He woke me up once during the night and his blanket was off. When I got up he had crawled down on the lower bed and was cuddling a pillow. I got him straightened up and with the blanket on him. At 7:40 he woke up coughing. He came out to the couch bed. By the time I came up he had crawled completely under the brown blanket. I got under all the covers next to him and he eventually poked his head out of the brown blanket and sort of restlessly fell back to sleep a bit after asking for a tissue and doing some lamenting. About 8:05 he got up for good. Some more nose blowing and he went in the big bedroom for a moment before we headed down.
Downstairs we finished reading the 30th anniversary edition of Where the Sidewalk Ends, then played Minecraft. He stopped a bit early. He watched a video while I made French toast, then we ate breakfast. He then did some graphing until Gilad called to play Minecraft. They played in the “Way of the Bee” world, on Gilad’s computer for the first time. When they were following what the bee scientist was telling them to do pacify was a word of the day.
He started his own Way of the Bee world and burned things for a few minutes. I got him dressed, then I made him a quesadilla. I ended up as the pirate captain for some reason. He did more graphing and was saying things like, “The pseudorandom lines are actually waves.” “I’m doing a breakthrough with theta…” “Rate of change is the best thing ever…”
We got headed to town around noon. A busy shopping time before things closed. We went to the hardware store and I found shorter screws for our hooks. I only had eight so they gave them to me for free. We went to the small grocery store by VIPizza. Found everything on our list there except for kale. August wanted a snack and wanted a pudding thing. I realized I didn’t have a fork or spoon. He was almost upset, but then I reminded him of the little pastry things up front. He got a cookie and a thing with powdered sugar.
We walked across to the park. I had put him in his long shorts and we were quite comfortable in the park. Had my sweatshirt on but would have been okay without. We sat on the bench in the sun while he ate. Think I did some reading. We then walked to the fruit and veggie stand. Surprisingly, no kale. August was quite whiney about going to a third place, Stop City!, for kale, but made it and I let him get a pudding thing for this weekend (a wanted an iced coffee thing). We got our kale and headed home.
At home we sat on the couch and he had been talking about wanting to make a huge cube in Minecraft and was using a calculator to calculate how many blocks it would take at different sizes. That was easy enough, but then we talked about making hollow boxes and it got more difficult. I wrote on Paper and we talked about it, then decided to actually try it in Minecraft, so I was building boxes of different size and using different colors of concrete to show him how they related to equation I had figured out. That worked quite well.
We got out of Minecraft and brainstormed a whole new point system so he can get stars for things beside just doing chores, but with a limit to the number per day. The idea is to slightly incentivize some harder forms of learning (such as actually working through Khan Academy as opposed to just experimenting with graphing). That went well.
He did alone time while I hung up the hooks. The screws were still too long. Sadly, they hadn’t had 35mm screws in stock. So I got the middle three of five in okay, but the ones on the end I just couldn’t get in deep enough, then the drill bit broke on the right one. I think it will be okay, but not as rock solid as I would like.
I made us a strawberry smoothie as he started Minecraft, then I played with him. Carly was home before 4:30, just in time to partake of some smoothie. He told her, “did you know that the further you get from an atom the less likely you’ll find an electron orbiting it…even a mile!…it’s an asymptote…never gets to zero…” Which sounds accurate, but I’m not sure where he learned it. In Minecraft he produced a third ‘cloud’ piece after doing a huge explosion. Which gave credence to my theory that they are glitches of TNT that gets ‘stuck’ mid explosion. I wasn’t sure though, as the resulting cubes are bigger than usual.
For his second time he played more piano and rolled around on the couch. Back in Minecraft we are planting a whole forest and making streams and animals around our house in the flat world. He then watched Joseph’s Machines: Exercise, Pass the Salt, and the Page Turner. I read more of How To. He and Carly then did a ton of math. Think she read some Astrophysics too.
I was going to go on a run, but then realized I hadn’t put the clothes in the dryer earlier. Carly went and took a shower instead. August was having his characters doing a lot of competition games (math, Minecraft), against different random people of different ages. Not sure if he was supposed to be Myna or Bar. He ate his sweet potatoes, then had more noodles and butter.
We Skyped with my parents. He showed them a lot of his graphing and piano playing. As he was graphing one of them asked, “What would you do without parents like you have?” He immediately replied, “Go off the grid.”
Carly took him up and gave him a bath. We said good night at 9:20. We went in and listened to “The Singing Witch” and “The Plum Pit Thief” on Stories Podcast, then the “Panther” episode of Bedtime Explorers. We listened to Brian Eno’s The Drop and he was asleep at 10:20.
Playing on the flat world in survival:
Demonstrating a parabola graph:
TNT and fire in Minecraft:
Explaining a graph:
Circle spiral graph:
Couch craziness:
Squirrel voices on Skype:
