He was up at 7:30. I went up and got him from the couch and brought him down. He lay on the couch for several minutes with his head on Carly’s lap. Carly said, “I need to go get my coffee before it gets cold.” He replied, “You mean room temperature.” Carly “Cuz your shirt says staff.” “People in charge of a school…from the library bathroom.” Carly read The Thank You Book.
He watched Wild Kratts and ate a bunch of frozen mango. I made him a small bowl of oatmeal. After a second episode we went outside, where Carly had been cleaning up. I hauled the random pieces of wood into the storage area. Back inside he got sad at the idea of us all going to do recycling. Carly held him, then she went by himself. He played Toca Builders.
We played with the construction kit. He started as my assistant as we made a bridge, but then he turned into my boss, telling me “I’m a professional” so he wanted it built exactly how he wanted (I think he meant ‘perfectionist’). It morphed into a sort of ship thing. He really liked it, and brought Carly over a couple times to see it. The second time she was outside and he had her look through the open sliding door, then we opened it entirely.
He went to the bathroom and was doing/asking a lot of questions about how many milliseconds are in a tenth of a second, etc. and math about how many things something could hold with Carly. He played a little Robot Factory.
Carly went to the store. For lunch he did rotations of broccoli, frozen strawberries, and a small piece of toast with butter. I would give him a little of each, he would eat all of it, and he would get another plate of all three. He ate four plates of it. He randomly asked “What’s feasibility mean?” He also asked if motors have stamina, so we discussed reliability.
We finished reading Dragons Beware. He got grumpy about not being able to play Polytopia until we were waiting at Gabi’s later. He did math in his head, surprising me with “What’s 66 plus 66? 132?” And then explained how he got it. When he went to the bathroom he asked me “Did you know an octosecond is a septillionth of a second? Cuz English is funny.” This morning Carly and I were talking about how words are spelled multiple ways, after he said ‘staff’ should only have one ‘f’. I pointed out how most of the words that sound like letters are spelled differently (you, tea, bee, sea, jay, oh, pee, you, ewe, etc.) and Carly said that English is funny.
Carly got home and I put groceries away and they built with the straws. They were also doing math and he told her, “People don’t like to make mistakes on My Planet…they go to jail…”
At 1:20 August and I left to go to Gabi’s. He was dancing to Kate Tempest in the car and added one of her songs to his playlist. He picked a flower for me and we had about 15 minutes of Polytopia before our time. When I was asking if he could stop he said, “Well, I am pretty obsessed…”
August was willing to take the picture he drew of the chook to show Gabi, and he showed it to him, but he didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t want me to tell Gabi about it either. For our time we mainly played snakes and ladders, which was supposedly ropes and ladders in this version, but they looked like worms, so August and I called them worm snakes. Gabi and I played each other, and August was the dice roller. For the first half of the time we played with an unusual dice that had 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 on it. August wouldn’t join in, even when I just tried to get him to have his shoe be the third player. August said he didn’t want to talk about why he didn’t want to play with Gabi, but that he would tell me later. He is definitely getting more comfortable with Gabi though, and touched his cheek once.
Finally, August was intrigued by the plastic and rubber swords that Gabi had. So we spent the last few minutes swordfighting, just hitting each other’s sword.
We said goodbye, and we played a few more minutes of Polytopia in the car. He did the ‘Pacifist’ task and asked what it meant. Another word of the day. Now, when we drive by the SAP building, August calls out “SAP!” as we drive by, after he first spotted it a few days ago. He was falling asleep as we got home at 3:45, but he unbuckled himself and got out.
Inside, he told Carly about the swords. Carly tried to convince him to walk to town. But he was afraid it was going to rain. We played some Dragonbox Little Numbers, and I added to the straw thing, saying it looked like bubbles. He told Carly about how he upgraded Skoda Mama to run on compost. Less pollution, but it smells bad.
Eventually they did head to town, and I did some work. They went to the health food store, and also got a couple of things at the grocery store. He had a mango popsicle, and his bottom left front tooth fell out as he was eating it, and he must have swallowed it. He went to Carly and she held him for a couple minutes, but he didn’t get upset. He told her that he knew it was loose, but didn’t want to tell us about it, and he wasn’t worried about it, and knew it would fall out. He didn’t want to finish his popsicle after that, and when Carly took it in to throw away the woman there was very excited for him as well.
They got home at 6:30. He didn’t really want to talk about his tooth with me. He got grumpy about the iPad and started to get upset, but we joked about the Chook and tickling it away, and he started laughing. He and I went up to make the beds. He had us play the Brother game with the chicken with a concussion, where he ends up chasing the chicken-stealing farming away with traps.
We went back downstairs, and he gave Carly his teenager look for some reason, and when Carly liked it he said, in his teenager voice, “Hey teacher. What are we doing today?” He took tiny baby steps across the floor. Carly fed him spinach and vinegar and he liked it and had seconds. He kept eating, and asking about units of time we ended up talking about thinks like zeptoseconds and attoseconds and attophysics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(time)?wprov=sfti1 He had some pie, and I got some and ate with him.
Then, he told me all about a guy named Jason, who died in 1979 at the age of 81. He told me all sorts of things about him: he had wanted to be a doctor, because he liked surgery, but he didn’t have money to do that so ended up working in a grocery store. He lived in north Egypt, and liked seeing the pyramids with his Dad, but he didn’t have a Mom—didn’t know anything about her. They were kind of poor, and couldn’t go on flights to go on adventures. He was kind of a mad scientist, and died when he wasn’t careful enough and mixed some chemicals that exploded.
Then, randomly, he asked, “What’s 6.8 plus 6.8? 13.6?” We did reading, and he read Plums and The Swimmers to me, putting the latter in his stack. We then read the start of Ben Braver 2 — ‘spill the beans’ and ‘dodging questions’ were phrases that he asked about.
I took him up for his bath. He chose art supplies for table time tomorrow – sparkly watercolors and art pencils. In the bathroom he danced to “Stand By Me” and a children’s song called “Cookie Bakers of the Night”.
I washed his hair, which is easy peasy nowadays. While I dried it he said, “The elves gave me a challenge: to see how many times I can try the passcode before I can’t use it for a minute.” We got his iPad and he found out it was 6 times. He brushed his teeth. He’s been rejecting toothpaste recently. He was sending me back in time with his powers, and sent me to see dinosaurs. He told Carly, “Don’t worry about Dada. He’s in the Mesozoic Era.” As I left them about 9:50, I heard him asking her “Mama. You want me to teleport your watch to the 1980s?”
I made him a tooth fairy card and taped in 5 shekels.
Big addition:
Adding drums to our new song:
Oh my gosh and his missing tooth:
