There should be an App for that!

Okay, it has been a rant here that the kids are more interested in watching hours of Tamil Variety TV programs or nail polish videos on Youtube. 

Wile checking the history recently, had found that the two of them had watched more than 7 hours worth of Nail Polish videos on youtube in just one week! 

So when all other attempts to steer them to subjects like Geography and science during the hours after they just make it back from school had failed... there was only one thing left to do!

Find Geography quiz and science quiz apps on the iPad and play with them. It has been a very successful program, if one can call it that! The Geography rehabilitation program.. 

Today I watched with pride as Jr. correctly identified the Capital of Azerbaijan as Baku and the little one said Brunei's capital is Bandar Seri Begawan... Life has its little moments! They are able to identify capitals and flags reasonably well. 

Next step, they have to actually be able to point to them on the world map. That is a work in progress. 

All this app business gave me an idea, given there is no App for making them eat a quick breakfast. 

We should have an App that shows them a mish mash of nail polish videos, my little pony, good luck charlie, an occasional geo quiz question, and every 90 seconds those should be interrupted by a video of daddy saying "take another vai (mouthful)!" or "another spoon" or "chew and swallow" or "why is the throat not moving!" .. the App should let me pre record 3 or 4 such 10 second videos which the kids have to hit with a snooze type button (or we could rename it the "I ate" button. 

That app alone has the potential to improve the quality of our life 347.5%! 

Sometimes I wish my day job was to write apps.. would at least write some for my kids. Unless there are some crash courses for old engineers whose last programming exercise was with Fortran 77 or C++ in the late nineties. 

Let me know if there is a weekend course for app writing in the local area or online.. 

The evidence is damning..

Tonight the bedtime quiz started with me playing songs from my Youtube favorites and asking the kids to guess the singer. Not the song or raaga.. just the singer! They got 2/10  on videos they helped favorite.. That was disappointing. 

Then Jr. suggested instead of videos, I just show them images of the singers and they guess who the singer is... so I played along.

Showed them old photos of GNB, MLV, MS, etc. and they guessed better... 4/10! again on pictures they had seen before..

Then on a hunch, I showed them pictures of movie stars.. Tamil, Hindi movie stars.. They guessed everyone from Rajni, Kamal, Sridevi down to Vivek, Vadivelu and Sivakarthikeyan! they even guessed Shahrukh, Amitabh and Aishwarya!

So there is nothing wrong with their memory or their willingness to remember things.. the what to remember is being molded by all the TV watching they do with mom in the evening. 

So the solution to my problem is to make mommy watch educational videos with kids and maybe spend time on Khan Academy. No wonder they don't like to spend time with me when I show them "cool stuff".. I am competing with the entertainment juggernauts of Bollywood, Tollywood and Kollywood!

Switching to Organic food - Not so fast .. or easy!

A video is worth a million words..

After realizing that even Greek Yogurt is now Corn starch instead of Milk we tried to switch to Organic waffles and real maple syrup instead of the corn (GMO?) rich waffles and Aunt Jemina Corn syrup (which a lot of FB posters said was GMO corn based).. Day 1 was a struggle and we pretty much said "ok.. tomorrow is another day!"

Day 2 was captured in video. They are soooo hooked to the taste and sweetness of the corn syrup that it is not easy for them to switch to something healthy. 

I ended up eating the organic waffles for the last two weeks and it was okay. Yes, it tastes different and it is definitely not as appealing (as in, wants you to keep eating more!) but it did make for a decent breakfast and once I went to work, the feeling that I was still hungy was gone. 

This has nothing to do with affordability of the food. It has to do with additiveness of the food. Think this "bliss point" thing is a real deal!

For now, we are back to Aunt Jemina with 50% of the quantity they used to have before. 

A new home record..

The kids almost always beat me at a game of Ticket to ride. It has replaced sequence as the new popular game, thanks to the MIL who introduced it to us.

Today, Daddy answered back with a new home record score of 140 points by connecting three sides of the board... Yes! I went from Los Angeles to Miami via Vancouver and Montreal..

Just on a side note, Jr. made a 130 once and the little one made 135 once and they play like pro's.

Now that Daddy is on the same footing with the girls, the games are going to be interesting!

USB stands for..

One of the new pre bedtime activities with the kids is "Playing" Snapcircuit!

When we were little, our favorite playing was a "mechano-set", which was a bunch of steel parts with screws, nuts and bolts and we could make mechanical models of automobiles, airplanes etc.

Somehow we never got introduced to the electronics plug and play games. Now that I get to relive my childhood with the girls, this is really fun for me as well as for them.

Trying to teach them I = V/R and forward vs. reverse bias on an LED is fun. They like to do more of the mechanical

follow the book

make the circuit look like the picture

turn on slide switch and see what happens

method while I insisted on making them read the instructions first, then build the circuit and read the explanations for what they just did. After figuring out that they were in a rush to finish "making" all 300 circuits, put the brakes on.

Now the bedtime quiz is not what we call "Tamil Mirugam and Ragam" (the bedtime quiz was a hodgepodge of questions that were either about Tamil-English and vice versa translations, animal trivia or Carnatic Music Raga identification) anymore. Every alternate day is Snapquiz!

Questions are like :

What is S1 and what does it do?

What is an IC?

What is the unit of measuring resistance?

If you increase the resistance in this circuit from 100 Ohms to 1000 Ohms, what happens?

etc.

Both the kids are now very receptive to the Snapquiz and are answering the usual questions very fast. Now the question bank is increasing slowly. 

Recently I asked them "What does USB stand for?" after the little one mentioned that "all power comes from USB's!". Guess she is used to charging all the devices she uses using an USB cable and she thinks the B in USB stands for some battery!

Jr.s' answer? "Use it. Succeed with it. Bring it everywhere!" . While that was the most creative BS way of saying "I don't know!" she did crack me up and got a lot of hugs and kisses for making us laugh.

Then when they heard the correct answer was "Universal Serial Bus" the little one goes "What does USB have to with Cheerios?"..

We have ways to go and there will be many more "snapquizzies" in the days to come to figure out the relationship between Cheerios and USB.