Day 16 - Nostalgia

• Taught Florian how to ride standing up on the bicycle today. Another trick to motivate children is telling them it took you one week to learn that. He was very proud that he managed within a couple of tries.
• Florian often listens to a "Maya the Bee" CD he got as a present. A big coincidence is that when I was a kid I had exactly the same stories on a vinyl LP. Listening to the same stories again gave me a strange feeling of nostalgia. Even though the stories are not very exciting by adult standards, when listening to them I could still vividly remember the emotions I had as a six year old as well as the old apartment we lived in, and I could recognise the parts where I didn't understand what was going on at that time, which now were plain obvious. I guess my grandchildren will listen to the same stories again, then maybe through some neuro interface :)
  
• For lunch we visited my mum and celebrated her birthday in the same restaurant as last time. No incidents today except for Matthias running full speed into a table leg (little bleeding from the front teeth, nothing major), Florian getting a lollipop, breaking it while unwrapping, big tears, gets a new one, half way through, breaks it again, big tears.
• At my mum's place I found something very cool which made me feel nostalgic again. 1995/96 I studied in Strasbourg, France for a year. I've kept all the letters I got during that time in a box and have stored it in my old room, so I've completely forgotten about it until I rediscovered the box today. I read through a couple of the letters, most from people I haven't seen in ages. It reminded me of the timecapsules you sometimes see in some US movies. The weird thing is that nowadays something like that box wouldn't be possible anymore, since everyone spending a year as an exchange student abroad will communicate with his friends via email, instant messanging, skype, SMS, etc. None of those conversations are kept these days. That's kind of sad and makes me happy that I was lucky enough to spend a year abroad before the communication overkill started.
  
• Something else I noticed again when reading through the old letters is that the younger you are the more you think that you know how life works. When you are a teenager you think you are already really mature even though you are super insecure, later in your twenties you know you've got it all figured out. While right now I know that actually I don't know anything and just let everything happen and let life surprise me.
• Toddlers also think they've got life figured out and that's very funny. For example when I'm going cycling with Florian now I push Matthias on his tricycle (which has got a handle) and he's always shouting "I'm also a super cool cyclist". Normally I answer: "Yeah, right, your feet don't reach the pedals yet, you don't hold the handle bar, you simply sit around like Jabba the Hutt and are being pushed!". He then replies: "I'm also a super cool cyclist!!". There's tons of more examples when Matthias thinks he already has mastered everything in life, stuff like "I've got two feet", "Poo is from the bum, pee from the front", "I just carressed the carrot" (he's very nice to vegetables, doesn't even eat them). I'll give more quotes when I can remember.
• Lunch: nice Chinese restaurant food, Dinner: Spaghetti Bolognese