Day 11 - Success

• Finished the following task today: Teach Florian to ride a bicycle (without stabiliser wheels)! I taught him how to start riding the bike by himself without the initial push. Now officially he can start, ride and stop the bike by himself. That's cool, it's the first REALLY useful thing I've taught anyone :)
  
• When we started bike training yesterday he was not motivated at all. So here are some tipps how to motivate children:
  
  1. Play dumb (waiting for stupid remark), no I mean even dumber than normally. Kids like that. What I did is run next to him and pretend that I assume that he'd stop to let me rest, of course he didn't. In the end that made him cycle for 40 minutes. Afterwards I was totally exhausted.
     
  2. Dare them. We have a big empty parking lot 5 minutes walk from our place. I said that he'd never manage more than 2 rounds on that parking lot. He did 18 in the end! Again the hamster theme. Kids love running, cycling, swimming rounds and counting them.
     
• More success: Florian loves Ninjas. I've been playing Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox the last couple of days (a great game by the way). He watched me and now we play Ninjas with rubber swords in the garden all the time. For some reason he says "Rangers" instead of "Ninjas" though. I tried to explain that there is a profound difference. Rangers are nice people taking care of forests and the others are mean Japanese killer machines. He still prefers the word Ranger.
• Even more success: I've been cooking nearly every day for the kids. Today for lunch Matthias (without me asking) suddenly said: "This tastes very good". I was quite proud of that compliment.
• Matthias has been exploring the concept of ownership recently. Everything he sees, he needs to know who the owner is. M: "Who's frying pan is this?" Gottfried: "Ours, all the pans and pots belong to us." M: "Is it mum's pan?" G: "Ok, yes it's hers" M: "Where is yours?" G (random pointing to another pan): "This one" ... later ... M: "Who's banana is this?" G: "No one's banana it's just there, eat it if you want." M: "Who's banana is this?" Florian: "It's mine." M: "Where was it yesterday?" G: "What?!"
  
• The concept of ownership also extends to people. Matthias has a friend called Paul, Florian as well, but his lives in Hong Kong right now. M: "Where does Paul live?" Heidrun: "Who, yours or Florian's?" M: "Where does my Paul live?" H: "In Baden" M: "Where does brother's Paul live?" H: "In Hong Kong" M: "Where does dad's Paul live?" G: "I don't have a Paul, oh no wait I know a Paul in England" M: "Where does mum's Paul live?" ... So remember: Everyone needs a friend called Paul.
• When you stay at home with the kids then you turn into a search engine as kids are always looking for that one specific toy. So officially now I'm "google House"! And believe me a good google House is thousand times more useful than google Maps, Groups, Finance, etc. Heidrun actually is even better than me so I guess that makes her google and me Yahoo!