Miru

Fragments written for my daughter Miru, born January 2013. Observations about her life, her learning, her loveliness. I share stories about how she grows up as a bilingual child dividing her time between different continents. There are also reflections about parenthood, as well as letters that I write to her.

Miru also has her own website at miru.creativechoice.org

Math
Dear Miru, Your calculating is improving and you actually like it. We play with numbers together. Two times ten is twenty. Six plus five is eleven. Ten minus 2 equals eight. It is all very playful. You learn how to figure out calculations by making drawings of dots, lines, squares on the whiteboard. You don't ...
Kamiel Choi
, ,
Laughs, Miru, The good life
Fearless
Dear Miru, There lives an intuition in me that wants you to be fearless. I know that fear has a vital function, but it only works when you experience it against the background of fearlessness. When your mind is troubled by unprocessed phobias, the fear that might have saved you will become useless and irrational. ...
Kamiel Choi
Miru, The good life
On Education
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don't accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge ...
Kamiel Choi
Miru
At the Zoo
About a month ago, I took Miru to the Tierpark Berlin. When we entered the large park, she had no expectation and did what she does best: smiling at the guys who checked our tickets and nagging for a candy she sees in the hand of an other child. I, on the other hand, had ...
Kamiel Choi
, ,
Miru
Bird watching with Miru
Miru and I found ourselves on the church square in the village of Vimeiro in the Alentejo region of Portugal. A father and his daughter. In the portico in front of a church, where we sat down because of the shade we looked up and there were swallow nests between the naves of the dome. Miru ...
Kamiel Choi
Miru
Learning from Miru
What do you do when your two year old daughter points at your plate of spaghetti and says "papa" when you come into the kitchen? I was late for dinner the other day, due to trivial computer work that ate up my hours, and I hadn't eaten enough. Miru knows this exactly, and readily takes ...
Kamiel Choi
,
Miru