He really yelled “Dada! Dada!” a little before 4. Not sure what was up when I went in. He went right back to sleep. I think I heard him call out again a while later but I didn’t have to go back in. He then called out loudly just after 7. He lay back down but got up after a few minutes. Downstairs he lay on the couch for several more and I put blanket on him. I read the How To part about moving a house through the air, then August turned it into a Brother and Sister game where Bar moves their house with jet engines.
We played Minecraft and he had oatmeal. He then watched a video on the Bermuda Triangle from The Infographics Show. He’s asked about the Bermuda Triangle a few times. He then watched a Brave Wilderness video about five alien-looking animals they’ve found. Helgomite (sp?) was our favorite, and a word of the day. Derek in Korea told me their school is now closed, for at least a week, but he thinks it will be longer.
He did some graphing, then we did music time. He practiced “Good King Wenceslas” and made cool rhythms on the metronome. He cleaned the other toilet to finish earning his star, as he cleaned one yesterday. He started doing division of odd numbers in his head: “What’s 5 divided by 2? 2.5. What’s 9 divided by 2. 4.5…” He had 5 stars, so used it to get an extra 30 minutes of iPad time.
As we played we listened to a What If World (about a greedy tree) and the Wow in the World episode about Betelgeuse (yesterday we had listened to “Good Habitat Keeping”) and the Brains On! called “For Crying Out Loud”. I made the Geologic Time poster as we finished that and hung it in the bathroom. He did more graphing and math, creating an equation for how much rocket fuel he needed for something. We were listening to the Every Little Thing podcast about sketch artists.
We got ready to go. We drove up into town and went to the pharmacy, where we bought hand soap, hand gel, and three masks. You have to ask at the pharmacy for them and they are down to their last box. August was a bit incredulous that we’d be doing anything about the coronavirus.
We then headed to school and got to the library, where it is Library Tech Week, just as the robotics team was getting ready for their presentation. August really liked that, and when they lifted the robot up so the kids could see its brains and asked the kids to move closer August ran up and got a seat right at the front.
After the presentation was over we walked around and looked at some of the things the library had out. Sadly, they don’t have toys out like they did before, when they had all the building toys out. They had computers set up though where there were things like a body synth which played music based on how much you moved. That as our favorite, although it didn’t do much.
We then headed over to the cafeteria, as he was hungry. We got a long slice of pizza with corn to share, and I got him a chocolate cookie and I had cappuccino. We went back over to the library and looked at the robot art out of recycled materials. Heather came along, who was responsible for it all, and I had August show her his favorite piece. I talked to her for a few minutes about finding Dremel tools in Israel. August was taking photos and took photos of her, and was also twirling around fast to do crazy panorama shots.
Back in the library I found the picture book The Music of Life by Elizabeth Rusch, which is all about Bartolomeo Cristofori and his invention of the piano. In it, it talks about famous composers for the piano and I added an album of each to our Apple Music library to listen to later. Midway we moved out to near the chess games when a class came in. We sat on a bench and August cuddled in the stuffed animals but payed attention.
I checked out a magazine called Beanz, which is all about kids and computer science. Turns out they have a whole stack of them. I’d been looking for the new Scientific American, as I had seen the cover and think it has something August would like, but they didn’t have it.
We headed out. They have the ribbons down, so you can go on all of the grass now. August ran in circles on it to wear it out. We stopped at the guard station to pick up the Amazon box from Cherie. It’s August’s presents. The car really smells of warm strawberries after we left the strawberries in the car for a couple hours the other day when we were at school. I talked about how it permeated the car and August asked what that mean, so permeate was a word of the day. We also quarantines (another word of the day) and why we got soap etc. He turned on the AC as cold as it could go because he could.
On the drive home we listened to Scott Joplin and I talked about how music at the time of these songs spread through sheet music and speculated about ragtime being played on our piano back when it was young. That was a cool thought.
At home he did alone time and we played Minecraft. Carly got home and I went for a run before it got dark. She went up to town to buy a few more things; they were out of masks by now. August was trying to tell me that “a couple” means 5. I asked him where he got that idea. He told us, “Well you two. You two were arguing about it and I got my opinion.” Carly and I had indeed once debated how precise the definitions of “a few” and “several” are, but I don’t remember “a couple” ever being open to debate.
While he was graphing he figured out radians, telling me, “A full circle is two times pi…” “and I turned it into a mind blender…”
Carly gave him a bath, and in bed we listened to two Stories Podcast episodes, “The Greedy Dog” and “Wiggly in Walt Disney World!” (Which he hadn’t liked the first time we tried it because it wasn’t a folk tale, but liked this time). He was whiney about more Cheerios, and I finally got him some. We skipped a Bedtime Explorer today and listened to Haydn piano music and he was asleep at 10:35.
Crazy metronome:
Making crazy graphs:
Robotics team:
Up close to see the robot:
Visual synth:
Visual synth 2:
Running to wear out the grass:
