He woke up while I was still upstairs. He had come out of the office, where he and Carly slept, and huddled on the couch. I took him in on the usual bed and he fell back to sleep, and got up just before 7:30. I read Fix It, Sam and The Thank You Book (an Elephant and Piggie book). We went over and I made a funny phrase on the whiteboard for him to read. Today was ‘exploding underwear. ‘Scary goat’ was yesterday’s. We played our few minutes of Green Planet. I realized he’s learned really percentages and percentages and fractions of a circle through it.
He ate frozen mango and had oatmeal for breakfast. I read him more of Ben Braver. He then wanted to do the store game, and had me have a debit card. But the game turned into me not being able to afford anything, or he would overcharge me on the card. I’d call the police, but he would get away. We went up and started laundry, then he played on the iPad. We then finished readingDragons Beware.
We went to the floor and got out the new ink pads from Max and did rubber stamps. He watched as I did his name a few times. He then asked about the name rocks for me, etc. I got those, and he had me rubber stamps ‘Mama’ and ‘Grandpa’ before he moved on. We did some math on Khan Academy. Then, quite uncharacteristically, he tried grabbing the iPad away from me and tried to play something else, and wouldn’t put the iPad away. He got quite upset when I did take it away, particularly when I set it on top of the refrigerator. He kept doing the frantic “Dada, Dada, Dada, Dada…” which he does with Carly, but hasn’t really done with me at all. He also was telling me to get away, even as he kept slowly pushing me across the room.
But when he did start to calm down he did something very interesting: He started a 30 minute timer on his watch and said we could talk about it then. This is not a strategy that we’ve used with him, and he did it before I had said anything.
For lunch we had the pate we bought awhile ago with crackers, and then also frozen strawberries. We read moreBen Braver, then I got out a piece of paper and markers, then asked him to give a name to the thing that takes over when he’s angry. He called it the ‘Chook’. So for alone time I asked him to draw the Chook. He did that, then I asked him about it. He said it hurts him, and when I asked where he pointed to his stomach. It was the swirly feeling he talked about before. Then he said it was like a hurricane since it hurts him. On the picture, he said the blue part was the heart.
For his alone time treat he chose a jelly bean and 9 M and Ms out of a random bag up there. We then worked on big number multiplication. I taught him how to figure out how many zeroes they have, using the equation. So, for ‘trillion’ you take the ‘tri’ equals 3 and multiply it by 3, then add an extra 3.
He read Samantha andAs Big As. He put the second in his stack and is up to 14 books. We next made beds and cleaned toilets. He looked at the possible rewards on his iPad, and said he wanted to be able to get a credit card for like a thousand points. He then said, “I could find a way to pay it back. Or I could never pay it back!” He ate more frozen strawberries, and asked about the moon of Mars. I said there were actually two, and we looked up the names, Phobos and Deimos, and learned how they were twins and followed their father into war. So we talked more about the Greek/Roman gods and why there were ‘gods of’ different things.
He also asked how his watch knows his step count, and we talked about an accelerometer, a word of the day. He had even more strawberries, then we played with another item from Max: a little combination lock. He was trying to figure out what to use it on. We couldn’t figure out how to change the default combo, even though I translated the Hebrew. Just didn’t seem to work. He skied more math questions, which led to the calculator. He then counted by 50s on his own.
We took his bouncy ball outside and bounced it on the patio. He told me how his actual powers now are flying (something Ben Braver thinks he can do in the book) and infrared sight.
We packed up and got going to school. We got there early enough to return the fox book back to the library, then we sat on our bench and played a few minutes of Polytopia. Bar and her brother came along and he got his Bar hug. Carly came a few minutes after the bell rang, and we all headed to the pool. I got him changed with me. The pool was pretty busy, but he was okay with that now. Carly got him in the water, and Omri talked to the two of them for a few minutes. They left awhile after that though.
It was plenty hot for the pool, so that was nice. August is very comfortable on the kickboard, although he still insists on having his floaties on too. At some point he’ll want to make the next step. We got going, and on the way out grabbed a couple of things from the electronics disposal site: a speaker, part of a printer that we hadn’t completely taken apart before, and something else small.
They dropped me off at the house, then went to the store to get vanilla ice cream and a few other items. Carly asked him what else they should get, and he suggested milk. They were home at 5:10.
We ate dinner together (the pasta), then they made the pie. When it got to “the boring part” he came and chose 30 minutes of iPad time as a reward for his chore points. He played Robot Factory, with me for part of it. We read more Ben Braver, then he made his pie crust cookies with the leftover dough. They were mainly letters, but he also said one was a Gramma one and one was a Grampa.
He ate one of those when they were done, then we took apart the speaker. We ate pie and ice cream when it was done. It turned out quite well. I explained what it meant to “Pull off a deal” when I thought he had said that, but he’d actually said something else. We ended up discussing regular polygons and their names, and he was making up names of ones with lots and lots of sides.
Carly gave him a bath, and got him ready for bed, then I left them at 8:50. He wanted to sleep in the regular bed, as he says it is more comfortable. Carly gave it a try, but after a few minutes they switched to the office to have air conditioning.
Drawing the chook:
Explaining how to clean the toilets:
Spraying his own shoes:
Pie crust cookies:
