Lofty Kids » Parenting

Sleeping in her own bed

PK — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 02:33:05 +0000

Some of you may know that M, at this age, still sleeps with her mother because her mother encourages it. I have tried many different way to change this behavior without any success. M is the type of child that does not response to normal carrot nor stick approaches. She is smart enough and strong will enough to get her own way, especially with her mother’s backing.

Finally, Friday, is the first night she managed to sleep the entire night on her own. How? There is one thing that she really loves to do. She is very good at Gymnastics, and she loves it. So I found the leverage. I explained: no matter how skillful a gymnist gets, she is not going to be able to be successful if she cannot even sleep by herself. So if M does not sleep like a real gymnist (by herself), there will be no need for anymore gymnastic classes.

Of course, the next morning became a special celebration. I created a certificate for her, and we talked it up all day. Now we are on the beginning of night number two. Let’s see if this last.

Impromptu Lesson #121

PK — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 14:24:22 +0000

G is doing his usual creative morning activity — where he is the first to get up, and then quietly working on a project of his own. This morning he created a 2 1/2D landscape of a carnival ride. I noticed he didn’t put a title on the piece. So we google up some architectural plans and showed him how a architect usually label the drawing with the project’s name etc.

By chance the floor plan that I googled up is not for a normal house, but for a dormitory. G noticed it first — is this for a mansion? he asked. We focused on the bathrooms, which are clearly men’s and women’s with a lot of stalls inside. So I prompted G to look at the bathrooms and see if he can deduce what kind of building this is. After some back and forth analysis, he figured it out that it is not a home but some sort of an office. Then I pointed out the bedrooms in the plan and decided that it is some sort of boarding school.

The Connection King

PK — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:04:59 +0000

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.

Letter from the Tooth Fairy

PK — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 04:05:58 +0000

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!”

TEDx Raising Kids to be Entrepreneurs

pk — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:40:05 +0000

Have patience — about 14 minutes in, he start giving specific advices and to dos.

Also, teach kids these skills:

problem solving
to ask questions
to be creative
to lead others
to learn from mistakes
how to save money
to want to make money
how to sell
to ask for help
public speaking
to never give up
to see solutions

Japanese toilet training videos

PK — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 03:18:14 +0000

No words needed:

It is a guy thing

PK — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 03:00:07 +0000

We have always encourages Guppy to read. His personal library contains over 20 books by now. One of his favorite is a Disney Look and Find book. He gets oh so happy when he finds a fish or a boat or a ball in the pictures. But that’s not the guy thing.

I was playing with him in our bedroom. I sneaked outside to grab my tea, and on the way back I realized that he has not followed me out, which is what he normally does. He loves company. Instead it’s all quiet in there. Could he have fallen asleep? I don’t think so. I took a sneak peek inside:

He is reading. More precisely, he found a Honda Odessey brochure that we left on the night stand. He is flipping through it, studying it, completely engrossed. That — is a guy thing.

Which is cheaper, Cow’s Milk or Formula?

PK — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 02:09:46 +0000

After G reaches one years old, everyone told us that we can switch to cow’s milk instead of formula, once he adjusted to it. Some people also commented that it is much cheaper to use cow’s milk then formula. That seems intuitively true. But, don’t you want to really know?

Let’s work the math by calculating the cost per 8 oz bottle of formula/milk:

One can of Similac costs about $20 here. It contains 728 grams of formula powder. You use 8.5 grams per 2 fluid ounce of formula. Therefore one can makes 728 / 8.5 / 4 = 21.4 of 8 oz bottles of formula. At $20 a can, that’s 20 / 21.4 = 93 cents per bottle.

One gallon of milk costs about $4. One US Gallon = 128 US fluid ounces. Therefore, one gallon of milk makes 128 / 8 = 16 of 8 oz bottles of milk. Cost is then $4 / 16 = 25 cents per bottle.

So the different in cost is pretty high, 93 cents per bottle vs 25 cents. Not to mention, it’s quicker to make a bottle of cow’s milk.