At 8:15 I heard the toilet flush upstairs, then he came down on his own. I read three chapters of Sideways Stories from Wayside School, then August wanted to play Minecraft. He was excited when I showed him that the Nether update had happened. We spent the time exploring the Nether in his flat world he uses for challenges. He seemed pretty happy with it. I finished writing an email to Paul asking him if he could reset the Nether on our survival world, as he has a Windows machine.
August then went outside to tell Carly about it. August asked for cereal for breakfast, and we ate inside and I read another chapter of the book. He and Carly then played cards outside on the blanket, then she read the Class Clown book to him. riot was a word of the day, and a little later he was repeating “It was a riot.” He had come in at one point to get the other two decks of cards, to mix all four together for some reason. They played chess, then when Carly went in to make food I took over and he and I played bizarre positions that he set up. He set up the conditions basically backwards, and actually beat me in the end. He went in to show Carly the end position and she was able to find the mate in one. He was impressed: “She’s learning!”
We had the computer analyze the position from the beginning, then he listened to a story, “King of the Frogs”, for alone time. He and I played in the new Way of the Nether world that was available for free on the app store. After that, we went upstairs for wrestling and to play the game where he was an animal that kept falling in the water and I was the shark that would save him. We went downstairs when he wanted to play Chess Kids on Carly’s computer. He did that, and Carly made corn on the cob and then got him a sandwich while that was cooking.
He had corn and was bored. I suggested he look at a book and gave him the Visual Dictionary book and he looked for a few minutes, then listened to “Loki and the Golden Hair” and “The Seal-Skin Girl” on Stories Podcast. Carly made him a little pasta and broccoli with the rest of the cheesy sauce, and I made a pasta bolognese for dinner. He skipped the end of that story and went to “The Know-It-All”. A couple minutes of that and he skipped to “The Bee’s Sting”. Listened to all of that, then we were talking about going for a bike ride: “I just want to finish this story first.” It was “The Incredible Singing Tortoise”.
We then got ready to go. At one point he said he didn’t want to go, and I got him to change his mind by telling Carly we definitely weren’t going for a bike ride, but whispering to him we should go to confuse him. He kept up the charade as we got going. On the bike we rode around the local blocks, then down to the trail and partway to the glass before turning around. We had ridden up Vatikim to see the finished houses they’d been building, then on the way back down we rode by a woman and kid, who was about 3. He said hi to us, and as we went by I realized it was the woman who was always walking the other direction, pushing a kid in a stroller, when I was pushing August north on his bike to preschool. August didn’t notice them though, this time, as he was busy reading off license plates.
When we came back from the path we stopped at the monster blasting playground. He went on the merry-go-round. He told me, “Spin me until I faint.” I spun him a lot, and he spun himself. He asked how fast he was going and we figured he was getting to 20 rpm on his own, and when I spun him really fast he was around 36 rpm. It was the most that he’s wanted me to ever spin him.
There were two interesting things at the park: first was an ant nest in a hollow of the tree. He studied them quite a bit. A second was the crunchy round seed pod things all over the ground. August said it was like roller skating walking on them, and he fell down a couple times. He decided, “Maybe I should learn to roller skate before we go to this park again. Let’s change it from the ‘Monster Park’ to ‘Roller-skate Park’.” Oh, he was also really interested in the exposed roots of the tree, and particularly the really straight ones.
Finally, we walked over and sat in the shade, out the south end, and he had his chocolate bar and I read some of Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Actually, I offered him the bar, but he wanted it to be all melty, and I’d just had it in the backpack. So he asked me to put it in my pocket so it would be more melted by the time we got home.
We went home, and then watched Grian and he ate his bar. It was the first Hermitcraft video to take place in the new Nether. He then went outside with Carly. When it came time for Minecraft with Vivian and Colin he started playing out there. Vivian needed to upgrade to the newest version, and Cassie was having trouble with the app being slow, so they uninstalled and reinstalled.
I chatted with Peter, then went for a run, then showered. They were still playing, but August got off and was then doing Wizard School with Vivian. I told them about how Wizard School is shutting down sometime soon, so they should enjoy it now. Colin kept telling Carly something like, “I’ll miss you when you’re sleeping.” August then played Mastermind on the games app, and then I figured out a way that he could play cribbage with my parents online. We tried to call them, but they were offline, so we left a video message. Mom called back after a couple minutes. It turned out she didn’t know how to play cribbage, but eventually we all worked through it together, figuring out how to use playingcards.io together to play it, and playing through the first hand, me and August against Mom and Dad. Paul said he’d gotten my email and would see what he could do.
It was past 10 by the time I got him up for his bath. Carly supervised that and I did the few dishes that needed to be done. August was talking about using TNT to find ancient debris in the new Nether when we playing in survival, and I showed him another option, showing him a few minutes of Xisuma using exploding beds. August really liked that idea.
We said good night, and he listened to “The Leaky Bucket”, requested crackers, then listened to “The Magic Bowl”. He asked what “the humblest pie” meant, and humble was a word of the day.
We brushed our teeth and he asked what “Center of attention” meant. In bed it was taking a good amount of time for him to calm down. He wanted to know about hypothermia and wasn’t happy when I said we could learn tomorrow. He requested jazz, and I put on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. When he finally lay down and was quiet he was asleep very quickly, finally asleep about midnight. I inspected his warts, filing off some of the dead skin (we tried it with him awake, but it was too ticklish for him). The ones on his feet are basically gone. I just put medicine on his hand.
Singing a mean song:
Spinning:
Hollow tree:
Cribbage:
