I started waking him up at 7:50. He rolled around for a few minutes. He finally sat up and asked, “Goo goo or gaa gaa? Which do you choose?” This is a game he’s developed the last few days. One choice is good, the other bad. It’s shifted to whichever you choose is the bad choice (usually killing), or they are both bad choices. Started out a bit more amusing.
Downstairs we started with looking at and planning our schedule on the window. We then played Minecraft and learned how to make a firework launching machine using redstone. We ate some banana bread, and went outside for a minute. He had a Brother game where he is playing with Myna, starting in survival mode, and plays really slowly, taking a long time to decide everything, like where to place his house.
For table time I started doing a voice journal with him. Today I asked him what he likes about Minecraft. He was then insisting we play more Brother game, even though we had done quite a bit. He used the “You said so” line, which seems to be a recent strategy to claim we said he could do something, when we had said no such thing. We finally compromised, with him agreeing to using a timer. When we started playing he made me smile using his fingers, saying “Your happy face is up.”
The Brother game continued, with a full story. Brother got blown up by a creeper and respawned way back at Myna’s spawn point. We then moved to science time, and he had Brother and Myna watching science videos together (over skype, that is). We watched the Kurzgesagt Marsbase video (https://youtu.be/uqKGREZs6-w), gamma-ray bursts (https://youtu.be/RLykC1VN7NY), and dark matter (https://youtu.be/QAa2O_8wBUQ). And we watched a Mumbo Jumbo video about how to kill the Ender Dragon using Redstone (https://youtu.be/jQ9TUoZNzGw). August really liked the line from one of the Kurzgesagt videos saying we are basically “apes with smart phones”.
The Brother game continued, with Myna getting him back from her spwawn point using a nether tunnel. She then had him gathering stuff for her brewing stand.
He ate two pickles and banana bread. We then tried out Simply Piano, as the Yousician free trial was running out, and he was stuck on Ode to Joy and there was very little other stuff he could do in it. He liked Simply Piano better, as there was more options, and more easy things to practice. He didn’t like that the practice speed wasn’t as adjustable as Yousician, but it definitely seems better overall.
Then more Brother and Myna. She blew up all their Minecraft games somehow and Brother was upset. She had backups though and it had just been a joke and she apologized.
He did alone time and I exercised. He did drumming and looked at the Visual Dictionary. He told me some of the words he found. I suggested he look at the story dice and make a story in his head. He said, “I already have like a thousand of them.”
We played Minecraft, working on Brother’s house. August knows about the app Brilliant from the Kurzgesagt videos, so we worked on a problem involving dividing groups of circles in half. I was looking for math videos he might like (after Numberphile looked to advanced) but didn’t find anything. I did, however, find the video of the Big Numbers song that I used to sing to him a lot, and he had me sing my version to him.
He had a Brother and Sister game where there house is destroyed by a hurricane: “And it’s terrifyingly destroyed.” All the people and animals were safe, and Brother kept screaming when he realized something that’s destroyed: spice collection, Pokémon comic book, his bed. Etc.
We then did art time. I would draw shapes on paper, and he turned them into monsters. All of his drawings had penises. We were then going to do math, but he talked about making a folder of our homeschooling learning apps and remembered coding. He found Coding Karts and worked on that a bit. He ate oatmeal and more pickles.
We watched watched an episode of My Little Pony (about Hearts and Hooves Day) then got ready to go to school. After he went to a bathroom he saw me watching a video on YouTube about photography techniques. He watched that with me, and we discussed how they did some of the shots (they were kind of set up shots). He liked the song and we found out what it was.
He talked abut Bright Side being his second favorite YouTube channel, after Kurzgesagt, although he “hated” the video about exploding a nuclear bomb in the Marianas Trench, as it turns out very little happens except killing some sea creatures: “Nothing happened!”
So August’s original plan had been to go swimming at school. The forecast seemed to support this idea. But before we left he decided it was too cloudy out, and we decided to go play at the playground and library instead. Now, when we got outside he saw the bike and trailer and wanted to go riding first. We started riding, and as we were down on the old highway it started raining. Very lightly, but consistently. Very weird, as there were just wisps of clouds. We headed home via the street, but it stopped. At the house he wanted to keep riding. We did some more, then came back, and he wanted to keep going a third time. We ended up riding two and a half miles.
The third time he had a specific mission: he’d been spotting things that the city needs to fix. This has started as the leak at our water piper is before our meter and the city’s responsibility. Also, there is a street lamp across from our house that has been hanging open for a long time. He’s pointed that out several times. And they are currently doing tree trimming (butchering, in some cases, as we saw at the roundabout nearest our house). As we were riding, he noticed places where the streets need repair, and one spot where the curb/sidewalk were broken. So he wanted to go out again, specifically finding other things the city needs to do and wants to tell them. He also asked for my ideas on what they should do. I talked about dark sidewalks at night, which are hard when running, and also more bike lanes.
When we got done it was 4:10 or so. He still wanted to go to school to play for a while. My watch was dying (the battery is worn out) so I told him I was just going in to put it on the charger. He automatically followed me in and kicked off his shoes and turned on the AC before I came back downstairs, then and said he was hungry. So we stayed home and he had something to eat.
He told me, “I want to go to Korea for winter break. What? We haven’t goed there for years.” He ate apple and pickles. We watched a couple more Kurzgesagt videos, then the power went out during the second one. It was getting rather windy out, although not really storm like. Shmuel called to us and we talked to him for a few minutes outside. August was then helping Carly by feeding the vine back through the fence. We went back in and finished the second video. We had watched the one on fusion power, then on electro smog. fusion was a word of the day.
Carly got home. He went out and helped water plants. He sprayed his slide, and then made an analogy of how the slide was like the atmosphere, protecting against the radiation from the sun (the water) and explained it to Carly. He talked about being a teacher: “Should I be a teacher when I grow up?…I want to be a teacher…Actually, I don’t want to be anything when I grow up.”
We went in and I heated up the rice dish for him. Carly opened a pomegranate and he ate that first: “I’m fascinated by pomegranate seeds…” He did evening time on the iPad. We were hollowing out a mountain as Brother and Myna. He ate the rice dish, then had some chocolate milk.
He asked about the difference between Ms. Shani and Mr. Gabi and teachers. He said, “Ms. Andrea should come here on the weekend…” And he wants to teacher about things to teach her students, like about electromagnetic spectrum. He wants to take the chart that Carly had printed out for him of the spectrum.
He read to me in Rivet. He read a level one book, then on his own switched to level 2. He read I’ll Be a Pirate. He was particularly working on pronouncing/reading ‘I’ll’. He was repeating the words like the kids he watches in the pronunciation app, enunciating it differently a few times. He had also started a Baa baa black sheep book. I remembered our version of the song and sang it for him.
He then traced a photo of himself on the tracing app (that I had used fro Lunch Robot). As he drew he said, “This is kind of educational…accuracy…motor control…” He went to the bathroom, and still thinking about what the city should do said, “Here’s something the town hasn’t thought about: benches.”
Carly read the latest Secrets of an Overworld Survivor book to him and I went for a run and took a shower. I heard him asking about what Christmas is. He then talked about having to cancel Christmas and the “no cars on the roads” holiday in a country he runs because of hurricanes, etc.
Carly got him oatmeal. He then talked about how he has a machine that cleans up nuclear waste. We discussed Hanford and looked up costs. https://amp.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225386510.html. He talked about TooVoo, which is his YouTube channel. He does science videos, like What if bad people came out of our computer. What would happen if we exploded nuclear bombs in the sun. Etc.
I put him to sleep. I read part of the My Little Pony Annual 2014. For story time I told him about family reunions at Lake Wenatchee. He wanted to look up why you should be afraid of square waves in water. It was a video he had watched at some point with Carly, but he didn’t remember why. He was asleep about 10, after I sang the whole Big Numbers song, after he reminded me about it.
Drumming:
Drawing a monster:
Drumming 2:
Twirling triangle:
Helping with the vine:
His atmosphere and slide analogy:
Reading about pirates:
