He was up at 7:15. I had read about the Canadian Film Board’s app of free films, and the first thing we did was watch a short animated film called “Sunday” about a boy who puts coins on train tracks and gets dragged round by his parents on a Sunday. August found it pretty funny.
He played Monster Physics and I made oatmeal. He then watched a Wild Kratts episode about jaguar, especially black ones. Before it was over he was ready to head upstairs for a Brother and Sister game about jaguars. He told me that only 8% of them are black, and it was going to be “A never before seen moment.”
So we went upstairs and played that. They saw the jaguar cub with its mom, but then the cub was sneaking off and following them when the mom was asleep. The mom then woke up and tracked it down and broke into their house and took the cub back.
Back downstairs we played Suspend Junior, then MathTango and I baked salmon. When that was ready we went outside and ate that and the rest of the cherries for lunch and played Polytopia.
He asked “What’s ‘scared out of my wits?’” I think from Ben Braver. I got out the packs of clothes pins and string, thinking he could add to his strings outside. But he had decided it was now too hot so we stayed inside. He opened them all with scissors, and hung a string across the coffee table. He asked what we could hang on there and I suggested books and got out the rest of the Bob Books he hasn’t read. They all just fit.
He changed his countdown to summer to ‘6’ and said, “There’s a lot of cool symbols in mooka Mook.” We spent some time taking stuff apart, making progress on the laptop, then played chess with the chess set before going back to the laptop. We’ve been listening to a lot of Morrissey, the Smiths, and Camoflauge. As we took apart the laptop he was the doctor and I was his assistant. We were doing an autopsy, but he wouldn’t explain why the body had so many screws in it. He had me touching the capacitors and pretending to get shocked. I wrote ‘wearable food’ on his magnet board for him to read.
We ended up talking about how computer memory works, and he learned about bits and bytes, words of the day. He then thought of partial pieces of information, and thought it was pretty funny: “A tripe is a quarter of a zero or one.” We went to the Bob Books, and I readThe King, which is the last one and he liked the look of when we were hanging them up. He then readJumper and the Clown. He asked “What’s ‘prowl’?” From the jaguar episode.
We finally got around to working on chores, with earning an ice cream bar as motivation. We made the beds and he cleaned the toilets. He then read Max and the Tom Cats to me, doing really well for the first read through it, and picking up words like moonlight and wonderful after only seeing them once. We then did the dishes together. He talked about getting the dishes 100 percent clean, and decided it was impossible due to microbes: “You’d have to keep washing it with infinite soap to keep it 100 percent.”
I exercised; he really was being lazy today and only had 20-some minutes on his watch (he did put it on late today) but didn’t really join in at all. He had his ice cream sandwich. We then went upstairs and did more Brother and Sister – they actually found an ugly goose, and it wouldn’t leave them alone.
We went back downstairs and were playing on the chessboard when Carly got home. He had been asking about the backgammon side, and I downloaded an app to try to figure out how to play. The app didn’t tell us how to play, it just started a game. August sat there, trying to figure it out. I made him chocolate pancakes. He figured out how a person wins, and then together we figured out more and had the rules down by the time we were done. He was pretty excited about having figured things out and telling me.
While he ate he accidentally knocked all of the little balls from the squishy frog out of their container. They were hard to pick up from the table.
We all went outside. He played on the slide and saw a dog on the street. He said he had installed a dog trap outside our gate to catch dogs. It had a sensor though to not catch cats. It was a safety feature so that the cats wouldn’t get trapped with dogs that would eat them. Then he looked for white bugs on the tomato plants and I helped him find them. I went back inside and they were outside for a while longer.
We went out on a short walk a little after 7. He only wanted to do the Holly block. We got him to go up one block further, but it took some convincing. On the way back down he was swerving, following the lines in the bricks, and having me go “military speed.” He’d had fun, but didn’t let us extend any further.
Carly went and took a shower. We checked Green Planet, then read more ofBen Braver. Carly took him up for a bath. He played and showed her how to give him a bath in the shower. She got him ready for bed and at least readThe Sneetches and Other Stories. I came in and read him moreBen Braver, then told him some stories of when I was a kid (falling off my bike, etc.). Sang a few songs, then fell asleep about 9:40.
Taking apart the keyboard:
Partial bits:
His dog trap:
Following the line:
