He woke up at 7:25. I went up and he was still in bed. I lay down on the lower bed and he kept rolling around in bed. After 15 minutes or so he said, “I can’t sleep.” He finally got up at 7:55 and headed downstairs. He asked, “Dada? Do you hear a mini slime on the roof?” The dripping from the rain sounded like a slime in Minecraft. We read some poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends. He then jokingly asked if you could train the dragon in Minecraft. That led to him singing the “Chickens everywhere” song that we had come up with some time ago.
We played Minecraft, and the glitches persist. More holes through the bedrock AND he saw a second cloud bit falling, close to where the first one is. I’ve searched, and I haven’t found any reference to anyone else experiencing this falling cloud bug.
We had breakfast (oatmeal) and then did music time. He played with the synth and I finished the piano tuning. Woohoo! I’m sure I’ll be going back and doing spot tunings, and update it in a couple weeks, but it sounds pretty good and seems to work just fine. We then did music class with Ms. Safe. Did a little sight reading (treble clef and rests), and worked a little on his piece.
He then went to graphing and was working on equations based off of the circle equation, and turning it into art. Very cool. I made schnitzel and a strawberry smoothie for lunch and we read about the most powerful supercomputers after August had been talking about them. flops was a word of the day. He had an imagining game with a Minecraft competition between sister and Myna. Myna, of course, won, and August spent a lot of time listing everything she made: “A city made out of parrots…a pool made out of cats…”
We got driving to his piano lesson. We listened to the Fat Boy Slim song “Praise You”. He asked why the guy was singing “praise you like a shoe.” Which it does rather sound like. He then asked what praise means, so word of the day.
Piano went really well. Walking in we talked about needing to not play too loud, holding his hands the right way, etc. I thought there’d be some push back, but he said he was fine with that. During the lesson they looked at the piece he has been working on, then they worked on two new pieces: “Bluebird” and “First Serenade”. They talked about sight reading, and it was really cool to see him working on sight reading a new piece, and figuring it out. He also asked about the forte/piano scale. When he asked if those (pppp to ffff) were all of the volume things she mentioned other marks (I think she meant like crescendo, etc.). She looked for a sheet/page for him but it was just in Hebrew, but said she’d get it in English for next week. And at the end she asked what I thought about moving to 45 minute lessons starting next week, as he was doing fine and she felt they had more they could do. So that was cool, especially how I didn’t know how things would go after last week’s lesson. So we’ll do 45 minutes next week.
We walked over to the park. He had a bar and a cat walked up to us. August was convinced it wanted his bar and was getting a bit panicky about it. He went up on a play structure but it followed him. I told him to go on the round swing. I had to carry him over, but that worked. The cat sat on the ground near us for quite a while then got bored with us. August told me that he had learned “XP” for “experience” from Phineas Rage. We did Brother and Sister games, with Brother’s cat reserves going out of control and Bar couldn’t keep up. They would get too big and she would reset time. Wasn’t clear if this was in their Minecraft or real world.
We then drove into town and parked in the paved lot. We first went to the ATM, then went down to the health food store. August wanted halva so we got a slice, along with pistachios and a small container of mixed nuts. They were out of cashews. We then went to Stop City and got a few things. Including soy milk, as August said it was better for the environment. We walked over to the round picnic table and had the halva and my iced coffee and some pistachios. As part of the Brother and his cats game we were coming up with crazy names for all of his billions of cats, like Fluffy Nuffy, Bringer of Doom, etc.
Carly called, asking if we could get cheese for her. We walked to the other grocery store but they didn’t have the right kind. So we went back to Stop City and got the cheese and some dried apricots for when Zoe and Eve are over tomorrow.
For all the extra time wandering around town I gave him 7 and a half minutes of free Minecraft time when we got home. He then did alone time, on the piano. We identified three keys that could be better tuned, so I did those when he was done. It only took a minute, and he was surprised it was so fast. We played Minecraft. August was trying to destroy a portal and couldn’t. He said, “It can’t be destroyed. Like Lord of the Rings.” I was surprised he knew about Lord of the Rings. Eventually he told me it was from Last Kids on Earth.
Carly got home, and when August was done he watched a VSauce video about a game involving placing tetra pieces and pennies on a board.
He ate three bowls of nutty noodles as we watched the launch of the Solar Orbiter. August wanted to play SimpleRocket so he played that as we watched more of the broadcast. We moved to the couch and I showed him a video called “Calculus at a Fifth Grade Level” It was a pretty good intro to the thinking in calculus. At the end the teacher made a pun and August caught it, saying, “Ha. Infinity.” And as he was playing with the calculator he told me, “I like to experiment with algebra. It’s nice.”
I started to do some math time with him, talking about solving for X, but first he got caught up in a series of rhyming words that he had to share with Carly, then expand. We then used Paper to work on solving for X.
I then got him upstairs. While trying to get him to go take a bath with Carly I joked about how slow I am compared to her, and was then an announcer announcing the slowest bath in the world as if it were a 24 hour race. He thought that was pretty funny.
Carly gave him a bath. He was playing in the sink first, and he told Carly that there was a straw in the faucet. She didn’t believe him at first, and asked me. It happened a few months ago, but since it didn’t seem to affect the flow we forgot about it. She was able to get it out with tweezers.
They went in the bedroom and read, I think, part of the Astrophysics book and Clementine. When we switched, he was bored and said, “I need something to think about.”
We went in to his bedroom. I asked him if he remembered waking up last night, and he said one time was when he had woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He told me something along the lines of it being horrible to wake up in the middle of the night, and he feels bad about calling me because he thinks I’ll be upset. I assured him it was always okay.
We started reading a new book, inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, called Emperor of the Universe: A Fable with Spaceships and Aliens by David Lubar. The main character lives in Washington. Reign was a word of the day.
Carly came in and said good night, then we listened to the Stories Podcast story “Who Guards the Gourdsmen?” For a mediation we listened to a new podcast, called Bedtime Explorers, listening to the episode called “Rainbow”. August liked her. We had lights off at 10, and when the meditation was over I put on Philip Glass’s _Koyaanisqatsi_soundtrack. He was asleep by 10:20.
Lots of destruction in Minecraft:
A tuned piano:
Piano lesson 1:
Piano lesson 2:
His rhyme:
