August woke me up at 5am. I got in bed with him. He complained he wanted mama, but immediately fell back to sleep. Then Carly did come in the room. A few minutes later he was really laughing in his sleep about something. I was up about 7:20 and they both slept for another half hour past that. Downstairs she started reading Matilda to him. Only got a page in though before he rejected it as too many words. So Carly headed out to water the plants. He looked at Night Sky on his iPad. He asked where the Earth was, and we talked about how he was on it. He asked what ‘horizon’ meant when I said it, so that was a word of the day.
We then designed games in Infinite Arcade. When I was playing one he wanted me to get more points as he said, “I don’t like things that end in 9.” We made a shopping list and Carly headed to the store. August and I went upstairs for a Brother and Sister game. We went back to where they found a tiger and cheetah for the first time (the tiger alone and hungry, the cheetah in a trap). August was also walking on the tiles of the floor and said “I can only move in L shapes” like a knight in chess. He wanted Brother to play Green Planet with the tiger, so we did a few minutes of that then we went downstairs.
We were going to do an art project but didn’t get to it. He did a Skype call with me while I went out and looked for bugs under the rocks. Carly was on the way home, so he then called her.
She got home and I started putting groceries away. August was making up his own ideas for Bob Books: “Ten men went in a vent…ten men drank a cup of tea…ten men went to a benefit.” He read Before and After to her, and I think they may have read or worked on a second. Carly prepared them a snack plate for lunch: watermelon, strawberries, grapes, cherries, carrots, and crackers and meet.
They left for a 1:00 appointment with Gabi. They played Monopoly and the color matching game, with Gabi joining in for at least parts.
When they were back I went to the bank to figure out a money transfer to Gabi through the ATM. Got that to work. When I came back they were looking at the time in poster. He pretended I was a tiger and they were rabbits and I was trying to eat them. We then started reading Over the Garden Wall on Hoopla, as I realized we can check them out through our Sno-Isle library system.
They then headed to the pool. I worked, and they were back around 5:45. I came down a few minutes later and Carly was skyping with her parents. I played Magnus Chess with him, which he was already doing. Carly went up to take a shower. August had a slow meltdown after turning off the iPad that lasted until after Carly came down. He hadn’t eaten dinner, and that seems to be part of it. He had some cereal and milk and more watermelon juice. I made a schnitzel and carrots for him and he ate most of that as well.
We got going for our follow-up meeting with Gabi. We read Monsters Beware in the car. He watched the Curious George Christmas while we met. Checked on us once and blew us a kiss as he went back out to keep watching. When we were done he told me exactly how long it had been, based on how much of the show he had watched. Back in the car we finishedMonsters Beware, then read more ofOver the Garden Wall.
We were home at 9:15. Quite late, and he started to get upset about something—maybe touching a slug—as we entered the gate. He realized he had 52 active minutes, so he and I went out in the yard and he was chasing invisible animals. He then finished off 60 by being a tiger or cheetah chasing me around inside. I gave him a quick wash and he brushed his teeth. I readWhere the Wild Things Are. He mentioned animals with lots of teeth and I looked up animals that had the most and we read about catfish and snails. He told me about his “marathon” animal and that it has “76000 septicles” Carly came in and I left them before 10:10.
He slept all the way to 8:20. I went up and he was sitting on the couch, drinking from his water bottle. I carried him down and he cuddled on Carly and ate pita toast with her. I read over half of Timepocalypse, then when I got up to get him some more frozen mango he started watching a Wild Kratts about coral. Then about the subnivean zone.
He then wanted to play a Brother and Sister game based on that. He was shivering, or pretending to shiver, as I took him up. We went upstairs, and he came up with a scenario (from the show) where Brother dug in the snow and exposed a family of meadow voles, making them cold. That’s why he was shivering. He told me about how they have groups of babies. I taught him ‘litter’, so that was a word of the day. He did lots of sneezing through the morning. Brother and Sister took the voles home and made a nest for them and put them in the closet of their lab so they could finish hibernating in there and be safe from all the other animals.
We played several variations of that, then went downstairs to take things apart. We were listening to Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective. As we took things apart, he was Tigey. All his story. I found him out in the woods and took him home. Parents were at a conference and Sister was at a scouts meeting. I taught him to use a screwdriver. He hid Tigey from sister and took the tiger for show and tell the next day.
Carly got him spaghetti and broccoli for lunch, and I went up to do some work. He read Before and After and Willy’s Wish to Carly and made the beds. I let him choose a new civilization on Polytopia for his two stars.
We got going and left at 1:20. He was talking about multiple universes and everything and told us, “There’s something called the multispace with a photomile between them: 6.2 trillion miles.” We just chatted and looked out windows for awhile. He pointed out the SAP building. We had discussed it in advance and I said we’d play Polytopia at the restaurant. But he asked if he could play in the car and when I said no he got upset. He was then quiet and fell asleep at 2:20.
He slept for 20 minutes or so, until we parked in Abu Ghosh. Carly had to squeeze the car through some narrow streets. I carried him and we walked around for a couple minutes. We saw an old broken car down below us and August liked that, then we walked back by the Benedictine Abbey and found that it opened at 2:30.
We chose the Old City Restaurant & Houmus House and found a table. We ordered hummus with eggs, labaneh, and schnitzel and fries. And I got a tea with sage. August and I played Polytopia. We took our time, and when we were done we got a big container of hummus to take to the party then walked over and looked around in the abbey, and August and I went and looked at the broken car again.
We then drove on to Marc’s place, north of Sabeel, for his party. August was a little nervous, but the gathering was outside and that helped. At that point Andraous was there, as well as a couple from Sweden. Carly and August got out his iPad and played Magnus Chess, which I think they’d played earlier as well.
They were playing that when the pastor of St. Andrew’s showed up with his family and three kids. The youngest, David, I knew was 5 (Marc had told me about them), but it turned out David was just 11 days older than August. He watched August and Carly playing, but was quiet, and wouldn’t really join in to play until Carly suggested a change to Toca Food. David, and also his older brother Joseph, knew the game and really got into it with August. August did a great job sharing the iPad with David as they fed the monsters food and tried to give them foods that would make them breathe fire. August was using his watch to set timers, as supposedly they had to cook the foods for a certain number of minutes (they tried 5, 10, and 15, I think) in order for it to work.
We shared some lemonade with mint with August, and Carly and I had a Taybeh beer. Andraous was manning the barbecue and there were burgers, but we were pretty full and didn’t eat a whole lot. We did try the barbecued halloumi cheese though, which was really good. And later there was vanilla and caramel ice cream, and August had some of that, and some watermelon. The kids did spend a lot of time on the iPad, but August did a lot of talking to David, and they also wandered around a bit. August wouldn’t participate in the hide and seek, but he was amused by it, and he also threw some rocks around. When Joseph and their older sister were fighting with sticks, August said, “Nice swordfighting technique.”
Omar and Heba finally showed up, and were there about 20 minutes before we left. They didn’t bring the kids though as Nasir has been sick and they think that Ghada just got it as well. But it was good to talk to them for a few minutes. Nasir is almost 6 months.
We left just before 7. August was telling us about the multiverse again and told us that the ‘quoltispace’ is even bigger, and is 4 quadrillion years old. He and I played Infinite Arcade in the car and then I read Monsters Beware. We were home about 8.
He did a little taking things apart by himself and Carly made a smoothie. He did his turn on his watch game, then he asked me to read Bob Books to him: Dress Up andWilly’s Wish. We did the Brother and Sister vole game, then Carly gave him a bath. He had Cheerios, and I mentioned how, after all the talk of really, really big numbers, that the actual universe doesn’t seem that old to me now, at 13.77 billion years old. Carly agreed. August said he had figured out it was really 13.78 billion years old.
I left them about 9:20. Carly was exhausted and basically trying to bribe him to let her sleep. He was waking her up to ask her to sing and she’d fall back to sleep. Don’t think it took him too long though.
He was up at 6:55. We went downstairs, and I read most ofMonsters Beware. He then did his move on his watch game while I got frozen mango and oatmeal for him.
We played some Easy Music, then he watched one Wild Kratts and a Pink Panther. He talked about shooting weights and stuff around, like in Pink Panther. I finished taxes. We went upstairs for a Brother and Sister game, but wrestle instead. We started cleaning the toilets, and he remembered the toilet that had lost the porcelain coating. He meant Ruby, but said, “the person that doesn’t have an iPad?” And remembered that it had something to do with baby poop.
We played some Polytopia, the he sang a song about his watch that went:
“Bb-8 is my best friend
Don’t pound the drums if you have BB-8
Don’t pound the drums if it’s the last thing you do.”
We then played Brother and Sister games, mainly about finding the bird in plastic again, then went down and had a lunch of crackers and carrots and pate. We played Math Tango, working on multiplication. I was teaching him some of the tricks for multiplying by 5s (ends in 0 or 5) and 9 (digits add up to 9).
He then wanted to play with the new fast fuse beads. Didn’t actually finish anything, as his idea was another Brother game, with the animals destroying everything as he worked on them. He went and updated his summer countdown to 16, but decided to switch to numbers from his planet, in the language of enshmugadorflug. He added a 5, also in the language, at the end and said it would confuse Carly.
Shmuel was downstairs, showing Mikaela’s apartment. He left a bag of small electronics (modems, etc.) by our gate. August took two of them apart. He then read two Bob Books to me and added them to his ‘I can read’ pile. I wondered how many were now in the pile and he thought it was 20. He brought them over and we counted and he was correct.
We then went up and made the beds. That got him 5 coins, and went down and he had an ice cream sandwich. In the morning we had stopped reading Monsters Beware with just a few pages left. We sat down to read it now, but he wanted to start from the beginning, saying he really likes the beginning of it, so we did that.
We packed up and got going to school. As we got to the car he asked me for my phone and he calculated, on his own, how many hours are in a week (168). He’d later use that later in the day for discussing something we would do in a week. We parked and walked in. We had about 10 minutes before the bell, so we sat on our usual bench and finished a game of Polytopia. We hadn’t heard from Carly yet, so we we walked over to her classroom and met her as she was about to come to us. Handed her her swimsuit, then we went ahead to the pool and changed and got to the pool about the same time as she did.
Omri saw us walking by as we had walked down there, and she was also going swimming. August, Carly and I got in the pool. Omri and her sister were playing with diving rings, a couple of which wouldn’t sink, and her sister gave August a couple to play with. He created a game of floating them back and forth on his kickboard as messages/mail. Carly then took him over to play with Omri, and he was throwing the rings out for them and us to get. I got out of the pool to read and they played for another 15 minutes. Omri is now swimming on her own, and her mom told us about how great the swimvest was that she had used, as it allowed freedom of movement of the arms, and lets them actually swim more. Carly later found it on Amazon and we are ordering it for the summer.
We were home before 5. A small meltdown, as he kicked his shoes off as he came in the house. One knocked one of the popper toys off the table. A couple inches different and it would have been the glass vase of flowers. I tried to gently remind him and have him clean it up, but he melted down over picking up the pieces of the toy putting his shoes away. Seemed like he was probably hungry, and he calmed down with the corn crackers.
He then asked Carly if she wanted to make mistakes with the circuit set: “Come over here to make mistakes…this is mistake city.” Carly made spaghetti for dinner. As he ate he asked her, what ‘be my guest’ meant. A word of the day. He was then doing math on the calculator, and I taught him how to use the x^y button. He was then using it: “Let’s see what’s 3 to the 3rd power…27.”
He and I did some art together. He was using the stencils to draw the shapes, and I was going to color them. He was being negative about his own art. When I said how much I like his abstract art, he said, “Well, okay. If you like my dumb art…” He did a lot of mistakes, but then got frustrated when he made a mistake. We stopped, and moved over and did Prodigy Math. He was doing a good job of estimating grams and kilograms—all that time weighing things on the scale, and on adding up perimeters. He was doing several three-digit number problems in his head.
Carly came down and looking outside saw a big printer/copier at the junk pile. They went and got it. There was still a piece of a kid’s art in it, which was a fun surprise. They started taking it apart. I ws looking up Abu Ghosh for our outing tomorrow, and found out that one of the restaurants had the world record for the largest dish of hummus, 9000 pounds. August said, “That’s 4 tons and a thousand pounds.”
Carly took him up for his bath. When it was time for me to come up and take over to put him to sleep he told me, “I invented a battleship called Breaker. Did you know that?” It shoots really loud sounds to hurt people. And it absorbs people’s DNA. “Thats actually one of my powers. I can absorb DNA.”
We started readingHocus Pocus, which is a choose your own adventure graphic novel. After awhile he seemed quite tired, but was hyper for awhile, and resisting me singing to him. Finally, he asked me to tell a story or sing a song. So I made up a song about how I used to draw a lot back in elementary school. He was asleep at 9:45.
He woke up at 6:45. I carried him downstairs and he fell back to sleep on the couch until 7:45. We discussed Carly’s fake birthday. I suggested something amusing, and he said, “Dada, you know one of those toys that has a clown that pops up? We will get one of those.” He meant a jack-in-the-box. A great idea, but might have to wait for another year.
We read the first 50 pages or so of Monsters Beware again. I was hungry for breakfast so we paused. I got him frozen mango, and he told me he needed the Apple Pencil. He had invented a symbol for agorot and wanted to draw it. He drew that, then watched an episode of Wild Kratts. We then went upstairs and played Brother and sister games. Brother discovered another animal “Mannakin tiger…it’s the most beautiful thing on the planet.” It was his third new species, after the Blue Mook and the blue-footed, blue-beaked woodpecker. So the next one Sister found first, when they found a spotted bird stuck in plastic on the beach when they were on vacation. Sister had to perform CPR, then they took it home and cleaned it and bandaged it and then took it to the vet for further care.
We didn’t go down until after 10. He watched another Wild Kratts, then we played some Prodigy Math. He has gotten down telling time in 5 minute increments pretty well, and was converting between time units (years, weeks, days, hours). I wrote the rates on the whiteboard as a reminder, although he knew some already. He was also estimating months based on number of weeks quite well.
For lunch he had a slice of pizza, several carrots, and I made a mango and strawberry smoothie that was really good. When he finished all of his lunch he had one of the coconut cookie things.
We played our few minutes of Green Planet, and at some point he randomly asked “What does ‘on the double’ mean?” I think he heard it from me or Carly, as he specifically said “get washed on the double.”
Outside, I stretched more paint out of the tubes and managed to just cover all the visible parts of the chair.
He made Tabletop on my iPad, then we got ready to go. He asked, “How many elements are there in the book of elements? You know, the periodic table?” I told him it was 118. He then told me about the three he discovered: EP(PS), septon, and tython (30 times the strength of steel). It keeps explosions out of the house. Then there was a fourth called magnathon.
We drove down and parked in the Tiv Taam lot. We walked up to Max and were quite successful shopping. For Carly we got a green bag, then all sorts of green-themed fun things: a bag of marbles, a bag of bouncy balls, a rubber-band powered plane launcher, a pinwheel kit, a green squishy frog, and a handheld thing that launches balls up in the air and then you can catch them. We got two of those, so we could try to play catch. We also got a big bucket of the fast fuse beads. I had told August he could choose one item. He looked at some odd porcelain llama piggy banks, but settled on a pack of 6 colors of decorative tape.
We headed home. At home I ironed the fabric for the chair and got it set up outside. August and I then made a ‘Happy Fake Birthday’ sign for Carly. August chose the colors, and then used a marker to add to the bottom, making shapes. He then wanted to use the things from Max to decorate. I went up and got the bag, and he glued on the little balls and flowers.
We were still working on that when Carly was walking home. August said he would call her and tell her to wait outside until we were done. So he used my phone to do that. He was hungry, so was actually eating a piece of pizza and more smoothie when Carly got home. I took out the food from Younes to her, along with some smoothie.
We finished the sign, and hung it up on the freezer. He went and invited her in. She looked at the presents. They started with the airplane, and took it outside. They then opened the bouncy balls and were bouncing those around. He was tossing them off the slide. I went inside, and he started playing with the hose on the slide. He got totally soaked and kept playing.
When they came in she got clothes for him. I went upstairs and rested. They played Prodigy Math together, and soon after I came down Carly skyped with her parents.
After that, Carly went up for a shower. He ate carrots, frozen strawberries, and oatmeal for dinner. We discussed the terms double, triple, quadruple, etc. after he asked what the word was for ‘four times’. He wanted to know what was past that, so I looked it up and found them for up to ‘eight times’ and for ‘a hundred times’ (centuple). I wrote them out in a chart for him. He also asked “What’s ‘heroic’ mean?”
As he went to the bathroom he told me he has classes in his lab: 2-yeae olds running and getting cookies. Hard math for older kids. He calls PE classes ‘PC classes’. A nice quirk.
He read Play Ball to me and we read Come In together. We went upstairs for brother and sister games. Brother was hurt by tigers and pythons and Sister saved him. A 24 hour timer went off on my watch, which he had set yesterday, and he set another one. Another quirk is that he says “tomorrow after that” for “the day after that”.
He told me all about different kinds of portals that he can make. And he asked, “What does ‘I’ll pass’ mean?” It’s fromMonsters Beware.
Carly gave him a bath, after he was out playing with the guitar for awhile. She got him some Cheerios as a snack, then decided she wanted to go to sleep when he did, so she convinced him with a little chocolate. I said good night to them about 9:10.
I got him back to sleep at 6, but he was back awake at 6:35. I came up and sat next to him as he lay on the couch and almost fell back to sleep. It was about 15 minutes before he pointed that he wanted to go downstairs. I carried him down and he spent a few more minutes curled up on that couch. We then read a lot ofMonster’s Beware, then we each had one of the coconut balls. He played PBS Science for a little while, then needed to go to the bathroom. Afterwards, he told me “Here’s something I can do with the little portals I can make: I can clean the floor. And you know where I teleport the dust? 400 million years in the past!”
We talked about the cent and dollar signs for a minute and downloaded a Google Map on his phone so he could use GPS while we were up in Haifa. He played a little Dragonbox Little Numbers and I got us breakfast and packed to go.
We drove down and parked in our spot and caught the 9:25 train north. We readMonster’s Beware. August asked “What’s a diplomatic breakthrough?” That was a good phrase of the day. We played Polytopia, and transferred trains in Binyamina. At one point he asked me, “Do you know what migrating for humans is? Traveling on planes for the summer.”
We got off at Haifa Central Station, and walked west, stopping right at 11, as it opened at a pizza place called Donatello. We ordered a small pizza, with corn on all of it and sweet potato on half. We also got a grape juice. We had the full indoor seating area to ourself, and we read moreMonster’s Beware. August didn’t eat a whole lot—I don’t think he was really all that hungry, and the pizza wasn’t as good as VIPizza. So we ended up with half a small pizza in a box. I carried it with me for part of the way, as we continued west to the train museum. But eventually I folded up part of the box and made it fit in the backpack. It made it all the way home remarkably intact.
It was an interesting neighborhood to walk through, part old Haifa and part port area. And not crowded like the rest of downtown. There were a couple of neglected Arab cemeteries along the way.
We got to the Israel Railway Museum, which involves going through security, then walking over a big bridge. It turns out the this area was the original Haifa East Station, sadly not used now. Later, we saw the monument erected outside the station when it was built. When we got to the museum we were told it was technically closed today (not clear why), but they let people walk around anyway. And for free. All that was missing was, it seemed, that they didn’t have a couple of videos playing.
It was an interesting museum (the last railway museum I went to was, I think, in York, and there was also the museum up in B.C.—too late to find one in Korea), and there was a lot about how the trains were used in the wars, and how they and the tracks were targets for both Jewish and Arab forces under the Mandate. August really got into telling me how old the different trains old, how much they weighed, how fast they were, etc.—all incredibly exaggerated, of course. He was a little nervous in places, either afraid of going in some of the the darker cars, or unsure if we were allowed to go in them (he’s always bothered when I might be going somewhere we might not be able to go).
August also told me all about how one of the older engines shot bombs, etc. There was, as I said, a lot about their use in war, so he was processing some of that. We had gone out the back of the big building, then back through the building, then looked at the things outside on the front side of the building. My favorite car was the wooden passenger car inside, with wooden benches, etc.
At some point he was x-raying my bones for some reason, and told me that the color he uses for his x-ray is “Tiger red…ultrared.”
We went back over the bridge, and headed to the last area, an indoor hall. August saw the sign pointing the other way to the exit though, and started to get upset when I wanted to go in the last building. I tried to convince him we could just go in for a minute and sit, as it was nice and air conditioned (nothing else he been), but he wouldn’t go for it. So we walked back towards the other train station, seeing the second cemetery along the way.
About halfway we found a nice Korea-style coffee shop called Butterfly Caffe. I say Korea-style, because almost all of them here are actually full cafes, with kitchens, and are always crowded. Not many reasonably-priced, coffee and snack places with comfortable seating and plenty of space. So we got two small brownies and I got a cappuccino. August played Polytopia, and I read Colin Meloy’s Wildwood (which I’ve been wanting to read, and was downloaded on August’s iPad, since he was using my phone). Eventually he got up and was dancing to the music playing in the coffee shop, and played a piano in the corner.
We left around 2:15. He told me, “Dada. Did you know I can drink water and shoot it out my bottom? Or my head?”
We got to the station, bought tickets, and hopped the first train. We took the slow route, as that train stopped in Atlit. We had about 20 minutes to wait and played Polytopia until the train to Binyamina came. We stood, looking out the door on that train. Then had another few minutes to play until our final train. We played Math Tango and he read a Bob Book,Play Ball.
Carly called and asked us to stop at Younes to pick up stuff for dinner. He was falling asleep as we got there, and I held him as I went in and ordered. I had to set him down to open the door to the car, and he leaned against Skoda Mama with his eyes closed.
He fell asleep right away, then it took longer getting home, as I couldn’t get across the the lanes to make the left I needed. We were finally home about 5.
He cuddled with her, and Carly and I ate dinner. He was taking photos with Carly’s phone, and setting alarms, and didn’t want to give it up and had a meltdown. It was kind of a rough evening. He came back down and they did story problems for a long time as he ate dinner, eating all of his pizza and carrots, and checking answers on his calculator. I gave him a couple as well. But he hit me when I said no to iPad, and she took him upstairs for awhile.
He came back down and she took a shower. He pretended to paint my face with the watercolor set. I wanted a tiger, and was getting upset when he painted me as other things (tomato, etc.) We went upstairs and did a Brother game, where he gets grounded by Sister after accidentally hurting the tiger when it squishes his origami. He almost had a meltdown, or had a bit of one, after he threw a pen at me after I said not to, and slammed the door after I said it needed to stay open. I think he just needed a little crying time, as it went well after that. We did a long game of real life Polytopia of sorts, where I was a giant that wasn’t too smart and accidentally was destroying everything on my own team. August was then introducing the idea of child soldiers, and I was other soldiers trying to get him to go home. He had Breaker, the sword fromMonster’s Beware, and was basically acting out Claudette, who wants to be a famous warrior bashing monsters, etc.
I got him in the bathroom and playing in the sink, and he ended up washing himself with soap bubbles from the sink, including his hair. I think it was the soapiest and wettest he’s ever been. He called it his shaving cream as he put bubbles on his head. That took a long time, then I helped him rinse off and we dried his hair. Sadly, he slipped and fell in the bathroom when he ran back in to show Carly how he had lifted up his feet, one at a time, to rinse them in the sink.
He asked me to put him to sleep, but I told him I’d just spent two hours with him and that Carly was going to tell him about the time that aliens invaded Centralia High School. He said that never happened…because the only aliens live in other galaxies. I was able to leave them about 9:10.
He was up just before 7:40. We spent a few minutes upstairs on the couch. We went downstairs and he played Dragonbox Little Numbers. At 8 an alarm went off on Siri that August had set for the fun of it yesterday. He grinned. We went upstairs and played a Brother game where the woodpecker was stolen by the zookeeper, then Brother had to get a raise at the farm, then eventually make even more money mixing chemicals at a factory to buy back the woodpecker from the zoo. I finally convinced him to go down and get breakfast at 9:05.
While he was eating oatmeal I went up to put the chair fabric in the washing machine. August yelled up a joke he had made up: “Why did the elephant bite it’s nose? To get to the other pig!” We played Prodigy Math together. The quesrions on telling time we’re good for him. But then there were series, probability, and chart questions. He got ‘mode’ pretty well. I explained it, and he said “most popular?” A word of the day. We also discussen ‘equal chance’, ‘mean’, and ‘median’.
We read some of Monsters Beware and ‘repugnant’ was another word of the day. He discovered the x^2 and x^3 buttons on the calculator and I explained them. He had initially thought that the first one meant times 2, as he had tried it on 2, but ended up understanding it. He read the Willy’s Wish Bob Book to me, then we went up to make the beds. He made up a Brother game where Brother couldn’t get his math homework done because of the animals. His mean teacher then sends him to high school as punishment. The woodpecker goes with him, and is stolen by Dexter Dunn, a high school bully. He tries to get it back, but Dunn punches him in the face. He tries to trick Dexter a few times, but fails. He ends up stealing the bird back after he does a stakeout of Dexter and knows when he leaves to go to work.
At one point he asked me, “Is 6 minutes 620 seconds?” I said no, and he said, “720?” He finally made the beds, earning 30 minutes of Polytopia time. He can totally play on his own now, but wanted to show me something every few seconds, so it was hard to get work done. It was difficult for him to stop when his time was up, but he did it. While he went to the bathroom, an alarm he had set on his phone went off and he thought it was really funny when I pretended to think it was a door bell.
I was desperately trying to get us out of the house, but he was really dragging. He wasn’t excited about walking over to the mall. He took out the passcode he had written on a piece of paper a few days ago and said he didn’t need it anymore, as he had installed a fingerprint scanner for his network/internet. He was acting a bit grumpy. We had had some crackers and cheese, but I asked if he was hungry, and he agreed that was probably it. He did more calculator math as I got him frozen strawberries and peanut butter on crackers.
We finally headed to the mall. I took his bike, but he walked quite a bit on the way there. At the mall we went to the health food store. We picked out a pack of coconut ball things. Kind of like cookies, but not overly sweet. A good choice. We went to the art store and bought the 3 bottles of baby blue that they had and a pack of dark blue fabric dye.
We walked home, and played 15 minutes of Polytopia (our daily time) together on the couch (I would have said outside, but it was hot). He did even better ending this time. He helped me put the fabric from the chair in the dye, then helped sand the lounge chair. He then lay in the center of it and said, “By order of the robot government, it is night night time.” We then painted. As usual, we were just short on paint. I had three and a half tubes. One more would have done it. Two would have been even nicer.
He wanted to send me messages from his phone. So I got Skype set up for him. He then send me messages, and read some of mine. He did a voice call to me as I was outside and pretended to be a kid that Brother babysits, and told me that he could see that the smoke machine on the top of our house is broken and clogged. I then suggested he call Carly as she was walking home. He did, and when she showed him where she was he said, “Oh, Vatikim!” He then directed her home, working on his left and right.
At home, they did a couple of other games, where he sent her out, via Skype, to find something outside. He sent her over to the junk pile, then watched through Skype as she walked down the dirt path by the orchard. He then wanted to climb the big hill of dirt, so I took him over to her.
I read a little Ben Braver to him. Carly was doing math time with the whiteboard and I went up to work for an hour, coming back down at 7. He had had strawberries, carrots, and oatmeal. He was now doing multiplication in Math Tango, although he was doing a lot of guessing. We worked together on it though, and he was doing a lot of thinking. We had one of the coconut cookies, and he was jumping from rug to rug in the living room and kitchen. He got his activity goal on his watch, so we did his turn on his watch game, then went upstairs.
On the bed he jumped around with the phone, trying to make messed-up panoramic photos. We did a short Brother game where he made a paper airplane and it was crushed by one of the cats. Carly took over and gave him a bath, then got him ready for bed. I left them at 9. He had wanted me for a few minutes and started to hit me when I went to leave. He then clung to my arm for awhile before calming down and being okay.
August was up at 6:45. Carly greeted him upstairs. She headed to school and he watched Pink Panther and one Aardvark and the Ant. He stopped, and asked me, “Do you want to babysit 10,000 friends?…There’s 150,000 people in my lab. And 10,000 kids. There’s also a built-in science school.” His lab is down in the lava.
He was getting money from me by selling things for American coins. He said it was because Carly had told him that she lived in an apartment building in the Unites States where she had to use quarters. So he was getting change to exchange at a store. Apparently he plans on moving out and doing his own laundry soon. He asked and answered his own math question to figure out how many quarters were in 10 dollars: “So how do we figure out how many quarters are in ten dollars? 4 times 10? 40?” He then did it up to a billion. That is, showing that he knew how to do 4 times 100, 4 times 1000, etc.
We did multiplication on the calculator, then I suggested Khan Academy and we did some of that, but then I compared how they do fractions to the points/possible points in Infinite Arcade and he wanted to do that. We played that for awhile, then I went outside for a second to see if the smoke from last night’s bonfires was dissipating. Not really. When I came back in August came up to me and said “I have a sore throat.” I picked him up and held him for awhile. He had woken up pretty stuffy. I told him it was probably just the smoke, and to drink water. He did that, and I went up and got the Ricola. I broke one up with the hammer and gave him small pieces.
I had read an article about how The Who’s Tommy turns 50 today, so we listened to that. So I’ll always know that the album is 7 years older than me. We did our short session of Green Planet and I made French toast—he had already had oatmeal soon after Carly left. When it was ready he told me wanted swedish pancake instead. I would have said no, but there was leftover egg mixture, so I had the idea to add a little more milk and some flour, and voila, a cinnamon swedish pancake. He ate the whole thing, but said it was too thick. Too much flour, I guess.
We then did calculator math, but this one was really interesting. He’s into knowing what, for example, a trillion times a quadrillion is. The trick is in simply adding the number of zeroes. So we started doing this on the calculator, but only in calculating the number of zeroes. So, for ‘a million times a million’ you add 6 plus 6 and the calculator says 12, which you then know is a trillion. We kept going and going, to things like ‘a nonillion times a nonillion times a nonillion’, and eventually ‘a googol times a googol’ etc. I was of course interpreting the large ones, but he really got the idea and understood what was happening.
He asked me about the backs of his quarters, as they are different, and I talked about the designs (76, the regular one, and state quarters) and said he could look at all of them this summer with Gramma and Grampa. We then played a game with a Duplo horse tied to the end of the kite string. First we had to piece together a string long enough as the kite string got all tangled. It was the usual sort where Brother tried to take the horse home but it kept getting pulled away. I took the opportunity though to clean the house every time Brother walked away from the horse. It then turned into a game where Brother was late to babysit someone. We took the game upstairs and it turned into a wrestling game where more and more kids came for him to babysit and they jumped all over him.
Back downstairs I was still having a headache, so I pulled out the couch and rested for awhile and he watched something. I got up and went to look outside. August started telling me (inspired by the bonfire holiday last night) that he designed our house to shoot fireworks out of it: “On a special holiday the house shoots out lightning-hot fireworks…”
He watched the Curious George Christmas special as I started to make baked salmon for my birthday lunch. He also played with music apps like Musyc. We sat down and ate lunch and he ate his whole serving of salmon.
We read Ben Braver, made the beds, then he read Samantha to me. I let him play Polytopia while I did dishes and cleaned. He then asked me “Do you like to fail?” He tested how I respond to failure by having me build a circuit with the broken capacitor. He had me pretend to be upset, and he talked about the poster we have on the wall with strategies for when you’re upset. So I was modeling and talking about them. It’s the first time he’s really been interested in that part of the poster. We actually completed a couple of circuits.
He wanted me to draw a picture for him (he refused to draw a picture for me through the day) and he brought me paper, a stencil, and a pen. I made a picture of shapes and he gave me a timer, which he extended with a two minute timer. I colored in a lot of the shapes I drew with markers. He really liked it: “Wow. This is really impressive. I love it.” We discussed the strategies chart more. Then he had me use his bus card as a credit card to buy things and he’d do the subtraction math from my credit limit. But then it turned into a funny game where everything was just above my credit limit, so I couldn’t buy anything.
We went outside and worked on the vacuum cleaner, getting the motor out and a couple screws off of it, but getting stuck on how to get it actually open. It was really dirty, so August took the hose to it and the rest of the vacuum cleaner to clean it all of.
Carly got home about 4:45. He did more buying and math with her. He explained how to do math in the billions etc. using the basic numbers. They were doing multiplication and division and going into negatives. And he used tape to hang up the picture I made for him.
I finished making dinner for me and Carly and we all ate. August told us how “There’s an asteroid that’s going to hit the earth in 1400 years.” I was packing up the backpack and he got his headphones and turned them into a necklace again, putting his animal-summoning paintbrush on it “In case I want to eat a little rat.” He was saying ‘attracting’, and Carly taught him what ‘summon’ means.
We drove to Gabi’s office. We were meeting with him and August watched Curious George and a Cat in the Hat. August fell asleep on the way there, and was still really groggy when I set him down and he started watching. After Curious George he came in and I went out and helped him find Cat in the Hat. He still looked half asleep.
As we walked back to the car he insisted Carly make the pie tonight and got upset when she said she wouldn’t have time. We got him to the car, and he asked to have Carly sit next to him, so I drove home.
At home he did his turn on his phone game since he’d reached his 60 minutes. I got him a little oatmeal, then my parents called and we skyped with them for quite awhile, discussing summer plans, primarily. August was doing math with Carly and she taught him about ‘estimation’. When he was still hungry he ate 4 pieces of frozen strawberry.
After Skype Carly took him up for a bath. When he came down he said he was lucky to get a second power to scan underground for bones. They had some cereal and milk. He asked her, “Can you sense I’m happy right now? How do you do that? So you scan my nerves?” Carly told him she could make ‘inferences’ based on evidence. August immediately asked “So it’s not 100% accurate?” Carly said he understood ‘inference’ better than some of her students. August talked about how Carly’s power (of inference) wasn’t as accurate as his powers. Her inferences are 75% correct.
We took him back upstairs and I said good night to him as she got him to brush his teeth. I left them some time after 9. They slept in the office on a mattress on the floor so they had the air conditioner. Carly asked him why he got upset he said something like “No hard questions, only scientific questions.”
Fireworks from our house:
[YouTube https://youtu.be/QWwo72DqC2Q]
Listening to music on the circuit set:
[YouTube https://youtu.be/24cA2DnNA6w]
He was up at 6:40. I tried to run up and put him back to sleep, but he was awake. I took him down and he cuddled with Carly on the couch for a minute. Carly headed to work and he watched Pink Panther. We had oatmeal for breakfast and he played a little Gro Forest. He was impatient to get going, and we packed up and everything and left the house at 8:18. As we walked out he said, “I sense there’s a little dew in the air.”
The parking lot at the train station was already packed with commuter traffic. Clearly not big enough. We parked in our now usual spot and walked. He said he released robots again. There was a blue team and pink team. One studied soy beans, one studied pine trees.
The trains went smoothly, and we didn’t have to wait more than 10 minutes for any transfer. We rode it down to HaHagana, then transferred to the airport, then took the new train to Jerusalem. Along the way we played Polytopia on the platforms, read Ben Braver, and looked out the windows. The train to Jerusalem is interesting as there are a total of 5 tunnels and some good views.
The whole trip took about an hour and a half. We got off, found the #16 bus and hopped on. Found out we needed to buy a bus card. The card and trip were 10.90, so not a big deal. Got off and walked to HaMesila Park, only to realize that said park is a 2km long old railway line converted to a trail. We were trying to find the chalk festival that was in part of it. I went back to the description and it said it was at reading station. So August and I googled that and ended up walking a kilometer to the south end. Along the way August climbed onto a sign along the trail and pretended to nap. There was a playground and reading station (a free library place, apparently), but no people.
It was now 11:45. August looked at a big book of photos, then found an old paintbrush. He was banging it on things, making different sounds, and said that each sound attracted a different animal. He that that this was actually his power. When I said that and eating everything, he told me he’d just been lying to me the whole time, and when I said I’d thought I’d seen him eating crazy stuff he said it had just been a dream.
I found a copy of Sylvain Cypel’s Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse and A Wrinkle in Time. I figured out that there was another reading station at the north end of the park, about 1.5 km back the way we had come. But he was done looking, and I agreed.
We started walking back towards a bus stop. Along the way we stopped at a drinking fountain and refilled, then we found a Big Apple Pizza and had lunch. He had a slice of cheese and I had olive. We shared what we thought was a bottle of lemonade, but turned out to be grapefruit, and we enjoyed that. He saw a machine full of bouncy balls, and, after making sure I had enough to buy another bus card for our ride back (we had no idea where to refill the first one), I gave him five shekels to get one. He got a yellow ball.
We walked up to the bus stop and had a few minutes to sit on the ground and play Polytopia. We bought a new card on the 14 bus and we rode it 20 minutes to the stop near the science center. August was very excited when I gave him one of the bus cards to keep. It was something, like a debit card, that he could really (potentially) put real money on.
It was just a couple minute walk to the science center. We went in and it was packed with school groups. As I guessed, however, it cleared out in about 10 minutes. August asked for money for the vortex thing. I gave him a 10 agorot, and he threw it right in the center, which we both thought was quite funny. While it was busy we sat and played his turn on his watch game for getting his 60 minute goal for the day. He then had me carry him through the hall of mirror things. We looked at optical illusions, including a couple we hadn’t really looked at before.
While it was still busy we had walked over to the big iron ball lay machine. He told me to go play by myself and he would just watch. He was pretty amused by that. We went back after it cleared out and spent most of our time there. We did the ball thing, him cracking loads of balls up to the top with the lift, and then played with the scale, with me lifting him and him lifting the backpack. Finally, he figured out what each handle did on the gear machine.
The other thing that we focused on was a new step challenge thing, where you step on colored lights as fast as possible. Reflexes and all of that. We spent 10 minutes or so on that.
He was finished, so we headed out. Last night, August said he was okay with walking back to the train station if it was 1.6km (the walk from here to school) or less. Google said it was 1.7km, but I pointed out that Google seemed to miss a shortcut. Now, he said he preferred to take a bus. Again, we had cards but no money on them, and the nearest bus stop was a 7 minute walk in the direction we were going anyway. So we got walking. August started a game of I Spy along the way. Also, he spotted a little column thing and said it looked like the 5 shekel coin.
The street I thought was a shortcut was, indeed, a shortcut. It was a road that went through a bus area. You couldn’t drive through, it looked like, but walking seemed fine. I carried him most of the time. He was still getting pretty hot and sweaty by the time we got there, but didn’t complain at all.
We bought tickets and put them on our transit card this time. Think it saves us a shekel as opposed to paper tickets. We went in and took the long, long sets of escalators down (on the way in we could only find elevators up). We missed the 3:00 train by seconds. Which was fine, as we were in no hurry to get home. We went back and August went to the bathroom (he had last gone when we arrived at the station—I later realized I hadn’t gone all day. Which means we should be drinking more water, but we refilled our water bottles through the day and drank from drinking fountains a cope of times. It was a sweaty day), then I got him a small bag of the Bamba (the puffed peanut-flavored snack) for him.
We got upstairs seats on the 3:30 train. More Ben Braver, some Dragons Beware, Polytopia, and looking out the window and we retraced our route through three trains to Bet Yehoshua. We had upstairs seats on all of the trains except for the ones between downtown and the airport, which are only one-story trains. We ate some more snacks and Cheerios, and every time we went in a tunnel he would ask “Hey, who turned the lights out?” At one point he randomly asked “Does Ruby actually not have an iPad?”
At Bet Yehoshua we followed the crowds and went out the west side, then realized we were parked on the west. My card let us back in the gate, but not out the other side. An attendant let us out the wheelchair gate though. We walked back to the car (August recalled his science robots as we did so) and we were home before 5:30. August had almost fallen asleep on the short car ride back.
I took him in and he cuddled with Carly. They then worked on a circuit. He said he was going to test how she dealt with failure by having her child a circuit with the broken capacitor. They went outside, and I started making a pasta dish. I made a version just for August with pesto and broccoli, and prepped the rest of the veggies to finish a version for me and Carly tomorrow, as we ate other things.
Back inside he heard the ice cream truck, then asked Carly to go try to catch it but fail. Really dealing with this idea of it being okay to fail, as that’s why he stopped even asking for the ice cream truck, as he was afraid that we wouldn’t catch it and he’d get upset. August asked me something about the circuit set, and I made a joke about doing a ‘circuit’ of the house, and explained that meant to go around something. A word of the day.
Carly went upstairs. He wanted to earn an ice cream sandwich, but needed 3 coins. He made the beds, then we read Bob Books. I told him about how he’d actually hadn’t read to Carly the previous night. He agreed to read extra today. He read 5 books to me: The Trip, which he added to his ‘read’ pile, then Sun Sets, Samantha, The Swimmers, and As Big As.
He got his ice cream sandwich and I did dishes. He then did more circuits with Carly, making one with a light. He then turned off all the lights, then thought it was hilarious to close me in the bathroom with the circuit set. Upstairs we discussed birthday plans on the bed and he flopped on it. He tickled himself with his toothbrush a lot. We read Lucky Beans. Carly came in about 9:20 and I left them.
He was up before 7:10. He cuddled on the upstairs couch until I got there, which had been what he has been doing. Downstairs I read a couple chapters of Ben Braver. He then continued to pretend that he could eat everything “even hot glue. That is still hot.”
He told me the first thing we do is add to our songs. We did that, then talked about our plans. I talked about wood projects for the fall, and he said we wouldn’t have time, as he would have to go to school. We talked about that, and he clearly wants to stay at home.
We played our few minutes of Green Planet, then he ate frozen mango and then oatmeal. He watched some Curious George, then we went up and played a Brother and Sister peregrine falcon game (where they’re on an island and find a baby falcon and raise it). He wanted to play Polytopia, but when I said we couldn’t right now it turned into a real life Polytopia game, with him being one of the warriors and us both dictating what was happening in the game. It went on for a long time, and we switched roles.
We went downstairs. He sat and sang as he counted his money: “I have more than a 20 shekel bill!” I downloaded the regular Khan Academy app and we did part of a math course together. He really liked it. We did adding and subtracting within 20 and adding three numbers. There’s a lot of reading involved, so I have to do it with him, but he also gets to see the math as it is written, which we don’t do a lot of.
Back on his iPad we made a new song. He did the looping and layering on his own, doing three tracks, then he had me sing our alligator song over it. He made a structure out of Duplos and had me copy it. The schnitzel was ready, so we had lunch, then I finished the copying. He asked, “Is 100 million a hundred thousand thousands?” It took me a while, but yes, yes it is.
We read a few chapters of Ben Braver. ‘Integer’ was a word of the day. We discussed our powers for a long time. He says that I have fire power and Carly can put her shoes on fast. His is the ability to eat everything, which yesterday we decided makes him a multivore.
We made the beds and he told me he had discovered the “Bullet beetle…it runs 150 miles per hour.” August was playing with Siri, setting timers of 1 second and the such, and he found a sort of glitch, where if he asked for a timer of “2.8 second” she would just ask “For how long?” over and over. He read me two Bob Books: The Trip and The Swimmers. He hadn’t eaten his carrots at lunch, but ate them before we left.
We walked to school and went to the cafeteria. He got a small muffin with chocolate chips and I got a small cappuccino. We sat and played Polytopia. At 3 we went to the library. He jumped off the platform onto the carpet of squares. I got a new Elephant and Piggie book, he found the Fix It, Sam book he likes on the preschool tables, and we also got Dragons Beware to read again.
We sat and read part of Dragons Beware, then I got a message from Heather saying they were available until 4. We went and found them, and I went with the three kids to the big playground while Heather worked on the show. They all went to the climbing stuff first and were practicing their climbing. They kept telling me to “Watch this!” but I managed some reading. They then all played together on the big structure. August found a little toy truck in the play structure. He showed it to me, and he wanted to give it to the PKB kids playing with other cars we had seen. August was a little too shy to do it himself, although he walked over to them. But a couple minutes later he came and told me he had given it to Zoe to give to them. That was very nice of both of them. He kept looking at the time on his watch and saying things to Eve like “Nine more minutes for play time. Right? Your mom said you’d go at 4 o’clock.”
I had them all with their shoes on and ready to go when Heather got there at 4. Carly had decided to drive home at 3 but said she could come back to pick us up. We called her, then sat in the shade for a few minutes and played Polytopia, then went out and waited on the street until Carly showed up.
At home I went up to work after awhile. They were outside, and making paper airplanes. I think they threw one over the fence once. Maybe it was a card for Mikaela, as I think I saw August writing on it. He did more music in Tabletop. Later he told me he had read to her as well, but it turns out he had not. Perhaps he was thinking of yesterday. Carly read all of Lawnmageddon.
I came down at 7:30. They had had fried rice and then a swedish pancake, then she made him another swedish pancake when he was still hungry. She went up for a shower. He went to the bathroom and made the perfect travel bag for me. He said it had no weight, even with stuff in it. So it could float in the air and I could push it along. We did more Khan Academy, taking a test for earlier stuff that he already knew, and doing some more new stuff. In Skybrary I read Lucky Beans and Left, Right Emma.
Carly took him up for a bath. I did the dishes. She decided to put him to sleep. I first read The Butter Battle Book and then, as fast as I could, which August found funny, “Too Many Daves”. I left them right at 9. Heard him talking for at least awhile.
He was up at 7:40. We sat together on the upstairs couch, then headed downstairs. I read part of Ben Braver and the Incredible Exploding Kid He asked, “What’s the name for a trillionth of a second?” He was thinking of picosecond. I then remembered the card I had put under his pillow. We went up and he found it. He liked the card, and was very excited by the 5 shekel coin. Back downstairs I made a chart of fractions of a second, down to quintillionths (attoseconds), and then he played Dragonbox Little Numbers.
We then played with the art supplies he had chosen last night. Actually, we never got around to using the watercolors, as he made up a game: “So Brother is just colouring a nice picture for their neighbor Mikaela, and while he holds it up to look at it a woodpecker pecks a hole right in it. “ It was the blue-footed, blu-beaked one from a week or two ago.
He did like the art pencils and we used those for a few minutes, with him writing big numbers, and working on getting his commas in the right places (he drew them more like 1s at first), then we went upstairs to continue the Brother game. Brother was learning to make a paper airplane (“trying to make an airplane in the late evening”) but it was crushed by the tiger cub. Brother also found a cheetah cub and it became best friends with the tiger cub. Brother had to go earn money to pay for the medical supplies he used on the cheetah to make it better, then also to pay for more origami supplies. We paused to read Creepy Pair of Underwear to the cheetah.
Then, when brother was going to work for a farmer, cleaning up animal enclosures, and needed to earn 30 shekels at 2 shekels an hour, August did the division in his head and told me it would be 15 hours, and explained his thinking on it.
We eventually went downstairs and did our Green Planet time. I mentioned something about the Tooth Fairy, and August said, “The tooth fairy, you know, isn’t real.” We found the flash cards in the Bob Books container and he read through them. There were three that he had difficulty with: then, bring, and little. He was doing more multiplication and division in his head today, which means he’s now working on 3rd grade stuff, at least in arithmetic.
Lunch was ready, so we ate that: schnitzel, broccoli, and frozen strawberries. We played a little Polytopia, then went back to the Brother game. This time, Brother earned a 5 shekel coin, then the tiger cub swallowed it. He had to give it an x-ray, then get the coin out of the poop. When he got a second coin, the cheetah got in on the action. Every time he would try to hide the coins or keep them away from the cubs it would happen again.
He read to me, reading Plums andWilly’s Wish. The first went in his stack. He wanted to go buy a snack with his shekels, so first he exchanged one of his 5 shekel coins and some ones for a 10 shekel coin. He played some Dragonbox Little Numbers, then when we got ready to go he put the coin in his back pocket of his shorts. He was a little afraid it would rip his pocket, since the material was soft.
We left t 2:40 and drove to school. As we were getting out of the car he told me that Lydia once got upset at a meeting when someone said the same idea that she had. He explained it as a kind of stealing from her.
We went to the cafeteria and he used his 10 shekel coin to get a chocolate muffin. It was 8 shekels and the cashier asked how much change August should get and August said “Two!” He ate the muffin, then, a few minutes after the bell, we got changed and headed to the pool.
The pool was nice and empty. A woman and her third grade daughter showed up. August heard the girl talking and she said she got to the wall “literally five seconds ago.” August asked, “Did she say literally?” We played in the pool for quite awhile, with him kicking around on the kickboard (he said he’d think about trying his floaties off soon) and pulling me around. then, over by the stairs, he made up a game when I tried to shoot the kickboard up on the land. I got different points for how successful I was, then more for going through the space in the railing, then even more for going over. I kept playing, with him raising how high I was supposed to get, until we got up to 11,474.
As we got out, he told me of the 8000 mirror maze he has in his lab. The mirrors are so hard to see you run into them, but he said they were cushioned. I used the phrase “Cushion the blow” and he asked what that means.
We headed home. August asked a math problem and I used the calculator on my phone. On the drive back he used it, doing math problems. We got home close to 5. Carly was making dinner: little cheese pastas and baked cauliflower. August had an idea for a game and set up the wooden chair frame for a game similar to the one we were doing at the pool, with different points for the different parts you got it through. Carly went out and played it with him while I got changed. When Carly questioned his decisions on the game, he said she had to restart with zero points. Carly said she should teach him about authoritarianism.
He came in and said he had the idea for another Brother game. We went upstairs and he needed something to throw. He found his bag of hair, and Brother was working on his overhand throwing, and the cubs were getting in the way. Then, the woodpecker (which had become friends with the cubs) got hurt when they got too rough. Brother took care of it, but a zookeeper from the zoo wanted the rare animal and stole it. Brother ended up stealing it back, and there were a few rounds of that.
We went downstairs to check on dinner. August wanted to check something on my calculator again, and I got him his phone. He hadn’t used the calculator on it before, and he ended up sitting on Carly’s lap for 15 or more minutes, typing in problem after problem in as she gave him word problem involving multiplication and addition and decimals. He also found the calendar and realized that June 16th is Father’s Day. So our countdown is to both summer and Father’s Day.
We had dinner: little cheese pastas and cauliflower. He wasn’t big on the pasta, but ate lots of cauliflower. We had the last of the pie and ice cream, and I figured out our travel options for our adventure to Haifa later this week. August wanted the same weather app that I have (Carrot Weather) on his phone, so I installed it and set it to be less sarcastic than on mine.
He did art on my iPad after I wrote out a bit math problem out for him using it. We then tried out the Prodigy Math app for the first time. It is a wizard adventure game that incorporates math, so perfect for him. It started throwing a lot of geometry at him, so words like ‘vertices’, ‘acute’, ‘obtuse’, ‘perimeter’ and ‘area’ were words of the day.
We went upstairs and did a quick bath. I had given him 5 free minutes of Polytopia since we had run out of time for him to earn two more coins and 30 minutes of iPad time (he’d had plenty anyway, although it was good time with us learning together). All went well until the end of the 5 minutes and he was getting upset. Carly took over, and he calmed down and brushed his teeth. He had planned to read to Carly before bed though, and decided not to. He asked her, “How many 2s are in a trillion?” I asked him, “What’s have a trillion?” He replied, “500 billion?” He then went and did it for hundred, thousand, million, nonillion etc.
I left them about 9:15.
He thought that fairies could only be girls, as the two examples he’s seen of the tooth fairy are on StoryBots (where he says she wears pink and has a pink wand) and somewhere else. Carly told him that the fairies take turns and the next one would be a boy. August and I talked later, and when he told me he had always seen girl tooth fairies, I agreed that the tooth fairy is usually a girl, but that there are all sorts of fairies.
