Today we started up Zephyr's chatbot, gave Lyric some dedicated reading time with his 91 year old Nana, and took an architecture walk to appreciate the Beaux Arts styles of two Cass Gilbert masterpieces.
For Zephyr's chatbot we established a Facebook page and filled it out with an image of ZRR-Bot, which stands for "Zephyr's Reading Recommendation Bot", (pronounced "Zurbot", but you can call it "Zurby"). Zephyr drew a picture of ZRR-Bot for its image icon:
The weird string arms were something Zephyr insisted upon.
And then we started building a conversation for ZRR-Bot on octane.ai. Hopefully we'll have the start of a working model by the end of the week.
Meanwhile, Lyric was supposed to be reading with his Nana, but when we picked him up later we found he'd been unwilling to go there with her and resistant to reading. I wasn't thrilled with the effort there from him, but that's Lyric sometimes - he doesn't always perform on cue. I think if we keep at it we'll get him to a point where he gets into it.
Also meanwhile, my kitchen sink started spewing out black goo because of some plumbing problem, forcing me to pass off the kids for a little while to their grandparents for lunch. Yuck city.
But after the plumber came, we were able to take a walk (with Grandma Andi) to see Cass Gilbert's US Customs House and Woolworth building, and talk a bit about the architectural and sculptural details that made them great:
The three of us under the statue of the personification of America at the Cass Gilbert US Customs House.
I love these two buildings and the conversation they have with one another, and I was thrilled to share that with the kids. Plus it was great to see it with my Mom, and I even learned a new architectural term...
Oh yeah, and Lyric's tongue apparently caught on fire.