Tuesday, December 10: Ramat Aviv Mall, bike riding on the waterfront, and a trip to school

He called down the stairs before Carly even had the door closed, right at 6:45. I ran up and got him back to sleep pretty quickly. I then went back up at 8:05 to wake him up and met him as he opened the door to come out. Don’t know when that has happened before. We read from the Perlutsky book then he went to the bathroom. As he washed his hands he told me we should launch rockets from the moon to explore space because there is less gravity.

We read more of A Pizza in the Sun. A lot of laughter, particularly about “I Think My Computer Is Crazy.” A new word was ingest, from the last one we read. We then played Minecraft and he played with TNT. He requested waterfall noises on Siri and we listened to those all morning.

He had a breakfast of French toast and we did Brother games of him buying potions and enchantments. He was singing “Chickens, chickens, chickens, all through the town…” Which he says is something that I made up when I had Brother putting chickens everywhere.

He also sang a song he said was based on Minke’s lesson, then had me accompany him on songs, first with drums, then the recorder. Then we hooked up the keyboard. He played, then wanted the app with chords and played with chords in Piano Companion.

My goal of getting to the iDigital store in the morning was fading, so I had to hurry him a bit to get going. We’d actually been almost out the door when he decided he wanted to do music. But first, we had to search for one of his red shoes. It was in the bathroom. As we left he was humming “Always” and said he wants to learn that on the piano.

We listened to Story Pirates, finishing the Thanksgiving episode and listening to the latest, on our way down to the Ramat Aviv Mall to go to the iDigital store to get my phone fixed. We spotted donuts at an Arcaffe stand as we walked through the mall and he pointed out the kind that looked like the kind he had the other day. At the iDigital store he sat on a stool and played music on the Piano Companion app, then did “satellite work” on the graphing calculator. It went pretty quickly for me. I had come to this mall, hoping that they had a full service center at this location (the guy at the local iDigital had told us that once) but it still ended up going in an envelope to go to another facility. And will take five days. Sigh. When I was done, August told me the problem he was working on and said, “That’s approximately half of the gravitational pull of a medium-sized black hole.”

We walked back and each got a donut. He got one with white chocolate balls covering it, and I got one with a dob of caramel on the top, and it turned out to be filled with it as well. His had the white filling, and he loved it. We walked a bit and found a bench by some plants and ate them. We then discussed a Christmas present for Carly.

With that in mind, and the weather being nice now, we drove over to the waterfront, parking by the power station. Surprisingly busy though, and we parked even farther away, at a free parking lot. August rode his bike. He enjoyed riding around in a couple of big puddles, and said he liked the waves. I was helping push him on the brick sidewalks, and realized he kept stopping his pedaling. He was running a Brother game on the way. Bar had a simulation room (based on the Story Pirates episode) and Brother got to use it. First he was just using it to play Minecraft, like usual, then was doing other things. He then had a story where Brother was having an ice cream dream and was woken up, then arguing and fighting with his parents, wanting ice cream in the morning. August was calling Brother’s arguments his “kidding tricks” and the responses from the parents the “antibodies.”

When we got to the boardwalk we stopped on a stone bench for a few minutes. We kept playing the Brother games and we watched a guy stencil the slippery signs. There was also the smell of electrical work, and August remembered the electrical fire at school.

We got going and he rode on the boardwalk, going down the short hills a few times. Bar was using the simulator to test Brother’s argument/negotiation skills, going to higher levels. I was actually trying to make them as useful as possible, showing Brother compromise and agree with reason.

We finally went into the book store (the one attached to the Greg Cafe that we’ve gone to on his birthday outings and where we ate lunch with Chuck and Cherie) and August had fun riffling the corners of the pages of books. We found the English section, where they have leather-bound children’s books. We found a leather-bound copy of Swiss Family Robinson and a book of mythology in a slipcase. The idea was that they were books that were gifts for Carly, but also for August, as she could read them to him.

Back outside he had Brother getting in an argument with Baby Sister over a toy and figuring out how to get a tiger toy she was playing with (he found another toy she would like and offered to trade). He then was arguing with his parents, saying he wanted a new bike and not just Sister’s old bike. He lost that one, and August was providing some of the parent arguments. August was also taking photos and set the phone against a pole to get a cool time-lapse of people on the boardwalk and of the clouds. He then had us move to another bench area to do a “special Brother and Sister game” and we’d do “around Christmas.” An idea he started yesterday, although I’m not sure what makes them special. In it, he had Myna taking 50 years to create something. It was a “moving model of the earth charging over time…climate change and everything…” Sister had been wondering why Myna was so busy. In the meantime, Sister had made a complete fantasy spherical world in Minecraft. Bar then came along and had a machine that made things from the real world into Minecraft. So she helped Sister add to her world, for example, scanning a photo of minerals to add all sorts of minerals throughout the world, and scanning all the mythology of the world to add mythology, but with a changer option that would change everything slightly. They did the same with archeological ruins.

We were back to the car at 2:05. There was a cat that was meowing to us a lot. August said it was hurt, and it turned out it had white paint over it, like it had rolled on one of those signs we saw the guy painting. It did have a bald area on one leg where it had been trying to like the paint off.

We listened to more Story Pirates and were home by 2:50. He flew a paper airplane outside. He came in and told me, “Did you know I’m famous? For making a chocolate chip Eiffel Tower.” He had some banana milk. As he started drinking he said, “I knew it was worth doing that argument with mama to get this.” He had nutty noodles and seconds for lunch.

He did 15 minutes of alone time, then we did 30 minutes of Minecraft. It was now a little after 4 and we headed to school. We had to pick up packages, and we also wanted to check out a book of paper airplanes. We went to Carly’s classroom and she said we had perfect timing, as she was just finishing. We went to the library while she packed up and she met us there. We got one paper airplane book, and Carly asked if he would like a book about the body and we checked out a book on muscles. She had also checked out several books earlier with Liz’s help: Clementine, Junie B. Jones, Horrid Henry, Ivy & Bean, and Dahl’s The Magic Finger.

As we got home he said he wanted to watch a documentary right away, then educational videos as well. We wanted to eat dinner first and he got upset, blocking us from opening the gate. Carly and I were carrying a bunch of stuff and just wanted to go in the house. Finally got him in and he curled on the couch, then talked to me. We decided on one video about dreams (Ted-Ed) then 30 minutes of documentary later instead of his 15 earning/30 Minecraft he still had left for the day.

So we watched the Ted-Ed video together, then he had a little couscous and broccoli. Skipped the zucchini. He decided to show Carly the Simple Rockets app instead of watching a documentary. I helped him show her. He then read several Rivet books to Carly, although only in levels 1 and 2. She read him Julie B. Jones (the second book, where her brother is born–I’ve read it before, I think when I was tutoring Christina Bekris many years ago). He was hungry for popcorn and agreed to eat more carrot and broccoli. He did that, and we ate popcorn and did Brother games. It was a backstory with sister when Bother is born (turns out she is 6 years older, as I thought she was younger, but then he said she is the age of Jill, who is in 6th grade) and she didn’t want a sibling. We then moved from that to Brother in Minecraft. He was taming a fox, then trying to get a bat by building an upside down house in a cave around it.

He was still hungry so had hummus and crackers and carrot and strawberries. A few pomegranate seeds earlier as well. He finished all of that and asked for a couple more crackers for the hummus. It seems like he barely eats all day until 3 or so, then just eats constantly in the evening. We listened to and watched James song and video for “Better than That”. He then got upset when I said it was time for a bath and he said he wanted an educational video.

But we got him upstairs, and Carly gave him a bath. He was loudly singing the notes to “Always”. She read more to him (Julie B. Or Clementine, I think) and I took over sometime after 9, after she brushed his teeth and had him floss. We went straight to Ninja Focus. He had been singing songs for Carly, and now told me about his famous songs and sang a couple for me. He’s really developing a sense of tune. He was then singing a song, with words, about Ninja Focus as I looked up the password for it.

In Ninja Focus we listened to a couple of the bedtime sort of stories. He wasn’t calming down well though. He kept sitting up and looking at the screen, even though there wasn’t really anything to look at. When he was lying down he was kicking a foot against the pillow. When a story was over and I turned it to an instrumental bedtime song, he said he would show me a “Dance Party” song. I said we weren’t turning on the screen anymore and he got upset and hit me. I started to get up and made the mistake of saying that if he was hitting me he could go to sleep on his own. He started wailing, and curled up with me on the lower bed, but kind of upside down, with his head by my knees, and pulling the soft blanket around his head. I thought he’d go to sleep like that, but when he was still not asleep after several minutes I asked if he could move up on his bed. He did, but lay down upside down, with his feet on the pillow. He still took another ten minutes or so, as he kept dropping his foot on the pillow. I think it was a little after 10:30 before he finally fell asleep.

TNT fun: