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:))

We bought a map for the Safari before we drove in and pretty soon Evan realized that Mommy and Daddy knew exactly what animal we were going to see next just by checking that map in daddy's hand.

So he decided to take over. We pointed to the map and told him which route we were taking, where we were and then pointed to the animal sign along the route at the next stop asking him what it was. We were hoping this would help him to learn how to read the map. 

Unfortunately every time we finished one area and started driving, he didn’t bother to figure it out where we were going next from the map by himself. Instead, he would just unfold the map and ask me: "Mommy, what animal are we going to see next?". He wouldn't let anyone take the map away from him either.

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

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 had a tight schedule. The book is more than 100 pages long with a lot of text 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.

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

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