I went and woke him up, in the big bed, at 9:15. Downstairs I suggested he go say good morning to Carly, who was out working in the wind in the yard. He went out for a few minutes. They came back in and got their iPads and played Minecraft outside. When she found an abandoned mineshaft he said, “Good for you, mama. I love you.”
He had oatmeal for breakfast, and asked me, “How was your book group meeting?” I then asked how it went going to sleep with Mama: “Weird…I think I stayed up until 11:28.” After breakfast we watched some videos I had lined up: We finished the Crash Course video on human evolution, then we watched a Vox video on how all maps lie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIID5FDi2JQ&t=1s), and played with the Truesize.com website.
We went upstairs to do some wrestling, and Ms. Safe class games. There were odd animals involved, like a gorilla with a pointy beak and “a mile long basilisk.” There were a lot of new students, including a new student in a wheelchair named Blank. After a long time upstairs we went downstairs to the piano. I missed recording a really cool song him played, then he played another amazing one as I was making some lunch. He told me, “I play the best songs when you’re not video recording…To mock you!” I think it was the really haunting song he played several times today, but I didn’t manage to record.
We went outside for lunch. As we went out he said, “My song was basically the opposite of this.” Indicating outside. After eating for a couple minutes he asked “Will you guard my food from flies while I play music?” He ran in, played a bit, then came back out. We had oats and hot dogs (cut up). I read the first three chapters of Beasts of Olympus: Hound of Hades. New words included solar plexus, griffin, immortal, charges, boasting, and entrails.
He ate it all, and we then had small pieces of pie as we kept reading. He was then still hungry so Carly got him mac and cheese and he listened to “I’m Bored” outside for alone time. He played Minecraft with Carly, then they played chess. I rested for a bit. When I came down he told me about the chess match and about how Carly was ahead and he let her get her hopes up before he “curved” it back to him and won.
We all went out for an ant walk. We fed the ants a few pieces of apples. Got him to walk a tiny bit further, but not over to the bridge, as I had initially suggested, and I found two mini chocolates dropped on the ground. We broke those up and fed them to the ants as well. They seemed to really be excited about those.
At home we read more of Beast of Olympus, then watched a few more videos from the queue: “A Day in the Life of a Roman Soldier” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5e7cl19Ha0), “A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWYhMoDTN0), and “Can You Trust Your East? (Audio Illusions)”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzo45hWXRWU
. He really liked the Shepard Tone Illusion and then walked around, having Myna going OTT with auditory illusions. I’m not entirely sure what it all entailed, but at one point he said, “It’s basically a camera-less particle accelerator.”
We went and played a couple of Gravity Maze levels, and while we did so we watched part of an Iskall livestream on Twitch. He played chess with Carly again and I went for a run. I got back and he finished playing Minecraft with Vivian. Kind of odd, because she apparently couldn’t hear us, although we could hear her. I had his dinner ready and we were going to read, but as soon as I hung up the call with Vivian Cherie called. As he ate he asked her, “Do you believe in god?” They debated that, and I fed him the line “That’s just redefining terms until they’re meaningless!” She asked “Do you believe in love?” He said he doesn’t, and he had some interesting wording, which I don’t think I got accurate, but was something like, “I believe people get along…they don’t fit with one person…” I realized what he was talking about was soul mates: One of the videos we’ve watched is on the mathematical impossibility of finding your soul mate, if there was just one person out there for you.
He played piano for her, then wanted to show her a Brother and Sister game. He ran circles around the bed and sang the song, but then we went back downstairs. They played chess together with Carly. When they were done I emailed Cherie and Carly information on ChessKid.com, and we’ll be able to use that in multiple ways, including playing together while in a Zoom call, once Cherie gets a new computer (she’s stuck on her phone now, as the wi-fi stopped working on her computer).
August hadn’t eaten a ton of dinner, although he’d at least had all the green beans. Carly had placed a fruit and veggies order today, which came during my run, about 15 minutes after she placed it, and they now ate the half of a watermelon, almost all of it. He enjoyed using the ice cream scoop to scoop it out, and also drank the juice with a straw. While standing there he spotted tiny ants on the wall and had fun counting them. More seemed to appear every time he looked at the spot, and he called it his superpower. We put a couple drops of the ant poison on the wall.
I got him up and gave him a bath. Carly had prep to do for tomorrow. He asked, “What’s a dilemma?” Once he was in pajamas we went down and checked on the ants. Back upstairs we did the Sister game with her finding out about the simulation. He ate his crackers and peanut butter and listened to “Bunny’s Big Leap” and “I’m Bored”. Carly pointed out it is the seventh or eighth time he’s listened to that story, and when it was over I asked why he liked it so much. He replied, “Probably because it’s my nature to be bored.”
We brushed our teeth and said good night to Carly again. He wanted nonfiction time, so I read to him about Zeus and Hera from Bernard Evslin’s Greek Mythology. We got the lights off, and he asked, “What’s diagnose mean?” We listened to a Steve Reich organ piece (“Four Organs/1970”), and he asked about the difference between hyperbole and sarcasm. The organ piece was over and I put on “Piano Phase (1967)” and he said he really likes that one (we’ve listened to it several times). He woke me up to tell me that if we had to quarantine for two weeks that we’d be just fine. I was only able to agree and tell him to go to sleep. He was asleep by 11:35.
“That’s gotta do”:
Surface tension and waves:
https://youtu.be/EG_vrHbzmKIWaves slo-mo:
“Attack of the nest”:
Starting a game:
Scooping watermelon:
Ants in the kitchen:
Melodica before bed:
