I woke him up a little before 8. Downstairs we played Minecraft in our Survival Trival world. We then watched a few educational videos I had saved for him: “Legacy of the Spitzer Telescope” from SciShow, “Meet the Sight Words – She” from Preschool Prep, and “The Fastest Growing plant in the World” (which is about bamboo). He then told me, “I want to be a dirt researcher when I grow up.” Which is because of the documentary from last night. Also kind of funny because the parents in the Brother and Sister game are dirt researchers, and a running joke is that their jobs are boring. August didn’t want me telling Carly about that though.
I made him oatmeal for breakfast. We then checked on his salt on plants experiments (I don’t remember writing about it, but last night he had had the idea to put salt water on a plant. They chose the weed that he and I had taken from across the street and planted, and was doing quite well) and read about why salt is bad for plants: https://sciencing.com/happens-put-saltwater-plants-6587256.html The plant yesterday had started to look quite wilty after only a few hours, and it now looked even worse.
He got whiney when one of us wouldn’t play Katamino (the blocks we borrowed from Shani) with him. Eventually he asked me nicely and we played for a long time. He then did alone time and they played Minecraft. We talked about binary, Morse code. We then did some funny brother and sister games, but I can’t remember what they were.
They drove to down to get a couple things at the grocery store and to get a pastry at the bakery, which was apparently really good, but I didn’t get details. They also went to the bank, and Carly called me. She asked me to research credit card options for us (ours are expiring anyway, and we’ve talked about switching), so that was the rest of my time.
They got back and Carly got him some eggplant. He did eat much, although he had liked it pretty well yesterday (even though Carly didn’t). He did alone time, then the two of them did Minecraft. That took us just close to 12:30. We got ready and drove to Gabi’s. On the way he talked about creating some sort of machine. He said, “I’m doing something to see if we’re real.” That is, he said he’d test to see if we were in a simulation by creating something that would lag the computer we were in. He then asked for the escape velocity of our galaxy. According to Google it is 550km/s.
At Gabi’s I got him set up with his iPad and he watched things. Heard some laughing, and he was watching Llama Llama when we were done. Nothing much to report, although I got to hear the fuller story of how they negotiated last week for a cookie once every three weeks. He wasn’t upset when they did it, but he sort of hid behind Gabi’s chair while he and Carly talked about it. And last week they had played Monopoly. August didn’t want to compete, so it was Gabi versus Carly. August then basically took over playing for Carly and was making decisions and everything, although he mentioned a couple times that he wasn’t actually playing. When they finished, and Gabi had lost, Gabi asked him how he thought that made Gabi feel, and August said “Stupid”, which was quite revealing.
On the walk back to the car Carly pointed out it was a leap year, and we talked about February 29 birthdays. August was kind of confused at first.
At home he was on the graphing calculator and we discussed the tilde. A word of the day, though we failed to figure out how to use it in a regression on the graph, although there is one already set up, and we talked about what they are for, discussing “Regression parameter” in Desmos. I then realized it was a Palindrome Day: https://apple.news/A4AHfE3YKRru-vvtXV5yWmw I wrote it out for August and we discussed it.
I then went up and did some work, and Carly was cleaning the car. I think he spent a minute on the couch alone before finally going out with Carly. He had to pick up a cashew for her that she found in the car. He came up to ask me about the status of his alone times, and told me he can now play “Ode to Joy” in six keys. When I came down at 4:30 he was watching the Kurzgesagt video about a Dyson sphere. I think he had finished his alone time and was watching educational videos first, as she was still finishing in the kitchen.
I went to the dentist for a cleaning, which was quick and easy. No issues. Which is good, as it has been four years. Back at home Carly told me he had really learned the word acronym from the Comic Science: Plagues book. He was finishing a video, then showed me “Ode to Joy” in multiple keys, his looks and motions. We ate Carly’s soy chicken and sweet potato for dinner. He asked about allergies and they watched a video about peanut allergies. That just made him want to eat straight peanut butter, and he ate a couple spoonfuls.
We read some What If? and sublinate was a word of the day. He then did a lot of graphing. I found the Desmos user manual, which was great and we got equations from, then I found cheap/free textbooks that might come in handy at some point. Some on Apple Books, and also the OpenStax app. He played piano, and Carly was talking to Cassie, then they used FaceTime. Vivian was talking about Toca World, and Cassie told August, “Thanks for getting my kids addicted to it.” August sensed what she was saying and declared, “Sarcasm!” The funny thing is that August almost never played Toca World—maybe just once or twice, although he had made good use of Toca World and Toca Builders in his pre-Minecraft era.
He showed them the piano, and Vivian or Cassie said something about “the piano.” He replied, “You mean broken piano?” To which Colin replied, “You’re funny August.” August then had the phone, and Colin wanted him to go upstairs. They were then playing hide and seek: Vivian was taking August with her as they hid from Colin or tried to find him. August would play too, turning off his mic when they were hiding from Colin, and also climbing under the blanket, in Carly’s closet, and in his room as if he were hiding too.
We said goodbye at 9. Carly gave him a bath. They did more math, and at the end were talking about how he wants to learn binary code, starting tomorrow. He was so into binary though that we used Paper on the iPad and started right now. I used the ‘month’ paper background as a template and taught him how it worked, then we did several numbers, taking turns, and also going both directions (from a base two to base ten and vice versa). It was pretty amazing how quickly he got it. Before we were done he wanted to do one in Base 8, and we used a calculator to figure out that 777777=262143 in base 10.
For our story we listened to Stories Podcast version of the Yiddish folk tale we’ve heard on Circle Round, where the house is so crowded and loud and the advice is to bring all the animals in. In this version the main character is a woman, and it is called “Smaller than Ever”. We then listened to the first Andy Hobson meditation, and he was asleep by 10:20.
Ode to Joy in different keys:
Manipulating graphs:
Another song:
Hide and seek with Vivian and Colin:
