Category Archives: Education

Sur Le Pont D’Avignon

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There’s a popular children’s song which mentions the town of Avignon, France, which was my family’s destination today. Do you remember the song?

Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse, l’on y danse
Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse tous en rond.

Rough translation:
On the bridge of d’Avignon
We all dance there, we all dance there
On the bridge of d’Avignon
We all dance there, all around.

It’s sung in a round, naming all the people dancing -ladies, gentlemen, etc, and is similar to “Ring Around the Rosy” with everyone circling and falling. The bridge from the song was built in the middle of the 12th century –cue the incredible departure into history for my family!
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Leaving North America and traveling to France becomes an instant history lesson, since pretty much everywhere you look there’s bound to be something older than Canada. And as you can see from the photo, everything resembles famous paintings, or just plain looks like it should be in a painting. Avignon is in the gorgeous South of France, with an ancient walled city that famously housed 7 popes before becoming part of France during the French Revolution in 1731.

Fast forward a little bit, and you’ll find my family arriving at the Avignon train station during an incredible one-day music festival –Fête de la Musique. Our friends from Vancouver, who are now proud residents of Avignon, picked us up amid the flurry of thousands of other people visiting the city for the one-day free fête which celebrates any and all performers wanting to perform any type of music or song. Pure chaos, but in a good way. We enjoyed a glass of chilled rosé at their apartment before launching our still-jetlagged (and train-weary) bodies into the dizzying kaleidescope of thumping music and people in the cobblestone streets.
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We saw all sorts of musical performers, but most of all, we reunited our daughter with our friends’ daughters, two of her first best friends. It was an explosion of hugs, kisses, and jumpy jumps as they danced and circled around each other, just like the dancers of that famous song.
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Illustration from The Baby’s Bouquet, A Fresh Bunch of Rhymes and Tunes by Walter Crane (1878).

Up, Up and Away!

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Off to the airport this morning, we are on our way! After planning this European holiday almost a year ago, and counting down the days for months on the calendar, it was finally time. My heart has been fluttering almost constantly for a week, and I’ve been jittery and light-headed for the past 3 days. Yesterday I walked into a pole, botched the laundry, and lost my house keys. But today?

Today’s the day to fly to Paris!

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Wish us luck, we have a long flight with a stopover in Montreal, then another 6 hour flight to Paris. We arrive at 9:30am Paris time, so we are planning to take the train into Paris, settle into our hotel, and try to stay awake as long as possible –here’s hoping! Tomorrow we hop on a fast train to Avignon for a week of adventures with our Vancouver friends in Provence…

To sign AIRPLANE in American Sign Language, one hand takes off like an airplane up and across body with the pinky, index finger, and thumb extended while other 2 fingers are tucked in.
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Potty Training and Beyond!

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Oh, potty training.
I get asked what the American Sign Language sign is for POTTY a lot in my baby sign language classes. Some parents are starting earlier rather than later, with their newborns and babies, like my mom-friend Lindsay Coulter, who writes the Queen of Green blog for the David Suzuki Foundation. Check out her son, Wyn, on the potty at 4 months old!

The sign for POTTY should be added to the conversation whenever babies and kids use the TOILET or POTTY -it’s the same sign for both. The visual cue (sign) as well as your spoken language (word) creates two opportunities for your kids to learn and follow your prompting about potty training. To sign POTTY, make a fist and tuck your thumb underneath your index finger, and then twist your whole hand at the wrist sideways few times.

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Newborns to toddlers, every child needs to be potty trained at some point. I trained both of my two kids at around age 2 1/2. One was easier than the other, but for both it took between 4-6 months until they were diaper free in the daytime.

Nighttime was a different story

Potty training takes patience. Even once my daughter mastered daytime potty training, we went through many, many, many months of nighttime wetness. It seems that little bodies that know how to go to the bathroom during the day don’t necessarily wake up at night to go pee. My son’s body had a long go of it, he was 7 years old before his body was automatically waking up to get himself to the bathroom. So for both kids I spent many nights washing sheets and remaking beds.

In the dark.

While my naked toddler sat on the floor shivering.

My history with nighttime potty training is looooong and wet. And I will admit, it made me quite cranky to change wet sheets in the dark while also trying to soothe my wimpering, shivering, cold child (and avoid the pee myself!).
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I thought I was so smart when I started double-making the bed: 1 plastic sheet + 1 fabric sheet + a 2nd plastic sheet + a 2nd fabric sheet. When I got the warbly call from their bedroom that they were wet, I’d pull off the top sheet and plastic sheet, get my kid redressed and back into bed, and throw the wet sheets in the laundry. Not bad, but my genius idea exhausted me; I still had a full set of sheets to wash in the morning, and then re-make the bed each day. Every day. And those plastic sheets were crinkly and made my kids sweat like crazy.

I wish I had been as smart as my friends, Liz and Amanda! They’ve created a brilliant solution: PeapodMats -a soft, terry-cloth mat that doesn’t slip or leak and goes ON TOP OF your child’s sheets. It absorbs and locks in the wetness within its waterproof backing. Yes, that means all you have to do is pull off the mat and throw that in the wash.

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Your sheets and mattress stay dry.

No wet sheets, no remaking the bed, only one thing to wash. Simple, soft, and effective. And it doesn’t take away the sensation of being wet on the top, so kids’ bodies still learn that they need to wake up. I love them for nighttime sleeping, and also for daytime playing, strolling, and sitting.
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PeapodMats are eco-friendly, washable, waterproof and useful (which I know my friend Lindsay will love)! And Liz and Amanda have given me one to giveaway!

Enter to WIN A PEAPODMAT of your own. Contest ends June 7th, 2014.

More info about Peapodmats and what they’re made of HERE
Photos by Tracy Paterson Photography

The Colours of Sports Day

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Every year my school-aged kids have Sports Day, and I have to admit, I love it. I have vivid memories of my own sports days as a kid – I absolutely loved the running, the games, the parade, the 3-legged race, the relays, and admittedly, I loved the doughnuts and hot dogs. All that still happens at my kids’ school now (including the doughnuts!), and it’s like a fantastic jump back in time for me. Literally. There’s a hilarious Parents-Only Sack Race & 3-Legged Race at the beginning to kick off the kids’ day.

Another big part of Sports Day is the COLOURS (yes, in Canada we spell it with a U, bear with me, my south of the border friends!) Each year the kids are assigned to a team with a team COLOUR. For me, I was always on the orange team, which was almost impossible to find clothes in, of course, but my mom did her best to make sure I had one tee shirt with some scrap of orange for sports day. Now that I’m the mother, it’s my job to dig through the dresser drawers for the right tee and shorts to match my kids’ team colour, which changes each year. Sigh.

You should know that I refuse to buy
clothes just for one day. I won’t.

And for some reason, neither of my kids has EVER been on the blue team. Why not? Blue clothes are stacked aplenty in our closets. And why hasn’t there ever been a pink or purple team? That would be handy for the two entire years my daughter refused to wear anything that wasn’t pink or purple. Instead, I’ve repeatedly had to find green, yellow and red, which are unfavoured, scarce clothing colours in my house.

Last year, Ian was on the red team, and I managed to find a red-ish tee in his closet, yay! But it was a scorching weather week, and as Sports Day edged closer I realized he would need a hat to stay cool and protected. That morning, digging through the front closet yielded a cargo green hat. Green! Dagnabbit, I needed something red. After some thought, I decided I’d paint the hat red. I know, I know, that is a pretty silly idea, but I was determined to use what we had. I didn’t have time to paint the whole hat, so I thought about something that could make the hat appear more red than it was, at least from the front, and I remembered something Ian loved that could ensure the hat was a success and worn for Sports Day.

TAH DAH!
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Not bad for an 8am paint job.

Sports Day has rolled around again, and Ian informed me that he is not on the red team again, but on the green team this year. Green.
Of course.

What lengths have you gone to for Sports Day colours?

For more COLOURS, check out these Signs of the Month on my website
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No Means No

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Kids have all the time in the world to keep asking you something even when you’ve already said NO. When I’m busy or tired, I often have far less resources -time, energy, patience, diligence- than my kids, so they’ve figured out that pestering can sometimes work. When they really want something, their enthusiasm and excitement for immediate gratification can eclipse my voice. So, saying NO and meaning it is a message I am always working on with my kids. Adding in a firm NO in American Sign Language gives my verbal answers a big visual punch to let my kids know I mean business.

My kids are 4 years apart, so when my son came along, I already had a very sign-savvy preschooler to help me teach signs to her baby brother. We started right away, and she loved signing our beginner signs like MILK and BATH and ALL DONE. My son is now 8, and the ASL signs I find myself using with him and his sister are more command-oriented since they are fully functioning people in the world: STOP, YES, NO, WAIT, NO, PLEASE, THANK YOU, NO… (did I already mention NO?).

No means No.

The other day after school at the playground, I noticed my son, Ian, and his friend were having a wild wood chip fight, scooping up piles of wood chips from the ground and throwing them at each other. They were smiling and giggling and having a blast, and neither boy seemed to consider what I saw to be massively dangerous, but I knew their fun could change quickly and I called his name. He was too far away for me to yell out a full command, so I just signed NO when he looked at me. He knew we already had a strict rule about not throwing wood chips but had forgotten in that moment of fun.

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Of course, right then as Ian looked to face me, his friend tossed a huge bunch of wood chips right at him, and my son quickly bent down for ammunition to retaliate. I called his name again and signed NO once more as he held an armful of wood chips, ready to fly. My face meant business and he saw that. My hand was also speaking loud and clear, backing up my voice and my face. So he dropped the pile of wood chips and stepped away, but I could tell he was very annoyed at losing not one but two wood chip battles that day -with me and his friend.

It all ended there and I didn’t need to explain myself or talk to him. I signed GO PLAY, and he ran off with his pal to the monkey bars. I felt relieved that I could shut down the wood chip fight without embarrassing either of us, or his friend, with just a call of his name and one ASL sign.

No means no (unless you say yes).

 

See more Signing Babies Sign of the Month
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I Heart Chocolate

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Oh boy, it’s almost Valentine’s Day, and I met a woman yesterday whose family is partly responsible for bringing me some of my fondest memories of Valentine’s Day as a child. Her name is Karen Flavelle, and she is the owner of Purdy’s Chocolates in Vancouver, a company that currently ranks in the top 50 in Canada to work for. Karen spoke at my mom’s group, mCentred, and she lit up our boardroom full of moms telling us about growing up as the daughter of Purdy’s owner since 1963, Charles Flavelle. Now, as a mother of 3 grown kids, she explained how she and her husband managed to raise them while also lighting their own work worlds in business and finance on fire (lots of planning, teamwork and strategizing).

Apparently, chocolate didn’t play much into her own childhood unless they had parties and dinner guests, but if she and her siblings helped out at the factory on Saturdays, they were allowed to eat the chocolate at the end of the day -tummy aches usually followed. After university, Karen didn’t start out her business life working for her father, but she did work her way up the corporate ladders at General Mills and Cara Operations in Toronto before purchasing Purdy’s from her dad in 1997. She’s been hands on since then while also embodying one of the most dynamic and business savvy women in Canada. It was such a pleasure to meet her yesterday and hear her honest account of both the difficulties and triumphs of being a woman in a predominantly-male field. One member of our group asked her about the proverbial “glass ceiling” in the workplace for women.

Karen replied that the idea of a glass ceiling is directly related to how you look at problems and that a ceiling describes something you cannot control. She prefers to look at difficulties as hurdles. Hurdles are just obstacles to get past: you figure out the best way to do that -over, under, around, whatever -and keep making your way.

Now that’s what I call great advice!

Karen brought us 2 of Purdy’s new artisan Single Origin dark chocolate bars from Peru (slightly fruity, intense chocolate flavour) and Ecuador (roasty, more fudgy flavour) to taste test, and also some Himalayan Pink Salt Caramels to sample. I was swooning!
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So yes, I got my chocolate fill yesterday in that boardroom with Karen Flavelle, and also some amazing nuggets of wisdom from a fellow mom and business woman. But I’m still putting together some little bundles of love for my kids for Valentine’s day -I like to give them a small jar to fill with some candies & those beautiful foil-wrapped Purdy’s heart chocolates, as well as a new book. After school, we’ll come home and eat some chocolate and read by the fire before (a super-healthy) dinner. I can’t wait!

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Here’s Karen and I signing the ASL sign for CHOCOLATE:
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Thanks, Karen! (And I think I owe some credit to my mom for passing on her love for Purdy’s chocolate at Valentine’s Day, too!)

Happy Valentine’s Day to you, and your lovies!

Year of the Horse (and Noodles!)

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My husband is half-Chinese, and our daughter was the first grandchild born into his side of the family so we were all very excited to celebrate Ella’s first Lunar New Year when she was not quite one year old. I didn’t know much about Chinese culture, but during my pregnancy I had looked at the characteristics of being born under the sign of the HORSE (which is also the Chinese zodiac sign we just came into this week for 2014). By New Year’s, Ella was eating solids, and her proud Grandma made an incredible feast of traditional Chinese dishes meant to bring us good luck and fortune in the new year. One of the dishes Grandma made that Ella could eat was NOODLES.

Long noodles [mee-yan]

Traditionally, long NOODLES symbolize longevity and are served uncut. If the NOODLES are cut, it symbolizes cutting your longevity short. Only I didn’t know that -all I knew was that mealtime usually meant me sitting next to the high chair helping Ella keep bite-sized foods on her tray and hopefully into her mouth. Uh-oh.

Ella was hungry by the time we arrived for our New Year’s dinner that night, and I had plunked her right into the high chair as Grandma brought her a dish of NOODLES to get started on. I reached across to start cutting Ella’s NOODLES and I heard a gutteral, “Nooooooooooo…. don’t cut the NOODLES!” as she spied me while heading back into the kitchen for more food. My husband chuckled at the puzzled look on my face, and I was informed about the symbolic nature of long NOODLES.

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Oh dear. I had cut some of the NOODLES before she managed to eat any. I quickly scooped up the short NOODLES and replaced them with fresh, long ones. And against my better judgement and experience as a mother, I let Ella eat the rest of the long NOODLES, and she was in heaven! Anytime Mom lets food be fun is great, of course.

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I sat nice and close to supervise the eating, and we giggled a lot together as she manoeuvered the long, slippery NOODLES. My husband took these photos to remind me of the time I almost blew Ella’s first Chinese New Years (there are some short noodles on her bib, but we picked up the rest and replaced them with ones that would ensure a long, healthy life)!

Somehow along the way, her nickname became NOODLE, and we still affectionately call her that today.

Oh, mealtime is always an adventure!

Here’s Ella today doing the ASL sign for NOODLES:
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And the ASL sign for HORSE:
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Happy Lunar New Year to your family from ours!

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Garden Variety Family Walk

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We wanted to venture outside today beyond our soggy backyard, so my hubbie & kids headed back to the UBC Botanical Gardens -our first visit since August. Earlier this week one of my returning signing clients had asked me about the gardens after reading my summer canopy walk post, and I remembered we still hadn’t gone back to check out the cultivated gardens. The canopy walk is now closed for the season, but the forest trails and formal gardens are all open and admission is FREE now until spring! Lots of great exploring for little feet. Here are some photos from our day visiting the cultivated side of the gardens, which were still showing lots of colour and activity despite being November.
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My kids loved seeing all the veggies & plants growing in the huge Food Garden area:
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Ian chomped on some kale, literally (oops! we realized too late not to pick!):
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Have you ever seen a cultivated fruit tree growing flat against a structure? This is the side view of a full apple tree: (how did he get more kale?)
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We decided it was WAY more fun to read the Alpine Garden’s trough plant names out loud like they were spells from Harry Potter…
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…Scutellaria PONTICA!!
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There’s also a beautiful outdoor amphitheatre:
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Multilayerd stone & cement walls surround the amphitheatre:
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My daughter was inspired to show us the duck calls she learned at outdoor ed camp this week:
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To end, we raced the Labrynth around and around to the end -no skipping over lines!
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BYE-BYE!

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One Fun Thing

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One of our bucket list items this summer was to visit local tourist attractions that we normally don’t have time for during the school year. Have you been a tourist in your own town?

We had started the tradition a few years back to choose one fun thing to do as a family before the summer ended. Over the years we had done bike rides, pool visits to soak up the last of the sun, evening ice cream shop visits, little stuff like that. Several years ago, our daughter started begging us to go on one of those red trolley tour buses… oh, brother. My husband and I are not keen on tour buses and we found ourselves saying, “Oh, yes, sure, one day we’ll do that!”. And yes, we managed to distract her and not do that for quite a while, but finally the jig was up, and it was her “one fun thing” end of summer wish.
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So off we went, and we had a blast! We learned tons about our city, so many exciting things we had no idea about at all, and we caught the bug for being a tourist in our own town.

Flash forward to this year, and we decided to embrace the not-so-sunny weather this week for our “one fun thing” before summer ends. We hit the UBC Botanical Garden and Greenheart Canopy Trail, a new local destination for our family.
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It was a great place to go to on a cloudy day because the trees protected us from moisture (okay, yes, I mean rain!) and the cultured trails took us through all sorts of wild forest growth. We could let the kids run and play without getting lost easily. There is a paved path suitable for strollers:
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This path leads to the more formal cultivated gardens -an Alpine, Carolinian, Food, B.C Native Garden, and a very cool labrynth -that you access through this cool tunnel:
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We didn’t spend much time in the formal gardens, but my kids ran back and forth through this tunnel a few times listening to the echo as they ran yelling at the top of their lungs,
“ECHO! ECHO!.. Echo!… echo!… echo…”

There’s also a woodchip path which leads you through all sorts of glades and more wild forest areas.
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Following the woodchip path leads you to the Greenhart Canopy Walkway which is a suspended trail system which allows you to literally go up into the trees and walk 75 feet above the forest floor.
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So, because we were now those people who liked guided tours, we waited at the trail entrance to meet the free forest guide:
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(It’s entirely possible we might have played leap-frog here).

The guided tour was fantastic! We got to listen to an enthusiastic university grad student who also had helped build the walkway tell us about the treetop trailway, forest history, the first nations’ uses of local forest materials, and lots of cool facts about the trees of this coastal temperate rainforest including western red cedar, western hemlock, Douglas fir, grand fir, and red alder. We learned that some of the trees we saw were over 400 years old, and some were thought to be close to 1000 years old at least!

I was fascinated hearing about the Taiwanese “Coffin” tree (a relative of the redwood tree which also grows in BC) whose wood is so hardy and resistant to rot, it was used for making coffins. It also has remarkable needles whose extra-thick coating of protective sap allows the massive trees to withstand the hot & sunny climate of Taiwan -the needles look green on sunny days but show blue on cloudy days due to its protective sap. We got extremely close to these enormous trees in the first part of the walkway, and because it was a dull day, we could touch and feel the sticky, visibly blue needles.
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You can see the Taiwanese coffin trees’ needles close up in the top photo above, and then how the trees look blue-er than the surrounding greenery shown in the bottom pic.

My kids were thrilled to traverse the swingy walkways (slightly more than my husband and I were, mind you) and we all loved the incredible balance of adventure and learning. We didn’t make it through all of the gardens, but we plan to return soon. The forest is an incredible place to visit all year around. (Please note: the canopy trailway is best suited for bigger kids aged 5 and up, in my opinion. It is quite swingy and a wee bit tippy.)

So there’s this year’s “one fun thing” before school starts and we ticked off visiting a local tourist attraction (without getting too touristy) from my family’s summer bucket list, too! It was very fun and a great way to tackle a less-than-stunning summer day. I was proud to learn that the Greenheart Conservation Company which built the walkway is a local Vancouver company. They design, build and operate conservation-based canopy walkways and other nature-based attractions around the world. Canopy Walkways are the among the finest examples of the global trend in sustainable and responsible tourism:

“Construction is as non-invasive as possible using the patent pending ‘tree hugger’ suspension system. The tree hugger uses no nails or bolts or intrusive fasteners of any kind, using instead, a variable tension system to provide the least amount of infringement or impact on the trees.”

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What one fun thing are you planning this weekend?

Click here to see the ASL sign for TREE

Why I Do What I Do

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To me, so much of the beauty of early communication with your baby is about ending the constant guessing games and being able to act on what you know -because they can tell you! As humans we all just want to be understood. And how beautiful is an exchange between you and your (non-verbal) baby where you know exactly what they want and can act on that expressed need? That’s what made me passionate about sign language. That’s why I started teaching classes to new families.

Many people ask me why I started teaching baby sign language. I always answer that it came from a personal passion for sign language, which is absolutely true. But, honestly? It was also kind of a fluke. I had worked with kids of all abilities when I taught preschool before having my own kids, but I’d never heard of sign language for babies until I became a parent myself. One of my best friends who was bravely blazing the trail of parenthood a few years ahead of me suggested looking into baby sign language as a fun activity to do while on maternity leave. So I looked it up and found a class and I tried it. The class got me out of the house, I met some other new parents, and it was fun. I learned quite a few signs, and for many months it remained a fun, light-hearted activity within my long days and nights as a new parent. Until the morning my daughter signed EAT.

At the age of 10 months, my daughter noticed a piece of pasta underneath our kitchen table. She pointed at the pasta, looked at me and signed EAT, and then dove under the table to go eat it! I was ecstatic to see her very first sign, clear as day. We celebrated and I started clapping and cheering, “Yes, EAT! EAT!”, even though I was a teensy bit appalled because I realized that noodle was from last night’s dinner. Oh well. I still considered it an outstanding victory in parenthood after months of not really knowing what the heck I was doing most of the time.

Her first sign was a day I’ll never, ever forget.

We signed and said EAT at every meal– “Okay, let’s go in the kitchen and get your breakfast, time to EAT!” or “Mmm, mommy has some apples, let’s EAT!”. Mealtime happened many times a day, every day, so there was lots of repetition, and I would also sign it when I was eating, even if she wasn’t joining me.  EAT was a natural first sign because I had practiced it with her a lot, and boy, was it nice to know what she wanted! Once she was able to sign EAT, it meant she could tell me when she was hungry or just wanted to talk about food. Prior to that, she and I could only play guessing games, which often ended in tears for one of us (and sometimes both of us). But all of a sudden, well before she could say the words for EAT, or MILK, or HUNGRY, she could sign them. WOW.

Sign language is the bridge between what our babies can tell us with their bodies before what they can tell us with their mouths.

I started teaching sign language classes because I became so passionate about what sign language can do for both babies and parents –the possibilities are endless. I still use sign language with my big kids everyday. My background in creating and teaching preschool programs allowed me to build a curriculum based on what I had learned in my first sign language class and also incorporate my own personal experience as a parent forging a path of greater communication with my family.

And so, my love for sign language really started as a very personal story of the pull I felt as a new mom who couldn’t stand not knowing what my baby wanted and why she cried. And my classes became what they are today –my passion. I’m so thankful I get to share this passion with you.