At the end of G’s informal classroom graduation, the teacher give each student a certificate of achievement. Together with that the teacher highlighted one thing that each child is particularly good at. Some are expected, “funniest”, “always first to arrive”, “great speller”. It is not easy to come up with eighteen things that make each parent proud and somewhat behold to the truth.
G’s specialty was something of a surprise: he is the “connection king” — how he always come up with a connection from one story to another, or from one topic to another during class activity. I am not sure the room gets what this means, but I sure do.
And I am extremely proud. One of my heroes explain the importance of being able to make connections in the quote below:
To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something — chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.
That was a wired magazine interview of Steve jobs. The person that brought Apple from near death to being the top of the world.
I have long believe the importance of being able to see connections between things, before I read the Steve Jobs quote. A much earlier quote, from 1989 said it also:
I begin to wonder how many things that I know would suddenly take on new meanings if only I could perceive the connections. I forsee a restless night.
– Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, Discovery 1989 pg 265.
Therefore I am glad that G is showing this trait now. This will take him many wonderful places.
May is always a fun month. Weather turns nicer (eventually) and we get some outdoor playtime. M being her athletic self got really into jump rope. Within a few weeks, she went from barely able to do it to jumping non-stop for 20, 30 jumps, and now she is working on going backwards. She really enjoy doing it — seems like she spends all her free time jumping room in the house. I wonder if it is the fun part of it that keeps her going? Or the sense of achievement.
G being his non athletic self, is moaning about having to take Gymnastics each week. His muscle sore “so much” after his first week back to class. And during class you can tell he is trying his best to not do anything — that is hard since there are only two of them in the boys section. His teacher is pretty good and like it or not, he is building up some muscles.
One thing that surprised me though — we went to the park one day and he insisted we bring a ball. We play catch with a kids size soccer ball. Surprisingly, he can catch the ball very well. He said he has been playing that a lot during recess. There is some hope after all.
We are at the end of May and finally I have time, and the weather cooporated. We went to Home Depot to pick up plants and herbs and flowers for the balcony garden. M and G helped me plant all the stuff. Then they play with the water hose, spraying each other until they are both soaked. They so enjoy it.
M is usually a very good sport, but when she is tired she gets cranky. So let’s end with a funny moment this evening: We are all watching a silly comedy on netflix. M and I are sitting together under a blanket. We got pretty comfortable and I didn’t realized that she was completely leaning on me. I had to get up to do something, and the minute I got up, she “fell over”. She cried out “I can’t get up!” and it as so funny that I had to laugh. Unfortunately that sent her into a moment of embarrassment and she started crying. Luckily she recovered quickly and we ended the evening in a good note.
That’s right. My six years old asked me to explain how to buy a house. “After you buy a house, do you still have to pay money each month?” he asked. He must have heard us talking about monthly budgets. I explained the concept of mortgage, and monthly expenses associated with home ownership.
Then he asked “How much is a car?”. That leads to a discussion of a “loan”. “Mortgage is a type of loan” I said.
Finally, we talked about work. “If you have all the money in the world, would you still need to work so hard?”
The answer: I may not need to work as hard, but I really enjoy what I do. I enjoy making a contribution to the world. Helping people makes me happy. You will not be happy if you do nothing every day.
I hope they understand.
Don’t know what drove this today. M wanted to shower by herself. With minor supervision she did great. I applied a little subtle peer pressure, and G did the same. Another milestone reached.
M has an amazingly good grasps of business economics. We drove pass our favorite family restaurant today. I told them that the business is closing. M was disappointed of course. This conversation follows:
M: why did they close.
Me: they do not make enough money.
M: I see lot of people there when we were there!
Me: they still done have enough customers.
M: I know, we can pay them more money each time.
Me: I don’t think that will be enough.
M: they can charge everyone more money?
Me: I don’t think people will pay that.
M: how about they make all their other restaurants pay their money to this one?
Great biz thinking I’d say.
M’s baby teeth were badly damaged due to bad feeding habbits. That’s for another post. When she was 3 she had real surgery to have several teeth taken all out at once. It was quite an experience for all of us.
Now that she is older, she started to wonder — would those lost teeth be eligible to be “reimbursed” by the tooth fairy? So, while we are still in the “we believe in Santa” phase, I told her I would email the Tooth Fairy and ask.
Today at work, I printed out a formal looking letter (thank you Apple Pages templates), as a official reply from the Tooth Fairy Bureau. TF apparently acknowledged the tooth loses, gave M extra quarters, and threw in a few requests about the need to keep her teeth clean and health. As a addition note, TF said “our record showed that your brother has not been taking good care of his teeth. Please also tell him to take care of his teeth.”
This worked wonder. M was very grateful, and promptly wrote a thank-you email back to TF. At night time she brushed her teeth extra hard, while mumbling to me that “I am taking care of my teeth!”
Driving in our minivan, Mommy threw some cookie crumbs out of the window. M cried — “Mom, don’t pollute!” When Mommy declare that cookie crumbs are probably just going to be eaten by birds, M suggested “Ok. But if you throw the tissue out then it would be pollution”. G quickly added “And if you throw the kids out that would be illegal”.
Apparently Mommy often threaten to throw the kids out of the car if they don’t calm down.
G has been creating some amazing books for the last few months. Yesterday I decided to setup a template for him so that he can make his books a little neater. You can download my PDF template here.
Looking at his latest creation, I realized he wrote “Written and Illustrated by G”, but “decided words by M”. Then I realized he always thought “Author” means the physical act of writing, not the creative writing. For this story he was creating this book with input from M so he wrote “decided words by M”.
I just found out that M has encouraged the two of them to have all sorts of monetary tranactions, using coins from their piggy banks. M has been selling things to G, and sometimes paying G to do things for her. Listening to their transactions cracks me up. At this age of course they don’t really assert the correct value of each transactions. I wish I have a log of their transactions and show them after a few years!
We were are the Museum of Science’s special Raptile exhibit having fun. G was running from one station to another looking at different displays. I saw him running towards something on the sidewall and then did a quick 180 degree turn, and laugh. “This one got me” he said. I looked — he was running towards a big “in case of fire break glass” case, thinking it was another exhibit.
Now if we were at the museum of modern art then we have to double check.
