I was woken up by Carly twice as she was up at 2-something. August then woke up at 4. He lay in bed with one of us or the other until 5:30. At one point he wanted Carly but she was upstairs. I tried to go up with him, but he went back in the room and curled up, as the house was too scary. Eventually he let me go up and get her. She came down and lay with him for a while and I lay down again as well. Then they got up. Carly tried on clothes and I listened to my book. He said “I know a kid from Kepler Academy who was unlucky. His power was throwing up.” “Mama, is allergies a strength or a weakness.” He was jumping from the high bed onto the lower bed.
When he started playing with the door I suggested iPad, and we played Polytopia together. While Carly took a shower I took him upstairs. He was chanting “Chocolate-covered floozy, walking in the park, counted them all there were 80 after dark.” Which combines lines from Ben Braver (the beginning), our Brother and Sister song (the park/dark structure), and our 7 times 7 rhyme (counted them all). In the living room we spotted Cindy outside and saw her chase a squirrel off the feeding enclosure. I went to get August and I toast/english muffin, and when I came back he was sitting in the wooden rocking chair, playing with the solar calculator.
He ate a full English muffin, then Carly came and let me go back to sleep. They walked over to where Chuck and Cherie are staying and hung out there for awhile, then they were all back around 11:30.
Carly headed to the store, and after some Advil kicked in I headed upstairs. They had played with the new Snap Circuits set a bit, and I think they had been outside feeding the birds and squirrels, and as I made a sandwich, Mom, Cherie, and August came up the back stairs. They had been charging a calculator in the sun, and determined it needed another half-hour of sunlight.
Inside, he and Cherie played the game on her tablet. He then wanted to go downstairs with me and play a Brother game. He was very private about it, and told me I wasn’t supposed to tell Gramma about it, when I just said he wanted to play a game. In the room he then locked the door, and was reluctant to even let Carly in when she got back. Think he just needed some quiet time with less people for awhile.
His Brother game had a new character, Blanka, who could Blanka who could go through glass. There was a story where she could also time travel and took him back to the Mesozoic Era, but that turned out to be a dream. Her second power was being able to go in peoples’ dreams, so Brother had a series of bad dreams and she was also there. Carly got home from Walmart, and brought him a super cool new water bottle.
He was getting really tired, but didn’t want to go out for a drive. A little bribe, a couple small pieces of chocolate, solved that. Carly took him out to get him in the car, and he remembered how he doesn’t like Paul’s car. It didn’t help that when they turned on the AC dust came out of the vents, and that they didn’t actually turn on the AC for a few minutes and it was just fans.
But I got “Take Me to Church” playing and we drove up towards Union Valley. He fell asleep by the time we got to the turn off, so I turned around and we came back. Carly carried him downstairs and he slept from 2:20 to about 4:10. She tried to wake him up a couple times before finally succeeding.
He was slow to wake up. He spotted a plastic drink bottle downstairs, so I took him upstairs and we got a pineapple coconut drink and shared it. I then read Tessa Tiger’s Temper Tantrum on Skybrary, with him perched on the back of the green chair behind me. He then took the iPad and kept sitting on the back of the chair as he watched Wild Kratts.
He was then doing story problems with Cherie. He got the multiplication and division and other questions she asked him at first. We were all getting dinner ready, and it was quite a feast. We did steaks and veggies (mushrooms, zucchini, and asparagus) on the grill and corn on the cob and garlic bread inside. We all fit around the new tables that Dad had made. It was rather windy, but nice enough.
When he was done eating, I brought down the new speaker I had bought and showed him. I played a Matt and Kim song, “Forever”. He whispered to me “I have a secret: That song’s from me.” He explained how he made one of the sounds in it with some sort of explosion. The explosion destroyed a pyramid and went back through time and destroyed the ancient Egyptians.
Convinced him to take a bath by making it a hair washing day. He chose a lemon lollipop. He played with the containers and toys for a few minutes. He was nervous about the bath, so had to keep things low, and he would keep scooting to the far end of the tub. He called the flat area there his safety area, or something to that effect.
He said good night and we went downstairs. He wanted the window open and noticed the stick keeping it from going fully open. He asked about it, and I said it kept someone from opening the window from the outside. He talked about making a window with triple protection: a lock, something else, and tons of cactus spikes. ‘Deterrent’ was a word of the day.
Before he could go to bed he had to process all of that with a Brother and Blanka robber game, where a robber tried to break in when they didn’t put the stick in the window. Sometimes Blanka would stop the robber in advance, or sometimes the stuff would get stolen and she would track him down. Blanka had ‘photospines’, which make you invisible.
I was then able to brush his teeth, and I left them at 8:35.
Corn on the cob:
Story problems with Oma:
Fun on the deck:
