He was stuffy and Carly had to put him back to sleep about 6:30. He woke up at 7:20. I read “Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees”. I talked about our day, and he was excited about the train: “But not now. I’m going to change it to 32.” He went and changed the countdown. We played Robot Factory together, then he did the Weather app while I made oatmeal. He brought up the supernova and nuclear bomb discussion from yesterday or the day before. When I was talking about putting sugar in his oatmeal he said, think you mean poop sugar.” That led to a funny discussion of what would be the worst sugar. Candidates included poison sugar, Mercury sugar, black hole sugar, and magma sugar, among others.
He said there was “Question planet..Its full of trillions of questions cuz nobody has explored it.” He went to the bathroom. He asked “How many moon years in a Neptune year?” He then wanted to calculate the length of the year on his planet in Earth seconds 5.385887662e27. Add one Earth year every ten years as their leap year.
I made sandwiches for our lunch. I was focused on getting ready to go. He accused me of being grumpy, although I wasn’t, I was just not playing with him as much as he wanted. Still, he told me “You’re being so grumpy.” Which was a good use of his words. He then invented a little game where he gives me a book but I’m a pirate (I think this started with our pirate store game) and don’t have a need for books, as pirates don’t read and they can’t use it to start a fire on the ship. Somehow he made the pirate fall in the water and said, “Well I hope your brains is tasty to the fish.”
We left at 10 and drove to the east side of the train station at Bet Yehoshua. No parking at the station (they don’t have nearly enough parking for the commuter traffic), so we parked a few blocks away (by a playground we once played at) and walked. We walked by an orange grove, and August said he used the parts from a printer (then an airplane) to make a bunch of little science robots that were now studying everything about the orange grove. They would relay information back to his watch about the soil, how they were growing, etc.
We got to the station and bought tickets, and played Polytopia while we waited. On the train we sat upstairs. There was a boy across from him who said hi, in Hebrew. His name was Dean. When we stopped at Herzliya and they got off, August spotted the number ‘4’ on something. He said, “4. One of my favorite numbers because it starts with the ffff sound.”
We walked to the park, and found a bench in the shade. We had a snack/part of our lunch, and did little scavenger/I spy games for each other. We went over to the playground and spent a long time playing with the zip line thing. August only sat on it once, while I held him. The rest of the times he went he hung from the seat by his hands. He also watched me do it several times. He was giving me points for things, and tried to figure out 666+555. He said 1111, which is close, and impressive for trying it in his head. He was then asking how many zeroes an octillion, etc. has. We figured out he meant ‘digits’ as he was including the non-zero numbers. So ‘digits’ was a word of the day.
August was reluctant at first, but was convinced to walk around the lake to do some geocaching and see some of the park we’ve never seen before. We stopped by the snack stand to look for food, but they only had hot dogs and August wasn’t interested. He was interested in the stage area though that was set up. I think for some sort of graduation/moving up thing. August had me Shazam one song they were singing, and I heard another about being born and living and loving and Israel.
We walked around to the point that goes out into the lake and looked for the first one. We knew the cache was actually missing due to the log, but people said it was still fun to find the right spot. So we examined all of the palm trees and found the hollow parts and looked in. He talked about how he had hidden his own geocache and left a clue based on the letters painted up on the tree.
We then walked around the rest of the lake, looking for two more geocaches. I carried him much of the way and he held the phone, with the navigation on and he’d tell us how far away from the geocache we were.
We stopped on the far shore to look for another one in a hole somewhere. We looked in fence posts for a couple minutes and moved on. We circled most of the lake, then got to the planned garden area that we’ve never been to. The last one was in there. August was excited, running ahead, but then changed his mind abruptly about going in for the last one when he realized it was in the opposite direction from back to the train station.
So we headed back, stopping to fill up our water bottles. We figured out the trains this time (no extra mileage to Haifa and back for us today) and were back to Bet Yehoshua by 3. We rode upstairs again and after looking out the wind for a few minutes played Polytopia. As we walked back to the car we passed the orange grove and August said he collected the robots as they were done with their science. He asked, “What does ‘midair’ mean?” Another word of the day. I think it came from a recent variation of the Brother and Sister game: he said they were in a plane crash and fell to the ocean. So I had their plane hit by an asteroid—a likelihood that August understands is basically impossible, so he wouldn’t worry about it.
He played along the edge of the road while the car cooled. He asked me, “Do you want more Q bots for science?…Thats what I call my little robots.” On the way home he was surprised when I stopped at the strawberry stand again and went in and bought another flat of them. I figured we could have some full strawberry smoothies and freeze more.
At home he played with Tabletop on his iPad and I did the first load of strawberries. Carly did more while I was gone later. I gave August the most perfect strawberry I found and he said, “This is as good as like a lollipop.” Carly got home at 4:40.
I then left to go over to Jem’s at the mall. Ryan and Michael were there when I got there. It was just the three of us for awhile until Howard, Matt, and Jon showed up. We had a couple beers and veggie tempura there, then walked over to Agadir Burger. Finally, as I’ve never eaten there. Had the beef and lamb burger, and another beer. It was a good conversation, ranging from the candidates for head of school and other school issues, to how wives/women on the staff think about the guys nights out, to Nakba Day and Palestine, to Avengers and Game of Thrones. Actually, Matt and I had an aside about GoT as Ryan hadn’t seen the latest episode. The others discussed Avengers, which we didn’t care about. I told him my theory for the last episode. Jon and I had a respectful discussion of ‘Palestine’ as he says he only calls it ‘West Bank’ since ‘Palestine’ doesn’t officially exist. But he was intrigued by the Palestine history book and we might both read it over the summer. And Howard has also read the Jerusalem: A Biography book and raved about it to everyone.
The highlight though came at the end as Howard told his story of getting drafted into the Israeli army back in, I think it was, the 70s. He was playing semipro ball at the time for an Israeli team. They convinced him to get Israeli citizenship, telling him they could get him out of military service. They could pay him more. So he did, only to receive a letter two weeks later drafting him. The team said they’d see him in two and a half years. The IDF wanted him to either enlist long-term or do combat. He’s 6’ 8” and didn’t fancy being a target. So he got a two-week pass to leave Israel and didn’t come back for seven years. Not entirely sure why he came back, but he was caught and court martialed. The IDF was trying to figure out what to do with him. In the meantime, he blew out his knee, so basketball and his physical were shot. They found out he had a degree in pharmacy so he ended up handing out birth control pills and antibiotics to soldiers for two and a half years.
I was home at 8:40. They were reading Madeleine in bed. They came down and he had crackers and cheese. I took him up and brushed his teeth. He listed every way to equal 7 through addition. I read The Butter Battle Book. Carly came in and I left them at 9:30.
Data from his robots:
Hanging from the sliding thing:
Reading his water bottle:
