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Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
Alex died yesterday. Very famous parrot, this was the first I had ever heard of him. This morning, Sylvia and I watched a really nice video from PBS: Scientific American Frontiers -- the last video listed on that page, titled "Animal Einsteins", is half about Alex and half about chimpanzees learning arithmetic. Utterly charming. When I got home this evening, Sylvia wanted to watch it again.
...And again this afternoon! Sheba the chimp touches the numbers she is looking at and Sylvia says, "Sheba always has to make sure," grinning.
posted evening of September 12th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
So this evening, for the first time ever Sylvia told me "I want to ride my bike." -- Til now I have been encouraging her a lot to go out with me and practice riding, but she's been a little reluctant. Well tonight, it was a whole new deal. She's riding! For as long as 6 revolutions of the pedals, by my count, before she put her feet down on the ground to stop the bike. A couple of times she was even successfully stopping using the brakes. So exciting. Update: Some pictures of Sylvia riding.
posted evening of August 8th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, August third, 2007
I am reading Sylvia Moominsummer Madness for bedtime stories now, not sure if this is the first or second time we have reread it. Last night, she was absolutely loving the bit with Snufkin getting his revenge on the Park Warden, it seemed like she remembered it very clearly from last time (at least a year ago). Anyways, I want to put together a Moominpost for KIDLIT but I haven't figured out quite what yet. It seems to me like reading diaries belong on this site -- after all that is the primary purpose I had in mind when I created READIN -- and that site is more for analysis. There should be analysis of this particular book and of the series in general; I'm not quite sure yet, where to start.
posted morning of August third, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Last night for bedtime stories, we finished Through the Looking Glass, which was totally enthralling for Sylvia. She's into pointing out the impossibilities of the story. What's funny: previously I had asked a couple of times if she would like to hear "Alice in Wonderland" but she always turned it down flat. I think the title just made it sound too much like a "princessy" story. But now she wants to hear it, and asked if we could read all of the stories in our Collected Work of Lewis Carroll. (I am skeptical how much of "Rhyme and Reason" she is actually going to want to listen to.)
posted afternoon of December 28th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, October 27th, 2006
I felt proud of Sylvia today -- we have been taking a beginning Mandarin class together and making gradual progress -- tonight we went to listen to the Music from China ensemble playing at Seton Hall. We were looking at the program (which was in both Chinese and English) and Sylvia pointed to a 小 and said "Look Dad, 'xiao'!" And she was right. I was surprised, because I had not even been looking at the Chinese characters figuring I would not recognize any of them. So we looked at them for a while and found a number of characters we recognized, mostly numbers.
posted evening of October 27th, 2006: Respond
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Thursday, July 6th, 2006
A couple of new pictures in the family album -- long time since I've put any photos up! There is a shot of Sylvia in her costume before her dance recital, and with her class ready for the recital. On the way home we came through Jersey City, and Sylvia and Kaydi found some big chess pieces to play with. On the 4th of July, Sylvia rode in the bike parade, and was proud of her prize ribbon. And here is the writing desk which we built a few posts down.
posted evening of July 6th, 2006: Respond
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Sunday, January 15th, 2006
It snowed last night -- there is not a lot on the ground but Ellen thought Sylvia and I should take the opportunity to head down to the park and go sledding. I was a little skeptical, whether there would be enough snow to bear the sled; but we set off. A good thing right off the bat -- I had forgotten that we got Sylvia a new sled last year, a very lightweight orange thing to replace the ponderous red sled we had two years ago. The red one would not have stood a chance; this one floated along under Sylvia. Good thing two -- when we got to the park there was a lot of ice in the grass under the snow. As it turned out the lightweight sled could move quite a distance on that thin layer of snow and ice. Sylvia was hesitant but once she took the leap, she was loving it. And no-one else had come out to go sledding -- I guess it did not seem worth-while with so little snow; so we had the big hill all to ourselves. This afternoon we will go ice-skating.
posted morning of January 15th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, January 7th, 2006
We went ice-skating again today -- Sylvia now a little more hip to the idea that she does not know how to do it, so more resistant to learning. But after sitting on the sidelines for about half an hour, she had a change of heart and tried it out. With Ellen in hand she made it around the rink (next to the wall, usually holding it) 3 times!
posted evening of January 7th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, December 31st, 2005
Sylvia has been taking violin lessons for a couple of months now. She seems to be really enjoying the playing part of lessons and practices, but it is hampering her, that she hates making mistakes and not being able to do things. (No diagnosis here -- I think this will give her trouble and need to be overcome at some point, and I think she picks this mode of being up in part from me -- just saying how it is.) Most of what she does in lessons and practices is of course stuff she is not able to do yet, so it gets frustrating for her. My current approach is not to push at all, just let her approach it from a place she feels comfortable, and this seems to be working out pretty well for the time being. Today she came up with a new strategy which I think may be very useful to her, which is to transfer her frustration with not being able to do things onto her bow. We are learning to play "I Have a Little Dreydl", for the seasonal tie-in, and she has got the sequence of notes correct but was not getting the meter. So: I tried explaining to her that the notes were played in pairs, and played it through exaggerating the pairs; and she said, "I know that -- but my bow makes mistakes." A little light went on for me and we talked back and forth for a few minutes about helping the bow to get better by practicing. And I realized, we should really be doing "I Have a Little Dreydl" in the same way we play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Litle Star", repeating a set rhythm for each note, that will be a lot easier for Sylvia's bow to remember. So we tried it with the "Elephants-and-mon,keys" rhythm and she was able to do it straight through, very smoothly. A note on the Suzuki method: I learned Suzuki violin from when I was approximately 5 years old until 13 or so (IIRC) and hated much of it. It took me until I was 18 or so to start getting back into music and until this year to pick up the violin again; in between then and now I think there are a lot of lost opportunities. I have thought all along that whatever I did, I would not subject a child of mine to Suzuki music instruction. But I had a bit of a change of heart last year or so. Whatever the faults of Suzuki, it does seem to have left me and my siblings, all of whom were in the program, with an abiding ear for music. So my new idea is to start Sylvia in Suzuki, but (a) keep a very close eye on whether she is enjoying it and having a good time, and make it clear it is her option whether to stay with it or not; and (b) encourage her to learn to read music early on. (Her teacher seems to be pretty good about not viewing Suzuki as a doctrine, just as a teaching tool, which is encouraging -- my memory of my own childhood experience suggests that this attitude is not universal.)
posted evening of December 31st, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
We have read seven chapters of Prince Caspian; chapters 4 through 7 are a story-within-a-story, in which the dwarf Trumpkin tells the children how Caspian came to leave Miraz' castle and to be recognized as king by the old Narnians. Last night as we sat down to read chapter 7, I had almost forgotten that this was a digression, and was thinking of Trumpkin's story as the main story in the book. Sylvia however had not forgotten. She said she was bored with this story as I opened the book; I didn't quite get her meaning and asked if she wanted to stop reading about Narnia and find a different book. But that was not it -- after a little back and forth, searching for expressions, she let me know that she was tired of hearing the dwarf's story and wanted to get back to the main frame where the children were. So, we skipped 7 and read 8 last night. Funny, this was a little like The Princess Bride except in reverse -- Dad did not have it together enough to abridge the uninteresting portions of the book so young Sylvia took the task in hand herself.
posted morning of December 27th, 2005: Respond
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