小天使(284)-Trip to Canada(3-4)

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by 冰溪

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Trip to Canada (3)-Awesome!

"Awesome"is a word that Olivia recently picked up and she used it a lotduring our trip. The funny thing was, Evan picked it up from Olivia andhe always repeated it right after her.

For example, when Olivia was touring the old city of Montreal, she went: "Wow, this is so beautiful! This place is awesome!"

Evan would follow: "Yeah! This place is awesome!" and he would show the same excitement on his face.

It was funny as I wondered whether he actually knew what he was saying or simply repeating what his sister says.

Trip to Canada (4)-Stories about map

We don't know that Evan likes to "read" maps until we had this trip.

We first noticed it when we went to the African Lion Safari in Cambridge, Ontario. The Safari tour itself was a very exciting experience for all of us which I will be writing at another time (hopefully:))

Webought a map for the Safari before we drove in and pretty soon Evanrealized that Mommy and Daddy knew exactly what animal we were going tosee next just by checking that map in daddy's hand.

Sohe decided to take over. We pointed to the map and told him which routewe were taking, where we were and then pointed to the animal sign alongthe route at the next stop asking him what it was. We were hoping thiswould help him to learn how to read the map. 

Unfortunatelyevery time we finished one area and started driving, he didn’t botherto figure it out where we were going next from the map byhimself. Instead, he would just unfold the map and ask me: "Mommy, whatanimal are we going to see next?". He wouldn't let anyone take the mapaway from him either.

Since then for the rest ofthe trip, he would ask to hold the map from time to time and sometimesjust stop at the corner of the street and check it out for a couple ofseconds.

We bought a travel guide called "Top 10 Montreal & Quebec City" and carried it with us all the time when we were in Montreal and Quebec City.It helped us a lot to pick out the places we wanted to see since we hada tight schedule. The book is more than 100 pages long with a lot oftext and some beautiful pictures.

One day, after strolling along the St. Lawrence River by the old Quebec City for a while, we decided to take a rest on the lawn by the river near a children's playground and a bicycle trail.

Evanasked for the "map book" while Daddy was reading it. He took the bookand sat down on the lawn and started to read. He very much concentratedon "reading" his "map book" and flipped the pages whenever he finishedone (picture). He ignored whatever was going on around him for a longtime which was amazing to me as from the time he spent on each page, itdidn’t appear that he was just looking at the pictures in the book.

Daddyis someone we Chinese call a 活地图 (live map) and I am totally theopposite, so I am hoping Evan will inherit his Daddy's gene and becomea 活地图 one day himself :).