He was up at 7:05. He was very cuddly down on the couch. I asked if he had had good dreams and he said yes, but didn’t elaborate. I gave him the blanket and he asked me to turn the fan on for the noise and he rested on the couch for a few more minutes.
We played Minecraft. The goals today were to play with mine carts and redstone. He then had oatmeal and watched a Brave Wilderness episode about killer bees. He was then telling me about wasps he discovered and asked, “Do you know I work with killer bees?…I use robotic drones to get the honey…” I bribed him with chocolate chips to put on lotion on his hands and it worked. He did it a few times through the day and got more comfortable with it. He read three books to me in Rivet, then did 3D art in uMake. We figured out a few more things, like adding colors to surfaces.
I introduced the new Minecraft Earth game to him, and after playing in the house for a few minutes he requested we go for a walk. We first walked up to the park, and I did recycling. We did what we could in the game up there, then came home and got his orange bike. We walked to the nameless park to the southwest (where he used to blast monsters in his Hilo phase) and played there. He also went on the barrel walking thing and merry-go-round. We walked back past the big Israeli flag, took the bike up the stairs, and came back by the cloud bridge.
He let me take apart the remains of the fort outside, then I found his phone. We had figured out the building aspect of Minecraft Earth. You can place a build plate on the floor and build together in VR. Once it was charged we realized his phone was too old.
We then did a series of Brother games, August had the idea, of Brother buying “professional” things, starting with professional paint brushes (this is after August had wanted some really expensive paint brushes at the art store). Brother gets tricked into buying them, thinking they will make him a professional painter, builder, and writer, which they don’t.
For lunch we had avocado on cracker and lentil soup. He then had a Brother game where Bar is sister’s teacher after Bar gives her chemicals and Brother caused an explosion in the professional blender (he had actually bought the professional blender this time knowing it was more powerful and wanting to blend things like old electronic equipment). When the parents go to school to complain that Sister is being allowed to use dangerous chemicals for a school project, they walk in to find out that the teacher is Bar.
We got Minecraft Earth on his iPad and he built a little, then we headed to Ra’anana. August told me about the blue icy treat and Oreo ice cream on a stick treat he had had with Carly. We left at 1:05. In Story Pirates hokey was a word of the day.
We stopped at a small park north of Gabi’s for a while. He played a little, had a snack, and pretended the Xs on the ground led to Minecraft treasure chests and we joked about what worthless stuff was inside them.
He went right in with Gabi. He went to the bathroom afterwards. I asked what they had done and at first said he didn’t want to tell me. But after a few seconds he volunteered, “Okay I’ll tell you…I tried a winning game.” Two, actually. One card and one board. The board game involved telling a cat or elephant what to do. It was just practice, and they stopped before they got to the winning part. He said they did a little play dough, but no army.
He was rhyming on the way to the car: “Oh no, said the farmer, the lion could bring a blight? Do you think that is right? Pull the knot tight! The knight needs to fight.” I rhymed with trite and taught him what it meant. We ended up discussing bee stings and how they can kill you. We were driving at 3:10.
He was grumpy when we got home, but agreed to alone time. He did alone time and I exercised. We talked about synesthesia (we had been listening to a Story Pirates episode that was about it) and he told me, “I think I have a different really cool sense…that I can build up possible pictures in my mind…I can picture people at the pool at school wearing cones on their head.”
He then went on a long walkabout, telling me about a machine he had made to study and also let people experience synesthesia. And he randomly gave me an analogy for fingerprints: “those are like deep chasms on the earth…” He then totally explained how fingerprints worked, explaining how if you got ink on your fingers and put them on paper it would leave a fingerprint (“but not the bottom and side of the chasm…”)
We played 30 minutes of Minecraft, then he did another 15 minutes of alone time, this time looking at the atlas. He knows about the Himalaya Mountains, and I taught him about the Great Rift Valley. I explained that was where humans evolved and he said, “Whoa.” We had some snack mix, and he asked, “What’s noble?” Which is actually from the last episode of My Little Pony that we watched (with Spike having a “noble dragon code”).
We did our second 30 minutes and Carly got home. Carly started painting with him after a while and I went up to work. They called Cherie when his foot started shaking when he was doing a yoga-ish pose on the couch to ask her about it. They then headed up to town to go to the fruit stand and walk around. August had the idea of pizza, so they got a slice. They came back with a star fruit (and other things) and we tried it. He had his new (from Thatcher) polar bear shirt on.
I took him upstairs and gave him a bath. He asked, “Is star fruit citrus?” (No, it turns out.) He had other questions we need to look up later: “What causes gravity?” “Why doesn’t light have mass?” “What are antioxidants?”
He has a big scrape/cut horizontally at the top of his right foot. No idea where it came from, and it hasn’t bothered him. He told me, “I had a dream last night that that scape was gigantic…really thicker…hospital…they had to spray some antibiotic mist…it looked cool…it looked cool…I looked at the giant chasm.” He said it wasn’t a scary dream though, but maybe funny.
After his bath we played a Brother game on the big bed. Brother was working for Bar and she was punishing him for going to the bathroom and then for saying things about her. I came up with an “evil boss” song.
He had us play with the stuffed animals, me doing the voices for each. He agreed that I could sleep on the couch, and liked the idea of the “friends” (stuffed animals) sleeping in the lower bed. He asked about eating pufferfish. We then did knee reflexes with the thing from his doctor kit. As we walked downstairs for something he admired his “Kayla teacher and naked teacher” pictures. They are ones he drew a few days ago. He said the first one looked like both Kayla and a teacher. Then the second one had a sad face and was a teacher who had had its pants pulled down by the teachers.
He said good night to Carly at 9. We used the Ninja Focus app and listened to meditations and then music in there and he fell asleep by 10. I left the friends sleeping in the bed next to him.
Let it go in the park: https://youtu.be/ISC0e84sKLg
Rhyming on the way back to the car:
His machine to study synesthesia:
Using the synesthesia machine:
Evil boss:
