My fifth thanksgiving in the US-part 1

We don't celebrate thanksgiving in Vietnam. I started adopting thanksgiving and its atmosphere since I came to the US in 2007.  There are much more important thoughts shared later, but first of all, I'd like to share a couple of my personal facts about thanksgiving after experiencing it for 5 years. Again they are personal so that they might not be applicable to other people. Thus don't get mad/upset if they are not true for you.

- I've had turkey three times during thanksgiving, and I've concluded that a roasted turkey leg (in carnivals/festivals) is much more tasty and yummy than Mr.Turkey.  I can finish a whole roasted turkey leg but I can barely finish a couple of bites of the roasted turkey despite how tasty the sauce is. Sorry Mr.Gobble Gobble!

- I cooked turkey once last year and I don't think I am patient enough to do it one more time. To me cooking turkey is similar to babysitting, requiring a lot of work and attention. We had to keep "entertaining" Mr.Turkey by basting him while hoping it's a right amount of sauce and time to make him happy so that he could serve us good food. Same as you do with a baby. You have to keep "entertaining" the baby while hoping that the baby is happy so that he/she could give us a good time by not screaming/crying

- After trying different Thanksgiving food, my most favorite Thanksgiving food is sweet potato casserole.  I always love sweet potatoes and I can have it anytime. I usually use a "lazy" recipe for sweet potato that is to microwave it for 5 minutes. I make fried sweet potato for Dan's dad sometimes when he is in town because he loves it. Other than that, I never try any other "recipe" for sweet potatoes.  However, last year my friend, Diane, brought her sweet potato casserole to the potluck in my apt and I found it really yummy and tasty in a different way from my "sweet potato." I got it again this year when Dan and I had a late lunch with his brother's family and I could not stop eating it. This dish will be def in my to-do list.

- In the past, my most favorite thing about Thanksgiving was that I had a long weekend to get some sleep back. I did not really care about what Thanksgiving was about, but knowing that I could sleep as much as I wanted after sleep deprived days as a result from school work was enough to make me happy. Sounds weird but in the past, whenever thanksgiving came, the first thing that came to my mind was a bed and long sleep.

Later on and now, my favorite thing about Thanksgiving is that I have a chance to get together with some friends. I remember that the 2nd thanksgiving back in Atlanta, one of my school friends invited people in town to come over to her apt for Thanksgiving dinner and it warmed me up. I currently do not care much about what i have for thanksgiving or whether I liked Thanksgiving food.  More importantly, it's a chance that we can share our laugh, stories, and thankful thoughts about what we value in life.  I used to argue that we do not need to wait for Thanksgiving  to think about valuable things in life. Instead, we should do it all the time.  So true!!!! However later I realized that it's more theoretical and ideal. There are many moments in life we tend to forget and appreciate what we have in life. In particular, when we are mad, upset, or when things go wrong, we keep blaming that life is unfair and our life is full of crap.  To me, Thanksgiving is another chance to remind us of what we should be thankful for and what we should appreciate in life. Knowing that there are many invaluable things in life always calms me down and makes me realize that others should be secondary.

- My most favorite joke this thanksgiving is "who is never hungry during thanksgiving." I raised this question during the meal with the family of Dan's brother. Beyond my expectation, his 7- year nephew responded very quickly in moments that it's turkey.  And again beyond my expectation, his reason is that we eat the Turkey so that the Turkey is not hungry. So cute and very innovative. I hope that you all are able to find the actual reason for why Mr.Gobble is never hungry during Thanksgiving.

- Shopping: I went with the flow- going to a mall  to get deals at midnight two years ago. I swore myself not to do it again after that experience. We went to the outlet mall at midnight and we stayed there till around 5a.m. Until now, my bf still cannot stop laughing at what I purchased after sacrificing 5 hours of sleep to beat the crowd and to patiently wait in a long line (for both trying on clothes and checking out) . Yup I ended up getting the only 10$ shirt for me and a 20$ jacket for my sister.

I don't know much about electronic stuff because I never shop for electronics on Black Friday.  However for clothes, I think having good deals on Black Friday is more about a perceived norm rather than what it actually is. You are still able to get deals but not all good deals happen on Black Friday. For example Anna Taylor has 50% off discounted items and full-priced items on days other than Black Friday. This Black Friday, it's only 40% off discounted items and 25% off full-priced items.  The Limited sometimes has 50% off discounted items but this black Friday, its 50% off full-priced items. However, again you still can get a good deal. For example, Levi's offers 40% with free shipping that doesn't always happen.  Also, today I got tennis shoes for me and my bf with reasonable prices at Tennis warehouse that I long wanted to have . My advice is to be alert and do not be too obsessed with shopping on Black Friday.

Speaking of clothes shopping, I prefer to shop on the weekend right before Thanksgiving. A lot of stores offer deals that weekend. During thanksgiving, the price is not much different regularly.  More importantly, I am able to find my size that I was not successfully able to do when I shopped during the crazy midnight of Black Friday.  Plus I hate competing against the crowd for clothes or waiting for a long line to just check out a 10$ shirt.

------Continued--------

Babies are smarter than us??

Last Tuesday, I finally pushed myself back to my Ted talk club. Our theme this week is about babies. No, I am not talking about sex education, pregnancy, family planning, or how to change diapers or feed a baby.  It is about babies' brain and its development.  Thanks Luke for picking a very interesting topic as usual.

Have we ever wondered if we should learn how to learn things from babies? That thought never came to my mind before. Well, probably I do not have children so that I do not interact with them a lot to realize that there are many things that I should learn from them. To me, babies are ingratiatingly cute when they are happy and smiling but very messy and troublesome when they start crying for their demands.  However, the talk by Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC, Berkeley and the second given by Patricia Kuhl, a professor of Speeach and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington that we watched on Tuesday provides us different perspectives when we look at babies.  They are not irrational, illogical, or egocentric as we think.  Instead they are deep thinkers and they own great learning and innovation skills that we should learn from them. 

Here are the links of two Ted talks

The speech by Alison provides a general idea on the ability of babies to learn and pick up things very fast.  For example she conducted an experiment with babies to investigate if babies figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.  Basically, she gave babies one bowl of broccoli and one bowl of goldenfish rackers and tried to figure it out if babies knew what her student likes or dislikes between them, broccoli or goldenfish rackers.  She first realized that all of the babies preferred the crackers to the raw broccoli after they tasted them.  However when her student acted that what she liked was the opposite of what the babies liked (she acted as if she liked raw broccoli rather the crackers) and then her student asked the babies to give her one of two things they have.  She found out that surprisingly, 18 month old babies gave her student raw broccoli instead of goldenfish crackers.

Alison proposes a couple of hypotheses to explain the powerful learning ability among babies.  First, the babies have long childhood than any kind of animals that allows them to solely focus on learning.  It can be true to me. Babies do not have to worry about anything.  They entirely depend on dull, sluggish, sleep-deprived parents, who are fond of them, for survivalJ.  When the babies have nothing to worry, they might be bored, leading them to observe and explore things around them to keep them busyJ. Second, it is about the development of the prefrontal cortex, a part of our brain.  The more we activate prefrontal cortex, the more it becomes flexible and more plastic, thereby sending more signals to our brain.  She found that babies’ prefrontal cortex is flooded with more neurotransmitters that are good at inducing learning and plasticity that adult’s. 

Although there are a couple things she overstates in her talk for example saying that our adults should take all babies’ idea and put them into practice, in general, I like her take-home message.  We, grown-up adults, should stop being lazy thinkers and should keep our mind activated and keep our brain open to new things, if we want to own the powerful learning and innovation ability like babiesJ. 

The second talk by Patricia specifically focuses on the ability of learning new language among babies. Her experiment reveals that the linguistic ability of the babies develops very early.  Babies can distinguish different sounds from different languages in different countries very early, unlike adults.  However, babies and children are geniuses in language till 7 and then this decline keep reducing sharply till puberty, in which we fall off the map.  The reason for it is that babies absorb new languages, changing their brain while adults are governed by memory that is formed during the early development.  Thus, like Alison, she emphasizes the importance of openness of our brain to new things when we are still little kids.  However it seems that adults tend to lose this ability when they grow up and get older.

 Those above talks remind me of the story of Joshua Foer, the US memory champion and the author of the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”.   To cut a long story short, Joshua describes his process of training him from a person with an average memory to be a champion who could recall 107 first and last names associated with each of the person after staring those names and faces in 15 minutes, 88 digit mixed up in 5 minutes, and setting up a new record of memorizing deck of cards in order after they were flashed in front of him in one minute and forty seconds.  Joshua said that our brain and memory is trainable and the process to train our brain and memory is the same as the process of building up our muscle.  The more we train and it active, the better it is.

Back to the topic of the post about if babies are smarter than us. I do not think that babies are really smarter than us.  However, they are better than us at opening themselves to new things and keep their brain active.  Grown-up adults tend to shut down our brain to new things. It can make sense because we have so many things to worry, or we sometimes get used to mundane activities that do not require us to think much, or we become so focused on what we are doing, we forget that there are other interesting things.  If we can keep our brain active and open as babies and children, we should be able cultivate our learning and innovation skills as they do. Any skill is able to be learnt.  Despite easier said than done, back to the old saw practice makes perfect.

PS: Another suggestion is that you should record all activities of your babies and show those videos to them when they become a grownup.  In doing so, they can remind of themselves being an awesome learner when they are little kids and who knows that they might be able to utilize some of their innovative ideas they come up during their childhood (j/k).