family

Magical Bridge Playground: A Place for Everyone to Play

May 26, 2019 By Kat

It’s rare to find a place where everyone, regardless of age or ability, can come together and play. And that is why Magical Bridge Playground is such a special place. It’s designed to be inclusive of the 1-in-4 people amongst us who have physical / cognitive disabilities, autism, visual / hearing impairments, medically fragile, or are part of the aging population.

The Story

The founder Olenka Villarreal wanted a playground where her disabled and non-disabled daughters could play with their friends. They had very different needs and she found that the existing playgrounds didn’t cater to these needs well. She gathered a team of volunteers together, created the vision together, fundraised, and made this a reality over the course of 7 years. The playground opened up in 2015 in Palo Alto, CA as a socially inclusive playground, where all are welcome. Now it has over 25k visitors a month!! Wow!

Olenka and her friend Jill Asher went on to create the Magical Bridge foundation, and Santa Clara County has allocated $10M in funds for more playgrounds like this!

My Visit to the Playground

Here are some snapshots from my first visit to Magical Bridge Playground. Hint: If you go early in the morning, no one else is there and it’s having a whole playground to yourself!!

I love how colorful everything is and how many different play structures there are!

I had never seen these before!!

They have little descriptions on what the different play zones are, who it’s for, and the science behind them. Neat!

They have a bunch of different slides too. Slides are my favorite – so much fun to go down!

Omg the baby slide in the tot zone is too cute!!

Alright, that wraps up the photos that I took at the Magical Bridge Playground. All I can say is how impressed I am with this place. They put a lot of thought into making this a place for everyone. They collaborated with play experts, educators, therapists, families living with different disabilities, and landscape architects. They’re very conscious of the health and wellness benefits of play as well. It’s a magical place!

They also have other local authors and concerts this summer in the playground. Check out their Facebook page for the event line-up.

The success of this playground has led to even more of these Magical Bridge playgrounds being planned for around the Bay Area – with locations planned for Mountain View, Morgan Hill, Redwood City, and Sunnyvale.

But there is still a $1M funding shortfall to kick off construction of the Mountain View playground. So please consider donating to this nonprofit if you want to see this playground come to your city. I already made my contribution! You can donate here: http://magicalbridge.org/mtnview/

Storytime Event

Also, I’ll be doing a storytime for my book Use Your Voice at Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto on Sunday, June 2, 2019 from 3-5pm. Check out the Facebook events page for more details and to RSVP!

Thank you for reading! Hope you have a chance to check out this place and get to experience it for yourself! The pictures do it no justice.

Where I Developed My Sense of Imagination

December 18, 2018 By Kat

I have the most fond memories of going to my grandma’s place – well it was my grandparents’ home, but she was the woman who ran the household, made sure all the kids were fed, and was the glue of the family.

She lived down the street from us, and my parents would drop me and my sister off at their place so they could go off to work. My grandma would bring us to school, picks us up from school, feed us a tasty afternoon snack, and then let us play until our parents picked us up. My two cousins were around the same age as me too, so it was the 4 of us hanging out and growing up together.

It was so much fun. It was a humble home, didn’t really have many toys, but we always found something to occupy our time. We loved to make up games and use the furniture to setup obstacle courses. We’d crawl under the dining table. We would turn the folding tables on their sides and pretend they were cars. We would make ample use of the sofa pillows and blankets and create forts. Or we’d use pens/paper to entertain ourselves for hours. We would draw or make things out of paper and scissors, and use up all her tape!

We didn’t have much technology – there was a TV in the living room that we’d watch cartoons on – Animaniacs, Sailor Moon, Power Rangers, or whatever was on. They had the best shows back then! The TV would overheat and she’d tell us to turn it off and go do something else instead.

There was a small backyard with fruit trees and a grass area for running around in. We’d make up games, play on our little bicycles, play water games in the summer, or kick the ball around.

I smile as I look back on all these memories – playing and using our imagination. Anything was possible with those pillows and people to play along with.

A couple distinct things stand out:

We loved our grandma’s spaghetti. It was always exciting when that was the afternoon snack.

We enjoyed watching the Teletubbies and even created our own Teletubby club, where each of us were a Teletubby. I was LaLa, the yellow happy go-lucky one! We also had our own Teletubby newsletter complete with “news” and puzzles and other cute clipart images – whatever was available on the Create-a-card software we used.

We dedicated two blank notebooks to each of our grandparents and would each add a page to the notebook. For example, we’d add a drawing or glue in something. Then when the pages would all get filled, we wanted to gift it to them. We never finished it, so we never gave it to them, but we’re pretty sure they already saw it when they would clean up each day lol.

On occasion, she’d take us to McDonald’s, which we loved because of the food and the ball pit.

We would also play “school” to mimic our teachers and teach my little cousin. Looking back, maybe that’s when I started to like teaching! It’s so funny to find early traces of our current selves in our childhood.

All in all, I am so grateful for this time in my life when I had time to play. Life got much busier as I got older. I started doing more activities and running from extracurricular to extracurricular. Unfortunately, there seems to be less time to play for adults, but I’m realizing how much fun it is and how necessary it is for my soul. So I’m trying to make more blank spaces in my life to imagine and create things! Who knows what can come from it? Perhaps the best part is to have no expectation at all about any result, and just let things unfold.

Was there a specific place you remember your imagination developing?

November Favorites: Kids Books on Family, Food, and Gratitude

November 16, 2017 By Kat

The holiday season is upon us! I wanted to do this month’s favorites on children’s books in the spirit of Thanksgiving. I chose books that reflected the themes of family, food, and/or gratitude. So hooray, here we go!

1. THANK YOU BEAR

This is “for anyone who ever thought they had something great,” as described on the dedication page. This endearing story is about a little bear who comes across a box. He thinks it’s quite awesome, but as he shows it to the other animals (monkey, fox, owl, etc…), they scoff and say that the box is nothing special. I could empathize with the poor bear as he got sadder each time. He starts to think that the box may not be so great after all. 🙁 I won’t spoil the ending, but I think the book has a great lesson in gratitude and in staying true to yourself when you see the value in something – despite what other may people think.

2. THE BLESSINGS JAR: A STORY ABOUT BEING THANKFUL

A little girl starts off her day feeling bummed and thinking that the day will be no fun. Her grandmother grabs a jar that they call the blessings jar and they set out on an adventure to make the most of their day. Along the way, they gather little reminders of God’s blessings to put in the jar. It’s an adorable story of counting your blessings even in the smallest details of every day life.

3. COOKIES: BITE-SIZE LIFE LESSONS

In this clever book, the author explains life lessons (or rather character development traits) in the context of cookies! For example, “patience” is explained as waiting for the cookies to finish baking. Oh I definitely know that feeling. “Generous” is described as sharing cookies with others, while “trustworthy” means not eating someone’s cookie when they briefly leave the room. Ha! I love how everything is described as it relates to cookies because who doesn’t love cookies?! And the book ends with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies!! I think that would be a perfect activity to do with a child after reading this book. I love when you can feel and taste the story! 😛

4. CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

Ah, such a classic. I remember reading this growing up and loved reading it again recently. The story stretches your imagination to the extreme. Unrelenting torrents of food. Yup, that appropriately describes Thanksgiving. I get hungry thinking of hamburger storms and a pancake big enough to cover an entire school. P.S. Apparently there’s a movie and a sequel out too!

5. THAT IS NOT A GOOD IDEA!

From the author of the Elephant & Piggie series, Mo Willems brings another entertaining book. This is a silly and fun book about a tricky fox who tries to invite a goose over for dinner. Uh oh, be careful! 😮

6. YOU GET WHAT YOU GET

Melvin the squirrel doesn’t deal well with disappointment. (Who can relate?) He throws a tantrum if he doesn’t get what he wants. But at school, his teacher has a rule, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.” Melvin tries to outsmart his family, who doesn’t know the rule… or will they find out? This is a fun story of learning to accept how things turn out, without complaining! And wouldn’t that make the world a more pleasant place… 🙂

7. THOSE SHOES

This is a touching story of a boy who really wants a pair of shoes that the other kids at school all have, but his grandmother can’t afford them. As he navigates the embarrassment of having to wear hand-me-down shoes, this story about wanting something badly turns into a story of generosity. The author and illustrator do a great job of showing diverse characters and providing a glimpse of poverty from the eyes of a child.

8. SYLVESTER AND THE MAGIC PEBBLE

Sylvester the donkey loves to collect cool looking pebbles. One day, he finds a fantastic magical red pebble that grants any wish you want, as long as you are holding the pebble. He get into a little predicament when he gets startled by a lion and accidentally wishes to become a rock. The pebble falls on the floor beside him, so he cannot reach it to make a wish to be his old self again. The book goes into how he tries to deal with that problemo! Ultimately, I like how this fanciful story shows that the love in a family can be worth more than a silly pebble, even if it can grant you any wish you want.

9. UNIQLO ULTRA LIGHT DOWN JACKET

And for my last random favorite, I would say that I can’t survive without this black puffy jacket. I get cold easily and Bay Area weather can get unexpectedly chilly (I know, I’m a pansy.). I’ve had this jacket for so long and worn it everywhere. If it’s summer time, I’ll will wear it. If it’s winter time, I’ll wear it. It’s washable and you can squish it into a teensy bag for travel purposes. This one time, I was wearing it, and my 2 friends decided that they needed one too, so now the 3 of us have the same jacket! You’re welcome Uniqlo for being a walking ad.

Alright, that’s a wrap! Do you have any favorites that you discovered this month? Leave them in the comments below!

I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday! Eat until your eyes and hearts are satisfied. 😀

And keep reading! Perfect weather for cozying up with a book, magazine, or anything with words. Cheers!

Disclaimer: This post contains some affiliate links. I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. At no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. Regardless of this, these are books that I honestly enjoy and would recommend anyways. Thanks for your support!

The Monopoly Game at Safeway

May 26, 2017 By Kat

OMG, guys, this game is ridiculous.

THE GAME

If you aren’t familiar, every year, the Safeway grocery store has a Monopoly game where you collect game pieces and try to win some prizes – money, scholarships, free food, cars, homes, etc…

When you buy something at the store, the receipt tells you the number of Monopoly game tickets the cashier will give you. If you buy “Monopoly bonus game ticket” products, you get an extra ticket. On a normal shopping trip, you may earn anywhere from 1 – 20 game pieces, if you had a full cart of groceries.

Sometimes the cashiers (either being really nice or don’t give a crap about the game) hand you a stack of tickets instead of counting out the number that your receipt says. YES! More to open!

THE PIECES

When you tear off the ends of the game ticket, you unfold it and see either a coupon of some sort and 4 thin game pieces that go on the Monopoly game board. Similar to the game we all played when we were younger, if you collect all the pieces within a category like $1 million dollars, then you win that prize.

Anyhow, I’ve never bothered to stick the pieces onto the board because you’ve got to hunt around to find where it belongs. This takes an insanely long time. There’s a ton of duplicate pieces, so sometimes you don’t even get the satisfaction of sticking it on the board! What a letdown.

MY SISTER

My sister had the patience for this. Last year, she emailed my whole extended family asking people to give her their Monopoly tickets. For months, she collected stacks and stacks from family members and methodically put them on the board. The whole time, she was 2 pieces away from $1 million, but couldn’t find those last two pieces. They were probably only a couple of winning pieces somewhere in the vast expanse of this country. Or the winning pieces were at the bottom of someone’s trash can.

MY COUSIN

This year, my sister has a baby, so she ain’t got time for this no more. Instead my cousin, full of eagerness (and more importantly without any kids), emailed out to the whole extended family asking for their Monopoly tickets. And so the craze began. Except she has a wedding to plan for this summer, so she is swamped with other things to do. Too bad there’s no Monopoly prize for a free wedding that plans itself.

MY OTHER COUSINS

Anyhow, one time, she delegated the work to my younger cousins, who are in middle and high school. That’s the age in life when you love collecting and sorting things (it was stickers and pencils in my day), so they loved playing the game. I was hosting a cousin get-together at my house and prepared all this food for a taco bar feast, but my younger cousins just ignored the food. They were just too enthralled by the hundreds of Monopoly pieces that needed to find their resting spot on the board. I walked over to the living room and sat on the couch nonchalantly. Then I got yelled at by my younger cousin for stepping on all the organized piles of pieces on the floor and ruining their system. Oops.

THE INSTANT WINNER COUPONS

Anyhow, this game is just a hilarious waste of time, but it’s so funny how people get so into the game for bursts of time (including myself) juxtaposed against people who absolutely do not care about the game but get wrapped up into it somehow.

Collecting them is addicting. It’s like lotto tickets but instead of winning jackpots, you can win things like a loaf of french bread or a bottle of aspirin. This one time, I passed by a hungry family was sitting outside Safeway asking for spare change. I didn’t have any more money on me, but I gave them the coupon for a free pound of bananas. They looked very confused, but I hope they redeemed it.

For me, these tiny prizes can be just as exciting. Hey, fresh produce is expensive these days! So my basic workflow would be to first open each ticket to see if I got any instant winner items (like free groceries), or coupons for things I would normally buy ($1 off soap or 50 cents off frozen veggies). Then I would neatly store away all the board game pieces in an envelope for my cousin.

MY PARENTS

When I visited my parents, they handed me a fat envelope full of unopened game pieces. Since I’m unemployed (see last post), they figured I had time on my hands to open all of them. Eh, makes sense. I gleefully did so, and found that they had earned free flour, aluminum foil, and bread, as well as a long-tail of random 50 cent off coupons. I enthusiastically shared my discoveries with them, and they brushed me off, telling me to redeem them because their eyesight isn’t good enough to read the tiny font on the pieces. (The game makers should think about accessibility next year!)

My cousin would get wide-eyed with horror when I would hand her these envelopes bursting with pieces. She just saw hours of her life flash before her eyes as she thought about having to sort through them. Haha poor girl.

YOU WIN… MORE TICKETS

Sometimes the Instant Winner coupons said you win 2 more free Monopoly tickets. So I went back to Safeway to redeem those additional tickets, and presumably some of those would also tell you that you won more free tickets. It’s a vicious cycle that you can’t escape.

One day, I was at the grocery store with friends. I handed the cashier my “more free tickets” coupons and he handed me AN ENTIRE BOX of tickets. He was like “Here. The game is ending today anyways, and we need to get rid of these.” I was OVERJOYED and couldn’t believe my luck.

This caught the attention of my friends, who had not heard about the game, but now their interest was suddenly piqued. When we had reached the car (not even reaching home yet), they began tearing them open, trying to find some free stuff. One of them was moving across the country, and needed to re-buy his stock of spices, so a coupon for free salt was very exciting to him.

PEELING THEM OPEN

I was quite shocked. Here they were, my friends coming all the way from out of town, wanting to spend an afternoon opening these Safeway Monopoly tickets. Simple minds have simple pleasures. Haha just kidding. They’re actually very smart engineers, and one’s a doctor, but they totally jumped onto the Monopoly train that leads to basically nowhere. Of course, since they’re engineers, they’re very analytical, so they started sorting the tickets into categories of free stuff and coupons, as well as prioritizing them based on usefulness. It was a sight to see. I overheard, “50 cents off paper plates!” “Oh NICE! …Hmm we know we’re becoming adults now by what we get excited about.” 😛

Upon their insistence, we went back to Safeway two more times that day. Golden Gate bridge got nothing on this Safeway. My friend tried to bargain with the cashier to give us another box, but they only gave us a meager stack instead. But as soon as we got inside the house, the 3 of them ripped through those lotto tickets in 10 minutes – fully sorted and incorporated into the sophisticated coupon prioritization system as well. I was impressed.

Upon surveying our winnings, we decided that we could feed ourselves off of free food for the rest of their visit in California. We could have free buttermilk waffles and greek yogurt for breakfast. Then for lunch, we could get free bread, tuna, and macaroni salad. For dinner, we could have free pasta, pasta sauce, cheese, iceberg garden salad, can of corn, and 1 avocado to be split among 4 people. Oh and don’t forget, free mentos for after-dinner mints.

Here’s a snapshot of only a portion of the coupons we redeemed.

Other local friends would come over to visit these out-of-town friends. They would be flabbergasted at my kitchen counter now filled with Monopoly tickets. They laughed in shock / horror and secretly thought to themselves, “Do these people have nothing else better to do with their time??” Nevertheless, we convinced them to take some coupons like the free Shutterfly photo books or custom reusable tote bags. I mean, who doesn’t want their own face on a reusable bag? (Not me, that’s why I tried to get rid of them.)

Some of my friends don’t really eat carbs, so there was too much of the bread left over. As a result, I decided we should make bread pudding. Tastes pretty good! Harder to say no to bread that’s covered in chocolate. 😀

Note: Chocolate not included in winnings

THE BURDEN

My friends eventually flew back to their own homes. I had the box of game pieces, which I promptly dropped off at my cousin’s place. She politely tried to decline them, “Oh, you don’t need to drop them off.” But I insisted. “Oh I’m already nearby. TAKE THEM!! And have some bread pudding too.” She accepted. Muahaha! When I handed her the box, I could tell by the less than enthusiastic expression on her face that she was not going to be putting those pieces on the board.

My friends also left a gargantuan stack of coupons and free stuff for me to redeem. Being Asian, I can’t let free stuff go to waste. The coupons apparently expire in one week. I had to go on multiple trips to different Safeways to redeem the stuff because everyone else in town also freaked out that the coupons were expiring soon. Hence, the stores were out of stock of the 74-ct tissue box, salsa, 25 sq. ft. aluminum foil, and etc…

I did manage to convince the cashier to give me a box of 75 sq. ft. aluminum foil for free, in exchange for 3 coupons of 25 sq. ft. aluminum foil. Math comes in handy, kids.

I also got 2 free containers of iodized salt. I was pushing my cart around the store, and then ran into another lady who had a cart filled with 7 containers of the same iodized salt. Nothing else. Just salt. I don’t even know what it means for salt to be iodized, but seeing her made me want to go get more salt. I had more coupons for that too. But unfortunately, the shelf was now completely empty. She had taken all the salt! 😮

As I was doing self-checkout for all my items and ringing up my dozens of coupons, I kept getting errors where I had to wait for assistance from the cashier. I was having a friendly conversation with him, and he said that the problem was that I had exceeded the coupon limit for a transaction. He had to manually override the system to allow each coupon. Wow, exceeding the coupon limit! Never thought that’d be on my list of accomplishments. I don’t know if I should be proud or extremely sad.

GIVING UP

After the checkout machine printed out the longest receipt of my life, I walked out of the store with 2 huge bags of mostly free groceries (I did buy some stuff for money). However, I STILL had a handful of coupons. Darn it!

At this point, my mom came over, and I decided to hand the rest over to her and throw up my arms in defeat. There was still 27 coupons for free donuts, so I figured my dad could bring them to his work. Who says you can’t buy popularity in the form of donuts for the office? I also gave my parents the 5 coupons for free hot dog buns – that’s like 72 buns! Memorial day is coming up soon and BBQs are a thing. Hmm, but our big family even isn’t THAT big. Oh well, it’s their problem now! I also gave them the remaining free loaves of french bread. I can only make so many trays of bread pudding before I run out of new people to feed it to. (I’m making my last tray tonight for my church group.) WHEW! And that’s where my story ends – unless Safeway restocks their 5 lb bags of flour.

OMG I’ve wasted so much time on this game, including writing this blogpost. And now I’m wasting YOUR time as you read this blogpost. LoL. *Shakes fist in the air* Curse the people who created this game!!!

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