Category: Staying Positive & Learning

Maker Faire 2017

Posted hopePosted in Staying Positive & Learning

Sometimes quality of life takes higher priority than worrying about germs and crowds… Last weekend, after 9 months of staying home with barely any outings (except to the park nearby), we took our kid to Maker Faire 2017, something that she’s been dreaming about for nearly a year… (oh yes, we were loaded with hand sanitizers, masks, and a big stroller with her food and drinks.)

It was lovely to see the “maker” spirit in children! Reminded us that their bodies may be fighting a cruel disease, but their spirits are strong and they are quite the makers! Beyond the joy of making their own little things (be it lego or art or whatever else), they make everyday of our life special, with their warm and loving presence…

In particular, our kid had such a blast watching the various exhibits, ranging from a giant robot (15+ feet tall) made of balloons; to a large lego exhibit with moving lego trains, model of Santa Cruz boardwalk complete with moving roller coasters and rides all made of lego; 3d printers printing model brains, machines and intricate designs; giant cardboard robots (she got to wear some giant cardboard hands!); riding on robotic mythical creatures; pedaling bikes to power the music stage; sewing her own bag out of jeans; making her own soap, giant bubbles, stuffed dolls, toy balloons, ceramic pots, origami boxes etc. She was so excited, and so were we, to watch her joy. Thank you Maker Faire!

Busy and happy with DIY projects

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

Our kid went crazy with DIY projects — it kept her busy, creative, and distracted from the pain of cancer treatment.

Young minds (and old!) are happier when they are kept busy in constructive ways. After days of watching too much TV and iPad during the initial part of the treatment (see this post), our kid was getting increasingly bored, tired, and irritable… We realized that we needed to find new ways to keep her busy and cheerful, through the long treatment period of around a year. Thus began our venture into DIY projects!

Huge thanks to SaraBeautyCorner for her fun and engaging Youtube videos on DIY food, craft and gift ideas. Our kid loved watching them. We started picking fun projects from there, to try hands on at home.

Of course, the first DIY projects had to be food related (remember the hunger pangs from steroids in induction?). We baked our own healthy granola bars with nuts, made fruit kabobs, packed glass jars with fruits for snacks, baked ginger almond cookies, almond muffin cakes, and melted dark chocolate into different shapes — from dinosaurs to Fairy Godmothers — and had fun decorating them with different toppings.

Our six year old especially loved the Fairy Godmother chocolates. After returning from a week long hospital stay during her birthday, we celebrated by baking cakes and making these chocolates. She would close her eyes, and make a wish before eating each Fairy Godmother chocolate. The innocent joys of childhood!

As the steroid effects went away, the new set of chemo drugs during consolidation left her severely nauseated and uninterested in food. At this time, we switched to DIY craft and other projects. She enjoyed playing with modeling clay, melting crayons into different shapes, and making various patterns with melty beads.

As described in this post, she loved art related DIY projects and found them very relaxing. From drawing simple cards, to shrink art, sand art, stained glass paintings, sketches and acrylic, she enjoyed herself with oodles of art!

During the winter, coupled with chemo, her lips went dry and started cracking. As she started exploring different colored lip balms in the market, we wondered why not make our own lip balm?! She loved the idea. Thanks to the recipes from the YouTube DIY lip balm videos, we  made our very first lip balm  with simple and good ingredients (beeswax, coconut oil, beet juice for coloring). It was so simple and easy, that she made several of these and started gifting them to her friends, doctors and nurses for the holiday season. I still use the one she gave me 🙂

We owe a lot to DIY projects! Thanks to them, our kid became a busy bee, eager to try new projects. More importantly for us, she was cheerful and distracted from the painful effects of chemo.

Celebrating small joys of life

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

People often get busy chasing big dreams and lofty goals — dream job, dream family, dream house, dream startup… Sometimes we get so busy that we forget to cherish the small things and celebrate the small joys of life.

Our kid’s cancer taught us that happiness is not in things outside, but in being grateful for what we have and making the best of it.

We learned to pause, savour the moment and appreciate the joy of small things… We built our own tents and pretended to camp, shredded paper into bits and made pretend snow in sunny California, talked goofy with Alexa, and did several things together — from baking, reading, art, board games, funny faces on snapchat, and silly singing to crazy dancing… This helped make our long and boring hospital stays and clinic visits more bearable.

Books are a true loyal friend…

Posted hopePosted in In love with books

During the induction phase, amidst all the chaos, our daughter cheered up when she saw a book with her name on it. The book was about a young kid who was a refugee. Although his life was hard, he loved helping his friends and family. One day, he found a pair of magic eyeglasses through which he could see sparks around some people. Curious to learn about them, he later discovered that whenever people helped without expecting anything in return, these sparks appeared magically. The boy was thrilled and eventually became a spark collector, who’ld help everyone around, and use the sparks to brighten the hearts of those in need…

Our kid loved this story. She would read this book again and again, especially during the port accesses, dressing changes, or other medical rituals that scared her. It had a strange, calming effect on her. She wasn’t reading much except for this book…

When we transitioned back home after one month at the hospital, she had frequent violent and emotional meltdowns from the steroids, trauma of hospitalization, hair loss etc. The doctors insisted on setting and following the same rules for acceptable behavior as we would if she were normal and off-treatment.

All that sounds good in principle, but how do you set and enforce rules for a kid whose life is already severely restricted?

Books to the rescue! We started reading toddler books like “Little dinos don’t yell”, “Calm down time”, “Little monkey calms down”, “Little dinos don’t hit”. These books gently reminded her of acceptable behavior, e.g., take a deep breath, count 1-2-3, go to a cool down spot, play with stuffed toys, read a favorite book, sing a quiet song, hug us and discuss her feelings with us. We also made up funny songs with these rules, and sang them to help her remember good ways to cope with the stress…

We had an aha moment when we discovered the first Berenstain Bears book. Her home school teacher brought a couple from the library, and our kid loved it. We ordered the full set of 30 odd books. The bear family was fun. The bear cubs ran into similar challenges like us — watching too much TV; eating junk food; forgetting manners; learning to be brave, kind, respectful, speaking the truth; avoiding gimmies; playing fair. We started by reading one book every night. She fell in love with these books. She was so amused with the book, “The Berenstain bears forget their manners”, that she read it to us over 3 times in just a day. We even tried making a set of golden rules for our family 😉

A fun facet is that most of these books come with stickers. As seen in this post, our kid loved stickers. After reading each book, she’ld pick a sticker and paste it in her chart. She loved these books and stickers so much, that sometimes she would read 2-3 books in one night!

Upon finishing 30 Berenstain bear books, she was mighty thrilled to earn a golden trophy sticker. Beyond improving her reading skills, more importantly for us, these books were a fun way to reinforce good habits and values. Indeed, we started seeing a gradual improvement in her attitude. We owe a lot to the Berenstain Bears family 🙂

It was time to try chapter books. Since this was a significant step up from the picture books she was reading, we incentivized her with a golden trophy sticker for each chapter book that she completed. She received a couple of Fancy Nancy chapter books as gifts around Christmas time. She liked the books on Super Sleuth, and Soccer Mania. We then experimented with more books, on ponies, princesses etc. She’s now reading Charlotte’s web and loves it. It’s a bigger book, and is taking us much longer to read, but she’s enjoying it so far.

Like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” who loved to read books, our kid has now fallen in love with books, and finds the much needed comfort and room for imagination. Indeed, books are a true and loyal friend!

Playing with the microscope

Posted hopePosted in Fun with Learning

Ever seen a kid playing with a new toy? Their excitement, sense of wonder and curiosity can be infectious — be it playing with a ball, doll, game, or a microscope!

When a good friend gave us their son’s microscope, we wondered if it might be too much for a six year old. We were so wrong! When she saw an onion peel under the microscope, she was blown away by how different it looked under the microscope. The next thing we knew, she was scrambling around the entire house looking for different things to inspect under the microscope. We tried various items ranging from edible stuff (sugar, onion peel, crushed ginger, spinach leaf), liquids (water, hand soap, green juice), to paper and clothes (cotton, synthetic from a doll’s dress, wool from a sweater). She (and we) had a blast! You can watch her excitement in the video above.

Fun with Math

Posted hopePosted in Fun with Learning

 

You are probably wondering, “Who cares about learning and math when the kid is undergoing cancer treatment”? Indeed, the shock of the diagnosis and trauma from treatment was hard enough to cope with, that for a long time, learning was the last thing on our minds… However, after a month, when she kept feeling that her life was being wasted without school, playdates and classes, we realized that we were wrong…

We learned that engaging kids in various fun and learning activities provides them with a much needed distraction from their social isolation, long and painful treatment. It helps them stay positive by providing a sense of accomplishment and something to look forward to. And if done the right way, it can be fun too! So we began our hunt for ways to make learning fun for a kid with cancer…

During the induction phase, when she had more energy from the steroids, and was addicted to the iPad, we introduced her to some educational apps. Here are a few that she enjoyed a lot.

  • Osmo tangram: This is a fun game for kids and adults. You arrange triangles and squares to make funny shapes. When you solve enough tangrams, you can conquer castles and earn more treasure. What a cool way to have an adventure with geometry!
  • Osmo numbers: Allows hands on play with numbers. Kids go fishing for numbers by placing physical tiles that add to the number. It offers a fun way of adding numbers. Our kid loved to dive into this ocean of math fun!
  • Math Bingo: who doesn’t like Bingo? And this game is Bingo with a math twist — you solve the addition or subtraction problem and find the resulting number on the Bingo card. Our kid loved it!
  • ABCmouse.com: It has a section full of math apps (also puzzles, science, geography etc).

After the induction phase, as the intensity of chemo drugs increased in the consolidation phase, she had much less energy and started playing mindless games on the iPad, and watched a lot of candy and other videos on Youtube. She was irritable, had trouble sleeping, eating and had several emotional meltdowns. Per our oncologist’s recommendation, we tried to gradually wean her from the iPad (see this post).

We introduced a jewel chart to motivate her towards good habits and activities. Everytime she completed an important task (e.g., brushing teeth, eating healthy food, taking medicines, walking / exercise), she earned jewels. As described in this post, the jewel chart helped convert boring everyday rituals into earning colorful jewels and rewards.

The jewel chart was a simple and fun way to do math too! At the end of each day, she would add the jewels for different tasks to find the total number of jewels earned for that day — that’s adding numbers up to 25-30 each day. Every sunday, she was eager to add and find the jewels earned for the entire week — that’s two digit addition with carry overs and she learned it in a fun way. 🙂

We also kept a running count of the total jewels earned so far. That started as addition with 2 digits, became 3 digits after a week, and 4 digits after a month. Thanks to the jewel chart, she was eager to earn and add bigger and bigger numbers!

We tried to make the numbers more fun by adding milestones. Her big wish was to go on a 3-day trip to Disneyland with family and her best friend. This seemed like an excellent opportunity for some Disneyland friendly math. Together, we went online, checked the ticket price for a 3-day trip to Disneyland, made a list of how many tickets we needed, and she added the three-digit numbers to find the total number of jewels needed to make this wish come true. The answer was ~2500. If she earned 2500 jewels, she could win the Disneyland trip. She was now excited to learn subtraction to see how many more jewels to her favorite milestone.

By now, she was growing fond of math and wanted to do learn more. However, books and worksheets were still too boring for her. Around then, her best friend introduced us to IXL math, an online website that offers math worksheets on various topics from first grade. We tried it as an experiment, and our kid liked the instant feedback and encouragement and the variety of rewards. At the simplest level, upon answering a question correctly, the site would randomly say something like “Terrific”, “Well done”, “Excellent”, “Good job”. Further, upon completing a skill that comprised of around 30-50 questions, the site would give a gold medal. Finally, upon finishing a set of skills, a magic prize (the picture of an animal or artifact) would reveal in the first-grade grid. She was so eager to unlock all the surprises in the grid, that she happily learned more math skills.

What a fun way to gamify Math! Our kid loved it so much that she finished 2000 math questions by the end of the consolidation phase. We were proud of her efforts and gave her a small trophy. She was so thrilled to win the trophy that it’s all she could talk about for the next week or so. 🙂

 

 

From boring rituals to colorful jewels and stickers

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

 

After one month at the hospital, when we returned home, even basic habits like brushing teeth, eating on time, drinking water, walking, peeing etc became a challenge. Each day seemed to consist of a long list of rituals. It was like having a newborn baby, who was five years old…

Thanks to a wonderful suggestion from one of the nurses, we tried jewels as rewards. It worked! Our daughter loved jewels, and a jewel chart was a perfect way to motivate her to do basic chores (and eventually, choose good activities).

We bought adhesive jewels of different shapes and colors. Red hearts for “thinking happy thoughts”, pink hearts for “brushing teeth”, green stars for “eating”, pink ones for “walking”… And if she earned more than 20 jewels a day (that typically meant brushing teeth twice, drinking around a liter of water, eating 3 meals, taking medicines, walking well, pee + poop regularly… and bonus for good activities), she could pick a surprise gift from the treasure box (we made one up with items from the dollar store or such). Soon, the chart was filled with jewels. 🙂

We then asked our kid what she would like to do when she gets well. She wanted a 3 day trip to Disneyland with her best friend and family. Nothing like a happy dream or wish to look forward to, amidst the painful medications!

We went online, checked the ticket price for a 3-day trip to Disneyland, made a list of how many tickets we needed, and she did the addition and found that we needed ~2500 jewels needed to make this wish come true. We gave her a bonus of 1000 jewels for enduring her first month of hospitalization and for doing a great job with her medicines.

Our kid started working earnestly towards the Disneyland milestone. Each day of boring rituals was now converted to earning colorful jewels!

In a couple of months, after making the Disneyland milestone, she was starting to tire of jewels. At this point, we switched to reward stickers. Emoji stickers for good attitude (her favorites!), food stickers for healthy eating, space stickers for learning, sports stickers for walking, ribbon stickers for excellence — you name it, we had the sticker. 😉

We set a mix of small and big milestones. After reading for half-hour (roughly the time to read a picture book like the Berenstain bears), she’ld get a small sticker, and after reading 30 such books, she‘ld get a small trophy! She suddenly fell in love with reading books. After every book, she’ld go and pick a favorite sticker and paste it on her chart.

Her room was soon filled with colorful jewels and sticker charts! She loved it, and for us, it was a simple and effective way to help her choose good habits and activities over bad ones. Tell us what worked for you!

Too much iPad = iMad = iSad = iBad

Posted hopePosted in Staying positive

During the initial induction phase, we were ever grateful to the iPad. Hats off to Steve Jobs for inventing one of the most addictive devices for kids! The instant audio-visual entertainment from apps was hard to beat. She would spend hours on Osmo apps (tangram, numbers, word, coding), ABCmouse.com, and several gaming, cooking and other apps. But continued hours with iPad = iMad = iSad = iBad. Breaking this was key to better sleep, mobility, and well-being.

Our oncologist noted that, “The American Pediatric Association recommends not more than 2-3 hours of iPad or TV for kids this age”.

Wow, we were at the opposite extreme — our daughter was probably without the iPad for that time during the day!! That was her way of coping with the trauma and stress of being stuck at the hospital for a month…

And she wasn’t alone. Every time I took a stroll in the hospital, or saw other kids, they too seemed hooked to a smartphone or screen…

How were we going to wean her off the iPad?

As mama bear in Berenstain Bears puts it, “When you want to remove a bad habit, start by introducing good habits”. But unlike the bear family, rules wouldn’t work in this case. Instead, we tried a combination of rewards and doing fun activities together. As she was watching her iPad, I would sit by her and start coloring something funny, read an interesting book, or play puzzles like word hunt or tangram. Nothing worked the first few times… I kept trying to draw her into the activity — “what hairdo do you think we should draw for this princess?”, “what color do you think we should use?”, “could you help me with this word?”, “hmm, I can’t seem to find this word in the word hunt”, “I wonder how to make this tangram shape”… Eventually, she would join in the activity and take over the art, or puzzle, or read the book by herself 🙂

We also incentivized her with stickers and jewels for selecting good activities over iPad or TV. This paid off quite well, as described in this post. By the end of the consolidation phase, our kid was spending <3 hours/day on the iPad, choosing from a wide range of fun activities, and much happier.