He got up a little before 7:50. I was still reading in bed and he came and crawled in and stole my pillow. After ten minutes or so we went down and he cuddled with Carly. We then told him about how we are looking to buy a piano, as the woman wrote back and said we could come by today. He liked the idea, and we talked about where we could place it in the house.
All the talk of music made him want to play, and he hooked up the keyboard and played until 8:45 before he decided he wanted to play Minecraft. He was mainly experimenting with sound, and questioning why they included a sound in their collection. He’s definitely listening closely and using some sort of criteria to judge what makes good sounds. They aren’t just the clearest sounds, as he creates lots of very distorted sounds as well.
He moved to math and started to try to figure out how to use sin and cos. He was asking me how to spell them, and I told him, and he was actually typing in c-o-s, etc. Which actually works, but then I said there should be buttons for those things and we found them. He was very excited by this as it opened up a whole new world of buttons for him to play with. He found a wave pattern where the waves get closer and closer together and told me that it was asymptotic. He was then showing me how an equation crossed the x-axis. “What’s it called?” X-intercept. Working with the new buttons he said, “It’s actually nice I can do trigonometry now. Without seeing error messages all the time.”
I left at 11:45 to go to the big Tiv Taam. It was a big errands trip. I stopped by the bank in town to get cash (the woman had told us we could see the piano this weekend), then went to Tiv Taam, which took quite a while, then got gas, then stopped and bought six containers of strawberries on the way home.
While I was gone they went for a walk (I assume he was actually walking) over to Vatikim and played at the park over there. They also picked a small orange somewhere along the way. I think they had also done some math and other things. When I got home at 2:15 he was watching a video (Life Noggin or Kurzgesagt, probably) and then did some graphing calculator. We all tried the fresh loaf of bread I got and a new cheese, and he had some pate. He commented on how I got a lot of new things.
He asked me, “How do equal and opposite reactions work?” Not sure where that had come up, but I think I’ve mentioned it a couple times. I did another demonstration, and later he would use the phrase himself. He asked me about buying an oscilloscope. I emailed Mike if he had ideas, and I was looking for them on Amazon. He saw, or I mentioned, them being 200 dollars. He said, “If I was a parent of course I’d do it.”
He was playing with chords, and made an augmented chord. He wanted me to make a sign for augmented chord creation to, to go with my other three. I would end up drawing it later. We talked about chord inversions as he kept playing around with them, then he figured out a better way to tell chord types on his toy piano since, with it open, you can instantly see how many keys are not being played between the ones you are pressing and was then playing through chords and naming them all right as he did it.
We played with the alien for a while. When Carly tried to get him to go out on another walk he said, “I already got vitamin D3.” And he told me how since there about a million habitable worlds that we have 999,999 more to colonize and possibly become the first stage 3 civilization.
Eventually they did go out for a walk, over to the mall to get a “something something”. They went to the cafe there and he got a macaroon and they read a book. They left just before 4 and were back after 5, then skyped with her parents. They talked about their travel plans for coming here, and the countries they are going to after they leave us. It is getting close. He played a lot of music for them and showed the calculator.
He watched the Kurzgesagt Moon Base video again. It is one of his favorites. He played with the search field of my phone, after he had asked me to do a math problem. He included a letter and it thought he wanted to do a currency conversion to the South African currency. So currency was a word of the day. We then read from What If? about quarantining everyone to eradicate the common cold. Quarantine and Distribute were words from that. He ate some dinner, but just the pizza roll things, then we watched the Curiosity Stream documentary called The Story of Energy: Order and Disorder. Looked really good, but he didn’t like the voice of the narrator, saying it wasn’t the right voice. I think it was a British man, so not exactly an odd accent for him. I’m not sure why. So we switched to a series about the future with Michio Kaku and he was fine with that. He learned about Ray Kurzweil and the idea of the singularity.
She gave him a bath and I went for a walk. On the piano he taught her what an octave is. We talked about going to bed and he said, “My brain’s too busy thinking about math.” He hadn’t really had a full dinner, so now had rice and cauliflower. We reminded him to say thank you when she brought it to him. He did, then said, “And could you say thank you for teaching you an octave?”
We went upstairs and brushed his teeth and said good night. He talked about and described how math describes everyday life things. As an example he had a roll of tape and was rolling it on the bathroom counter and bouncing it off of things and said the lines could be described with math. We talked about that being physics. In his room he was pushing off of the wall and saying, “Look: equal and opposite reaction.”
We listened to “The Emperor’s Challenge” on Circle Round, then did an Insight Meditation on calming your mind (the last in the short series for kids we’ve been doing). He asked, “What’s it do to your brain? Meditation.” Told him we could look for a video tomorrow. Didn’t exactly manage to calm his mind completely, as right near the end of the meditation he interrupted to ask, “Dada. Dada! What’s a burial mound?” We listened to Beethoven’s String Quarter No. 14, which I had just heard mentioned in Musicophilia while on my walk. He was asleep right away around 10:35.
Crazy graph:
Chord progression on toy piano:
His way to tell chords apart:
Major major minor diminished major:
Laughing at the alien:
