He woke up once during the night and called me in. When I went in he startled me, as he was actually standing right behind the door. He said something as he got back in bed but I didn’t catch it, and he fell right to sleep. I was then up, and knew it was close to the Edmonds School District school board meeting. I put that on and listened to it to see how they were pivoting with everything, half sleeping through it.
He was then up at 8:35. I went up and he asked if he could have new pants. I got some and asked if he had had an accident. He then said he thought he had a dream he was peeing. We checked, and his underwear and pants were all clean. He laughed about it and put the originals back on.
Downstairs he tried to say “Boo” to Carly but she wasn’t on the couch. He then went to the piano and was improvising. Eventually we moved to Minecraft. Lots of talk about playing with Vivian and Colin as I tried to add them, but it wasn’t working. August wanted to change his Minecraft name, but they only allow shorter names now, and I eventually convinced him that he’d miss AugustinoMaster when he couldn’t go back to it. We played in the Greek world. He then played piano and had the last of the french toast for breakfast. I made the pieces into an A. He told me I should do Q next time.
We watched a video on black holes (https://youtu.be/UjgGdGzDFiM) and ergosphere was a word of the day. Not for him, but for me. He was excited to already know about it and how it spins faster than light, and he’s already told me about it from the Kurzgesagt videos. He wanted to do graphing, so he did that, and I found the Crash Course Statistics course and we watched the intro and first videos to that. It got his brain going for the day.
We went outside and he told me, “I need to use statistics for my kidding tricks…which day you’re most likely to give me ice cream…” After hanging outside for a while we went back in to the piano. Tons of improvising songs and fragments using really interesting rhythms and dissonant intervals. And his timing has definitely gotten stronger. He still has a tendency to play loudly, too loudly, but he’s also experimenting more with dynamics.
We went back outside and sat in the comfy chairs and he did a lot of graphing. He ate one of the hotdog things and then some peanut butter sandwich and apple. He also said, “I also need statistics to figure out the chances of someone on earth growing up to be a pianist.”
Back inside he did lots and lots of piano. We looked at some of the easier pieces that we had printed out, although he mainly improvised and tried out scales. He found a scale it’s 8 notes (1extra) that we looked up and was E Gregorian No. 3.
For alone time he listened to “Phaeton Steals the Sun”. We then played Minecraft. He wanted to blow up the Greek world and so he made a new version of it so he could explode things. We used a crazy amount of TNT to do so, including a huge block from 70 100 10 to 50 120 -20
I then got him to go on a little walk, with a chocolate snack bar as the payoff. We walked over to the monster blasting park (from when he was Hilo) and sat on the edge and ate the bar. I had to remind him he couldn’t play on the equipment. We then walked home.
We played a few rounds of Apples to Apples. Then we watched a YouTube video about composing and he played piano. We also watched a video about how to read a score. He then saw the short video we’ve watched before on radiation, so watched that. And in preparation of playing with Vivian later I told him that Minecraft had released a bunch of stuff for free, so we worked together to download them all on our iPads.
Carly came down and I went for a run. The new rule that you can’t go more than 100 meters from home on your walks goes into effect, officially, at 5pm. So I got out at 4:30 and ran directly east, stopping on the other side of the park over there to take a photo. I don’t know when the next time will be that I’m more than a kilometer away from home for the fun of it.
Cassie had gotten Vivian set up, so she and August started playing together in a city world. A bit later she had Colin set up and he joined them. Carly worked outside, and I made scrambled eggs and we had them with the rest of the potatoes and broccoli.
I then went upstairs to work, and they had a lot of good cousins Minecraft time together. Carly gave him a bath. I made up a song about brushing his teeth and ended with “like an ant” to make a rhyme scheme work. When they complained about ants not brushing their teeth I flatly said, “deal with it.” August was then asking her to play Minecraft with him in the morning. She said she would play for five minutes. He did the math in his head and said, “That’s one-sixth of what I asked for.” And when he didn’t want to do all of his flossing I told him we’d only listen to half a story. He thought that was pretty funny, and I heard him tell Carly, “I can’t believe he said half a story.”
Got him in bed and we finished listening to “Stella and the Dragon” (which he had listened to for his alone time earlier) and then listened to Stories Podcast’s “Robin’s Egg Blue”. He looked at the feelings poster and asked again, “Why are confused and tired and determined on unpleasant? Determined is SO good.” He went to the bathroom, then we listened to the Peace Out on Pluto. Trailblazer was another word of the day. At the end she asked you to think of someone that was a trailblazer for you. August thought about it and said, “Thatcher…he taught me about playing Minecraft.” I put on a Brian Eno album, but he said it was too exciting for bedtime, as was Tuatara’s Breaking the Ether. He requested Beethoven’s Fifth so that’s what we listened to. He was asleep about 10:30.
A new song:
Developing a chord sequence:
Humming and math outside:
Improv time:
Improv time 2:
Crazy TNT time:
Minecraft with Vivian:
