so, i’ve successfully made it through a few days of this blogging business. round of applause. but now, the question is how do i decide WHAT to write about and how will all my posts flow together? Will there be a recurring theme that connects each post to the others? as you can see, my over-thinking has no bounds. yet, i feel this internal obligation to start at what might be considered the ‘beginning’, hence why i began with my parents. i feel like i’m ‘raising a blog’, working my way through information i may have posted had i started this blog earlier in life. 

… with that said, let me make a connection between my previous post, about applied learning, and (you guessed it) my parents. my interest in applied and developmental learning stems back to my father and his style of child rearing. there is one story that i can tell to give you a pretty good grasp on his philosophy. 

story time! 

after my parents divorced at the age of 3, i lived with my dad for majority of the years between 3 and 7. i don’t think i could tell at the time, but my father was pretty scared of screwing this whole parenting thing up, and i think one of his most intense fears was - losing me, like, literally, losing me. losing me out in public, in the library, in a store, or in the woman’s bathroom. therefore, he resorted to a series of applied learning activities to help put his mind at ease that if i ever were to get lost that i would know what to do.

whenever i think back to the time i lived with my father i always remember him telling me ‘yasi if you ever get lost, remember to find a police officer or go up to the cash register of a store and tell them that you lost your dad and if they could page him for you’. and he would ALWAYS tell me this, every time we went anywhere. every. single. time. now, i also remember GETTING LOST A LOT as a child. -___- … yet the funny part was, i don’t ever really remember wandering off. i’d be at the library or in a store, i’d get engulfed in a toy or in a book, at one point i’d look up and my father would be gone. the funny part was, i was never scared, i’d just go back to reading my book most of the time. whenever i finished doing whatever it was i was doing i’d casually walk up to the cash register and tell them i lost my dad and if they could page him. and sure enough my dad would pop out of some aisle frantic and crazy about where i was and why i had wandered off. (slightly confusing for me but, i was young, what did i know). 

years later, i find out that my father used to just…walk away, fall back a little bit and observe, watch to MAKE SURE i was internalizing what he was teaching me, in different environments and different settings just to solidify the fact that he could trust his child to be independent, not to get scared and to solve her own problems wisely. 

now, many people who hear this story about my father get really upset. they say how could your father just leave you like that?! what kind of parenting is that!? … well, i think it’s effective parenting. 

and so began my love of applied learning…