I started waking him at 9:15. Up at 9:30. I read the first couple stories in the book Apollo: The Brilliant One. We learned the words muse and prognostication as words of the day.
We then went into the bedroom and wrestled. I was tossing him around like he was in a storm and used a lot of our new words, like sinews and muses and Typhon. We went downstairs at 10:15 and for his morning iPad time he played one of the older LEGO games. We switched to Minecraft, where he had the idea of making a copy of our survival world and making it creative so that we could use that as a test world, particularly to plan his new sky tunnel. We did that, and it was a really good idea. I could go up in the sky and see our builds in a way I’d never seen before.
He played some piano, then we had oatmeal for breakfast. He then read the first third of an I Can Read level 1 book called Dirk Bones and the Mystery of the Haunted House to me. We watched a SciShow video about animals without mouths, then started the Wayside School Arithmetic book, figuring out how elf+elf=fool. He started to get bored by it, but I pulled him around and when he mostly understood how it worked he was excited to tell Carly.
He played with the Sound Rebound app and talked about my work with me. We discussed the videos I had worked on, and he asked, “Do you think someone in the world is watching your video right now?” We then went upstairs and had fun wrestling before doing some upstairs learning time, watching videos on Sleepwalking (https://youtu.be/OUeN4uHEaGY), concussions (https://youtu.be/O8R1x6Co6OY), and light-headedness and fainting (https://youtu.be/0-Mwr1D_Qec andhttps://youtu.be/exH-wgTORfs
).
When we went downstairs Carly was home. He had corn and rice and cantaloupe for lunch and they played chess and he played piano. Carly went up to work, and at some point he did alone time, listening to a story. For his Minecraft time we played in a new Advanced Sky Block world, or something of the sort. I did my role of growing the trees and expanding from the one tree to more of a forest, and when August commented on how I do that in all of the sky block worlds I said it was appropriate since that was Grampa’s job.
We went outside, and he had more cantaloupe as we sat on the bench. We discussed his warts and also calluses, which he doesn’t have. He said, “You don’t have to worry about me getting callouses. I’m not going to be a guitar player, I’m going to be a teacher!” When I asked where piano fit in that he added, “That’s what I should be: a piano teacher!”
Carly came out and he randomly explained symbiotic relationships to her, starting with the example of a monkey eating bugs off of a tiger. It came up that he was the one that had been confident that the cantaloupe was ripe yesterday, and he said he thinks he learned how to tell in preschool. He said he had taught mama how to do it, and she should pass it on. He added, “This should be taught from generation to generation… and I should teach my kids, or kids… it could be a family heirloom. What? It seems like a pretty good thing to pass on.” We noted his use of big words like heirloom (must be from a story?) and he said, “I want to study big words. They’re interesting…I’m a conversation starter.”
We looked at the WBAIS CoronaZine that Ilana put together. He wasn’t much into it, but I read some of the student poems to him, and taught him about acrostic poems and we made one up together:
Mommy mommy mommy
Always in the garden
Many salads she has eaten
Always with tomatoes
We also read a poem from 5th grade Eve, Liz’s daughter. Carly found a whole pack of slugs, and August took them across the street to release them. He released them in the sun by an ant nest, seeming to think they should be punished. He let me shield them from the sun with a branch with leaves though. Back in the yard he helped water. Carly said something to him, and his response was, “Beats me. I’m just a kid. I don’t know anything.” He doesn’t like to turn on and off the water now, as the handle is inside his big weed. I asked why that was, and he told me “The leaves have a weird smell.”
I got him back on the bench and he read the next third of the Dirk Bones book to me. He told me he likes to do “rash reading”, where he reads quickly and guesses at words. He said I should only correct his words at the end of every two pages, and that he doesn’t like stopping as he goes. I told him that was a good idea and we could work on that. I then started reading the first Percy Jackson graphic novel to him. He really liked that, so I went ahead and bought them all on Apple Books, as they are 99 cents each right now.
Inside he played a bunch of piano. On one piece he asked, “Did you like how the bass was random?” He was really playing around with rhythm. It was now close to 6. He’d been wanting to do his hour of Minecraft a bit early; Vivian and Colin couldn’t play again today because they had friends over. Should be back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. They played in the Minecraft test world, and I played with them for a few minutes, finding some spider spawners we can make use of in the survival version. I then went for a run.
When I got back he was playing with Sound Rebound and he was watching the balls pile up at the bottom: “You pretend they’re Internet speeds… the chance ones is business internet.” The different layers are different internet speeds and another layer is an upgrade. We had talked about our speeds earlier when he had done a Speedtest and it was the fastest we’ve seen in Israel (38mbps). I showed him how it had been 80 in Korea.
I took a shower, and when I came down he was playing chess. He asked us, “What’s abundance mean?” He also asked Carly to read Junie B. Jones and I think they read a little. He then helped me make strawberry scones and played more chess and Sound Rebound. We ate the scones, which were okay but not as good as the banana ones had turned out, then Carly gave him a bath.
He declared, “We should do something special on the day in the middle of the summer and winter…solstice.” He was then asking her about capitalism and the role of government. “Is there any country that didn’t have a government?”
I came up and took over. He first listened to “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”: “I love this story. Even though in this version the boy doesn’t get chopped up by the wolf.” Next was “Sophia and the Snowflake”. When that was over he randomly asked, “What’s fiber optic internet?” That led to a discussion of speed versus bandwidth, and of video buffering. Buffer was a word of the day.
As we went to brush our teeth he asked, “You know how people say being kind is treating people the way you want to be treated? What if the person wants to be treated differently?” That led to a good discussion. We brushed our teeth, then discussed asexual reproduction (which came up because of the story of the birth of Jesus) and that led to a discussion of species, and, after asking who the first humans were, a discussion of the paradox that there are many species in our past ancestry, yet no single dividing line between them, so that if you start with him and work backwards you would say that every previous generation was the same species, and yet you’d get back to the first organisms.
We went back in bed, and he pretend to have amnesia, but also remember everything (reminded me of the “One dark morning” poem): “I have severe amnesia. I remember I met you before.” Somehow, that led to a discussion of whether a brain could ever be kept alive in a jar, and what life would be like without any sensory imput, and whether you could make artificial eyes, etc. When I talked about how awful it would be to just be a brain and said I’d go crazy, he asked, “What’s your concept of driving someone crazy?”
He was really having trouble settling down, and kept asking and telling me things. We listened to the Glassworks album again and, he eventually told me it was too Spooky. I put on a Benge album he had liked (the pop one) and he was finally asleep sometime around 12:15.
Explaining a symbiotic relationship:
Releasing the slugs:
More slugs:
Piano bit 1:
Piano bit 3:
Piano bit 2:
Scone dough:
Piano bit 4:
