Toes are awesome

It's been a long time since I have blogged..since May in fact.  Luckily, John has been keeping up with posts recently, but I would like to get better at it since it's proving to be important for documenting Davis' development and sheer awesomeness.  So here's a small warmup to get me back in the swing of blogging. 


I don't think I've mentioned it here, but after I defended in May (and officially graduated in June), I began work as a postdoc, joint with my Ph.D. lab and a new lab.  I'm still working out what it all means with regards to where I am and when, but it's awfully comfy to stick around my old stomping grounds and work with the same people I have been working with for years.  The biggest change in my postdoc is that I am now doing biological experiments and very little computation.  It's been quite the change and an eye-opening experience.  I've been completely overwhelmed and it's been pretty hard to go from feeling like you know something to feeling like you know nothing.  I'm blessed with great colleagues who are happy to help me through the learning curve of experiments (and enough of them I can spread out the wealth of my ignorance among them all, decreasing the burden on any one of them, although some still get a pretty heavy dose of me).  I think I enjoy it.  In contrast to when I was doing fabrication, the experiments I'm doing go fast enough to keep me excited about them.  Fabrication work left me pretty unexcited about getting back into the lab, but it's proving to be a completely different mode and timescale (for reference, it was typically 6 months to a year of fabrication before you ever even got to sit down with a device to see if it did what you hoped it would).  One of the hardest transitions to this new way of life is scheduling my day.  I'm eating lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon, missing the gym, and coming home exhausted after a full day of standing and running between labs.  I think as time goes on and I get the hang of things, it will get better.


Davis is growing and changing by the day.  It's cliched, but.. It sure is amazing to see the world through the eyes of a newborn/baby/toddler.  For example, Davis loves the toe song.  You know the one that goes "This little piggy went to the market, this little piggy stayed home..."  When we take off his shoes and socks he looks at his feet and points and I sing the song.  He laughs in delight when the last little piggy runs home.  He usually points again and we sing again..then one more time usually, perhaps a few more times.


John and I are amazed by his capacity to pick new things up and even extend them.  For example, when we went to the water park, he picked up a stick.  When he saw other kids putting things like buckets in the water stream to catch water, he put his stick in it.  Then when a little girl showed him how to catch water with a bucket, he tried it.  The first time we went to the water park he splashed in the puddles on the perimeter.  The second time, he was running through the center where the water was pouring down.  Who knows what he will do next time.


Davis is certainly like his dad was, a "me do it meself" kind of guy.  He gets upset at mealtimes if we try and give him finger food a little at a time.  This morning breakfast went much better when we handed him the entire plate of eggs and toast along with a fork.  He's doing wonderful at feeding himself with a spoon and fork.  We just have to be on the watch for when he finishes in order to catch the plate before it hits the ground.   


We hoped to go camping this weekend, Davis even has his own sleeping bag!  (Davis fell asleep on my sleeping bag on the last trip and I was freezing all night long).  Unfortunately, it looks like thunderstorms will prevent our trip from happening this weekend. 

13 Months!

Davis turns 13 months today which reminded me just how bad we have been at updating the blog.  The last few weeks seem like a whirlwind.  Some of the highlights include:

• Kristen putting in 70-80 (or more) hour weeks to finish her thesis, get her presentation done and prepare for a conference
• Kristen's conference being postponed just days before we leave due to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
• Kristen's parents coming to visit and take care of Davis
• Planning and taking last minute tip to Costa Rica Puerto Rico.
• Kristen's thesis defense and celebration

It has been a busy few weeks, but things have settled down a little for the time being.  It seems that Kristen and I are both back to working normal hours, Kristen's parents have gone home and we are back to our old routine: chaos. The next couple of weeks should be pretty sedate by our standards: Kristen is wrapping up revisions to her thesis (due date: May 21st), our daycare is closed for the last week of May and then Kristen will go through graduation ceremonies.

Davis has really grown in the last month. He:

• Has about 8-10 words, including: Up, Done (finished eating), Mama, Dada, Thank You (when given something), Hello (usually reserved for answering the phone) and Uh-Oh (dropping something).  His language has developed a lot over the last couple of weeks and besides these words has a lot of different vocalizations.  We think he uses "Ya-Ya" for grandma and has a word for the cats, but we aren't as sure about those.
• Spins around in a circle after watching mom or dad spin around in a circle.  This scares me a little bit as I nearly lost my eye spinning around in our kitchen and hitting my head on a sharp drawer handle when I was young, but it is really neat to watch.
• Can walk backwards
• Knows the song "clap your hands if you are happy and you know it" and does the clapping and stopping parts.  There really isn't much cuter than a stomping toddler.
• Is very opinionated.  If he doesn't get what he wants, he lets us know about it.
• Has a good understanding of basic language and commands.  For example, tonight, while skyping with Grammie, she said "do you want more" and he used the sign for "more".
• Gives fantastic raspberries when mom lies on the ground.
• Takes good and consistent naps at daycare (knock on wood).
• Has transitioned to milk instead of formula (woo hoo).
• Likes whipped cream, ice cream and popsicles 

Those are just a few things.  He is growing up so fast! I can't believe its already been 13 months.  Looking back at where he was a year ago, it seems like it must be longer than 13 months.

The Home Stretch

As of today, Kristen has exactly 5 weeks to finish and turn in her thesis.  It promises to be a busy 5 weeks.  A few of the big things on our plates for the next 2 months:

• Davis' first birthday
• Prepare poster / presentation for conference in Lisbon (Kristen)
• Plan and take a 1 week trip to Portugal and somewhere else in Europe (Both)
• Come up with a thesis title.  Current working draft is: "Biological systems and stuff" (Kristen)
• Write thesis (Kristen)
• Prepare resume (Kristen)
• Job Search (Kristen)
• Prepare thesis defense presentation (Kristen)

Most of these are typical things that happen at the end of a PHd.  We've certainly seen a number of our friends go through crunch time in the last part of their degrees, but it was kind of shock when we realized there were only 5 weeks left until her thesis was due. 

Kristen has been working very hard for a long time and it is hard to imagine where we'll find the extra time.   We're planning on taking Davis to daycare for an extra 3 hours a week which will help a lot, but it means trading off Davis time for work time for a little while.  

Our typical day goes like this:

• 5:30 - Wake up, hopefully sleeping through the night
• 6:00 - Parent #1 showers and gets ready for work
• 6:00 - Parent #2 takes care of Davis (fed, changed, playing - yay!)
• 6:30 - Parent #2 prepares breakfast for Parent #1, #2 and Davis
• 7:00 - Breakfast
• 7:15 to 7:30 - Parent #1 leaves for work
• 7:30 to 9:00 - Parent #2 and Davis time (yay!)
• 9:30 to 10:00 - Parent #2 arrives at work
• 5:15 - Parent #1 picks up Davis
• 5:30 - Parent #2 arrives home, starts dinner
• 6:15 to 6:45 - Dinner
• 6:45 to 7:15 - Playtime (yay!)
• 7:30 - Davis goes to bed
• 7:30 to 9:00 - John cleans, does laundry, chores, etc, Kristen works
• 9:00 to 10:00 - John on the computer, blogging / doing finances, etc, Kristen works
• 10:00 or 11:00 - Bedtime

Its going to be a busy and exciting time.

New Year's resolutions

It's always fun at the turn of the New Year to decide what it is that I would like to better about myself.  Someday, my resolution will involve doing that all year round, but that's not this year.  Instead I have three goals.

1. To drive more often.  By default, whenever we go somewhere in the car, John drives.  I want to make a concerted effort to drive at least half the time.
2. To conserve water while washing dishes.  I'm very bad at leaving the water running and could greatly reduce my water usage if I turned the water off while scrubbing.
   
3. To take one or more hobbies deeper.  I'm still deciding on developing some concrete goals for this.  This stems from the fact that I seem to make a hobby of collecting hobbies.  Here are all the things I have tried at various times in my life:

• Languages (in chronological order): Latin, Italian, Spanish, French.  
• Sports: cycling, triathlons, running, soccer, racquetball, tennis, volleyball, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, golf, rollerblading, ultimate frisbee,
  
• Outdoor activities: camping, backpacking, sailing, white water kayaking, sea kayaking, sculling
  
• Musical instruments: guitar, voice (ok..this consists entirely of one high school musical).
  
• Crafts: cheesemaking, food canning, cross-stitch, knitting, jewelry making, photography, wheel pottery, glass etching, creative writing
  
• Other: motorcycle riding

I think the hobbies I want to focus on are French and photography.  I'm still deciding what the exact goal will be for improving my French this year, but I think after I defend, I would like to join a conversational group and focus on the spoken aspects of the language.  For photography, I am picking up developing black and white film again and would like to enter a photograph in a competition.  A New England state fair of some kind would be ideal.  Below are a few pictures from my first roll of self-developed film in about 13 years!

 

 

Defining your own success

Tonight I attended the Arlington Working Mom's group for the second time. It's a nice group of women, who in one form or another, I have a lot in common with. Everyone has a different career and a different form of childcare, but we all face the same problems in the end and have shared similar trials and tribulations along the way. I find it inspiring and comforting. Tonight's topic was about the benefits and drawbacks of being a working mom for yourself, your spouse and your child(ren). It was an interesting night for me to attend, as my ideas about my career path have been in upheaval lately (since this weekend in fact). I've come to some pretty basic realizations about my current and future happiness.

When John was diagnosed with testicular cancer at the end of February, it was like someone took a picture of our life and framed it in a different perspective. Life isn't a guarantee. We don't know that we get to live out our lives to the end and fulfill every goal we have planned, be it an upgrade to a different category of bike racing, an addition to our family, or a tenured professor. We get what we get, and really we better make sure that each day we are happy with that day and the day before it, because there may not be one after. I know this sounds depressing, but when John made it through the surgery and then the radiation, it was like someone had given us a gift. The gift of realization that we live precariously, a chance to make sure we lived each day to the fullest. I promised then I would remember that lesson always. But then something happened. The same something that always happens, the here and now seems less important then the future. That I must work like there's nothing else in my life but work in order to get that one extra paper out, so that I can get that better postdoc, where I will work like crazy so that I can get a good tenure-track faculty position..so that I can then work like crazy to get tenure. But it's ok, right? Because it's only eight more years and then I can relax and spend quality time with my husband and son, get some good exercise, maybe take a a family vacation.

It's time I took control of defining my own success. Where I exist in work-life, which currently is just life, there is one definition of success. If you aren't aiming for a Nobel prize, you're not doing it right. Alright, maybe the Nobel is a reach, but at least a MacArthur award..It's a tough place to have any other vision of success in. If you consider working outside of academics, you're selling out. It's easy to get caught up in grandiose visions of "I'm making the world a better place by advancing science at it's purest form". Well, in the end, do I make the world a better place for myself, my husband, or my son? How about for the people I may have talked to at a local highschool as a volunteer for women in careers day? Or the person with a vision or reading disability who could have heard the book through me (I used to volunteer at Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic). The person on the other side of a soup kitchen counter? What's better, to abstractly impact the world or directly impact another person's life? I think they're both good, it's what YOU define as happiness and success. I'm realizing I have very concrete ideas about happiness. Family, health (as defined by the ability to do something extraordinary, like competing in a bike race or a triathlon), direct impact on another human being's life, a satisfaction and excitement about my job, and being the kind of person who Davis can look up to and respect, and know that he's always been first in my life.

Until recently, I have been gunning down the MacArthur award path. I feel like I have woken up out of some weird dream. I realized that working and spending a minimum amount of time with my husband and son (while feeling guilty about not working) is not what I want with the rest of my life. So here's me, wrestling with the here-and-now, defining my own success. May I remember that important lesson I learned a few months ago and never let it go.

My grandmother's house, alright the downstairs bathroom specifically, had an Irish blessing framed, and I often remember it. It goes like this:
"May the roads rise to meet you.
May the wind be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face; The rain fall soft upon your fields.
And, until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand."

I feel like I should start this new search for happiness with my own life blessing in a similar form:
"May I always remember what is important.
May I always seek to do what's right for myself and those that rely on me.
May I remember that everyone has their own path and gracefully acknowledge their path while holding true to my own.
At the end of my life, may I never come to regret the way in which I chose to live".

Davis can sit up by himself!

This morning Davis and I were in his room, I was folding his diapers and he was crawling around. When I looked up to see what he was doing, he was just sitting there. He had pushed his way up from the floor to seated all by himself!! Also, Davis definitely loves books. This morning I read eight books an average of two times each. Whenever I ended a book, unless I immediately started it over or started a new one, he would start to cry.

Some highlights for the week:

• Davis started antibiotics last night for a persistent cold with a cough and a slight ear infection. Hopefully, he'll feel better soon. Also, a hacking cough is no way to make friends at music class or in swim lessons.
  
• Davis loved our music class even more this week than last. What fun! All those people singing, and babies to look at. We also got to play with a drum this week in addition to shakers.
  
• I just submitted an abstract for a conference in Quebec in March. I didn't finish the draft of the paper I hoped to finish today, but at least I submitted my abstract on time. I hope to finish the draft by the end of the weekend, I am pretty close.
  
• This is the third week in a row that someone has told me they liked the music I played during my cycling class at the gym. It's been someone different each time!
• It's not recent news, but I don't know that I ever announced it, a few weeks ago I officially returned to my pre-pregnancy weight.
• There's a possibility that my yearly salary may have doubled. I'm not counting on it yet, since there has been some confusion with regards to the distribution of the Scholarship I was awarded, but the current scenario is that money will be in addition to my current stipend. What a blessing that would be! It's quite a bit of change for a house down payment, or essentially, it pays for almost two years of daycare!
• I continue to wonder how in the world I will finish everything I need to finish by graduation time in May. Life is crazy, but I know in the end we will manage to make it happen.
  

This weekend will be pretty low-key. Davis and I will go to swimming lessons tomorrow morning and then I'll be heading to a birthday party tomorrow night. Sunday we have brunch plans with Dave and Megan. Dave is going to lend us a black backdrop so that we can attempt some family portraits. This Wednesday is Veterans day and daycare is closed. Davis and I get to spend the day together! Unfortunately and fortunately, we'll kick it off with the H1N1 vaccine, but later we have plans to go to the Science Museum or to the Stone Zoo with some friends!

Davis almost sleeps through the night

Recently, Davis has almost slept through the night. Earlier this week, he only woke up once during the night and Tuesday, while he woke up a couple of times, he went the whole night without eating. Sleep has definitely been getting easier, tonight I put him down on his back (crying) and he put himself to sleep. I don't think we've done anything, I think this is mostly Davis growing up and getting used to our bedtime routine which we've been pretty consistent about for the last month and a half.

I'm sorry for the lack of posts lately, we've been adjusting to taking daycare and have both been swamped with work recently. Hopefully we're both out from under the heaviest work loads for a while and will be able to post a little more often. This blog is very important to both of us.

Goodbye pregnancy hormones, the angry me is back

I have always had a bit of a volatile temper, specifically when it comes to what I think is incompetent behavior or behavior that doesn't seem to follow any kind of logic. I rarely have this reaction to loved ones or friends, it's mostly reserved for strangers and/or people I know only a little. However, I really mellowed out during pregnancy and was very hard to anger (maybe it would have been a good time for me to start bike commuting again...this is a really good example of my angry streak, I quit riding my bike to work the day I almost got off my bike in order to smash it against a car..a car that had just hit me while they were parking..) Anyway, I can't remember any instances of being so worked up while pregnant, or since, until today.

On Monday the license for a program I use on a daily basis expired. I managed to get rolling on my laptop at home on Monday and Tuesday and continued working with this program (which is what I'm almost exclusively using right now for my work). However, when I came in on Wednesday I needed to get my desktop going too. Only, my desktop is on a different kind of license and so I had to e-mail to see if I could get the info for this license. I got back a really cryptic email (wait, I should really list the sequence of events).

1. I email Andy (IT guy #1) to find out about the license
2. He responds and cc's Bob (IT guy #2) who is charge of the license
3. Andy forwards me a cryptic email from Bob
   
4. I waste my coworker's time trying to figure out what is up with email and then I email Andy and say I don't get it.
5. Coworker and I have figured out what we're supposed to do, but it doesn't work.
6. Day #2, Andy comes to help and sees we are doing it right..he's stumped, we try some stuff. He emails Bob.
   
7. Bob emails Chris (support staff).
   
8. They email Dave (support staff).
   
9. Dave says Bob is in charge
10. Bob is stumped and tells me to do something I'm ALREADY doing
11. I tell him what I need and he tells me you shouldn't need that
12. He tells me I should uninstall and reinstall program (illogical and incompetent all in one)
    
13. I lose my temper and tell him that can't possibly be the solution and I'll just get license type that I know works .....
    

At this point I have to interrupt the post and condense what happens (I wrote the first half this morning and since then a lot has happened including multiple passive aggressive fights with Bob, a call to the company (that proves I have been right all along), two visits from Bob, 5 emails and in all I can summarize that I am in Catch-22 hell. I have passed from angry to amused, because you can't be angry when a situation becomes as ludicrous as this one has. Although I am sad that for all the time I have wasted on it this week that I have very little to show for my week, which is much more of a problem now that I have a munchkin to go home to. In fact I only saw Davis for an hour last night before his bedtime and I was hoping to leave work early today, but since this guy kept coming to my office to argue about how to fix the problem, I met with my undergraduate research assistant late, and so here I am again not going home when I wanted to. And this comes to the very essence of the point of this post. Now, not only am I struggling with my very own nature (the ability to anger easily when faced with bad logic and incompetence, with which I have been blessed in spades today) but on top of wasting time, it now means less time with my son. And so anger and sadness has rendered me even more volatile it seems when you combine those things. I know I have been worse today than I would have been pre-Davis since I actively showed my aggravation to Bob, normally I would simply have complained to my poor office mates, but today I made it very clear to this person that I was angry about the time he was forcing me to waste.

*Sigh* If you have made it this far, thanks for letting me vent. I will be working on how to separate wasted time at work from my time at home with Davis, but in all my life I have yet to find a way from getting angry when faced with a person's bad logic that directly affects me. I did try hypnobirthing techniques today and it helped a little. What helped most was a really good workout. Unfortunately, I have found that the people who attend my indoor cycling class rarely have a good time when I've had a bad week..everyone gets to have a hard workout then :)

Note: Names have been changed

Leaving Davis is hard work

Davis turned 11 weeks old this weekend! When Grandma M. gets here in a couple of weeks she's just not going to recognize the little guy. A real turning point in his weight came the last couple of weeks when he put on a couple of pounds in a short time. I realized how much he changed when the instructor of our new Mommy and Me class said "Hello Davis, it's nice to meet you..how many necks do you have??" Talk about making a Mom self-conscious for her little one! We are still get comments about how beautiful his eyes are, this weekend a stranger at a restaurant called them 'devastating'.

I don't have much time to blog anymore..right now I'm posting something quickly while some of my code runs in the background and I can't do much in the way of work until it's done. I guess the biggest news is that we did start a new Mommy and Me class. It's amazing how different this class is. We've moved on up to the alert baby stage and so the class is all about 'circle time', music and games and much less in the way of quiet discussion. I don't know about Davis, but I was pretty overwhelmed. The other thing is that today has definitely been my hardest day to leave Davis. I've had to fight back tears all morning. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have a yoga Tuesday to look forward to with him! John and I have started to struggle with who gets to hold him when we are home. Both of us seem want to make up all our time away from him on the weekends and at night. I'm really excited that John gets to take next week off for a whole week of just Daddy-Davis time. I think it will be a great experience for both of them.

I could use your help on naming a new blog I've started! I kept finding myself absorbing new information from other moms and different resources and then retelling it to other people. One woman actually asked me if I was in education..which, I am in a way, but not in the way she was thinking. Anyway, my hope for the blog is to post one factoid or tip a day with an occasional resource post for the local area (like things to do and free drop in groups, swim groups, etc.). I called it the Parent's Water Cooler to start, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now not so much. So please send me your suggestions! John has suggested "Kristen's quick tips", but their not really my tips, they are tips from other people and books, so I can't claim them as my own!