Category: Daily

He slept through the night again! And I realized I hadn’t turned the heat back on last night, after he requested the fan mode when he was falling asleep. He looked nice and cozy with his furry blanket, but I turned it on when I got up, although reduced it to 24 degrees.

I got him up at 7:45. He was totally cuddled in his blanket, the soft purple one from Max, which has now become his. We read half of a Dahl poem about the tortoise and the hare, then played Minecraft. When it was done we had cereal and strawberries for breakfast and he had us play Brother games involving Minecraft. He had a scenario where Brother added one more horse and it crashed the server. When I had Sister or someone ask, “Why’s the server so slow?” He laughed and spit out his cereal.

We finished Dahl’s “Tortoise and Hare” and he then remembered to change to countdown to 12. We were then Brother and Myna the cat. I suggested a Circle Round story so we listened to “The Drum” and he drew a picture in Procreate, starting with just a blank canvas. He had the idea of turning a photo into lines, so I downloaded Inkwork and we took a photo of the living room and he put it in Peocreate and colored it.

He liked the idea of quesadilla for lunch, and as we ate he requested an educational video and we watched a Smarter Every Day video on golf balls. He loved that, and we learned about elastic deformation, plastic deformation, and failure. August excitedly told me about a golf ball he shot in space. We then watched a Mark Roper video about planting 20,000,000 trees. August learned about how the mass of a tree comes from the air, and when talking about using drones to plant trees the video taught us the word biomimicry.

I got him upstair to change. He had another Brother game where Brother took Baby Ssister for show and tell. Bar took them on crazy field trips and showed the class a time loop machine. And Bar brought a bullet ant colony to the class.

We got going to the mall. Before we went out he said we needed to drive as he doesn’t trust the forecast in the rainy season (valid point). But I got him in the yard for a few minutes, then when we got walking he was telling me about something and just kept walking. We got to the base of the stairs on the bridge before he said “Wait, why are we walking?” But then he chose to walk the ramp route, saying he liked the path. Once on the bridge I carried him; the wind was bothering him and he put his head down on my shoulder. His eyes were also seeming to be a bit itchy earlier. Could be allergies, and we’ll start on the allergy medicine again, but we also learned later from Carly that the pollution was really high today. August commented on how hazy/foggy it looked, and it could have just been all the dust in the air.

As we got to the mall August pointed out a dead cat a few feet from the parking lot. We talked about that, and he handled it well. The mall was really busy, and I wondered why I had thought I’d be able to get my hair cut. First, we stopped at the candy stand (we’d also discussed the Arcaffe to get another donut, but he decided to go with the candy stand) and he chose two red licorice rolls. It was a total of 3 shekels. He then told me one was for me. I told him that was very nice. I had a little, and let him eat the rest of it.

And then the luck; at the barber the guy told me I could wait. There was just the guy he was finishing up, and a woman waiting. She was taking up the entire bench with her and her stuff, so August and I sat down outside the doorway and he finished his treat and we did a Brother game where he gets a robot from Bar to program himself. I was in quick enough. The woman working there filled August’s water bottle for him, and he watched while I got my hair cut. When it was done August told me I looked like a librarian or teacher or professor or principal.

He had suggested we got something at the druze place again. I said we were going to Giraffe today, but that would be a good idea next week with Carly so she could have a fresh sandwich from there. But then I remembered the dolma. August didn’t know what I was talking about. She was out of them, but the Israeli place next to her did. We bought a container, then went to walk outside to sit and eat some. I remembered the shoe store though and we stopped to look at rain boots. Being Friday, and the beginning of the rainy season, everyone else was doing the same. They had August’s sizes in the rocket rain boots, and he tried the 29s, 31s, and 30s. The 31s were too big, then he had the idea of trying a 29 on one foot and a 30 on the other. A great idea. He chose the 30s. We had to wait several minutes inside the busy store to pay. August sat on a store chair and looked at baby shoes. He said, “It’s hard to imagine feet that small.”

We then went outside and sat on the bench and ate some dolma. He ate a bunch, then said we should go in on the airplane, and he ate some more. We then went to Giraffe. We got the menu and I found the pad see eu that Carly had mentioned wanting and we also got shrimp pad thai. They have lime-infused water and August wanted some. We used one of our straws. We went outside and drank that and read The Last Kids on Earth and he ate more of the dolma.

When the food was ready it came in a big plastic bag. We had done our best to refuse plastic on this trip but still ended up with tons. We headed out the back of the mall and home. We said goodbye to the dead cat. He had me carry him again over the bridge so he could put down his head.

At the house he put on his boots and coat to try them out walking around the yard. We then did 15 minutes of Minecraft (what he had left) and read more of The Last Kids on Earth. We had chocolate milk, then we did a Brother game with each of them having a bad dream, then needing to pee. Sisters Minecraft worlds were missing, as were her backups, their Mom’s research materials and notes were missing, and Brother’s involved painting the castle that Bar and Sister were making in Minecraft with every color imaginable, only to find it didn’t end or something like that.

We were then trying to use Hooked on Phonics, but the internet was reeeaaaallllly sssllllooowww and has been recently. I did speed tests on it, and August loved doing the speed tests over and over, seeing the exact numbers he would get for the upload and download speeds.

Carly got home, and we used the cellular connection on her phone to download the Hooked on Phonics files. We found August’s sweet spot, around level 13 or 14 of the app. He found the word activities quite easy, involving SH and CH and the such, but said the reading activities with sentences were hard.

I was tired and rested on the couch for a few minutes, then had dinner. They started painting, and August was saying/practicing “yellow” and doing pretty well. He’s moving on to the medial L sounds. I went for a run. They did art and were reading Clementine when I got back.

I showered and switched with Carly. He and I left a skype video for my parents then sent messages to Vivian on Wizard School. He sent her a lovely video, and did some art. My parents were then on and we skyped with them for about half an hour. Dad had just had an MRI on his knee today. Paul studying a lot. Bunco party the night before and they left with the Frangos they came with.

We said goodbye, then did a Brother game and he ate crackers and pate. Carly took him up to a bath. Don’t know what assassination attempt they discussed tonight. I had promised him a full Brother and Sister game after his bath, so we went in his room and did the Tigey/Cheetey/and Tigey-ey story line. We distinguished that they would have different origins: Tigey was found alone, Cheetey was caught in a trap, and Tigey-ey initally attacked them.

Instead of fighting the Cheerios every night I’ve decided to embrace it, as he seems to do most of his eating in the evening. So I had brought up a full bowl of them for him. August asked two questions for us to look up later: Why do you get allergies? and Why do Cheerios go stale? We listened to the Circle Round story “Three Wishes”. August pretty randomly asked, “Could you estimate how many punctuation marks you have used in your life?” We listened to Beethoven’s First Symphony (his request) and he was asleep by 9:35, a full 50 minutes to an hour earlier than he has been doing.

Launching a golf ball:

Trying out rain boots:

Using Hooked on Phonics:

He got up to go to the bathroom in the dark. I went with him and got him back to bed, and when I got back to my bed it was 5:30. I thought it was a good hour earlier. So then Carly was getting up a few minutes later, then my alarm going off. But he’s doing a great job sleeping in his bed, after not calling out to me at all the previous night as well. So the next step is probably just walking him back to his bed when he does get up and seeing if he’ll go back to sleep on his own so I can return to the couch. Then at some point maybe I can move back to the big bedroom, and just keep both doors open. Kind of the wrong time of year to do that though.

He went up to wake him up at 7:50. He sat up and flopped back down a couple of different ways before getting up. We went downstairs and I started to read Presto & Zesto in Limboland. But he then remembered his countdown. He went and changed it to 13, then I read a few Prelutsky poems. We then played Minecraft.

Cereal and strawberries for breakfast. We watched a video about updates coming to Minecraft. That led to a Brother game of him living in the nether (because the update is about improvements to the nether) and Myna turning into a cat. I paused the game so we could get ready for Gilad and Lauren coming over. He had a funny saying in the mirror as he got dressed: “Mesh me smoosh smoosh.” He put his shirt on backwards but wanted to keep it that way: “That’s my argument: comfy.” He played “Yankee Doodle on the toy piano: “I think I’ve mastered ‘Yankee Doodle’.” “You said the chorus was downright super hard.” And he requested pineapple upside down cake for his birthday.

August then typed on my iPad in Pages as I did some cleaning and set up MEL Chemistry on his iPad for experiments. I also tried cancelling the Christmas lights, as I couldn’t figure out if they were for 220V. No luck, even though it was hours before the status of the lights changed to ‘shipping’, so I think we bought lights we can’t use.

Gilad and Lauren showed up. August said hi, but initially walked around and said, “I’m bored.” I suggested they start with Legos and they did. They made an abstract city sort of thing and August showed me a few times. I suggested he had been inspired by his building in Minecraft, which is often things on pillars up in the air, and he agreed with me, and repeated that a couple times.

We then, at August’s suggestion, got out the keyboard and they played in GarageBand. Lauren was really interested in it, and how Gilad could put on headphones and play with music as much as he wanted. It is difficult right now with a piano right in the middle of their apartment, and his dad working from home and other siblings around.

Finally, we did one of the Egyptian Night experiments from MEL Chemistry. It was simple: sprinkling iron dust on candles. They loved it, and it brought up questions about how fireworks work and the different colors, which we’ll be able to research later. Along the way they had shared a container of homemade cashew crackers that were really really good. August asked her in detail how they were made. We also cut up strawberries.

She got a call from her husband saying their oldest son was sick and needed to be picked up at school. She called him and had to convince him to leave school; he’s been soldiering through for a few days, and was worried about what his teachers would think. They left about 12:30.

August and I did timelapse photos of candles. We set up a new one and propped up the phone and did a timelapse of its entire burn. Meanwhile, August wrote a few sentences in Free Speech. Not a long reading time today, but okay, and at his request. He then requested Circle Round and we listened to “The Magic Cloth” and he colored on his picture and I exercised. When he finished his picture, he walked around the room in sort of his usual circles, listening to the rest of the story.

We played 30 minutes of Minecraft. We exited the nether this morning, which put us a long way away from ‘home’ in the regular world, and were now working our way home. We were then cleaning up before going to get Eve. I was putting the MEL Chemistry set away as he didn’t want to do an experiment with her today and one of the class containers slipped and broke on the floor. He handled it pretty well, just asking for another. Think the small ones at Max or Ikea are the same size.

As we left he had a Brother game with him practicing kidding tricks. He gave Brother a level 7 test, trying to get Christmas presents early. He really wanted me to have Brother figure this one out and overcome the arguments of his parents; I didn’t really want this to succeed, lest August then expect the same arguments to work on us. So I had him succeed in convincing them to let him open one present early, specifically one that his siblings could also play with. August then said the gift Brother opened was a present from Bar: “It’s a Polytopia board game.” The video this morning mentioned a board game about Minecraft, so I think that’s where that idea came from.

There were crazy winds as we left at 2:30, and the sound of thunder off in the distance. About half a block from the house we felt the first drops, then it quickly started pouring. We were lucky to have gotten out of the house, but then there was another problem: getting August out of the car at the school. I was contacting both Heather and Carly, about holding onto Eve for a few minutes or bringing her out, but then the rain stopped enough to get August out of the car in his raincoat. It was still quite stressful for him, and he insisted I also have the umbrella up as it started to rain a bit. We made it to the school, then I had to hold him for a few minutes.

When we went down the stairs he saw Natalie. We talked to her for a couple minutes about how quickly she had grabbed all of their rain gear before jumping in the car to come to school. He finally felt better as we waited for Eve to come out. She came out, and as we talked about the rain and our plans headed to the library. I then realized we hadn’t checked in with Heather and Zoe and circled back around to the elementary school and found them. Zoe looked a bit upset, and I think it was because she thought we had left. On the way back from the library Eve said that Zoe didn’t have a ukulele lesson today and had wanted to come with us.

So we happily took Zoe, and all four of us went to the library. I returned a few books and found the Nicola Davies book What’s Eating You? about parasites and checked it out. Heather had brought bags of snack mix to them in the library, so we left and headed home so they could eat those.

The rain had stopped so no issues. The kids were great until we got in the house. Eve immediately went to the chalkboard, before I was even really in the house, and erased it. It was August’s Christmas countdown and he got upset and pushed Eve. I separated him, and I talked to him and Zoe did a wonderful job talking to Eve. I heard her tell Eve how she needed to ask before doing things like that, and that she could apologize for it before August apologized. It took August a couple minutes to cool down, but it was all sped up by me offering everyone chocolate milk. There was a little further negotiations over who got the last of the banana milk in theirs, but then they all drank their milk and Eve and August said sorry to each other and everything was fine after that.

First, they played with the musical instruments, sort of playing a keyless version of “Jingle Bells” together. They also hooked up the keyboard and did a good job of sharing that; that got played on and off for the rest of the playdate. Eve and August then taped me into the black chair, which allowed me to rest and be still, then August, and Zoe a bit, were taping Eve in. It was uncomfortable for her arms, so they mainly taped in her feet and were talking about them as if they were entities of their own, calling them “leggies.” August said, “Who’s the boss now, leggies?” I put out crackers and cheese and they ate several of those. Later, about 5, Eve was hungry and she and Zoe both had a peach yogurt, and August requested crackers and pate. I realized that August had never had lunch; while we had played Minecraft I had heated leftover fishsticks for myself. He had said he would eat the leftover salmon, but that he wasn’t hungry at that time. I told him to tell me when he was hungry, and he never did.

Carly had gotten home around 4:30. She was still getting over a headache that had been affecting her since yesterday, I think, but thought it was near the end. She went upstairs. August called one of us queen, and asked, “What do you need, my Majesty?”

They were then playing with all of the mixed up play dough. Zoe asked August “Do you know what an asteroid is?” He replied, “A big space rock in space that sometimes collides with a planet or a comet or an asteroid or a black hole…or anything in space.” There was also a play dough lasagna made, and they were putting Lego people in balls of play dough.

About 5:10 August and Eve started potions. Heather got here at 5:30 and probably stayed about 15 minutes to chat and let the girls clean up. We talked about winter break plans and she told us about a castle in northern Israel that you can stay close to and is supposed to be really nice. We looked it up and it is 2 hours away.

They left, then Carly went to the store for a few things, and August and I played the rest of his Minecraft time (he had earned it all earlier, but agreed to save half of it until the evening). Carly got home as we were finishing up. We then had a Sister and Myna playing Minecraft game. And we listened to “Always”; he had started figuring out on his own how to play the melody earlier while playing with Eve.

I got him nutty noodles and he ate firsts and seconds. He then offered to come up with a parenting trick for Carly. When she asked for a way to get him upstairs he passed and wouldn’t address that one. Traveling came up, and he wanted to go to another country (he asked for Athens again). When I mentioned Germany he thought it sounded like a bad country. I think this was because we had talked about World War II yesterday or the other day (we were on errands walking around somewhere). So we talked more about it now, and how all the Nazis were put in jail and it is a different country now. He’s brought up World War II and I a couple times, asking who was on each side a couple times, and which was the most intense war and why.

We then read much of the What’s Eating You? book. Carly took a photo of the page about how people choose mates that smell good to them because they have complementary parts of immune systems to use as an interesting fact for her homeroom. He wanted specifically things about the immune system. He then went and hung out with Carly in the red chairs while I looked for another book on the immune system.

He used her phone to take photos and slo-mos of the fan. He then left it pointing at the ceiling for a timelapse. I didn’t realize it was there, and he got some good timelapse of my elbow. He ate a couple pickles, and shared some pita and hummus with me. I checked out a DK book on the human body and we read the pages on the immune pages, then pages about other topics. Pathogen, superbug, and glossary were all words of the day from that (there were other words through the day that I forgot to write down; there usually are, but today it seems like I was forgetting to write down a lot of them, including one Carly had just taught him as they sat in the red chair).

Cassie called on FaceTime. August ran over to Carly at the red chairs, and the first thing Colin said was “Poop!” So I’m not sure who is entertaining whom with the poop talk; seems a pretty two-way street. They were all back in Pennsylvania now. Vivian and Colin had each gotten a (presumably small) Christmas tree of their own so they could each decorate one. They saw August’s presents and Colin wanted August to open them. Cassie was impressed we could have them out like that. August said, “Could you ask Tia Cassie if she can teach me all about the immune system because she knows everything and I really want to know about the immune system.” When she was struggling to remember something for him I said he should tell her something. And he told her about how fevers are good for the body. She agreed and talked about how sometimes doctors tell you not to take fever-reducing medicine. She joked that she takes it anyway, and they discussed whether you should or not. I think August was teling her you should listen to the doctor.

While they were talking he came and whispered to me that he hadn’t watched educational videos today. Watched Ted-Ed and Kurzgesagt videos about the immune system.

August succeeded in wearing his shirt backwards all day. After Skype, he and I had a Brother game where he was an axolotl, after we had seen a picture of a stuffed one at the end of the video. Brother was using the scuba gear that Bar had given him and found it.

We then headed upstairs. August had been talking about his kidding tricks website, and was typing with his hands in the air, adding information to the website. As we went up, he was using his ‘tricks’. I caught him at one, as he started to tell Carly an interesting fact about axolotls or something to delay her.

Upstairs, Carly gave him a bath. I heard her reading to him about Garfield being shot and his infection and how people blamed the plumbing/fumes in the White House, and not the open wound that doctors kept digging around in with their fingers for his death. And it how it was because they didn’t understand germs yet. I think it was from a PBS article or something.

They brushed his teeth and he flossed seven of his teeth. He made sure she was reusing his floss stick, and talked about how he was saving plastic. We talked more about that, and how we reuse water bottles and don’t buy plastic bottles. He remembered the bottles of water that were waiting for us when we moved in and how he liked them. He remembered them because they had colorful tops. I don’t really remember, but Carly does. That led to a discussion of his favorite colors. We remembered his list, and he now added gold to purple, pink, peach, lavender, violet, and ultraviolet. I think because he likes the gold stuff in Minecraft.

We weren’t in bed until after 9:30. We read a couple chapters of The 117-Story Treehouse. We had brought Cheerios up with us, but he now finished them and requested more at 10 again. We listened to a Circle Round story called “The Owner of the Sun”. I was basically asleep at the end of it, but he then said he should go to the bathroom, so we did that. Back in the room we listened to the Tallis Scholars and he was finally asleep a little after 10:30.

Changing keys and octaves 1:

Changing keys and octaves 2:

Stretchy swing 1:

Stretchy swing 2:

Sorting coins activity:

Coloring a Circle Round picture:

Jumping jacks:

Mesh me moose:

Keyboard with Gilad:

Iron experiment 1:

Iron experiment 2:

Candle time lapse:

Forming a band 1:

Forming a band 2:

Escaping the tape:

Who’s the boss now, leggies?:

He was up at 7:50. Downstairs he first insisted on Minecraft, but I said I wanted to read funny poems first. I started making up my own and he helped me come up with:

Spaghetti in my pants

That’s how I tart my day

Spaghetti in my pants

I like my pants that way

Spaghetti in my pants

It really is quite squishy

Spaghetti in my pants

My mom thinks that is fishy

Spaghetti in my pants

You might think that sounds bad

But with spaghetti in my pants

I know I won’t feel sad

I read a few poems in A Pizza the Size of the Sun, then we did Minecraft. It was the new 1.14 update, which now has bees. So we did some more TNT fun, then started playing with the bees. August really liked making and taking care of the bees. He made an impromptu little poem that went “I’m happy to regurgitate everything I hear and everything you say

I’m happy to regurgitate every day”

We were supposed to have just enough time to finish, eat breakfast, then go to the bank before going to Shani’s. When it seemed like his iPad time was going long, as he ate his oatmeal, I realized that I had had to turn of the screen time limits on his iPad last night to update the phone I’m using and I’d forgot to turn it back on. And he had in fact had extra time this morning. He reluctantly stopped playing right away, and we got going.

The parking lot in town was crazy, as was all of downtown. We parked in our usual backup spot and went to the bank, paying Gabi and getting cash for Shani.

At her house he saw the new stretchy swing and checked it out. He noted its smell. Shani said she had talked to Gabi more at length, although she only said he said he was doing well. He ran to see the schedule. First was the swing. Trying to get into the swing was a challenge. He loved spinning and swinging in it.

He requested the sensory overload video he had watched with her a few weeks ago. She then got him to crawl through the hole swing, which was pretty stressful for him, but he made it. Seems like something that would have been easier for him if he’d seen someone do it first.

We watched the video on my phone. She thought it was interesting that he’s requested it in the swing. She seemed to think that the video was difficult for him to watch, and that watching it in the swing was helping him process it. I think she was overstretching, as he has never been bothered by watching any video. He simply remembered the video because this was where he watched it before.

They then went and did some drawing. He held a pencil “wrong” a couple times and she took note. He drew a house and grass.

He sang “Always” for her in the swing. He was really loud for her too and she was trying to get him to be quieter. She was giving him numbers with her fingers to indicate his volume on a scale of ten. She got preachy about needing to be able to regulate his volume around other people.

She was trying to challenge him on the swing. He was getting a little grumpy with her, and also told her she had a lot of rules. He said he did challenge himself, and when she asked for an example he said: “homeschool is a challenge…reading”

Listening to Story Pirates, we headed to the bigger Max, north of Even Yehuda. We stopped to get gas. I had to log into Dropbox on the phone to get my old passport number. August sang tunes and stood by the pump pretty patiently, although later when I told Carly he said he hadn’t felt patient.

Max was a disappointment. They have more stuff there, including clothes, but there were no lights in their Christmas decorations. They were also seemingly out of wrapping paper (there was one beat up tube of pink paper left). They did, however, have rolls of what appeared to be shimmery stuff, so we got a couple rolls, along with a roll of thick fancy ribbon. He chose the blue and white one with trees on it, rejecting the one with stockings on it because “Santa isn’t real.” He got a small can of Schweppe’s strawberry. As he started drinking it back in the car he had a short Brother game when we got in the car. Brother was having fizzy water for the first time and it burned his throat.

We listened to Story Pirates and when we got home we kept listening to Story Pirates inside (the time loop episode again). We kept listening while I cooked salmon and we wrapped the present for Carly. He had a bowl of canned corn while he waited. He ate all of that, then devoured his salmon. We then listened to the crossover episode again, and he asked if we could listen to more Circle Round. He listened to “Nilsa and the Troll”.

It was really interesting to see how focused he was on the stories. When we were wrapping the present, starting with green and blue construction paper, he wasn’t saying anything and I thought he didn’t like how we were wrapping it. I asked, and he perked up, saying, “I love it!” He was quiet because he was listening intently. He added plenty of tape to the present. But the wrapping paper stuff turned out to be…just clear plastic. Such a waste. I can’t believe they’re selling just rolls of plastic. Aargh.

He heard Circle Round mention a coloring book. I said we could download their sheets and print them. He said we could just color them on the iPad. I set it up so he could color the picture from Nilsa in Procreate. He loved it and I counted that as alone time while I exercised.

We then did 30 minutes of Minecraft and bees. He was getting frustrated when he had to turn it off, so I successfully turned that into wrestling onto the couch. He was a bit hyper after that and with the microphone thing I had found in a drawer (I had also found the bouncy balls and he’d played with those and wrapped one in the mixed up play dough as well).

He kept coloring and coloring as I did some clean up. He said things like, “Circle Round was right, this is cool.” “I could do this coloring page for hours!” He also said that it was a lot better to color on there than on paper and talked about how much he could get done by the time Carly was home.

We worked on BR as he colored. He came up with words like brim and brew. It was interesting though that he thought “My hat brew away” was correct. When I said “blew away” he thought I was talking about the color. Even after this explanation, a few minutes later he argued he was correct. He was excited by both learning how to zoom in and how to use the color picker to choose a color he had used before” “It’s so easy now!’ He had earlier said he wouldn’t do the trolls fingers or more of the girl, but then when he learned to zoom he could, and he could use the same color as before.

His eyes were tired and he was rubbing them and he agreed it was time for a break. We finished BR and then I was the gym teacher making him exercise. He did jumping jacks, getting them completely correct for the first time, I think, then I was having him jump on the couch. I was doing bad jumps on the couch and having him show me and explain how to do it.

We did 30 more minutes of Minecraft. For educational videos he watched Kurzgesatz videos on “What is a Thing?” and “What is Life?” and “How Bacteria Rule Your Life” . It was hard for him to stop after that, but I started to read Ivy + Bean Break the Fossil Record and he got interested. That lasted until there was a mention of someone walking more than 800 miles on his hands, and August asked if that was real. I looked it up, and only found that there is a world record for walking 3.2 miles or so at one time. We didn’t go back to the book, as he was hungry. He had already had a little bit of Cheerios, then some strawberries. I heated some nutty noodles for him.

Carly got home. I was doing dishes. August came over to me and said, “Mama’s home.” I asked if he had said hi, and he said he hadn’t. So I told him to go say hi. While August ate I played a Brother game with him, where Brother had put way too many rainbow-related items in the atomizer (Bar had just said “the things in the rainbow sock”).

We had placed Carly’s present up with the others, and I had asked him if he was going to point it out to Carly, or whether we should wait and see how long it took for her to notice it. He chose the latter. But now, she wasn’t noticing it, so August was pretty clever. He went and asked her questions about the present behind it and she finally saw it.

He updated the countdown to 14. He then showed her the coloring, and told her about the podcast. Did more coloring on the couch. He then did color mixing while Carly did some painting. She then went upstairs for a shower and he did a little more coloring, and asked for a Circle Round story. We listened to “The Banker’s Riddles”.

I was spending money: Carly wanted an electric toothbrush, and on Amazon I ordered two strings of Christmas lights, painting canvases for Carly, a couple plug adapters, and a book on Poop by Nicola Davies for August. The book got added because we were a whole 4 cents short of free shipping.

He had more pate and carrots and we took them upstairs. We then did a Brother game where he is no longer allowed to use the atomizer, and instead was working with the animals. The robots predicted he would cause damage and get hurt, and they were right.

August washed himself in the shower for a long time. Did a great job, and asked me to wash his face for him. He asked me to turn it even colder when he was rinsing himself and said, “I think for Mama this would already be freezing.” “Mama would hate it, but I love it.” He then played in the sink. We were listening to the Music of Circle Round, as I bought the album on iTunes. Each song/story features a different instrument. He described instruments he made. One with rubber bands, one with lots of machinery. He told Carly about one with bamboo sticks to hit drums.

I took a shower and she read Junie B. Jones. As I took him to bed he told me about building a wall all the way around the world at the equator, with huge gates in it. No idea where that idea came from. He carried all of the couch pillows in on his beds and stacked them on. He immediately put petroleum jelly on his hands; he’s really gotten good at that. We read some Perlutsky poems and unorthodox was a word of the day. We listened to a Circle Round story called “Fiona and the Fairies”.

He had had crackers and pate and carrots before coming up, then brought seconds with him when he came upstairs. But now, right as I thought he was falling asleep, at 10 he insisted he was hungry. We got him a very small bowl of Cheerios. We listened to music of Circle Round, and he was asleep by 10:30.

Changing keys and octaves 1:

Changing keys and octaves 2:

Stretchy swing 1:

Stretchy swing 2:

Sorting coins activity:

Coloring a Circle Round picture:

Jumping jacks:

He called down the stairs before Carly even had the door closed, right at 6:45. I ran up and got him back to sleep pretty quickly. I then went back up at 8:05 to wake him up and met him as he opened the door to come out. Don’t know when that has happened before. We read from the Perlutsky book then he went to the bathroom. As he washed his hands he told me we should launch rockets from the moon to explore space because there is less gravity.

We read more of A Pizza in the Sun. A lot of laughter, particularly about “I Think My Computer Is Crazy.” A new word was ingest, from the last one we read. We then played Minecraft and he played with TNT. He requested waterfall noises on Siri and we listened to those all morning.

He had a breakfast of French toast and we did Brother games of him buying potions and enchantments. He was singing “Chickens, chickens, chickens, all through the town…” Which he says is something that I made up when I had Brother putting chickens everywhere.

He also sang a song he said was based on Minke’s lesson, then had me accompany him on songs, first with drums, then the recorder. Then we hooked up the keyboard. He played, then wanted the app with chords and played with chords in Piano Companion.

My goal of getting to the iDigital store in the morning was fading, so I had to hurry him a bit to get going. We’d actually been almost out the door when he decided he wanted to do music. But first, we had to search for one of his red shoes. It was in the bathroom. As we left he was humming “Always” and said he wants to learn that on the piano.

We listened to Story Pirates, finishing the Thanksgiving episode and listening to the latest, on our way down to the Ramat Aviv Mall to go to the iDigital store to get my phone fixed. We spotted donuts at an Arcaffe stand as we walked through the mall and he pointed out the kind that looked like the kind he had the other day. At the iDigital store he sat on a stool and played music on the Piano Companion app, then did “satellite work” on the graphing calculator. It went pretty quickly for me. I had come to this mall, hoping that they had a full service center at this location (the guy at the local iDigital had told us that once) but it still ended up going in an envelope to go to another facility. And will take five days. Sigh. When I was done, August told me the problem he was working on and said, “That’s approximately half of the gravitational pull of a medium-sized black hole.”

We walked back and each got a donut. He got one with white chocolate balls covering it, and I got one with a dob of caramel on the top, and it turned out to be filled with it as well. His had the white filling, and he loved it. We walked a bit and found a bench by some plants and ate them. We then discussed a Christmas present for Carly.

With that in mind, and the weather being nice now, we drove over to the waterfront, parking by the power station. Surprisingly busy though, and we parked even farther away, at a free parking lot. August rode his bike. He enjoyed riding around in a couple of big puddles, and said he liked the waves. I was helping push him on the brick sidewalks, and realized he kept stopping his pedaling. He was running a Brother game on the way. Bar had a simulation room (based on the Story Pirates episode) and Brother got to use it. First he was just using it to play Minecraft, like usual, then was doing other things. He then had a story where Brother was having an ice cream dream and was woken up, then arguing and fighting with his parents, wanting ice cream in the morning. August was calling Brother’s arguments his “kidding tricks” and the responses from the parents the “antibodies.”

When we got to the boardwalk we stopped on a stone bench for a few minutes. We kept playing the Brother games and we watched a guy stencil the slippery signs. There was also the smell of electrical work, and August remembered the electrical fire at school.

We got going and he rode on the boardwalk, going down the short hills a few times. Bar was using the simulator to test Brother’s argument/negotiation skills, going to higher levels. I was actually trying to make them as useful as possible, showing Brother compromise and agree with reason.

We finally went into the book store (the one attached to the Greg Cafe that we’ve gone to on his birthday outings and where we ate lunch with Chuck and Cherie) and August had fun riffling the corners of the pages of books. We found the English section, where they have leather-bound children’s books. We found a leather-bound copy of Swiss Family Robinson and a book of mythology in a slipcase. The idea was that they were books that were gifts for Carly, but also for August, as she could read them to him.

Back outside he had Brother getting in an argument with Baby Sister over a toy and figuring out how to get a tiger toy she was playing with (he found another toy she would like and offered to trade). He then was arguing with his parents, saying he wanted a new bike and not just Sister’s old bike. He lost that one, and August was providing some of the parent arguments. August was also taking photos and set the phone against a pole to get a cool time-lapse of people on the boardwalk and of the clouds. He then had us move to another bench area to do a “special Brother and Sister game” and we’d do “around Christmas.” An idea he started yesterday, although I’m not sure what makes them special. In it, he had Myna taking 50 years to create something. It was a “moving model of the earth charging over time…climate change and everything…” Sister had been wondering why Myna was so busy. In the meantime, Sister had made a complete fantasy spherical world in Minecraft. Bar then came along and had a machine that made things from the real world into Minecraft. So she helped Sister add to her world, for example, scanning a photo of minerals to add all sorts of minerals throughout the world, and scanning all the mythology of the world to add mythology, but with a changer option that would change everything slightly. They did the same with archeological ruins.

We were back to the car at 2:05. There was a cat that was meowing to us a lot. August said it was hurt, and it turned out it had white paint over it, like it had rolled on one of those signs we saw the guy painting. It did have a bald area on one leg where it had been trying to like the paint off.

We listened to more Story Pirates and were home by 2:50. He flew a paper airplane outside. He came in and told me, “Did you know I’m famous? For making a chocolate chip Eiffel Tower.” He had some banana milk. As he started drinking he said, “I knew it was worth doing that argument with mama to get this.” He had nutty noodles and seconds for lunch.

He did 15 minutes of alone time, then we did 30 minutes of Minecraft. It was now a little after 4 and we headed to school. We had to pick up packages, and we also wanted to check out a book of paper airplanes. We went to Carly’s classroom and she said we had perfect timing, as she was just finishing. We went to the library while she packed up and she met us there. We got one paper airplane book, and Carly asked if he would like a book about the body and we checked out a book on muscles. She had also checked out several books earlier with Liz’s help: Clementine, Junie B. Jones, Horrid Henry, Ivy & Bean, and Dahl’s The Magic Finger.

As we got home he said he wanted to watch a documentary right away, then educational videos as well. We wanted to eat dinner first and he got upset, blocking us from opening the gate. Carly and I were carrying a bunch of stuff and just wanted to go in the house. Finally got him in and he curled on the couch, then talked to me. We decided on one video about dreams (Ted-Ed) then 30 minutes of documentary later instead of his 15 earning/30 Minecraft he still had left for the day.

So we watched the Ted-Ed video together, then he had a little couscous and broccoli. Skipped the zucchini. He decided to show Carly the Simple Rockets app instead of watching a documentary. I helped him show her. He then read several Rivet books to Carly, although only in levels 1 and 2. She read him Julie B. Jones (the second book, where her brother is born–I’ve read it before, I think when I was tutoring Christina Bekris many years ago). He was hungry for popcorn and agreed to eat more carrot and broccoli. He did that, and we ate popcorn and did Brother games. It was a backstory with sister when Bother is born (turns out she is 6 years older, as I thought she was younger, but then he said she is the age of Jill, who is in 6th grade) and she didn’t want a sibling. We then moved from that to Brother in Minecraft. He was taming a fox, then trying to get a bat by building an upside down house in a cave around it.

He was still hungry so had hummus and crackers and carrot and strawberries. A few pomegranate seeds earlier as well. He finished all of that and asked for a couple more crackers for the hummus. It seems like he barely eats all day until 3 or so, then just eats constantly in the evening. We listened to and watched James song and video for “Better than That”. He then got upset when I said it was time for a bath and he said he wanted an educational video.

But we got him upstairs, and Carly gave him a bath. He was loudly singing the notes to “Always”. She read more to him (Julie B. Or Clementine, I think) and I took over sometime after 9, after she brushed his teeth and had him floss. We went straight to Ninja Focus. He had been singing songs for Carly, and now told me about his famous songs and sang a couple for me. He’s really developing a sense of tune. He was then singing a song, with words, about Ninja Focus as I looked up the password for it.

In Ninja Focus we listened to a couple of the bedtime sort of stories. He wasn’t calming down well though. He kept sitting up and looking at the screen, even though there wasn’t really anything to look at. When he was lying down he was kicking a foot against the pillow. When a story was over and I turned it to an instrumental bedtime song, he said he would show me a “Dance Party” song. I said we weren’t turning on the screen anymore and he got upset and hit me. I started to get up and made the mistake of saying that if he was hitting me he could go to sleep on his own. He started wailing, and curled up with me on the lower bed, but kind of upside down, with his head by my knees, and pulling the soft blanket around his head. I thought he’d go to sleep like that, but when he was still not asleep after several minutes I asked if he could move up on his bed. He did, but lay down upside down, with his feet on the pillow. He still took another ten minutes or so, as he kept dropping his foot on the pillow. I think it was a little after 10:30 before he finally fell asleep.

TNT fun:

TNT fun 2:

Cool new tune:

Updating the countdown and singing:

Riding through the puddles:

Riding down the hills:

His boardwalk time lapse:

Boardwalk time lapse:

Waves time lapse:

Classroom silliness:

Tel Aviv Slo-Mos:

So the phone issue dragged on all day. I finally got the laptop to attempt to restore it, but it would quit right away. Did all the updates on the laptop and still know luck. It was giving me a USB error, and I realized that I hadn’t been able to restore the last thing, August’s old iPad, that was having troubles with this same computer. So, I thought it might be the laptop. So I tried the 10-year old laptop upstairs in the afternoon. It was getting further, but still no luck. Finally, Carly brought home her laptop from school. I gave up after it was getting just as far, but returning an error related to a touch ID button, and my phone has no touch ID button. So, it will be a trip to the service center tomorrow. Carly let me use her phone in the meantime.

He was up at 7:10. Carly said he had been pushing her out of bed, talking in his sleep a lot, and rolling around. I was dealing with my phone suddenly deciding to be full and then not start last night. So when he asked to play Minecraft straight away I agreed. We built a giant slug, as per his page marking last night. We then did a little mining. He also updated the Christmas countdown to 16.

He chose nutty noodles for breakfast. I had cereal and strawberries. We played Brother and Sister games. He added “Oh my gosh, Brother. Oh my gosh.” Started in Minecraft, but moved to Brother peeing stories, which get very repetitive quite quickly.

We then did music time. Short, but recorded a couple of videos for our project for Mr. Minke. We then played Simple Rocket 2 for a long time. It’s right on the edge of between just being for fun or being really educational. But, I was able to talk about things related to orbits, like geostationary and escape velocity. We then made connections by watching a space shuttle launch again and watching a Bright Side called “Why Space Shuttles Take Off Only Vertically”. He ate a piece of french toast for breakfast. He then told me a bunch of ideas for machines to get people into space. He had the Family taking their car in one and forgetting their space suits.

For word time he chose DR. We watched the Preschool Prep video on it, and then made a list of words. This time I also got him practicing writing it. We then did more playing instruments. He had me playing London Bridge on the piano and he’d change the sounds every few notes.

There’s still one small poster on the wall from when we had a calm area over there for him. We discussed it, then he wanted to see the bigger posters. They were upstairs, so we went up and found them and discussed the one with all the emotions on it and calming strategies. We talked about the ones he does well (like closing his eyes) and might like to try (he chose doing art). He then wanted to make me angry so that I could practice the calming strategies. Of course, trying to make someone angry and telling them that is what you are doing is actually pretty funny, but I pretended, and suggested listening to music.

Back downstairs we did more music for Minke, including singing songs this time. I finally got him to do alone time. He did art. He started by drawing things out of the dictionary that he had marked, but then made a chart of three circles that showed the three states of matter: a straight line was a solid, the curved line was a liquid (to show surface tension), and the wavy line was a gas to show them floating everywhere.

It started raining really hard and we watched. He had me do slo-mos of the rain. He declared today the start of the rainy season. In Minecraft we put the riptide enchantment on tridents, which allows you to basically fly through the water, and through the air when it is raining. We had fun doing that.

We had to go pick up Carly and take her to her dentist appointment. It was raining a little so he wore his rain coat. We picked her up in front of the school, listening to a Thanksgiving episode of Story Pirates (on Carly’s phone, which she had left with me). While we waited he asked, “What’s pride?” and “What’s better done than said mean?”

We dropped Carly off at the dentist. August had wanted to watch, but when she said she’d walk home and we didn’t have to wait he was fine with going. At the house we sat in the car so he could listen to more of the episode. We were home at 3:10, and when we went inside it started to rain. I heard it first and told August to hurry to the porch. Then after a couple seconds it let loose.

He asked, “What’s_ live_ mean?” As in, “The Story Pirates Creators Club is now live!” We did a long story line of brother rescuing two cheetahs. Similar, but different from the jaguars one. Almost caught by Greena but convinced her his cave held a present for her. Myna started mining nearby to get iron for pick axes and it was a crossover with Minecraft that had him questioning what was real.

He did his second alone time. He was singing pretty loudly as he did some art. He was interrupted when he spotted a spider. I had been upstairs dealing with the phone/computer and came down to help him catch it. He talked about how it was the ordinary kind of house spider here in Israel.

Carly got home. He did Minecraft with her, then me. He did a great job stopping. We did a Brother and Sister game where Dad plays Minecraft. He was trying to build up to aliens. August was laughing hilariously. First Dad fell off his pillar and had to start again. He was then knocked off by the space station, then it happened again. Finally, he got to other planets and Bar realized she hadn’t turned on the ‘aliens’ option.

August and Carly then painted. He analyzed her Lady Bird Johnson and told her, “Maybe you overdoed the funniness…just a bit.” They painted. I messed with iPhone stuff. He mainly did his color mixing, which he loved, but he later also showed me where she had let him use her tiny paintbrush to paint a little on the cheek.

He quoted the poem from I’m Really No Good at Rhyming that ends “And on it’s sister island everyone’s named Rory…but that’s another story.” He then asked why the author didn’t write that story. I suggested he might write it in his second book. August said we needed to stay in Israel until that book came out. “I need that book!” I assured him we could get it in any country we lived in, if it ever happened.

He was then arguing for more Simple Rockets time. He was really quite convincing. I tried to use humor and he shut down my volume using an invisible nob. He then wanted to argue with Carly. They argued about the best food.

We decided on watching more documentaries. He ate a couple bowls of nutty noodles and watched the last 10 or so minutes of the first episode of The Body, then watched the second episode as I sat next to him and typed. He learned all about arthritis and osteoporosis. Carly joked we were all drinking milk, and he actually wanted some. He stopped the video at one point to tell me about his machine “the undoer”, which takes apart people (from wars) and reuses those body materials to make babies. When I must have given him an interesting look he said, “What?” and compared it to reusing plastic bottles to make new ones.

He again stopped the video with a few minutes left, but only about 5 this time. He was totally in thinking mode, but focused on space stuff, not the anatomy stuff he’d just been watching. He taught Carly the phrase escape velocity. I mentioned a book I had read (2312) where they had hollowed out asteroids and turned them into cities: “I read that book and it inspired me to do something real, not just in a science fiction book…” He said he connected five space shuttles together and went to asteroids. They separated and went to different ones and used the materials to build a black hole bomb. Apparently that is from a Kurzgesagt video. “I’m going to a new state of humanity.” It was all about creating enough resources so that humans could move to other stars before the sun burns out.

I lay down on the rug and he played with my head on the floor, which got him laughing, and he was going crazy with Minecraft references. Before we went upstairs he told Carly, “I saw something that isn’t good in your painting: Symmetry. You need more symmetry.” “And don’t overdo the yellow!” He wanted her to work on it while we were upstairs.

He was really giggly and funny and said, “I’m in funny mode.” We wrestled on the couch, which we haven’t really done recently. He was chanting “That’s a silly thing to do, that’s a silly thing to say” which is from years ago, and I think I mentioned it earlier in the day.

Bar invented an “infinite treats machine” and Myna and Brother went crazy eating treats. Carly came up a little after 8 to give him his bath. He was a little reluctant to go take a bath, but he was starting to fade just a little (he had turned the heater to fan mode a while ago) and he just lay across the top of me for a couple minutes then called out to Carly and went out to her on his own. She gave him a bath. He was talking about how he still doesn’t like Uncle Paul’s car, and how he is upset with Nava for the whole poop incident.

When they were done she read him more of Timmy Failure. He and I had read a few chapters of it but then kind of forgotten about it. She said she had started reading it to him yesterday and he was laughing a lot. I had him show her what he noticed earlier about the new pillow case we had bought: it was missing one of its red dots. Timmy Failure was a bit too difficult for August (the jokes are pretty complex) so Carly was looking at reading levels and decided to try Clementine again. They read the free sample of the first book.

He said good night and I took him in to bed. Preschool came up some how and we discussed his negative views of preschool and teachers he hated. Of one of the nicer teachers, he still said “She’s on the list,” although he didn’t say where on it. We read a few Perlusky poems, then “The Porcupine” from Dahl. He had me repeat it.

We turned off the lights and listened to Beethoven’s Fifth. He told me the parts he liked from it. He popped up a couple times and talked about a video about polluted water and asked why they didn’t use waste water treatment plants. He popped up a minute later and was telling me about some filter machine he had made. I was half asleep, but I remember something about “poop molecules can’t fit through” He was asleep by 10.

Carly learned today that Brian is leaving as the middle school principal. He’s taken a job with Search Associates.

Rehearsing for Minke:

Music for Minke 1:

Music for Minke 2:

The air vacuum launcher:

Music for Minke 3:

Music for Minke 4:

Chair music:

Rain slo-mos:

Not quite as smooth of a night. There was seemingly a party out on the street at 4am, which woke up both Carly and myself. August popped out of bed at 6:25. He went right back to sleep. So that technically ends the sting of sleeping through the night (I think it was 4), but he made it most of the way to morning.

He then slept until 8:12. I know that exactly as I looked at the clock and said, “Ah! It’s 8:12!” I jumped up to go wake him up, but then immediately heard him call down. He came down and played Minecraft with Carly, then ate a quesadilla. Carly read passages to him from a middle school book she is reading that is about fast food, etc.

He had a Brother game where he was getting bitten by scorpions. He then told me, “Dada, I need my science tific calculator. I need to figure out 70 million divided by 2.” “I made 70,000,000 pizzas in my lab, and half were for myself…” He was making story problems for himself. We did more problems and Carly got him ready to go. They left at 9:45.

They went up to town to do some small town shopping: the produce stand, a treat from the bakery, peanut butter from the health food store, and a few things from the small grocery store.

They got back at 11:05. He sat next to me and the sun came out, “Sun! Eh, I’m not mama. Anyway, it was probably just a cloud…” He told me about the bakery:

“We got a ‘special occasion donut’…they have it each year…fluffy bread with fake sugar on it and strawberry in the middle…” It was a Hanukkah donut. He asked Carly if he could have the savory pastry. She was talking to David about something. He was then jumping on the couch from a new angle, leaping over the folded-up blanket.

We did some Simple Rockets, then I got him to walk up to the park with me. We were going to fly paper airplanes for a few minutes, then go back and do more Simple Rockets. But he liked flying the paper airplanes so much that he decided that we could just do that as long as possible. We both tried each of the airplanes, and he decided he liked the long dart version the best. He was throwing it from the top of the ship and getting some good distance on it. Once, it went into the lawn bowling area. He was oaky with it being lost, but I walked around through the gate and got it. I had to assure him that it was okay, and not illegal.

We headed back to the house, he had some soup and seconds, then he and Carly headed to Mr. Gabi’s. August took the paper airplanes and showed them to Gabi and said they played with the army. They used play dough to make a landing pad for the helicopters.

From there they went to Herzliya Park and the big playground. No bike this time, as it wasn’t in the car and there was a good chance it would rain. But it was dray at the time, and they played on the big play structure. Carly wanted to go on the big slide but found it was closed. It has been closed off the last couple times we have been there. They went down a medium-sized slide. August grumbled about it, but went down one himself. I noted later that August has still gone down two bigger slides than Carly: this big slide once, and the big one in Korea that Carly never did.

They then went to the play area in the mall. Carly sent me photos of playing in a ball pit and launching balls from one of those air launchers, which totally reminded both of us of Korea. There was also a big area full of balloons that they played in.

They were back around 5:15. He did alone time. When he went to the bathroom he asked how banks work. We talked about loans and interest and credit card fees. Back to alone time he marked pages in the Visual Dictionary. Gastropod was a word of the day. He was marking things to make in Minecraft. Carly hadn’t gotten everything she needed at the store, so I walked over to Tiv Taam. August but with Carly, but didn’t try to do a gastropod as he said he didn’t think she knew how to do it. When I got back he was playing with the stopwatch on his iPad.

He ate nutty noodles for dinner. Three bowls. He asked about how allergies work, so we watched a couple about allergies, including the It’s Okay to Be Smart video on allergies. He then watched the Kurzgesagt video on “An antidote to dissatisfaction”. Gratitude was what that was about, and he was really interested in it.

I bought a year subscription to Curiosity Stream for 20 dollars, and we now did a documentary and popcorn. He chose one on the systems in the human body. He watched about 30 minutes of it. There were good thunderstorms during it, and we opened the door to watch the rain. He stopped the video before the end, and told me about his DNA bank machine and how “It’s as strong as human evolution…” We moved to Brother stories, and did the one where he finds twin jaguars in the jungle and tries to build an enclosure for them without Greena knowing.

I got him upstairs and he went to the bathroom. There was a new box of tissues and he was asking questions about it, then kept asking “Why?” to be funny. Carly said he’d been doing it in the car as well, and it reminded her of three-year old August. He had also fallen asleep in the car on the way home.

I gave him a bath, and he sang a cool version of “Walking in the Park”. We did the Brother and the first tiger story (where they get a tiger from the animal shelter) and in mishearing something he said I thought he said sheaf. He asked, “What’s a sheaf?” So another new word.

He asked about the next verse of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” so I looked that up and we were singing it over and over so that he could learn it. From there he wanted me to sing “London Bridge” but I couldn’t remember the words well enough so he wanted to hear a version. We listened to a few versions and added them to our iTunes library. I brushed his teeth and had Carly come up to say good night. He decided he wanted to sleep with Carly, so they went in the big bed. I left them just before 10.

And soon after that my phone, which is the biggest one and has never mentioned it was running out of space, told me it was out of space. I tried deleting things and offloading them. It didn’t seem to be working, so I shut it down and turned it back on. And it wouldn’t start back up. I started a download to restore it from the laptop, but it wasn’t done before I went to bed. So this is annoying.

Paper airplanes in the park 1:

Paper airplanes in the park 2:

Carly exercising:

August’s view of walking in the park:

Balloon fun:

DNA banks and seed banks:

His version of walking in the park:

His photo of the painting he likes in the waiting room at Mr. Gabi’s.

He slept until 7:30. I brought him down and he was groggy on the couch. Asked for Minecraft right away and was a bit grumpy when I said reading first. Carly came in and he cuddled with her. He played Minecraft with her, and started building one of our red chairs in Minecraft. I think there were a couple other things he did, like the cloth drawer thing we keep art supplies in. I made French toast for breakfast. He wanted berries on one of his, and helped mash the frozen berries after I heated them. He also had strawberry yogurt on them. Liked that, but not so much the berries.

We played through the Brother and new Baby Sister storyline, then got going to school for the Artisan Fair. Carly was staying home to work. Carly had replaced the dining room chairs inside, and placed the white ones outside to take over to the junk area. August asked if he could finally bite one. Apparently that has always been a temptation. I let him bite one.

He took a photo of his bite, then was the photographer at the Artisan Fair. He took tons, and also videos. He was changing the color settings and said, “With vivid warm it looks like we live in a more savannah country.” We did a loop of the fair and found Natalie working at the food stand, which was raising money for the gala and the charity it supports. We talked to her, and bought a chocolate muffin for August. We kept walking and went down by the preschool and looked at the gardens and the chickens, which are all grown up now, it seems. He played on the playground and took more photos and videos. I particularly liked his video of the spinning thing, and of me relaxing on the bench.

Eventually we went back up and looked at pillow cases and things at the Women in Hebron stand. We went back to the food stand and got a couple savory treats (one for each of us), two sweets (a chocolate ball thing for him, and a chocolate muffin to take to Carly, and two drinks (cappuccino for me, and a hot chocolate for me). We went down and sat at the top of the amphitheater and ate. Matt Kern came along and we talked to him for a few minutes. We talked about the number of cells in our body and related facts.

August loved the food, but didn’t think the hot chocolate was all the sweet. I told him it was because he had just eaten his very chocolate-y thing. As compared to my coffee it was really sweet. He also asked, “Why when you eat an orange and then you eat an Oreo the orange is really sour?”

We went back to the Women in Hebron stand. I was going to get two pillow cases and a pencil case, but they were more expensive than I thought and I had less cash than I thought I had. So I just got one for the pillow case upstairs. I suggested trying to find Corinne and Elise and he liked that idea. We found them with Natalie and Ben, and they went down to the playground with us. They didn’t play together much, in part because they started a hide and seek game with other kids and August had no interest in that. We got going, but then hung out by the elementary school for several more minutes as he took more photos, including me in a thinker pose.

We left at 1. It had been three hours. We noticed winged ants on the windows of our car. He added a couple “Complainer” remixes to his playlist, and sang “Every cloud is rainable / Every song is beautiful…”

At home we went right back out with his bug catcher so he could find insects. We went across the street, along the cacti, and ended up finding a bunch of ants. He started gathering some, and was surprised when one of the ground ants attacked one of the winged ants. The kids from across the street and another boy came by on their bikes and we let them look at the ants and they helped catch a bunch more. Eventually we headed home and he showed them to Carly. We didn’t keep them for a long time, but I think the two winged ones were dead by the time we let them go.

He introduced a new Brother story by starting, “‘Hey Brother,’ says Bar.” She gave him the choice of infinite Minecraft time or infinite YouTube time. I initially had him choose Minecraft, no contest, but August wanted him to be agonized by the choice. He then had Brother trying to cuddle with cute animals in Minecraft, but then accidentally hurting them and getting attacked by the animals.

I opened the box with presents from Dee and put them up. We haven’t had presents out in advance before, but I thought it would be a good experiment/practice for him. August reminded me, “Santa isn’t real.”

He did alone time, then we played in the mesa in Minecraft. He did painting with Carly. He mainly likes to watch her, and he enjoys mixing colors. He then helped Carly make paintings that she was going to use for cards for her students. He had the idea of setting up a timelapse of this, which turned out really well. He ate meat and potatoes and beets and chocolate milk for dinner. He asked me, “Could you tell me more about the people with the fascist groove?” And I told him more about East Germany.

He asked for a sliced apple. I did that, and we played Simple Rocket 2. I didn’t know if it would be too complicated, and it does have a steep learning curve, and I think we’ll be able to enjoy it together; once I get the hang of it. Basically, you build rockets and other space vehicles and try to make them work. He really liked it, and got upset when we stopped. But he then told me to think of the closest thing to what he wants to do that I would allow. That was a great idea. I thought of making paper airplanes.

He loved that. We spent the next half hour throwing my two main designs (well, the two I remember) around. We did a little Brother game, then Carly read a book to him. It is about a boy in a wheelchair. Handicapped was a new word for him. The narrator mentions the ‘fact’ that elephants are the only mammal that can’t jump. I immediately wondered about hippos and rhinos, so we looked it up. Turns out it is a common myth, and there are also others: like the sloth, for example (and probably koalas?).

I went for a run. When I came back they were still reading the I Funny TV: A Middle School Story book that she had started with him today. I took a shower, then gave August his bath and brushed his teeth. We said good night to Carly and went in to bed. We watched a little of the Nutcracker, then he wanted to go back to the beginning with the part with all the kids. He particularly liked that part. We did a lot of talking about it. He had me read some of the Roald Dahl poems while we kept it playing. We did one Ninja Focus track, then he fell asleep to Zoe Keating cello music, by 10:05.

His view on the way to school:

Zinnie view of walking into school:

Spinning thing:

Spiral ladder time lapse:

Zinnie view of walking through school:

Zinnie view of the artisan fair:

“I’m taking a video” song:

Dancing among the rugs:

Artisan fair time lapse:

Swinging on the bar:

Climbing in the tree:

Ant nest time lapse:

Fighting ants:

More fighting ants:

Time lapse of mama painting:

Color mixing time lapse:

Painting together time lapse:

Water faucet slo-mo:

Zinnie’s view of releasing the ants:

He was up by 6:55. He had me carry him downstairs, but then curled up with the blanket and lay his head on my lap. I was hoping he’d go back to sleep. He hasn’t been getting tons of sleep lately. But the good news was that he didn’t wake up at all during the night again. That’s three nights in a row.

We read some of Last Kids on Earth #2 then played Minecraft. He got upset when I was going to stop plying and do other things, but we talked and then finished our time after. Bit. He had Cheerios and strawberries and we did Brother and Minecraft games. He had a story where Brother got more jaguars in the jungle, then had to come to an agreement with Greena. Sister helped him build a new place for the jaguars, after he had been trying on his own in secret but not making much progress. Then Brother was taking redstone lessons after Sister and Myna build a double rainbow. August made use of “Yadda yadda yadda…”

We next got our words stuff and did some reviewing, then added BL to the mix. He then wanted to watch mythology videos and watched the Ted-Ed series videos on Pandora, Icarus and Daedalus, and Arachne. Mortal was a word of the day.

Gilad then called on Skype as he was finishing the last video. They had scheduled to play Minecraft at 9:30. They played for an hour as planned and Gilad had to go. August’s time was up, but then he got upset with me when I wouldn’t play with him longer.

We had crackers and avocado and pate for lunch. We had talked about making a video/piece of music for Mr. Minke as a thank you. We tried a few ways of coming up with a song, starting with him playing a tune on the piano, then I was trying to capture it for him, learning it from a recording. That wasn’t working too great, so then we settled on me playing the drum while he sang the tune he’s been singing after counting “and a one and a two and a one two three four…” We did it once and it was perfect. Unfortunately, it had been practice and wasn’t recording a video.

We took a little break for more food, I think, and to get him dressed. While my back was turned he then fell while putting on his pants and leaning against the chair. He was a little hurt, and we watched part of the Nutcracker, then he requested another myth so we watched Midas.

Ada then emailed, saying now would be a perfect time to go pick up the set of dining room chairs she had in storage at the school. The upholstery on ours has completely fallen apart, despite them being new chairs when we moved here. So, we didn’t get around to finishing the Minke project.

We ran to school and she wasn’t in her office. Going in, we saw Ms. Anna leaving and talked to her. Turns out she is getting a degree up in Haifa, but works with the preschool in the garden every Friday morning. We looked around for her, but no luck. Along the way he asked, “Do you think the preschoolers are still preschooling?” We decided to hang out in the library, in sight of her door, and I played chess against myself. August requested I explain what was going on. It was going well when Ada showed up. I told him we could get back to it later, but that never happened.

She took us down to the end of the gym building and opened a storage room. August complimented a painting that was in there and she almost made us take one of the big paintings as well. They were quite abstract and August talked about how he liked abstract art. We had also looked at a couple of Ada’s sculptures that she has in her office when she wasn’t there.

We got the chairs out. While we did that, August had spied a bunch of winged ants on the wall. A new thing. When Ada left he asked to take photos, and took photos of the ants. He then took photos as I walked two of the chairs to the car. He got a good photo of me. A security guard helped me get them through the gate.

We drove the chairs home, then drove down to Beit Yehoshua; our other plans for the day were getting a popsicle/coffee and smoked meats down there. We were happy to see the coffee stand place open. They didn’t have the popsicle thing open, but he said there were a couple of flavors in there. August was excited about banana, peanut butter, and chocolate. He got that and I had a cappuccino.

We sat over at one of the bigger tables and read more of The 117-Story Treehouse. We eventually got going, and August talked about being a little cold, and drove up to the pool area and in to the meat place. They had moved the actual booth part inside the covered area now. We got half beef, and a quarter turkey and chicken. Potatoes as well, but only one beet, as that was the only one left. We went outside and August did some photography, then needed a bathroom. We went back inside for that, then got going.

He asked, “What’s a cemetery?” We talked about it, and I asked if he’d like to see one. There is a Jewish cemetery just west of the international school. I first stopped at the produce stand by the gas station on 553, next to Younes, the Arab restaurant. We haven’t actually been there since Holly first gave us a tour. We got yellow corn, broccoli, and strawberries. Then, headed west, we took the road at the sign that says ‘Cemetery’. But it turns into a dirt road right as you get off. I did another loop on the highway and drove around past the school.

We parked and walked around the cemetery for a few minutes. He said, “So there’s skeletons in there?” We talked about other things that people do with their bodies after they die. As we were leaving, I got a message from Carly saying she was packing up. We got in the car and caught her as she was just leaving the school. She didn’t see us, and August told me to honk. She got in and we went to the school and walked back in and got the other two chairs to take home. August showed her the winged ants and took more photos. He had also taken various photos and videos out the car window. We were home after 4:15.

He took a photo of the dog poop on the sidewalk: “I took a photo of the poop so we can always remember that poop…” He smelled the phone screen and said, “It doesn’t smell like poop.” He took more photos inside, then he and I went up the street so I could do recycling and he could take photos. As we were talking about what he could take photos of, he said, “There’s inspiration everywhere!” He took a bunch of photos, then played a bit on the playground. He saw the different sitting and spinning things, which he hasn’t played with in a long time, and said, “Hey! My old friends!” We also ended up talking about time, and he told me, “Dada, time is a physical thing…made out of something like photons.” He had me take various time lapse videos of him on the exercise equipment, and he did a time lapse of me doing funny things.

It got dark and we headed home and had some dinner. He then did painting with Carly. She was going to paint the pinecone photo that he had taken, but said it might look like poop. He told her, “Try your best and it will be okay.” I went for a run as he started watching myths. He watched a Cambodian one and the Icarus one again. I got home as he was getting upset as he wanted to watch another one, and he hit Carly. Carly and I were doing some clean up. It took him a while, but eventually he let me give him a hug. Still took him some time after that.

I went up and took my shower. He ate broccoli, then two bowls of cereal with strawberries. Back downstairs Carly said “Seriously?” to me about something, and I realized that’s where he gets the saying. He was then with Carly on the couch. He was singing some lovely tunes and trying to have her copy notes. He could tell when she’s in tune. She went and took a shower. I read some of the “Augustus Gloop” poem. But then he said he was still hungry. I gave him just a few Cheerios and three strawberries. He requested we listen to “The Cat Came Back”. We listened to it twice and he remembered it was from PKA. We then did Brother games: being jealous of two jaguar twins because he wants a friend like that, and sister jealous of Myna playing with Mumbo Jumbo.

We looked at pages he had marked in the The Earth book. August asked how many cells we have in us and ended up looking at https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/how-many-cells-are-in-the-human-body He willingly headed up at 8:30. I had suggested we could skip his bath today, as Carly had washed his hair last night and I wanted to get him to bed a little earlier as he seemed tired. Didn’t go as quickly as I had hoped, but he was asleep before 10. We watched some more of the Nutcracker and read some poems, then listened to some Ninja Focus, before he went to sleep.

Singing along to our song:

Cracker eating time lapse:

The view out his car window:

The moving ant:

Spinning:

Playground time lapses:

Painting time lapse:

He didn’t wake me up at all during the night, then was up precisely at 7. Took a few minutes on the couch, then watched Phineas Rage. He only did that for a few minutes, then decided to play Minecraft. We did that, then had cereal and milk for breakfast, then got going.

I had an 8:55 appointment at the Netanya licensing office. We got there right on time. The security guard joked about August being there to get his license. Went up, got August watching a My Little Pony, then I was called up. The guy initially questioned my paperwork, but then called over a supervisor. She asked if we were embassy, said a couple things to him in Hebrew, and ten seconds later he was handing me the new registration for the car.

I let August watch a couple more minutes, as he’d barely started. We then headed back to the car, joking with the security guard again. I told him August was driving home. August watched the My Little Pony episodes on the way to Kfar Saba Park. We got there with enough time (I’d said we’d be there at 9:45) for us to sit and finish the episode.

We got his bike out and rode up to the big playground. No sign of Lauren and Gilad, so we rode around in circles a couple times. He rode up a pretty big hill all on his own, although the next two times he did it he had me help him. It turned out that they had parked at the mall at the south end. August and I headed south and met them halfway. Gilad was very in tune to the bike and pedestrian lanes (which don’t actually make much sense) and whether or not August was riding in the correct one or not.

The trampoline place was closed, but the zoo was open. It costs money (not a lot), but August wasn’t excited by it and I don’t think Lauren wanted to pay. So we walked back up to the big playground. The kids mainly played on the sailing ship part. They got us up on it as crew. They were kind of debating whether they were pirates or not. When August was the captain he turned into a nice captain and got rid of their cannons and said they were going to do trading.

A little after 11 they got going. We all went up to the bathrooms, then said goodbye from there. August and I went to the cafe right by the playground. It it actually quite nice inside, and we got a small table outside next to flowers. August ordered a blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry smoothie, I got a cappuccino, and we shared a pizza with eggplant, cheese cubes, and mushrooms on half. August said he liked the pizza, but then noticed it was kind of spicy. So he just ate a few bites. That was okay though as he loved the smoothie and drank the whole thing. It was really good, and I told him next time I’d get that instead of a coffee. And there was enough pizza left over for Carly’s dinner.

We read some of 117-Story Treehouse while we waited and after we ate. He then had a Brother game where he was playing with Mumbo Jumbo, etc. from YouTube and they weren’t impressed with his dirt house. August told me, “Let’s always do a bunch of special Brither and Sister games cuz it’s close to Christmas.” And he asked, “What’s a hermit?”

We left there at 12:10. We were still playing when we got back to the car and I said something funny as he spit water. We drove to Max. On the way we listened to Story Pirates and their Circle Round crossover. Jeweler and tailor were words of the day.

We parked at Tiv Taam and walked up. Max had Christmas decorations, but no regular strings of lights. We also got another blanket, grey this time and a texture that Carly is more likely to like, and a couple of minor things. It was quite blustery when we walked back to the car and August wanted to walk around. We dropped off our stuff and walked around the new mall across the street, which we’ve never gotten around to doing. He did an extra, non-science, video for his viewers.

We drove home and had time for him to do 30 minutes of alone time. He wanted to use 30 now, then 30 with Eve. For his time he marked pages with post-it notes in the Earth book and cuddled with new the blanket. We did 30 minutes of Minecraft and then ran to school.

He talked to Reia’s mom on the way into school. She asked about homeschool, and August gave her a math problem with shekels and agorot. We picked up Eve, then went to the playground for a minute. Eve went to use the bathroom, then August was concerned about rain and wanted to get home for iPad time, so we got going. It started raining as we got to the library building (they wanted the elevator). I had to pick him up as we went through the building. But then he was okay, and the rain had stopped. They shared the umbrella on the walk out to the car.

At the house Eve requested cereal with milk. She ate that and we set up the two iPads for Minecraft (I had asked Heather to make sure it was okay). Eve lasted 15 minutes with it, but didn’t want any more. So he saved his final 15 for later. I opened the bag of marbles but they did have much interest in those. They started separately, with her out in the Zinnie house, and him doing a potion. She came in and joined him and they were finally playing together. He made a “Fire Resitance IX” potion.

It was then raining, and they took the umbrellas out in the rain together, August wearing Carly’s flip flops. Eve made lemonade out of lemon juice, brown sugar, and water and they both drank that. Quite a bit. I got one of the science experiments set up and we made a rainbow out of Ph levels. Eve and August made a little fort in the play area out of three umbrellas and pillows and wanted their photo taken in that.

Heather showed up then and talked for a few minutes. August took a long video of us all. They left around 5:30. August had been pretty hyper and kept talking really loudly. He asked for the tripod, at a yell, and I asked him to take 5 triangle breaths. It worked. He closed his eyes and took them and was able to talk at a normal volume.

He set up a long time lapse as he ate, then made a structure in the kitchen and performed on it. A bit upset when he tried to turn it to see me and Carly on the couch and the camera fell. He then had the camera set up pointing towards the ground and he did a timelapse of him drawing a picture.

We did 15 minutes of Minecraft, then watched educational videos. We watched a little about machine learning on a couple videos, then found the CGP Grey episode on “How Machines Learn”. That one worked really well and we talked about it a lot. He then watched “The Race to Win Staten Island” and really liked that. Getting into history now, maybe.

We did the Brother and Myna and Mumbo Jumbo Minecraft game, and when Brother asked if Mumbo had liked his house he had Myna reply, “He didn’t NOT not like it.”

We made popcorn and Carly asked if he wanted to read the Myna book: “Yeah, cuz I’m so caught up in Minecraft.” He choked a little at one point. He ended up making a sort of nest with the new blanket between her legs and the couch and the table, then turned it into a storage area for his musical instruments and other things.

We did a Brother game. At one point he said, “Bam. And here’s the parenting trick.” He didn’t like not having internet in the jungle and they went back and forth. The parenting tricks were stronger.

We got him ready for bed. Carly give him a bath and washed his hair. He told us, “A baby starts out as a single cell. So I was once a single cell in your tummy.” I asked how many cells he had now: 60 or 70? He did a facepalm and said, “Billions. Billions.” We remembered he hadn’t given Heather any facts, so he had me send a message in which he informed Heather that Eve had once been a single cell inside her: “And when she was multicellular, she yawned.”

Carly and I were debating something and he said, “I’m afraid she has the stronger argument.” When we went in his room he went and got the cream for his hands: “Doing some preventive medicine.” Carly had earlier shown him photos of collections of rocks and shells that Cassie and Jeff had collected on the beach in Mexico. He had like one better than the others, then had asked to see Oma, Opa, and Vivian, and Colin’s collections.

They had written back. Colin had been too busy getting upset, and I think there were now photos of Cherie’s and Vivian’s collections. He liked them both and tried to decide which was better: “Hmm, it’s hard to compete with that.” When I suggested it could be a tie he said, “I am NOT doing a tie.” “I like the textures…and they look like wild mushrooms…”

Going to bed he decided his pants are too short. I got a different pair and put socks on him too. He said he wants to try panamas with feet again. I showed him the video of him first walking in shoes at Seoul Grand Forest when he was 11 months old. He was asleep by 10:15.

Dancing to iPad music:

Singing about a hippo:

Walking in the wind:

A message in the wind:

Potions time:

Feeling the rain:

Using umbrellas in the rain:

Umbrella fort:

pH rainbow experiment:

Zinnie vision:

House time lapse:

Drawing time lapse:

He woke up enough at 3-something for me to have to get in bed with him. I was then awake when he got up at 7:05. He went to the bathroom and we went downstairs together. He cuddled with Carly on the couch for several minutes, then they went outside to check the tomatoes. I made pancakes, and we all ate pancakes and strawberries for breakfast. August then sat at the table making up music. He stacked up all the magnet blocks, then played with them with Carly. They were making planets out of them. August made a planet that moves around on wheels.

They then did an art project with a cardboard box and glue and string and the tile-like things from Max. Carly got cotton swabs for the glue, and got extra, so August of course asked her why, which she had predicted he would do. He was then making fun of her for getting extra: “There’s a cotton swab emergency!” I said I didn’t know where he learned such behavior, and blamed it on the cartoons these days. I then joked about how cartoons when we were kids were wholesome. August asked what ‘wholesome’ meant. So a word of the day. And he presented his really soft yarn, which he’d chosen at Max, but hadn’t yet used, to Carly and told her she could have it.

We played Hey, that’s My Fish! We then sorted the Bob Books so he could choose them in order and he read Ten Men. It is interesting, because all of the books he has already mastered (he has 4) are from the ‘Sight Words’ set, while this was from Set 3. He does seem to learn the sight words more easily than a book like this, which has a lot of rhyming words that look similar (like tent, went, and sent).

He then wanted to do the balloon egg drop again. He wandered off as I made it, so didn’t really help. They then watched as I tossed it out the window. This time, we moved it to the grass and popped the balloons one at a time. The egg was just fine. Success!

Inside he started to do big addition on his own: “30 plus 30 is 60, 60 plus 60 is 120, 120 plus 120 is 240, 220 plus 220 is 440, 440 plus 440 is 880.” We read the Elephant and Piggie book Let’s Go for a Drive with him doing a few words. He asked me to wrap a present for him. I agreed and figured I’d wrap one of the Max art supplies. He liked my wrapping job (in the foamy stuff he’d gotten at the junk pile) but wasn’t impressed with the gift itself. It was the colorful popsicle sticks, notched so you can build with them. I built a little, but he decided he’d use one to make a mango popsicle. We thawed mango pieces a little so we could stick them on, and he’d eat them. He wanted it really hard, so we put one in the freezer, and he set timers on his watch to remind us to take it out.

We ate some pita and hummus. He put pieces of the soft yarn (he had wondered how they make it so soft) between my ears and glasses and said that I look like a poodle. He wasn’t quite sure what a poodle was though, so we looked at photos of them.

He had caught what looked like a sort of small cockroach outside earlier, and it was moving around.

We read Gaston, as the talk of poodles had reminded me of it. We realized that we know 3 characters named Gaston, as he thought I was talking about Dragons Beware. And of course there’s also Beauty and the Beast.

We then read parts of the DK Space Travel book. He’s never really been into nonfiction books, but he responded positively to this, and they’re only 99 cents. So we also bought Solar System and Energy and will probably buy a bunch more. We watched a few videos of rocket launches and discussed the size of the space station.

I then went up to work. He was helpful with Carly. He did dishes for a point and watered plants. Carly made sushi for lunch, and he helped bring everything up to me.

They then walked to the mall to get a healthy snack. Aroma was closed, so they went to the other cafe near it, which we’ve never been to, and had lemonade. As they were leaving, I was taking a break from sitting at my desk to rearrange the office. I switched the wardrobe and the chair, so that when you walk in you now see the chair and not the side of the wardrobe. It looks nicer, and now Carly doesn’t have to look at my back when we’re both working in there.

They also went to Tiv Taam and got toothpicks, which I had suggested. August keeps remembering we don’t have toothpicks. They were back at 3:20. They were in the yard for awhile so I kept working. They came in, but then were back outside for quite some time. They had toast, and August yelled up from the yard through the window to ask if they could use the bread we had chosen for hot dog buns for toast. They also looked at the new Energy book and learned about heat.

I came down and August and I shared some tonic water. He was counting by 11s and doing other math problems. He went to the bathroom and I watched some videos of him at Children’s Grand Park. I had randomly remembered the day we had bought a spray bottle at Daiso and played with it. Thanks to locations, I was able to find it easily and we watched some videos from around that time.

He’s been playing a game with Carly where he rushes to the bathroom before her. Sort of a reverse psychology thing to get him to go to the bathroom when we need to go somewhere. Carly told him it wasn’t a game though that he could play with other people when there was just one bathroom, thinking forward to this summer, particularly with Vivian. He said it was okay though as he had put Vivian to sleep for a few years. When I said that didn’t seem desirable as then he couldn’t play with her, he first asked what ‘desirable’ meant, then agreed to wake her up.

He then put all of his coins in two plastic bags and gave one to me. We were then pirates stealing money from each other. Which was mainly him stealing from me. I gave up being a private and stated a pirate supply store. He used his money to buy things like parrots, rope, figureheads, etc. from me. a twist to the game was that I was still a pirate so I’d try to cheat him on his change, and he had to double check it to make sure I got it correct.

Carly had gone up to rest, but eventually he wanted to go to her. She said he could come up so he was with her for a few minutes. I then came up. He told me “You’re a poodle. An extra disturbing poodle.” Even though I didn’t have the yarn on me anymore. We wrestled and he did math and we started a brother and sister whale story.

I remembered I was going to make the sesame ginger dish for dinner. We went downstairs and I did that. He went outside with Carly to do a photo scavenger hunt out on the street. He found about 20 things and got 22 million points or so. For a lemon he had taken a photo of a broken one, but then said he could have taken a photo of an “intact” lemon.

The dish, mushrooms and broccoli in a ginger sesame sauce over egg noodles, turned out quite well. August either really liked it, or didn’t. He didn’t eat a lot, and said he tasted the pepper. He drank a lot of milk though, and said he liked the mushrooms, which he hasn’t liked for weeks and weeks.

He did some tracing of our words of the day on the iPad, then we read more of Amulet #7. He went upstairs to Carly for a bath. He told her about how boys are tougher, and she talked to him about stereotypes (a new word) and how ‘tough’ isn’t really important.

Carly actually decided to put him to sleep, so I gave him a bath. We then read two of My Very Own Fairy Stories. We brushed his teeth, and he found a 5 shekel coin in Carly’s little treasure box. He claimed it as his own. He wouldn’t part with it downstairs, but he handled it well and didn’t get upset and we agreed we could make a plan for earning it tomorrow.

Back upstairs I read “Too Many Daves” and “Pale Green Pants” from The Sneetches. Carly came in and I left them at 9:35.

Checking the egg drop:

Unimpressed by the gift:

Addition:

Checking my change giving:

Toothbrush music:

Counting songs 1:

Counting songs 2:

Counting songs 3: