Future Etsy shop owner

Other day it was about 10:00PM and Sandhya informed Avni that tomorrow morning there is a biking adventure planned for it is B's birthday and since it is biking it has to be fairly early in the morning. While Sandhya and me were thinking of what can we gift the birthday person and found an almost new unopened/unread book from our book shelf. Avni had a different idea of her own. 

She asked for an empty glass jar and got down some color papers and glue and within about 20-25 minutes she made this colorful pencil stand as a birthday gift. 

 

 

More than one way to show and tell

A very good friend of mine recently pointed to me that our pet Daisy is getting featured on my blogs more than Avni. Not that anything is wrong with it but it means my focus is probably becoming lopsided. So, here goes one for Avni without Daisy.

As part of her kindergarten vocabulary builder and associated show and tell we had Avni do the word “Satellite”. Explaining the concept to Avni and her ability to reproduce were both easily achieved. Now came the challenge of the show and tell. We figured since moon is a natural satellite of earth, we can do moon as the show and tell. But the question still remained how would we show the satellite aspect of moon or in other words it wouldn’t make sense to just show picture or toy for moon without showing that moon goes around earth and that’s why it is a satellite.

Avni had a clear idea in her mind, she said she would make a moon and earth and hold them in each hand and rotate moon around earth. I wasn’t convinced with the idea and asked Dr. Google for help which came up with some sort of kit to show this. Needless to say, Avni wasn’t convinced with Dr. Google’s idea either. So, we decided to implement on our own.

After almost half hour later we had the following, 

Even though the pirated version was more representative, we let her take her own creation for show and tell. 

Podcast on Creativity

I am a recent convert to podcasts, turned to them specially after my good friends visit from California. Anyways, off the many things I subscribe to now one thing I am regular with is Ted Radio hour from NPR. The podcast runs for an hour or so in which they combine multiple ted talks on a particular topic, in essence it is a superset of ted talks. 

One such Ted talk that I recently heard were on Creativity, they covered few different aspects for creativity

1. Not being selfish, no me and mine 
2. Ability to fall on your face and make mistakes
3. Frontal cortex of brain or as we call Ego which monitors me and mine to be off
4. Practice a lot of it also helps
5. Creativity needs to be nurtured
6. Showing up every day and being consistent about the process

All good points, one thing I really loved if they had covered was aspect of meditation. For a good meditation more than a few criterion listed above are to be met and in my experience more and more creative ideas flow right after a good meditation. As Shri Shri Ravishankar says for a good meditation, you want nothing, you are nothing and then sit with that attitude and meditation will happen. 

Our Art of Living center here in Austin do offer Meditation courses among others. Needless to say there is the Happiness Program which is also offered on a regular basis which helps one with the awareness of interaction between the different layers of existence.

On other hand people say, meditate on the issue that you want to solve and I believe that is the most useless thing to do.

With age does creativity . . . .

One of those blogs, that I am not sure of the content completely but still feel it is worth posting. This one is coming from my 4 odd years of interaction with Avni.

Off late I have concluded that structured education or molding the brain is to an extent detrimental to creativity. I have examples from my interactions and Avni's side to prove the same. In the end I am not advocating anarchy and a believer of structured education system.

Observing Avni, she doesn’t fret about color combinations, her approach is free spirited, a creative venture of mix and match of colors, in her own words, mixupitis is always fun. One can call it as festival of holi played on the paper. Can you imagine a princess face being painted tri color and still looking pretty.

From my side, an example is children books, specially the ones for the kids in range of 1-3 years old. They have large pictures and barely any texts and as parents we used to spend lots of time creating stories for those pictures and now as she is growing up we have graduated to more verbose books and end up reading what's printed rather than fitting creative stories.

I wonder if this is part of growing up. The free out of the box thinking that we as adults try to ignite in ourselves (every now and then) is already present in us as a child. If you are still not convinced, try convincing a child through logical statements (not arguments). One can argue that those solution are almost always impractical, but that's what being creative is, right?.

Last but not the least, the creative solutions moms come up to either feed their kids or to pacify them is clearly unique to every single mom.