sister robot game. They found a Florian XBA Bot. Eventually, after they were attacked by them and hurt one, they took it to the Robot Doctor, who was a mad scientist who lived in town. We had music on and he danced to an “Ocean Eyes” remix.
We went downstairs and had hot dogs and milk for lunch. he asked about how many days were in a month and I read the “30 Days Has September” poem. He asked, “What would happen if the sun ran out of gas?” I talked about how it would take six minutes before the light went away: “Then we would get chilly?” We read https://www.popsci.com/node/204957
At some point I started prepping strawberries to freeze another batch. August went and played with the Duplos on his own, without any prompting, and made a cool, very symmetrical ship, that transported an elephant. When I was done he had me copy it piece-for-piece.
We did more of the robots game. He hurt his knee climbing on the bed once, but handled it well. Downstairs he read “Hop” and “Ten Men” to me. He then had an ice cream sandwich. We had used the vacuum cleaner to vacuum up some sand on the floor by the rug. I had taken the usual attachment off of it. August now started studying the attachment and used his tweezers to pull dust and stuff out of it. He spotted a letter ‘t’ magnet in it and was trying to get it out. I was looking in and he stood up and bonked heads. He got a little upset with me for that one, but not too bad.
We got going to go to school to play with Eve and Zoe. It took us a long time to get going. He was in full distractions mode. His last thing was to get pieces to connect our two ships together, wing tip to wing tip. We walked to school. Not too hot yet. And felt good to walk again.
We got to school and to the preschool as Heather was picking up Eve. We went over to the playground and got to playing. Heather went to prepare for the art show. Zoe was asking August all sorts of math questions on the swing. She was pretty good, asking open questions too like “How do you get to 200?” He gave multiple answers, like 100+50+50 and 100+100. When the three of them were on the swing, August added up their ages and combined the three of them into a teenager since their ages equal 17.
They went over to the kitchen area there. The Korean moms brought their kids by, so the six of them played together. They had brought water that they got somewhere—I think in the preschool—to add to the soups, etc. August and Eve and I made trips to the elementary bathroom to fill up water bottles. I was actually able to read a bit as they played.
They were picked up a little after 4. August played a bit more, then we cleaned up, and walked up to the library. He talked me into playing Polytopia. Didn’t plan on playing it for so long, but it was nice sitting out on the bench, so we played until 5.
Carly had come down to pick up the hummus to deliver for the weekly donation, and also took a couple books back to the library for us. She came back a second time to drop off a bag of small electronics someone had given her, then she had walked home around 4. So it was just me and August walking home. He made music on the way. He got off the bike by the gan on Vatikim when he found a play thermometer on the ground and put it back through their fence and walked most of the way home from there. There was a party of some sort going on at the synagogue on the way, with tables set out in the patio area that has always just been there. Now we know what it is for.
We were home at 5:35. He started taking things apart, the first being the walkie talkie. He was playing with Carly and started doing “2 plus 2 is 4, 4 plus 4 is 8…” He finally struggled with 64+64. There were two ‘old’ telephones and they played with them. He would call her with things like “The planet A62 is being invaded by giant squids. Could you help it?” “…is being invaded by giant birdhouses pooping over everything.” They took one of the telephones apart. He sang a song: “I saw a tiger, then I killed it, and I ate it for lunch.” I helped him take it apart and I wrote out the poem from earlier on a big piece of paper to hang up. He was using scissors and sort of cut or pinched his finger. I picked him up and we ran it under water and he handled it well and got back to taking things apart.
Carly went to take a shower. We played Green Planet, which I had earlier agreed to do at this time. Carly made him a dinner of oatmeal and smoothie and carrots. He was trying to climb on the counter and sort of fell off when Carly tried to get him not to. Looked scarier than it was, as he was okay. I then started reading a YA novel called Jaclyn Hyde to him. He ate the oatmeal and we did more reading. He did more math in his head, and we joked about lines like “I sevened and I sevened and I got 14…” He then played with the duplicate planes.
We went upstairs and he was asking me what different fears are called. So ‘entomophobia’ was another word of the day. I read him the list at https://www.fearof.net/. He then asked about the fear of knives, which wasn’t on the list, and “What about the fear of yourself?” Which was a really interesting question. He brought up the names for groups of animals, so we looked at https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/word-lists/list-of-names-for-groups-of-animals.html. I gave him a bath. On the bed we did a real life version of the Green Planet game, with hims blasting comets/asteroids and getting points, which I wrote down. Carly came in, and I left them at 9:10.
Counting notes:
Our first song:
Dancing to a country song:
Hose through the pot:
Jumping from the bed:
Taking apart the vacuum attachment:
Math with Zoe 1:
Math with Zoe 2:
Telephone game with mama:
Telephone game with mama 2:
