He got me up a couple times. I think he was having bad dreams. The second time was around 5:30. When I went in he commented on it being too dark, and then that he couldn’t hear the fan. So I turned that on for him. He was quite stuffy and was taking quite a while to go back to sleep. So I went back to my bed and had to stay up until I was sure he was asleep again to turn the heat back on so he didn’t freeze.
He was then up at 7:40. He went straight to the bathroom, then we went downstairs. He played Minecraft with Carly, then watched a Life Noggin video called “What if You Were Never Loved?” I then showed him Thought Cafe’s “How to Find an Exoplanet?” and Fuse School’s “Multiplying and Dividing Fractions”. He got on the scientific calculator and was finding the exponents of numbers (like 9 to the 22nd power), then typing it in backwards, taking the 22nd root of that answer. Carly got him to go outside for the fresh and rosy fingered dawn and eat his oatmeal out there.
I went out too, and we all enjoyed the amazing weather. I sat in the lounge chair and studied languages and Carly got August the green chair that we’ve never really use and he sat in it and did graphing, after he had done some while on the steps to the slide. He was doing graphing competitions with Carly to see who could make better graphs.
Back inside, eventually, he started to get into the statistics functions and I was teaching him about variance and mean and the like. We’ll have to get more into statistics. It was hard to tear him from the iPad and he did a lot of whining about not wanting to go to the beach or cafe, so we joked about how they were going to a broccoli or tomato cafe. Carly let me go upstairs to start working. I heard him play some piano, then they left about 11:30.
They went to their usual cafe. Walked around the square area, then along the boardwalk. They were going to take the elevator down to the beach but it was closed so they didn’t go down. They were back about 2:40. They went outside, then August was playing Apple Music on her phone to wear it out. He saw that the battery was at 64% and was excited because that’s how many things you can stack in Minecraft: “That’s a convenient number.” And he knew it was 8 times 8. He then did some awesome dancing to a Belle and Sebastian song. “52…I’m trying to exhaust her battery.” He recognized “Pumped Up Kicks”: “I love this song!”
He wanted more iPad, but I convinced him to start a course on Brilliant with me on Waves and Light. I got a blanket out and we lay on the grass and worked through the first section. We paused to do some graphing when he realized that the example picture they gave of a sine wave was actually incorrect. Their picture was labeled y=sin(x), but he realized the picture was too steep. We experimented with it and he figured out it should actually read y=sin(x)5.
We started work on the second section of the course. Lots of new words as candidates for word of the day, like periodic. Enough of that for one session, then I read some more of Last Kids on Earth. Carly walked to the store. The sun was going down and it was cooling down so we moved inside. We read a little more of the book, and dexterous was a new word.
He was hungry so had a slice of pizza and then a yogurt. He was playing piano and said, “It’s an epidemic. My music is an epidemic.”
Carly was home, and he started doing alone time and I went for a run. They played Minecraft, and when I got back they were talking to Cherie. I took a shower and was then chatting with Peter about his last day of school and upcoming treatments. Downstairs he was using the graphing calculator and trying to figure out the statistical functions. I taught him about standard deviation. Carly got him a second dinner of oatmeal and apple and peanut butter. Carly and I were discussing tahini (she had learned, from Israelis, that it is good with spaghetti) and antioxidants and I asked August what scientists think about antioxidants. He said they hadn’t found proof, and then added, “They have oscillated…”
We brought up how he had talked to Carly as she was falling asleep last night. Apparently he had been saying things like “It’s 9:00 and my kidding trick is working.” He agreed: “That’s totes what I said…” Carly and I were apparently being funny. He called us funny a couple times. As he was eating he said he needed to go to the bathroom, but then after he had gotten up he just went back to his seat. Carly and I joked about what happened to his pee and were using ‘totes’ as well. He said, “You two are totes funny.” And he spit out spaghetti twice because he was laughing.
Carly suggested they watch a documentary. They wanted different kinds though. I suggested Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which I’ve been meaning to watch with him. He got excited by that one so we watched it. As we were watching factories and smelters he kept saying things like, “In Minecraft it’s way easier…” And one time he rather randomly said, in a grumpy old man voice, “Back in the old days you had to do this by hand. It took a month.” It was similar to what a man had said at a marble quarry earlier in the film. The craziest moment for me of the film was the huge machines in an open-pit coal mine in Germany and how it is actually ripping up towns.
Carly went up for a shower. August and I talked about having popcorn. I first offered him milk and a cookie. He couldn’t believe we were having a cookie and popcorn: “You’re outrageous…crazy!” We had cookies and milk first, and when he was done with his milk I got the popcorn. In the film we learned the term technofossils. Not related to the video he asked, “What’s a Hiroshima Bomb?” So I talked about the bombs dropped on Japan.
We went upstairs and Carly was in bed. August climbed into bed with her. I went and lay down in the couch bed, and August came out a few seconds later and was surprised to find me in bed too. He said, “Tonight is weird.”
Carly got up and gave him a bath. I heard him ask, “What’s 16 squared?” When Carly took a second, saying ,“Umm” he said, “256…I memorized it…it’s part of the binary scale.”
We listened to “The Rooster in the Sky” on Circle Round, then the “Velociraptor” episode of Bedtime Explorers. We listened to the Henri Bok album Worlds of Bass Clarinet and he was finally asleep at 10:45.
The polygon function sont:
Dancing to Belle and Sebastian:
Piano during alone time:
