He was up just after 7:50. He got in bed with me for about 10 minutes. Downstairs he asked Carly if she knew what a vacuum is and told her, “No, a vacuum in physics terms is a space with zero percent matter.” He then told her about the glass half-full chapter of What If?
On the couch we watched a few videos I had saved for him:
• “What If humans suddenly disappeared?” from Ted-Ed Legacy was a word of the day
• “Astronomers just discovered the biggest explosion ever” from SciShow
• “Everything is Energy”, which Cherie had sent. Reincarnation was a word of the day. We talked about Buddhists and he asked, “But do they take antibiotics?” That led to a good discussion of reincarnation and suffering and we read answers on https://www.quora.com/Can-a-buddhist-kill-bacteria-or-take-antibiotics
We then played Minecraft. For his education videos he watched a couple videos, including on on “how deep can you dig?”
He played on the piano, then did alone time as I put on the keycaps with double-sided tape (temporary until we get the new set) and finished the atmosphere poster. Carly went tot he store. He played a couple songs of the day on the piano. We played Minecraft in our creative world and listened to an old Story Pirates and the Story Pirates/Wow in the World crossover that came after it. Carly got home. He did a good job of stopping on the iPad after watching the Bright Side video about going to the core of the Earth.
For lunch I made him a fried egg and he had a pack of seaweed snacks. I the made soft-boiled eggs as Carly put away. August made a bunch of cool graphs, including crossing lines and one he called “impulses”: sin(y^2+x^2)=cos(y^2+x^2). Even crazier was sin(y^2+x^2)=cos(y^2+x^x). His eyes seemed to be bothering him today, particularly in the morning.
He went outside where Carly was and was giving her basically impossible challenges on the graphing calculator. Carly cut him up and he ate some persimmon, which they call “sugar fruit.” He was still hungry so had a soft-boiled egg and we continued the endless Brother games: needing to pee on a long trip and making more cat reserves.
Back on the piano he discovered a scale constructed with HWHWWWW. We looked it up and it was C Super Locrian. It reminded me of the Elliot Smith song “Everything Means Nothing to Me”. We listened to the song but disagreed about which scale it was (C sharp something). We didn’t resolve it though as August wanted to go tell Carly about his discovery of a new scale and went upstairs to find her.
He was up there for 15 minute or so, then came back down and asked to do his alone time. He then went outside all on his own for the first five minutes or so, then came back and played piano. He went outside again to hear music from across the street. We played Minecraft, then we watched videos I had found: a short NASA video about the naming of Perseverance and “Why sunlight is older than you think” from Smarter Every Day.
He was on the piano again and I heard him tell Carly, “Here’s something that Ms. Dalit doesn’t give me: pages with dissonance.” He then taught Carly how to play with chords and was playing both of his pieces with chords. Back on the calculator he realized that the square root of 4^22 is the same as 2^22.
Carly made macaroni and cheese, and I got August out for a walk before 5. We took along a container of the macaroni and cheese. We walked up to our park, but he said there was “No way” we were stopping because there were two dogs. We kept walking, and headed down to the monster-zapping park. We sat on a curb and ate some mac and cheese and he played on the equipment. We moved over to the merry-go-round and played on there, then were harassed by a black cat. August reacts about the same to cats now as he does dogs, so I had to chase it off a couple times.
On our walk and at the park we expanded on a big story arc: It had started with Brother thinking they were going on a seven minute trip to visit their Granny, but it was actually 7 billion something to another galaxy. But then it turned out she had just moved across town to a new condo by the New Galaxy Mall, not an actual new galaxy. It turned out that Granny had invented things like quantum computers, and for some reason Bar ended up taking them back in time to see young granny, only to find that the older granny had traveled back in time to replace her younger self. There was a lot of time travel involved, and things like a cat uprising, a robot rebellion, and the extinction of the dinosaurs: her efforts to solve one problem had led to other problems with the timeline.
We walked home because he needed the bathroom. Carly was vacuuming, so we went outside and sat on the swing and continued with the stories. We then all ate Mac and cheese and broccoli for dinner outside at the table. August had wanted to continue our game, but I said we should talk to Mama. She said that put pressure on her to be interesting. He told her (jokingly raising the bar) that she just had to be more interesting than Minecraft. He asked me to fill up his water bottle and I agreed. He then started laughing and said, “I keep using kidding tricks…to get you to fill up my water bottle…It’s okay; you’ll forget by the morning.”
I went upstairs for a few minutes and he did some Khan Academy with Carly, then even on his own. That was impressive, even if just for a few minutes. He was then asking Siri for photos. That went on for quite a while, then I got him off with some peanut butter toast. He did more piano time, then had a Brother game with Bar teleporting people into Minecraft.
We headed upstairs and he went in the bathroom and had fun blocking the door with the stool and things. Would have been fun but he also took down our clean towels and used those as well. He instantly came out when Carly’s phone made a Minecraft sound. Carly called him a “Pavlovian dog” and he asked what that meant, so a word of the day.
Carly gave him a bath and washed his hair. He called Carly “cute in a grown up-y way.” She read to him (a Comic Science book, I think).
In bed we listened to the Stories Podcast story “Old Favors”, then he needed a second bowl of Cheerios and we listened to Three Bedtime Explorers: “Life Treasure Map”, “Friend Hat”, and “Magnifying Glass”. I then put on piano music and he was asleep around 10:40.
A song of the day:
Another song:
Super Dorian scale:
Laughing at me:
With me on the swing:
London Bridge with chords:
Skip to My Lou with chords:
