YOOHOO! MEW EARNED HER FIRST AMOUNT OF MONEY IN HER LIFE TODAY!

Exactly, 20$ is the compensation amount for her participation in a one-hour lab experiment in the service of a study on the development of both auditory and visual attention and working memory in typically-developing children of 3-6 years. The testing battery involves fun and interactive preschool appropriate computer paradigms that are game-like by design.  Each task is comprised of analogous auditory and visual components to best understand how attention and working memory converge and diverge in these two systems. The stimuli used include cartoon images of animals (cat, dog, pig etc) and corresponding sounds (meow, woof, oink etc). Mew did enjoy the games very much and she acted very well today despite my absence in the lab (I sat outside of the lab and completed various questionnaires for parents). With the accompanying of the lab instructor, she scored rather high in the games and all instructions and answers were in English. We just had minor problems regarding her vocabulary component when given an English word and asked to identify the appropriate picture: even though I helped her with some interpretation for new words, either I myself did not know the equivalent word in our language or Mew did not understand the notion/concept of the words. Overall, we were however all impressed at how good she was today. She also received a small gift (a Disney princesses puzzle to be coloured) for her today performance with some stickers as well. I was really proud of my daughter! We decided to give the money to her to keep for her own future needs (however we changed the bill for toonies and loonies so that she could drop them into her pigbank excitedly). Mew was wondering how much 20$ was worth and whether she could buy a castle, dress, toys, teddy bears, puzzles, etc. with that amount of money or not, lol.

After the experiment, I also took Mew to Baskin Robbins for a special treat: a FREE 2.5oz scoop of chocolate ice cream thanks to my signing her up in Baskin Robbins Birthday Club. Mew was so pleased with her ice cream cone that she did not want to share with us any!

As I was in so good mood with Mew this morning, I decided to reward her with a beautiful Cindrella dress. She was undoubtedly very happy with her new princess outfit. And we were very happy too!