He got up at 6 and called me, but then went back to sleep easily. He called me up again at 7:30 and he lay on his bed for quite a while, waking up. Eventually we went downstairs. I read a chapter or so of The Last Kids on Earth
We then played Minecraft, doing more building and terraforming. The mountain is getting pretty big. He watched a couple Joseph’s Machines videos and I made bacon and eggs for breakfast. We ate and he started doing some graphing. He’s really into t and how he can use it to make cool pictures. He was a girl selling graphs as art and selling it to Brother. We were listening to podcasts all through the morning, learning about things like kids doing science on the Galapogas Islands, Antarctica, and strange matter. We also listened to the first episode of the Space Programme.
As he was graphing he asked about double factorials, and we figured out how 3!! and 4!! work, and thought it was really amazing that the difference between the two is literally hundreds of sextillions (or so). He had been asking how to calculate pi, or why pi is what it is, so I looked up an article on 5 ways to calculate pi. When I got him off the iPad I tried to do them with him, but he didn’t give it a chance and was calling it boring, so I gave up for the time being and went to brush my teeth instead.
Back downstairs he made music using the chromatic scale as I made a strawberry smoothie. We came up with a “Chromatic snail” song as it went up the keyboard. We drank the smoothie, then got ready and headed out on errands.
We drove down to the complex with Ace and went to the pharmacy down there. Got several things on our list, but masks (Carly wanted more) wasn’t one of them, as they said everyone is out. We then went to Ace. I wanted to actually ask about a Dremel tool. It took time to find someone to ask, and I spotted rotary tools, from both Dremel and Skil high up on a shelf. August started to sing an “infamous of the genitalia” song so I had to explain what that word meant, and why he shouldn’t sing it in the store. Eventually I got some help and ended up buying a Skil model for about 70 dollars.
We then headed to Tiv Taam. He chose a treat from the bulk candy area and did a great job with all the errands. We also bought the heart toilet paper, which he’s been asking for for months.
We headed home. He’d done so well I told him he could have his first Minecraft time without doing alone time. We played Minecraft, then he watched Kurzgesagt videos. We had the pea soup/noodle dish for lunch and watched a Mumbo Jumbo video where he makes a TNT cannon in Minecraft. We then watched a Vox video on malaria and using a gene drive (CRISPR). He was then a polar bear under the blanket. He had tomato soup, then did alone time. He then said, randomly, “An affiliate of the University of Washington” literally seconds before I played KEXP. When you start the KEXP stream it always says that. I don’t know if he had heard the alarm that goes off on my phone at 4 to remind me the Morning Show is starting, or just his brain remembered that it was the time that he often hears that phrase.
We played Minecraft, then I was trying out the rotary tool. August was playing around a bit outside, and was outside when Carly got home. He went in and did graphing, then had a bowl of soup, after which he had his pudding from the other day. Carly spent some time cleaning out and organizing our kitchen cupboards. I went for a run, and they finished the Astrophysics bok.
Carly went to the store, and we did piano time. A little work on “Good King Wenceslas”, then taught him the pentatonic and minor blues scales. He did some math and graphing, and repetend was a word of the day. He also asked about negative exponents, so I taught him how they work.
Carly got home and he played blues licks for her and was then showing her complex chords and scales. She got him up for his bath. In bed I read him Chester’s Way, by Henke, which I’d checked out a while ago. We then listened to “Mr. Rat and His Lovely Daughter” and “The Boggart” on Stories Podcast. We put on a Bedtime Explorers (“Unicorn”) and he fell asleep soon after, to more piano music, around 10:30.
Making a song with a bass line:
Admiring hair colors:
His first blues and jazz:
