Category: Children

Posted on

West Coast

DSC09086-2_12-27-2017_12-27-2017-Edit

French Beach is a special place for me. When we first moved to Vancouver Island, we drove there to explore our new surroundings, and this is where I was really struck by the beauty of the local nature. It is very much tamed by the park setting, but it doesn’t detract much from the impression. To me, French Beach has all the essential West Coast elements – waves, tall trees, large pebbles and driftwood on the beach.

It all typically comes with West Coast weather too – rain, fog, wind. Last year, just after Christmas, we decided to go for a drive along the coast of the island despite the gloomy weather forecast.

DSC09076-2_12-27-2017_12-27-2017

We thought that we would explore the Sheringham Point Lighthouse, which we have never seen before. It is hidden among the private lands, and the access point from the main road is not obvious. The lighthouse was a bit underwhelming, but still a nice find, considering how long we have lived here without being aware of it’s existence.

The weather that day, was a real gift, though. An almost clear sky without any wind. I was just a single fine day in a row of cold and gloomy ones – perfect for getting out to the coast. Being able to look out of the window, grab a camera bag and some sandwiches and be out by the ocean at one of the most beautiful spots I know – this is what I like about living here.

I am also conscious that I cannot take for granted how easygoing our six-year-old daughter is. The fact that she can cheerfully switch from her Playmobil figurines to the idea of going to a picnic is impressive to me. Flexibility. It is yet another thing I am learning from her.

C0044T01_12-27-2017-Edit

DSC09102-2_12-27-2017_12-27-2017

Posted on

Sketching at the museum

DSC09545_01-02-2018

We discovered that our daughter loved drawing in museums when we are on sabbatical in Milan last year. We would bling her sketchbook and pencils wherever we’d go, and she would stop in front of every sculpture to draw it.

Today, we went to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria to see the wildlife photography exhibit, and there were some interactive setups aimed, I suppose, to teach kids the “rule of thirds” of composition. One could look at an animal figure through a frame with some wire grid and sketch it on a piece of paper.

Our daughter was happy to draw the animals, and she thought that the frame was cool, but as far as I could tell, she did not use any composition rules. I am glad that she she feels in her element drawing in public. And I miss our Italian museum trips, where my daughter and I sat side by side, sketching something. We should start drawing together again, while she still wants to do it.

DSC06508_02-20-2017

DSC09615_01-02-2018

Posted on

Career plans

DSC09183-2_12-27-2017_12-27-2017

I am sitting on a couch next to my six-year-old daughter, watching “Whisper Of The Heart” for the n-th time. She asks:
– Do you know what I want to be?
– What?
I half-expect the answer to be “A Pokemon Master” (it’s this kind of period for her).
– I want to make books.
– To be a writer?
– Yes.
The context of the movie we are watching is obvious – Shizuku Fukushima, the main character wants to be a writer. Then, my daughter asks if I want to be a writer. I don’t want to dismiss it, so I really think about it.
– Yes.
Then, I think some more.
– Actually, I am already a writer. You see, I write all the time.
After all, my work requires me to write. But if I think more, this is not what she is asking. Would I like to tell stories? I think the answer would still be yes. Or maybe, because a picture is worth a thousand words, I would rather be a photographer? Oh, wait, actually, I am already one. You see, I take pictures all the time…

Not to take anything away from the “Pokemons” (lots of exiting career choices there), but “Whisper of the Heart” is a truly special film. It doesn’t stop surprising me. I might be biased, because this is one of the few movies that I pay close attention to as I watch it. I know that it is my daughter’s favourite, and I want to know what she see in it. There are so many fascinating details that I notice one-by-one each time I am watching the movie. For example, I am wondering, what is the significance of airships to Hayao Miyazaki? There is a blimp flying past Shizuku’s apartment at the beginning of “Whisper of the Heart”, and an airship plays a major role in “Kiki’s Delivery Service” – another favourite of ours.

DSC09209-2_12-27-2017_12-27-2017

Posted on

Cookies for Santa

DSC08965

I am quite positively pretty much almost completely certain that my six-year-old daughter doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. But she is willing to play the game with full commitment, without skipping the beat. So today we were doing the Christmasy things all day – hanging lights outside our house, hanging stalkings on the mantle, putting out milk and cookies for Santa… Our daughter even pulled up a rocking chair for him “because he’s old”. So I even starting to think that she might be believing in Santa, at least a little bit.

I think, once again, that she is teaching me something here. That this is the way to do go about things: not to deny some magic in our lives, but not to lose the sight of reality either – simply enjoy the process as much as possible. As Yoda said, “truly wonderful, the mind of a child is”.

And then it started snowing – for the first time this year, in our neck of the woods anyway. Isn’t it magical? Probably not, but we’ll take it.

After our daughter went to bed, my wife and I were wrapping the gifts and stuffing the stalkings. I think I kind of believe in Santa too – specifically, that it’s my turn to be It.

DSC08933

DSC09000

Posted on

Running with my daughter

DSC07378-2

Today, my daughter and I went for a bike ride/run to a nearby ocean-side park. I ran and she biked. I remember that the first time we did this was last Spring in Milan, where we were on a six-months sabbatical. We would run/bike along Naviglio Martesana. She could handle about 15 minutes of non-stop pedalling on her bike, which we borrowed from my colleague. In that time, we could get to a playground, where she would play for about half-an-hour, spending most of that time hanging on monkey bars. We would eat an apple and some pretzels, which was her go-to snack over there, much like “fishy crackers” are consistent favourites here in Canada, and head back home. It was hot. We strategically chose the path to stay in the shade, as we ran/biked along the canal.

IMG_0967 (1)

Today, it was cold (by Victoria standard anyway – about 0 degrees C) and windy. My daughter is stronger now and she has a bigger bike, so she can ride 30 minutes non-stop. Still, I ran at a pace, where we could talk without breathing hard. It was fun to run with her, but it was no question about playing when we got to a playground at the local park. It was so cold, that even stopping was uncomfortable. This is the thing about Victoria: the running trails around our home are some of the best I’ve tried anywhere in the world. The air is unbelievably fresh – I was really missing it in Milan. The nature is spectacular. The people are friendly and polite. Yet, it is just not quite warm enough to be truly enjoyable.

To be fair, though, I would need to compare apples to apples, or rather, winter to winter. The very first time I ran in Milan was in the winter, in the cold, in the dark, along a busy Via Melchiorre Gioia to Piazza Game Aulenti, which was the closest place to our apartment (that I knew of), where some stores were open late at night. I wanted to buy a thermos for my daughter to bring hot chocolate in to her ice-skating lesson the next morning (the irony of the fact that she came to Italy from Canada to learn skating is not lost on me, by the way), so I decided to make a running workout of the shopping trip. It was slippery with ice, windy, dark, noisy and generally quite unpleasant to run that night. But at that time, when we were without a car for the first time in many years, simply bing able to cove some distance on foot and explore the new city was liberating.

Today also, the simple fact that my daughter and I could on the whim put on the runners, jump on a bike and be in a forest, by the ocean in less than 15 minutes, chatting all the way there, was definitely a gift, cold weather or not.

Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.

DSC07216_02-22-2017-Edit

Posted on

Bathtub experiments

DSC08846_12-20-2017

When our daughter was born, a colleague said that she was going to teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. It certainly has been true on many occasions. Nowadays, I find entertainment in finding funny analogies between her bathtub games and my research projects.

Yesterday, my daughter took her camera to the bathtub to document her newest toy – a robotic swimming turtle. The turtle has a rotating propeller (an intelligent design, I suppose). We noticed that it was noisier, when filmed from underwater. I could not help but chuckle, because our research group’s current project is related to propeller noise of ships. Who said the bathtub experiments are useless?!

Seriously, though, there is something to be said about learning by playing and experimentation. For example, if I had to explain to a six-year-old why a propeller is noisier in the water than in the air, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Somehow, the fact that the speed of sound is 4.3 times larger, doesn’t strike a six-year-old as a good conversation starter. But a pink swimming turtle does.

Posted on

Frozen splashes

AA5Q5012_12-31-2015

I am waiting in the school yard at pick-up time. My daughter runs out with her class. Her face is splattered with mud. “I’ve been playing with mud!” – she states the obvious. Her teacher praises her adventurous spirit, and I nod my approval too – the only correct reaction at that point.

Then, the teacher says to me: “I’d like to talk to you for a minute.” Nothing makes you feel on the spot like a teacher calling you out, even though there is no homework question to answer (I am pretty sure), and she is not even your teacher.

It turns out, I am being invited to give a guest presentation to the first-graders about something based on my work/expertise and at the same time related to their science lessons. My research area is fluid mechanics, and they have been learning about craters on the Moon… I look at my daughter’s mud-splattered face and decide that I will show the kids how the craters are formed. They are like frozen splashes.

Looking at splashes caused by droplets falling into liquid pools has been a pet project in our lab over the past couple of years. It is a bit unusual (perhaps unfortunately so) for my research to be motivated by shear curiosity. As many colleagues in engineering, I suppose, I am generally more opportunistic when choosing the topics – chasing grant funding or cool industrial applications. In this case though, we initially simply wanted to take cool photos of splashes, but in the process an artistic objective got replaced by a scientific one.

Still, this request to make a presentation for the kids is the most valuable outcome of the “droplets” project to date, at least for me personally. Paraphrasing Bart Simpson, finally there is a practical application of fluid mechanics!

Splash

Posted on

Meta-creativity

IMG_0657_11-27-2017

We stop by a local cafe t have a cup of hot chocolate after school and before my daughter’s art lesson. It’s a boost of sugar-induced energy after an already long day and an un-rushed comfort of a warm drink on a cold (by Victoria’s standard anyway) night.

It turns out that her creativity is well primed for the upcoming lesson. The foam on the hot chocolate comes expertly decorated by the barista with a doodle of a bear. That’s what I call applied art! My daughter sees the bear and raises the stakes by sipping the milk carefully, so the bear turns into a bunny…

I simply cannot complain about running of subjects for photos when surrounded by creative people everywhere I go.

IMG_0658_11-27-2017

Posted on

Chasing novelty

aa5q6649_08-02-2016

My daughter wakes up and goes straight for her new toys, which we bought the day before. It’s set of figurines of babies in cute costumes and their pet animals. She is eager to involve me into the game, while I am making her breakfast, so she lines up the animals at the edge of the table and makes a math problem for me: how many of them have tails? I am a little surprised at this initiative. Normally, it is my wife and I, who try to work little math questions into our games with our daughter.

I think what sparked her creativity is the fact these toys are new to her. She absolutely craves new things. Of course, this is not surprising, simply because she is human. I’ve read somewhere that the humans are programmed by evolution to favour new over old. A new object that enters the scope of our attention is getting more processing power of the brain dedicated to it, because there is potential danger and opportunity in the novelty.

AA5Q5973_07-19-2016

I think it was Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who said recently that if you have a choice between being the best at doing something and being the first to have done something, choose being the first if you want to make a mark in history (or generally make a impact). Actually, I think it is a false dichotomy. You don’t have to choose, because in many situations you can be both first and, eventually, the best (or one of the best). But the point is generally correct – it is a powerful statement and an advantageous position to be the first, whether it is scoring the first point in a kendo match, publishing the first paper in a particular research area or being the first to apply a certain technique (either in science or in art).

Of course, being the first at something genuinely novel is difficult. One technique is to broaden the scope to include not only whatever you are doing, but also yourself. For example, Amilia Earhart is not known because she was the ninetieth (or so, depending on how you count the early flights) person to fly over the Atlantic, but because she was the first female to do it. We all have a combination of certain skills, and while we might not be the best in the world in any one of them, the intersection of these skills makes us quite unique.

So with the new toys for children, it is probably wise to maintain some balance. On the one hand, excessive dependance on external rewards or praise is not healthy. On the other hand, new toys, puzzles and books are clearly effective for stimulating thinking, because novelty sides with evolution.

DSC04792_09-04-2017

Posted on

Learning from the master

Autumn_Tree copy

This is a tree that I see from my office window. I snapped a picture of it with my phone and did the drawing afterwards on an iPad.

I have been learning to draw from my six-year-old daughter. Not the technique per se, but to enjoy the drawing process itself. Children are masters of having fun, and my daughter’s drawing is a perfect example. She enjoys it so much that she goes right to her desk when she comes home, without even changing out of her school clothes. It doesn’t bother her at all that she might not have time to finish the picture, that she might get interrupted halfway through her project by us calling her to have dinner. In fact, she probably doesn’t view drawing in terms of projects at all. It is simply something to enjoy at the moment.

I find that emulating this attitude is not as easy at it sounds. The barriers that keep me from doing it are entirely imaginary. For example, when I was on sabbatical, I found time to sketch almost on a daily basis. I enjoyed it a lot and thought that it was a great exercise for developing observation skills. Now, when I am firmly back to my daily routine, I objectively don’t have any less time for sketching. In fact, I have even more opportunities – all my art supplies are right here in my house. Yet, somehow I hesitate to start something that I might not be able to finish, even though there is no external pressure to complete “the project” whatsoever.

So I am learning this child-like attitude from my daughter – taking action for the fun of it and not worrying about the result.