I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There are very few days better than my yesterday. Not only was San Diego classy with its perfect spring-y 75 degrees, but I had the privilege of doing “research and development” on our latest product line. That means that I twirled on a grassy knoll with my beautiful niece as we both grasped small planes -she held Amelia, and I flew Ace. We had to get our wiggles out before we landed the planes on their landing strips. We rushed into the classroom, found the runway that was the letter “a” and practiced our graceful descents into alphabet heaven.

As an “expert” educator with a master’s degree in education, I’ve attempted to teach her in the past, but she has the attention span of a two-year-old! Of course, her distractibility does not bother me since she is two, after all, but sitting still is not one of her many talents, and has made my lessons in the past difficult. She’s an explorer, a do-er; she is her father and her mother’s daughter, and I love her. In all of her sticky-fingered, movie line quoting, distractible glory, she is, perhaps, the most perfect person I’ve ever met, and today I taught her how to write the letter “a”.

In a world that often seems ruled by incredibly powerful boxes with wires, it was a beautiful thing to incorporate twirling in the sun into my niece’s educational plan. I hope that all of you wonderful readers out there know that I’m taking my work seriously and, while I respect technology greatly (it definitely has a very important place), I am striving to develop a program based around the philosophy of simple goodness. I want my “interactive” component to involve another person and the “movement” in it to come from little arms and not from the shifting and clicking of a mouse.

I hope that someday soon that you, too, will have a day like mine.