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Showing posts with the label parenting

Movie Review: Term Life

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Term Life is a story of Nick Barrow, who plans heist, but does not participate in them. A failed heist resulted in the death of the son of a cartel leader, Victor Fuente. Victor believed his kid was killed by Nick and wanted to kill Nick for it. The movie was slow in the beginning, but as the movie progressed I started enjoying it. Nick kept away from his daughter, Hailee because he did not want her to be involved in his world of crime. However, he had to went Victor sent his men after her. Hailee did not want anything to do with him either slowly grew to understand and love him. It was interesting to see how Nick uses his understanding of human behavior to plan out his work and how he uses it to hide in plain sight - especially when he told his daughter using wigs and sunglasses will make her stand out instead of helping her hide her identity. Later she asked him to show her how she plans out his heists. He did that by describing how to knock off a bakery - number one knowi

It is Entertaining

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When we were watching Bedtime Stories with my daughter, she commented that the movie was stupid. However, rather than standing up and walking away, she continued to stay and watch the movie to the end. Many movies and television shows  that defy logic but are very successful. Take for example, SpongeBob SquarePants. The show completely defies logic, how could you have fire underwater or even water underwater. Yet, it is one of the most popular cartoon series at the moment. Entertainment is the key. Are you able to engage your viewers and make them laugh?  Messages do not have to be dull and blend. Some of the most effective communications are entertaining and memorable. Being able to do this effectively is an art form and can be learned. However, it will take lots of time and practice. Do you remember how babies attract attention even with complete strangers? Is it just because they are adorable or it is something else? Maybe it is because they are just curious and not sel

How to Make up Bedtime Stories

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It is fun to make up your own bedtime stories and it provides a great opportunity to spend time with your children. I managed to tell stories I created for seven months before I ran out of ideas and my children lost interest. ©  Jan Teunis  (Belgium) Topic The first step in making a story come up with a topic. Ways of coming up with a topic include: Think of something your children are interested in. Ask your children for a topic. Think of something lesson you want to teach your children. Use Words that Your Children can Relate to To engage children, it is important to provide them with things that are familiar with or can associate with. It will make it easier for them to visualize the story. For example, in the Moths and Butterflies story, I started with fairies. Children know fairies can fly and to them butterflies and moths look like worms, hence the story. I used a similar approach in Dinosaurs . Dinosaurs look like scaly and mutated version of animals we know today.

The Mom Song

I just attended a talk today on parenting and was introduced this outrageously funny video and thought I would share it here:

A Mind at a Time

I am currently reading the book A Mind at a Time (actually more listening since it is an audio book). I found this to be a very interesting book in helping understand myself and my children. A couple of things I took from the book are: Some people are visual thinkers - for these people, it is difficult for them to absorb if you provide too many words to them. We have three types of memory, short term (works only for 2 seconds), middle term and long term. For cases where the short term is faulty, it may sometimes cause the person not to be able to grasp input that is too fast. Sometimes, our memory is selective, so some people have very good recollection in certain subjects but not in others (I believe I fall into this category). Our long term memory is potentially unlimited but sometimes the way we store it may cause them to be unretrievable. Many times due to certain mental development dysfunction, people misunderstood. For example, a person may be very intelligent but because of prob

Bring on the Next Generation

As parents we try to instill good values to our children. However, how we do it makes a lot of difference. Parents tell their children, behave and be polite but then they turn around and shout and grumble when they are kept in the line. Parents ask their children to obey the law but turn around and jump the red light. litter. Parents ask their children to respect their elders but turn around and start scolding their own parents. Remember children do what they see not what their are told. So a reminder make sure to walk the talk for the sake of the next generation :)