He was up at 7:40. Carly played Minecraft with him. He started adding things to her house and she asked him to not make it too cluttered. She talked about wanting it to be colorful and he said, “I’m respecting that and making it more colorful.”
He said he was going to call me “Mr. Sausage” from now on. I responded by calling him “Liverwurst Pond Basket.”
We read the Fluttershy issue. This led to going upstairs to play a Brother game where Bar was knitting. Then a survival in the jungle one where they find a lion hurt by a cactus and have to prepare for a storm.
We went downstairs for breakfast. His usual oatmeal. We watched a Kurzgesagt video on detonating a nuclear bomb in the Marianas Trench (https://youtu.be/9tbxDgcv74c) and a Mumbo Jumbo video about creating silly things in Minecraft (https://youtu.be/ua-3T12Um7U).
We started making banana bread. He requested I put on really unusual electronic music and I showed him the Underground playlist on Apple Music and let him be in control. He added a few songs to our library. Told me about his Minecraft machines in his world of “Minecraftia.”
He played with the Garageband loops, then we watched another Mumbo Jumbo Minecraft video. Carly headed to the store. He was practicing “Ode to Joy” on the keyboard and I wrote it out on paper (he had asked me to) so he could practice it without the app. We watched the “Ode to Joy” part of Symphony #9 after listening to some Beethoven Piano Concerto #1. He was somehow talking about fruit in relationship to the symphony, and described a “Piccolo fruit.” He asked about how the people (soloists) in the choir were dressed and which were boys and girls. We discussed the four parts of the choir. When they really started the loud part he told them, “Keep it up! Keep it up!”
I got him ready right before Carly got back. They were heading to the pool. It closed at 2, and it was just after 1, so they wouldn’t have much time and were in a hurry. They left and I put away groceries. They didn’t get home until a little after 4. After the pool had closed, they went to her classroom. They spent about half the time with her reading to him (Minecraft books, I think) and the other half he did art: he drew on the digital whiteboard, then did pictures on paper of Minecraft blocks and Minecraft trees.
When they got home we went out in the yard and Carly planted the mint plant she had gotten for him at the store earlier. He told us, “I have four kinds of mint…I do a lot of baking in my lab.” She had bought a mystery fruit and figured out it was a dragonfruit. August tried it, and said, “I like the flavor, but not the texture. It’s crunchy, like I’m eating a burnt piece of toast.” She said she had been telling him about analogies at school.
We went in and he had a Brother game with Myna – a character and story based on the Minecraft book. Myna is a character who is good with potions that saves him. We did that, then I got him out for a bike ride, somewhat reluctantly. He agreed to go around the roundabouts, then I coaxed him into riding over to where we could see the strawberry fields growing.
We came back and checked on the filling bucket. In the yard he talked about not liking the term teeter totter, like cubby. He asked if tires could stick in mud, and we watched a couple minutes of videos of cars getting stuck in the mud as we sat on the swing. He noticed the noise of the trucks that were stuck and we talked about what a muffler does. Watched cars stuck in mud.
He was staying outside until it was is evening time at 5:30. At one time he asked how many minutes were left and I said 6. He jokingly replied, “NOBODY says six minutes to me!” We went in and played Minecraft. Carly had made a cheesy rice dish with tofu and cauliflower. He then ate that, then did 15 minutes of lone time, then 15 minutes of Minecraft. He is combining Minecraft and Brother games now, as Myna is a character that Brother met online and she is helping him with survival mode in Minecraft. They were making his starter house together.
We then read a book I had purchased on Apple Books: An I Can Read! book called In a Dark, Dark, Room and Other Scary Stories. He particularly liked the one about the girl’s head falling off, and the one about the ghost pirate. He liked their startling, but funny, endings and had me repeat the endings several times. We then read Frog and Toad Are Friends. First time in quite a while. Carly had been upstairs, but came down and read the next Minecraft book to him. He had a second bowl of food, but made her keep reading the book until they finished the whole thing in one sitting.
He was then eating pickles, and wanted more and more. We laughed or something, and he said, “What? Pickles is amazing! What? They have a lot of fiber in them! Wait, do they?” He really ate a bunch in the evening again, now having a slice of banana bread, then a second on that as well. He told me, “I’m stocking up.” I picked him up at one point and said said I don’t hold him as much any more as he does a lot more walking now. He told me, making a mistake, “Then cut off my arms…I mean legs.” Yet another pickle, then some more bread. He talked about wanting to make pickles at home.
I asked him about Mr. Gabi’s yesterday. He told me he had play d a winning game using a second computer in his head that he had programmed to play winning games. They had been playing Monopoly as a winning game, until it got crazy.
He had one more pickle, then got him upstairs finally at 8:55. He told me about quantum physics, explaining, “It’s kind of the digital information space has to exist…the tiny information that controls space-time and tells it what to do…we’re all made up of it…” He said that since quantum physics exists, God doesn’t, and he compared the quantum physics to “Like the conductor controlling the music…” And without it “We wouldn’t be dead or alive…we wouldn’t even exist in th first place.”
He then switched tactics and talked about God and Titanic victims, and speculated about what happened to them after they died. He told me, “I have a million skeletons in my lab. It’s gross. And terrifying.” He said they were studying them to see what happens after you die: “Maybe when you die you respawn at your spawn point.” We talked about reincarnation being a buddhist belief. Another theory he had was that there was a “pathway through space time…” planet to planet. “When you last die at the end of space you die forever…or it goes on and on…because you’re in a loop!”
Somewhere in all of that I gave him his bath and washed his hair and he had a lollipop. We got him ready for bed and I left them around 9:30 and went for a run. She was reading a new Minecraft book to him. I heard him up again still after 10. Apparently it took him quite a while to fall asleep, and he actually woke her up a couple times.
Minecraft books they have read or are reading:
• Diary of a Minecraft Zombie
• Secrets of an Overworld Survivor: The Witch’s Warning
• Secrets of an Overworld Survivor: Lost in the Jungle
• Secrets of an Overworld Survior: Never Say Nether
• Secrets of an Overworld Survivor: Wolves Vs. Zombies
Making music with loops:
Practicing Ode to Joy:
Balance bike in the yard:
Composing a tune:
