Purposive without Foresight

Recently Kai loves watching Simon’s Cat on YouTube:

My father-in-law Günter loves cats all his life and has two cats around his house. He says the cat in Simon Tofield’s animations vividly capture cats’ character. He enjoys watching them too. Just coincidence, the owner of the cat in the animation, slim and tall, short-haired, big round glasses, looks very much like Dirk (I don’t think he looks like Tofield himself. Tofield is chubby and his hair has almost no length). When Kai asked us to explain what’s going on in the animation, we told him “Papa has a hungry cat…..”

Kai is talking more and more. When he builds Chinese sentences, he hardly made any mistake – there aren’t many possibilities of making syntax errors in Chinese – but his German needs refinement, just like my broken German. Yet another evidence that Chinese is easier to learn, more friendly to human brains! I just posted a joke he made today. He is also interested in learning Chinese characters with an app on my mobile phone. With the help of that app, he can already recognize more than 10 simple Chinese characters. I should spend more time with him on learning of Chinese characters.

In order to develop apps for iOS, Dirk got an iPad – ah well, my home is no longer Apple-device-free – Kai loves playing games on iPad. Many parents hate to see their babies playing electronic toys. But we are quite open to it. When used properly, iPad or my Android games help making Kai smarter and more informed. I’m thinking of developing an App that presents Chinese ancient poems nicely to children. Technically it isn’t difficult. But I know there will be huge effort on art, visual design, voice record and music. I do not have enough time for all those. If some company develops such an App and sells it for a reasonable price, I will be the first to buy!!!

The weather is very hot these days in South Germany. During weekends we have taken Kai to the swimming pool. He had not been in any swimming class for babies before. At first he was a bit scared but soon he learnt to enjoy the water. We always took him to deep water area, because there were usually not too many people and we could actually swim. Both Dirk and I are good swimmers, Kai was always on the body of one of us. The lifeguards saw it and did not say anything as they saw a baby appear in the deep water area. In the water, Kai likes to swing his arms like we do, and he giggles so much. What a lovely kid!

Tags: entertainment, life, parenting