The Bean Chronicles

Book review of "A Song of Ice and Fire" aka the series that the "Game of Thrones" tv show is based upon (in other words, why I haven't been around)

2011-12-04T20:41:00.000-08:00

I thought that I didn’t have time to read fiction. I thought being a mother and scientist sucked all the time away. I turns out that I do have time to indulge in fiction. . . as long as I give up blogging, blog-reading, reading the newspaper, looking at my children, talking to my husband. . . I’ve spent the last few months in a daze, sucked into the universe created by George R. R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series (the basis for the HBO series A Game of Thrones). The series has gotten so much hype this year that I fell for it and started the first novel this summer. More than 4000 pages later (that’s not a joke), I finished the fifth and latest novel this week. Guess what? The hype is totally deserved.

The publisher summaries on the backs of these novels are vague. I understand why—they’re difficult books to describe. Epic fantasy in a medieval-based world? That sounds so clichéd. It is a medieval-based world, the story is epic in scope, and there are elements of fantasy. . . But for large parts of the series, the fantasy elements are pushed to the edge. High-stakes political intrigue—diabolical and brutal, the “game of thrones”—takes center stage. Much of the first novel feels less like fantasy than incredibly gritty and detailed medieval history. This isn’t the medieval world of Tolkien or his early imitators—no happy peasant villages where the common folk are all well-fed and literate. Many of the knights in this series are as likely to rape a maiden as to rescue her. The caste system of feudalism is rigid. And men really do shit themselves in battle.

But on the edges of this harsh feudal world, the fantastical lurks. There are blue-eyed zombies (called “wights”) in the frozen north. There are the zombies’ mysterious makers and commanders, known as the Others. The reader comes to understand that the Others and their zombies are the real threat to the realm, but the kings and would-be kings are too busy fighting for power and tearing the realm apart with their wars to take heed of the threat. Across the sea, an exiled queen plots to invade the realm and claim her family's throne. And above all, winter is coming. In this world, winter can last years.

A Song of Ice and Fire is like a glorious mash-up of genres and themes. There’s war, and coming-of-age arcs, and political intrigue; straight-up action adventure and horror; lots of witty dialogue and cinematic flourishes. And in a story remarkable for its seeming “realism,” every now and then there comes an infusion of pure myth. There is one haunting scene in the third book that involves a rescue by a flock of ravens. It’s a startling, dream-like scene, evocative as any image from the Brothers Grimm or ancient myth.

But it’s the characters that really sell this story. The plotting is intricate and brilliant. The world-building is complex and fully-realized. But the characters. . . oh, my. Did I once write a blog post raving about how taken I was with the characters in the Hunger Games? I did, but I knew nothing. The characters in George R. R. Martin’s world are developed with a complexity and vividness that I’ve rarely seen. During the course of this series, he can take a character that you hate at the beginning, and then two books later switch to that character’s narrative viewpoint and make you fall in love. He can take a character that you already love and make you fall even harder than you thought possible. Of all the characters in these books (and there is a named cast of hundreds, with the narration told from the viewpoints of no less than twenty), I am most taken with the character of Jon Snow. Bastard-born son of a great lord, Jon Snow is a boy looking for his place in a world with little regard for bastards. In a world where there is little of black and white, where every decision is haunted by moral ambiguity, Jon Snow is—as described in a fan forum—“one of the lightest shades of gray.” He is one of the few undeniable heroes. Yet he’s no bland goody-goody, and much more than your standard-issue hero fare. His character is complex and multi-layered. When we first meet him, he’s only fourteen years old: proud and insecure, controlled yet rash, ambitious and hungry for glory. And he’s also kind and noble-hearted, with the courage of a lion* and all the integrity and honor of his great father. Watching the boy grow to a man is one of the chief pleasures of this series.

The author has the diabolical habit of piling up cliff-hangers at the end of each book. The end of the fifth installment, Dance with Dragons, is no exception, and ends with the worst, most diabolical cliff-hanger yet. I understand that George R. R. Martin took five years between the third and fourth books, and six years between the fourth and fifth. I am fervently hoping that the HBO series will light a fire and force him to move more quickly with the last two planned installments of his series.

And, um, now I’m bereft. I feel like a big hole has opened up in my life. Without another book of A Song of Ice and Fire to read, what am I to do late at night? Read science?

*or, er, direwolf. For those of you familar with the story.

Indian summer, lab reunions

2011-10-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

It’s summer in October—the days unexpectedly balmy, women in sun dresses and children running in shorts, all under a brilliant blue sky and trees flaming in reds and gold.

Our family took a trip to Old Postdoc city this past weekend. The lab where my husband did his research fellowship was celebrating its 20th year in existence. Quite a milestone, obviously. Lab alumni from around the country flew in for the event. A mini-symposium was even organized, where alumni (the ones still in research) gave talks on their current research. While Husband went to this Saturday symposium and reunited with old colleagues, I took my girls to one of the most beautiful parks I know of. The kids found sticks in the grass, wound them with stems of grass and poked them through leaves, and then tossed their concoctions into a lake, proclaiming that they were “launching boats.” After more than a half hour of this, I persuaded them to see the other sights of the park, and they chased each other over four bridges and under tunnels of trees. Gold leaves rustled above them. Ducks and swans and kayakers moved past on the river. All the colors of autumn—the warmth of russets and dark gold, the intensity of fire-orange and scarlet—were in that day.

Afterward, I met up with one of my old lab mates for lunch, and we were later joined by two more friends. We hung out at one of their houses, and the host spoiled my children with ice cream and cookies and allowed them (actually encouraged them) to play with and torment her poor cat. My old lab has shrunk considerably since I left, and my old PI seems content to keep it small. Although he would seem to be very successful with grant funding (two R01s!), he appears to be spending most of his time on administration these days, and is scaling back the research. His last student graduated a year ago, and the PI has said that it will likely be the last student he ever takes on. “We’re in the same place,” my one friend, a very senior research scientist, told me. “I am not so ambitious as I was, and I don’t think he is either. Once I wanted all my papers to be Nature or Nature Cell Biology. Now I’m content with MBC. I don’t want to work 14 hours a day. I want to enjoy life.”

I picked up my husband from his symposium, and we later went to a celebrated local restaurant for the 20th-year lab-anniversary reception party. More reunions, as my kids started melting down from the late hour. Four years on, most people looked mostly the same—maybe a spiky new hair-do, or a suddenly dapper wardrobe, but mostly the same. Many of our old friends’ lives have changed little, but some have changed dramatically. We heard tell of new engagements, marriages and significant others. Babies. Divorce and remarriage. Career changes. Of the people who showed up for my husband’s lab reunion, about half were in academic research. And half were working in “alternative” careers—from jobs in pharma and biotech to jobs working for a defense contractor, a non-profit science lobbying group, and a job for an health insurance agency (“the dark side” my husband termed that last. His own “alternative” was to move from research to full-time clinical work in medicine).

“Good for you!” a number of people told me after hearing that I was back at the lab bench.

Good for me, indeed, I feel. But I know that I’m not as ambitious as I once was. I’m not one of the eager grad students in my current lab, working crazy round-the-clock hours fueled by Mountain Dew and the energy of youth. I may still hope for that big GlamourMag publication, but I know that a solid MBC-type journal would be more realistic (and is also perfectly fine). My expectations are adjusted downward. If I could just keep a long-term job as a perma-postdoc/staff scientist in my current lab, I would be happy as a clam.

It’s been interesting to see who among our former lab colleagues is still swinging for the glamorous prize of PI-dom, and who has stepped away. The PI from my first postdoc was once very hard-driving and ambitious, and I would not have expected him to contentedly downsize his lab as he has done. I am not surprised by the choices of other people . . . And I admit that I feel some trepidation for the other postdocs/non-tenured scientists who are still in the academic game.

It all feels very unpredictable—life, that is. Or predictable in broad outline. . . and then not at all. The evening was so unseasonably warm that the reception area on the enclosed patio felt hot. We stayed through the dessert (the kids now past the meltdown phase), and my husband’s old boss hugged us good-bye. I don’t know if we’ll see any of those people again anytime soon. I can’t say that we are truly still close to any of them. But it’s a small world, and the academic and medical worlds even more so. Somehow, the goodbyes I’ve said to old labs have never felt final.

Friday lab rant

2011-08-26T08:10:00.001-07:00

Have you ever walked into your lab, taken one look at your cells, gone "F---!!", and then wanted to walk right out again and never come back?

Yeah. It's one of those days.

On vacation

2011-08-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not physically gone. But mentally I'm away. Against my better judgement, I gave in to peer pressure and hype and picked up Game of Thrones, first in a five book (so far) fantasy series which totals at least several thousand pages. Trying to put this book down at a decent hour is like trying to stop at just one potato chip.

Plus, it's summer. I'm trying to kick back. Or to at least kick back as much as I can.

So it's summer hiatus on this blog. I'm going to vacation a bit in Winterfell, try to get out of the lab this weekend, and remember to look at my children and husband.

See you all in a bit.

My new niece

2011-07-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

The midpoint of summer comes as it always seems to of late—far too soon. Already the newspaper is publishing articles on back-to-school shopping. Looking at the calendar, I see that Bean-girl’s summer camp ends in just a few weeks. We’re in the midst of a dire heat wave, yet fall is just around the corner.

Do you remember when you were a kid and summer lasted forever? At least it did for me. No schedule, no place to be, nothing I had to do: summer was a limitless day, an empty bucket begging to be filled. My sisters and I played with each other and neighborhood friends; we read books, lounged about the house, quarreled. We had to actively look for ways to pass the time. We sometimes complained that we were bored. Now I’m catching my breath from school graduation, getting used to the rhythms of packing lunches for day camp, and suddenly it’s time to think about back-to-school shopping. Do things slow down at your work in the summer? someone asked me recently. No. If anything, my experiments seem to speed up in the summer, as new data comes gushing in.

This doesn’t mean I don’t take any breaks at all. We’re off on a family vacation this weekend—a small getaway Up North to a place on a lake. My husband and I did sneak off in June for our anniversary. And two weekends ago we managed to get away to the Big City where my sister and brother-in-law live. Our new niece lives there, too, who was born this past fourth of July. I would post a picture, but I think that might freak my sister out. So let me just say my niece is the cutest baby that was ever ever born. And I can say this with perfect loyalty to my own children, because they were also the cutest babies ever born.

Baby M, I will call my niece. She was crying when I took her in my arms. I rocked her, and she went silent in surprise, her mouth open, her blue-black eyes staring at me in shock. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU??! her eyes said. Then her eyes closed and she went right off to sleep.

It’s my sister and brother-in-law, of course, who are the sleep-deprived ones. Baby M will sleep and eat, sleep and eat, coddled and pampered by her loving parents. She’s sooo cute! Bean-girl kept whispering, creeping up to gaze in awe at her cousin’s face. Legume, less impressed, spent her time playing with Baby M’s toys.

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They are doing remarkably well, Baby M’s parents. Almost preternaturally calm and confident. Where did they get that from? Was I like that? Did I give that appearance?

We in the Bean family are looking forward to getting to know Baby M. I envision vacations where our families get together, where the cousins all gather and play. My sister doesn’t know it, but I’m imagining spring break together in some warm family-friendly all-inclusive resort.

I imagine the cousins playing together on the beach. Summer.

Work-life balance rant, and tribute to fathers

2011-06-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear. I didn’t mean to get sucked into the perennial work-life balance meme. I really didn’t.

There’s certainly been temptation of late. From excellent posts by Cloud and others, a crazy-ass op-ed piece in the New York Times and the resulting blogosphere uproar. . . I wanted to say something because, hey, someone is wrong on the Internet (and thanks for that link, Cloud!) but really, last week all I wanted to do was get to bed before midnight.

But something—and I can’t even remember what—has just set me off again.

In all the discussions about women, motherhood, and work-life balance, one point is often brought up: that parental leave and family care and work-life balance are not “women’s issues”; these are issues that affect both mothers and fathers, men and women. I see women bringing up this valid point in various feminist comment threads—but often (not always, of course, but often enough) there is something angrily accusatory about it. The tone is often not Gee, we should also respect men’s rights to parent and have a decent work-life balance but Goddamnit, if men would just step up to the plate this wouldn’t be such a problem! If those lazy-ass dads would just pitch in and change a diaper it would be easier and things would change! Those @!*%! men! They are not helping out and it’s all on us women, all the time!

Look, I don’t doubt that there are douchebag husbands and fathers like that. Thankfully, I don’t really know any of them. This blog post is not about them. It’s about the many fathers I know who struggle every day to share equally in the demands and joys of child-rearing, family care, and domestic chores. The dads who need to be respected for that—just as their wives are. Who turn down certain opportunities at work because they put their families first—just as many women do. The truth is that in American society, it is really more acceptable for women to “opt out” of the workforce for a few years to be a stay-at-home parent than it is for a man to do so. It’s still more acceptable for a woman to duck out of a meeting early, or miss a work event because she is tending to a sick child or attending a parent-teacher conference than it is for a man to do so. When I think about including men in the perennial “work-life balance” discussion, I don’t mean to complain about selfish pigs who aren’t doing their fair share—I want to talk about the men who are trying their best to do their share, and talk about how to make it easier for them to do so. How to make it easier for everyone to do so.

This is not your father’s generation, as the old saw has it. Even the fathers I know who have stay-at-home wives are incredibly involved and committed to sharing in childcare duties. Two of the postdocs in my lab are fathers with young children and stay-at-home wives; they both get into work at an ungodly hour (6 am) so that they can leave early and have dinner with their families and see their kids before the littlest ones go to sleep. They coach soccer and spend as much time as they can with their children. When his kids were recently sick, one of the postdocs took time off from work to stay home with them—even though his wife wasn’t working and was home anyway. He knew that she needed a break and some help—three kids sick at once!—so he helped out. Somehow, I don’t see this as common among male scientists and workers of a generation ago.

My brother-in-law is seriously considering quitting his job to stay home and be primary caregiver for his soon-to-be born baby daughter. My parents are absolutely horrified by the idea.

And I haven’t even talked about my husband, and all he does for his daughters and for me. We absolutely share in home and childcare duties—sometimes it tips more his way for a while, sometimes it tips more my way. Overall, it works out to 50-50 (although it can be so exhausting that it often feels more like 120/120).

So to end this rant. . . There are committed fathers who want to share equally in childrearing and family life. It’s not just a matter of haranguing men to take more responsibility. It’s a matter of making it more possible for them to take more responsibility—of offering reasonable paternity leave as well as maternity leave, of making it more socially acceptable for a man to ease his work hours or take time off from a job to care for his family. Although yes, I am also aware that in the United States of America, a country with no paid maternity leave and no paid sick leave, the idea of a paid paternity leave and more humane working hours lies in the same realm as unicorns and leprechauns. *

*Because in the end, you know (and as GMP eloquently pointed out in a blog post) no one really cares.

Anniversaries

2011-06-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I saw this blog as a digital baby book of sorts—a place to record memories and milestones of the bean children. But they grow too quickly, my bean girls. The milestones fly past. Before I knew it, my first toddler became an articulate six-year old, a beautiful girl who dresses herself in the morning, finds her own snack to pack for school; who lost two front teeth in one week, who can read to herself (for a long time I despaired over the reading issue), and who, impossibly, just graduated first grade. How did this happen?

And my other bean child, the Legume. I thought she was a baby. I want to see her as a baby. But it’s been a long time since she was a baby at all. Two weeks ago, she turned four. Yes, four. I carry her when I don’t need to. She wiggles in my arms, squirms away. There she is, running away. “Bye bye,” she flaps a hand at me as she runs off to her friends at daycare/preschool. Her eyes crease into half-moons when she smiles. She has peaches for cheeks; her arms and legs are still rounded and soft. But those legs and arms have lengthened and thinned; she dangles against me when I lift her, and I can’t deny that she’s growing.

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“Legume doesn’t walk,” my husband observed. “She gallops.”

It’s true. She gallops. Or hops. Or skips. Or runs. Maybe a better word is galumph. She galumphs through the house. And clumsily knocks into walls, chairs, furniture. She seems clumsy, but then is very agile when it comes to scaling heights in search of candy and treats. She follows and worships her big sister when she is not squabbling with her. Her nickname (among many) is “Fire-pig.” My husband discovered this name when he looked up her Chinese horoscope and found that she is a pig with elements of fire. Somehow the name fits, and she delights in it. We told her daycare teachers, as she often refers to herself by this moniker; they were also delighted by the name, agreeing that it fits her spitfire personality. “The Fire-pig fights fires!” she proclaims. She and Bean-girl weave a complex mythology of the Superhero Fire-pig with laser eyes who fights bad guys. “Stay away from the stove!” I tell her, and she responds, “But mommy, the Fire-pig fights fires!” (yes, and stay away from this one).

She can eat a watermelon like nobody’s business. I’m talking an entire small watermelon, all by herself.

She is a tomboy who likes to play with trucks, cars, trains, space ships, and has a special fondness for fire engines. She wants to be a fire fighter when she grows up. And a scientist as well (just like mommy).

We despaired of her ever being toilet trained. We thought it might never happen. “I’ve yet to send a child off to kindergarten in diapers,” her lead daycare teacher told us. “There’s always a first time,” my husband said grimly, and the teacher had to nod in agreement.

But our stubborn stubborn child is coming around. When you are four, you have to use the potty, we told her. And now she seems to have finally agreed. I shouldn’t jinx it be writing this here, but I think just maybe we won’t be packing diapers in her kindergarten bag, after all.

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Time goes too fast. Last week I noticed the lilacs by our front door blooming, giving off their evocative scent. Today the blooms are already gone. Our youngest daughter turned four, and my husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. For the first time in years, we went away for an entire weekend, just by ourselves. Focusing just on ourselves. My parents came up for the weekend to take care of both kids—a first for all of us. Lilacs were blooming in the lakeside resort town my husband and I visited; lilacs lined the walkway to our B&B. It was a pretty tourist town with art galleries, ice cream shops, and little to do after dark. We walked on the beach, window-shopped, and ate out. On Saturday evening we took in some community theatre. The play, These Shining Lives, was well-written, although the amateur cast was mostly stiff. (The lead actress, however, was wonderful, completely natural and affecting. She was a college theatre major, and the training and talent showed).

On Sunday morning we sat in the B&B’s lobby and read the newspaper front to back. The silence felt like a heavenly indulgence.

The weekend made my husband and I remember that we need to take time out to focus on just each other. The last time we got away for a weekend sans kids, it was for a wedding. Fun, but not really a weekend of alone time amidst the usual wedding whirl and socializing. This time it really was a weekend just for us. A little bubble of peace and quiet. Our bedroom suite was beautiful. And my husband, who does not normally express his feelings in words, expressed them in a card that made me cry.

Ten years. Four and ten. My newly four-year old daughter was born on the date that my husband and I married ten years ago. I can’t believe how the years have flown by.

Bad Science Week

2011-06-08T20:02:00.000-07:00

It’s been a Bad Science Week.

Nothing catastrophic, just a hum-drum Bad Week. Microscope acting up. Western blot FAIL (second one). Cell lines not behaving appropriately. The big experiment that I completed—the one that was supposed to be Figure 2 of my hypothetical manuscript—the experiment that involved two staggered month-long cell culture assays—well, it didn’t work quite as expected. The trend is there. But the controls misbehaved, and the numbers don’t line up well enough with the first experiment in the series. Let’s just say that I will not be making my hypothetical Figure 2 tonight, after all.

But I was reminded again of what awesome colleagues I have. Even in the midst of the blues, I could vent and laugh today with my friends. Who else understands, but those of us who work in the lab? And more than one of us has had a Bad Science Week so far. One of the grad students was looking for Ibuprophen today (headache from staring at the computer screen too long) and heard a rumor that the guards at the security desk have a stash. “Ask them for some,” a colleague suggested. “Say that you could cure cancer today if you just didn’t have this headache.”

My benchmate patiently listened to my tale of woe and tried to cheer me up. “But it’s real,” he said of my experiments. “The trend is there, so you know it’s real. That’s important.”

It reminded me of my own pep talks that I’ve given to others over the years, and I smiled just a little, very ruefully, inside.

And a friend who had had a Very Bad Science Weekend (and aren’t they some of the worse?) gave an excellent lab meeting. She’s been disappointed that a certain hypothesis has not panned out, and she told me that she’d had a mini-meltdown over the weekend after multiple gels leaked and an expensive piece of equipment crashed. But she gave a great lab meeting that was enthusiastically received. She’d complained that her results did not support Hypothesis A, but after seeing her presentation I think that the failure of that hypothesis actually opens up a more interesting and exciting avenue of research. Other people evidently feel the same, as the room started buzzing with enthusiasm during her presentation.

There are two days left, and tomorrow’s experiments might yet (partially) turn this week around for me. Hope springs eternal and all that. I just hope Bad Science Week doesn’t become Bad Science Month or, heaven forbid, Bad Science Year. Because I’ve been in that latter place, and it’s a bad place to be indeed. Even with awesome colleagues who make me laugh.

I am an idiot

2011-06-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I transferred two gels backwards overnight. (In my defense, it's been about four years since I regularly ran Westerns, and the transfer apparatus in this lab is set up with exactly the opposite orientation of my last lab).

So today I got to pour new gels and re-run them in between other experiments. Set my gels to run super-low voltage while I ran to pick up my Bean-girl from school and get dinner on the table. After dinner I went back in. Just came home and everyone is asleep--including Husband, who fell asleep next to our little Legume.

Oh, and it's Legume's birthday tommorrow! And we forgot to get her a present in time (although we did order a cake). And I even had a three-day weekend in which to go shopping. How many kinds of an idiot am I?

Mother's Day recap

2011-05-14T19:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote this post the day after Mother's Day. But such is life--I had
no time to even post it until now. I made a promise to myself to blog more... and I've already broken that promise (this month is crazy, yo). Anyway, I'll post this here now, for the memories of that weekend. Happy belated Mother's Day to all the mothers out there!

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Mother’s Day tea at Bean-girl’s school, Friday afternoon.

Bean-girl was waiting for me in front of her classroom. When she saw me enter the school building, she fairly flew down the hall to me, eyes bright. She carried a corsage in her hand. A flower of brightly dyed cloth (later, I realized that it was a tie-dyed coffee filter --blue and purple, my favorite colors). She tried to wrap the pipe cleaner stem about my wrist, then gave up and let me do it on my own. Proudly she led me to the gymnasium, where a mass of first-graders stood waiting patiently on bleachers for the show to start. The walls of the gym were covered with hand-drawn pictures of the children’s’ mothers, each picture decorated with an award: “World’s Best ------- .” At least half of the pictures were decorated with a “World’s Best Cook” award. I turned my head, searching for my own portrait. The room buzzed. I looked curiously around me at the other mothers, many of whom were greeting each other as close friends. All of us had found the time to make it here at 2:45 on a Friday afternoon, many of us undoubtedly leaving work or leaving younger children home with a sitter. I will admit that my first reaction upon receiving the invitation from Bean-girl’s teacher was annoyance. That’s mean, I thought, reading the letter which admonished me (or so it seemed) to please come to the first-grade class tea because “the children have been working very hard on this. If you can’t make it, please have someone special come in your place.” And what of the working women who can’t come? was my first thought. And what of those working women who don’t have relatives in the area—no retired grandmothers to take their place? How are those children supposed to feel, singing to no special person in the crowd and serving tea to no one?

But I was there. One of the great perks of my job is its flexibility. So I could make it, as well as the other lucky women around me.

The children launched into their Mother’s Day concert. A series of songs honoring mothers. I pride myself on being unsentimental. My husband and I both affect cynicism. But by the second song, I found myself melting. A mother is like a flower, the children sang. A mother is like sunshine, and Bean-girl and her classmates crossed their arms over their hearts in the sign for love.

She got me right there.

And afterward, she and her classmates served us iced tea, lemonade, strawberries, cookies and Hershey’s kisses. There were only enough seats for the mothers, none for the children. So most of the kids ended up on their mothers’ laps, eating off their mothers’ plates. Bean-girl did not sit, but stood attentively and formally at my side, asking if I had enough food (and then helping herself to half of it). Bean-girl has my heart, but the boy in the formal dress shirt next to us also stole a bit of it (there’s hardly anything more adorable than a little first-grade boy in a dress shirt and tie).

But one of the best parts of the day? Bean-girl got me my portrait, and my award was not for being best cook, or gardener, or best crafty-mom. I had an award proclaiming me “World’s Best Reader.” And I was very pleased.
Because I’m not a great cook (that would be my husband). I hate baking. I hate gardening. I can’t sew and I’m terrible at crafts. I’m impatient and not good at playing on the floor with the kids, and I don’t like board games. But I love to read. And I love reading with my children. I will always love reading to and with the both of them.

Thank you, Bean-girl.

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And then a baby shower in Chicago

There was more to the weekend, much more. I feel like Bean-girl when she exclaimed over all the things she would have to write about in her school journal on Monday. We drove to Chicago for my sister’s baby shower—her first baby. Saturday morning my hugely pregnant sister took me speed shopping for the perfect suit jacket and skirt (needed for later this month). Then off to her house to prepare for the shower. My mother took over the kitchen (and took over the party from the official host). There was the usual family squabbling. My mother burned the pad thai and blamed the stove. I cooked batch after batch of spring rolls. There was yelling over cucumber slices and raw eggs. The house filled up, people ate and ate, children seemed to multiply, three kids had toilet training accidents (including one of mine).

My sister stood next to a business colleague, discussing motherhood and work. She absently rubbed her round belly. Her friend was talking about a “night nurse” that she employed. I had never heard this term before. Apparently, a night nurse is a person who comes to your home and gets up with the baby when it cries at night so that the parents can get some rest. Two of my sister’s friends employ night nurses. They also have nannies.

Life is different among the business executives of Chicago.

“My husband still travels 100%,” my sister’s friend said. “I cut back on travel when I had my kids, but I still go out of town 3-4 times a month.”

Academic scientists like to bitch about how hard we work. About how hard it is to balance work and family. But truly—many others have it worse. (although the high-flying execs do get paid more).

A father with a month-old daughter cradled her head tenderly. He had the dazed, shell-shocked expression of new parents. “As you can tell, we’re still learning,” he commented.

“Will you come stay with me after the baby is born?” my sister asked me. “We don’t even know how to bathe a baby! One of my friends said it took them an hour the first time they tried! I don’t even know what to do!”

Nobody does, at first. You learn.

The house was filled with parents in various states of learning. High-powered dual career couples. Lower-key families with a part-time working spouse. A full-time stay-at-home father and his wife. My sister and her husband have a wide range of friends, and various occupations and lifestyles were represented.

My sister has worried aloud about combining motherhood and career since the day she was engaged. Actually, I think she’s been worrying about it long before. Her husband is also nervous. He wants to be a good father. He’s actually talked about quitting his own job to stay home with their child.

I do worry about her. It’s not easy. And I don’t just mean about the work/family issue—it’s not easy period. A new child is sleeplessness and stress and an inevitable toll on the marriage. That wrinkled little baby will stretch you and strain you and change you in ways you cannot imagine.
But she will also bring you love and expand your heart in a way you cannot now understand.

I look at my sister in her pretty patterned dress, round and glowing and beautiful. I worry, but her husband is a good man, solid all the way through. She is worried about what lies ahead for them, but I know she’ll learn and be okay.

She’ll muddle through, just as the rest of us are doing.

Happy late Mother’s Day to you all.

My job does not count as "me" time

2011-04-14T20:26:00.000-07:00

I love my job. I do.

But now and then I look back wistfully at my life as a part-time science writer. There was more time, then, for reading fiction, attending meetings of my mothers’ group, and writing. There was time to get good home-cooked dinners on the table without too much stress (other than that provided by small children hanging onto me). There was time to relax with the kids at home. There was time to go to the gym.

Every now and then I read the online discussion threads of my local mothers’ group, and I feel a pang of envy as I read women making plans to meet up with one another (children in tow) at the local coffee-and-indoor-playground spot. I read of plans for a new monthly cooking club subgroup, a girls’-night-out, or the latest book club discussion (which I’ve missed again). My fridge is full of vegetables and meat that I buy over the weekend in the delusional belief that I will actually prepare it all during the week. Instead, I am racing through a restriction digest at work, and then running for the parking garage and off to pick up the kids, late again. Dinner is frozen Costco potstickers (nothing wrong with that; the kids love them and would eat them 5 nights a week if allowed. But I tire of them, and I do feel guilty about not introducing more variety into their diet!)

I do love my job. But sometimes, I also look back longingly at my prior life. And with summer approaching, I look back even further to those first two summers here in our Midwestern city, when I was home full-time with both kids, watching them splash in the kiddie pool and run through the backyard; arranging playdates; making friends with other stay-at-home mothers and exploring the parks and museums of our new home with my children.

It’s not that I want that old life again, exactly. I was bored out of my skull plenty of times, and crawling the walls. I have only to look back at some of my old blog posts to remember that. I love my children, but staying home full-time with them really take it out of me.

And yet. . . Husband was also more understanding of my need for “me” time back then. He was encouraging of my outside interests and nights out. Now that I work full-time at a job I enjoy, he seems to believe that my job counts as “me” time.

Newsflash: it doesn’t.

I love my job and children both. . . I just wish I had more room to breathe.

peace

2011-03-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

There are moments when the children play so sweetly together that you pause in the middle of dishwashing or cleaning to stop and stare. The older one is reading a “Clifford the Big Red Dog” book to the younger one. She reads it from beginning to end in her newly confident 6-year old reading voice. Then, at her sister’s request, she reads it from end to back, and they both laugh over the silliness. They are cuddled together on the couch, sunlight falling upon their hair.

The older one allows the younger one to sit on her lap at the kitchen table as she works on an art project.

The children head into the basement to play, and they play long and quietly and peacefully together, while you sit and read the Sunday paper.

And then you pack them up for a trip to the annual butterfly conservatory exhibit at the local botanical gardens. You’re meeting a friend and her family there. And although your children have never before met your friend’s little boy, and the little two-year old boy can barely talk, the children become instant friends. Wordlessly, the little boy leads your daughters in a spur-of-the-moment game: he finds a rock to sit on, and they both sit on either side of him. After 30 seconds of happy sitting, he darts up and finds another rock 10 feet away to sit upon. They race after him and again settle on either side. After 30 smiling seconds, he gets up again. Repeat.

And then the children all hold hands and make a train around the greenhouse conservatory together. Chugga chugga choo choo, your youngest daughter says.

And you wonder why world peace doesn’t reign. Because children are obviously naturally good and loving and open to everyone. People are inherently good. The little boy hugs your daughter, and your daughters hug their new friend, although they cannot even remember his name.

And then that evening, hell breaks loose, and your little angel girls are shoving each other, and hitting each other with hard toys, and the youngest one willfully scatters toys all about the living room and she bounces heedlessly on the couch and shouts, I’m a bad kitty! I want to be the Bad Kitty! and you realize, okay, maybe just maybe (as though you needed any evidence other than the evening news) world peace isn’t so easily attained after all.

Indulgent whining

2011-03-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

I think I hit a wall this week.

The gloomy dregs of winter, the endless colds, the endless demands of work and family and laundry and experiments and "that time of month" (you know what I mean, ladies), well, it all seemed to come together in a potent brew that has left me spectacularly unmotivated.

For, well, about the last four days now.

Not that I haven’t been working. I’ve dutifully done the minimum of what needs to be done to keep certain experiments going. And other than that, I’ve been staring into space, logging onto Facebook for the twentieth time that day, gathering a stack of papers to read in the café or library and then zoning out completely with papers in hand.

The latest discussions on the perpetual postdoc problem have not helped my mood. Anxiety is the undercurrent to a postdoc’s life: the knowledge that the odds are against you, that you have a vanishingly rare chance at even being able to have a sustainable career in the field you trained for, let alone a shot at assistant professorship at a decent research university. Me, I would be perfectly happy being a staff scientist, of the class that Jennifer Rohn envisions in her recent Nature editorial. Indeed, there are a number of such Ph.D.-level staff scientists at my institution. But word on high is that with current budget constraints, such slots will not be as readily available as in the past. And such a position is still no safeguard against insecurity; one is still dependent upon the funding of the primary investigator. I’ve seen one previously well-funded lab at my institute slowly dissolving over the past year, and one very senior staff scientist there (he’d been in that lab for nearly ten years) had to leave his family here in America while he took a second staff scientist position in Asia.

Insecurity is the name of the game in science these days—whatever level you may be at. I’ve hitched my scientific fortune to a mentor who is a rising star—but you can never tell what will happen. My husband jokes that maybe I’m bad luck: my first postdoc advisor lost his Howard Hughes funding two years after I joined his lab, and my first lab at this Institute (which I joined as a scientific writer/editor) rapidly lost funding and went from 15 people to six during my tenure there. Then again, I think it’s not so much a sign of my bad voodoo, as simply a sign of these very tough economic times.

Which is enough to get anyone depressed, along with listening to NPR and reading the global news.

So I hid out in the Institute’s library yesterday, tried to read a review, and stared into the gas flames of the fireplace. Outside was damp and gray, and the heat of the fire seemed the only warmth in the perpetual chill of the Institute.

Next week I have more experiments geared up. I’m going on vacation in early April, and there is so much I need to get done before then. If I think too much, I feel a little panicky because there is so much I need to get done always. And then I feel overwhelmed.

I need to get up and get motivated. Kick butt. Read, think, plan, do a dozen experiments, cook healthy dinners, spend more quality time with my children, try not to neglect my husband, and vacuum the inside of my car. The inside of my car is a disaster. If you saw it, you would shake in horror. Things are breeding in there. I subject my kids (who are also the major source of the disaster) to this horror every day when I buckle them in for our commute.

Okay, motivation is lacking.

Could someone please send Spring soon?

Valentine's 2011--our new friend

2011-02-14T19:27:00.000-08:00

“I think you’re really going to like your Valentine’s gift this year,” my husband remarked to me in bed a few weeks ago.

“Oh?” I said in a neutral tone, wondering what he had up his sleeve.

Last week was brutal. Kids sick. Kids crying. Kids throwing up. Me missing two days of work because I’m the one with the flexible job, not my husband. Me staying home all day with the children and then going to work from 5-9 pm last Wednesday, because there were cells that had to be harvested and things that had to be done. Experiments that didn’t work. Experiments that technically worked, but not in the way that I wanted them to. And last Friday, I topped off a hellish week by dropping a plate of Super Supreme Nachos in the cafeteria line. Shards of ceramic skittered across the floor, amidst clumps and puddles of chips, guacamole, cheese and beans.

Somewhere during the week of Legume’s night terrors and the vomit and the snot attacks, I stumbled into my bathroom in the darkness, having just put Legume down to sleep for the night.

I noticed that the lid for the toilet seat was down, which was odd. Then I sat, and noticed something even odder. I flipped on the lights and saw cords trailing across the floor.

I strode into our bedroom and said “What is going on!” to my husband, who was busy reading his iPad.

He did not even deign to look up. Didn’t even crack a smile.

“So I guess that’s my Valentine’s present,” I said.

Yup. A heated toilet seat.

“You spend so much time in there—I thought you would like it,” my husband explained.

And I have to admit, after several days with our new friend—it is pretty nice.

So that’s my Valentine’s day. The kids are healthy again, and brought back bags filled with cards and candy from their classmates. My husband’s admin baked pink frosted cupcakes for the office, and gave him a plate to take home for the girls (and they were so stuffed with treats from their own school parties that they could barely nibble at them). Our neighborhood babysitter dropped by with two huge foil-wrapped “Hershey kiss” treats for the girls (actually rice crispy treats molded and wrapped to look like Hershey kisses). Two hours ago, I found out that my sister is expecting her first baby girl, and the Bean and Legume can expect a little girl cousin to play with in five months. Husband is passed out upstairs in Legume’s room after reading her a bed-time story.

Almost ten years married now. We are not, by any stretch, a romantic couple.

But I do have my toasty warm toilet seat now. Husband does still sometimes surprise me. I was thinking of jewelry, but he gave me something I didn’t even know I wanted.

Maybe heated bathroom floors, a double-headed shower, and a Jacuzzi tub are next?

Letting go of mysteries

2011-02-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

In this business, I have begun to learn to let go of mysteries.

In graduate school, my lab studied a large family of signaling proteins. We were particularly focused upon one particular subunit of a heterotrimeric signaling complex. The “gamma” subunit comes in many flavors or isoforms—twelve different isoforms, the last time I checked. Why? This was the burning preoccupation of my PI. Why so many isoforms? These subunit variants have little amino acid sequence similarity (between 15-30%) and are all exquisitely conserved across mammalian evolution. That suggests that there are important functional differences between these isoforms. But what the hell are those differences? What are these protein subunits really doing in the cell? Why, my PI would frequently say with exaggerated frustration, are there so many of them?

It’s been over ten years since I left that lab, and the answer is still unknown. My old lab has made important progress on the function of some of these proteins, but my old PI’s question is essentially unanswered. It was a question that preoccupied me for a while, but I long ago left that field. The answers will not come from me.
*********************************************

During my first postdoc, I became absorbed by a different set of questions. And in the year before I left that lab, I made some interesting observations. Overexpression of a certain gene in a certain cell line led to striking changes in cell morphogenesis: the cells were suddenly able to form long branching tubules that could invade through extracellular matrix. Why? How the hell did they do that? Interesting, my PI at the time commented, and then remarked that he had no clue what it meant or how to pursue the finding. My time in that lab was limited; my fellowship funding had just run out, and I would be out the door in a few months. There was simply no time to follow up on my discovery. It was a mystery that would be left unpublished, unanswered.
*****************************************************

The image of those branching tubules from my first postdoc has stayed with me. When I joined my current lab, I decided to make use of the cell system I had learned during my first postdoc. And I realized that some of the cell lines I had made during that first postdoc would be perfect controls for experiments I was planning for my second postdoc. I further realized that this was a chance to solve old mysteries: the assays I had planned for my new project could also be applied for that old project I had abandoned. I would crank all my cell lines (old and new) through the assays together; I’d get two papers for the price of one! I told my new PI my idea, and he gave me his enthusiastic support. I wrote my old postdoc PI a long e-mail, catching him up on my career transitions, asking him for my old cell lines, and outlining a collaboration and project proposal. In response to my one-page letter, he sent these exact lines: “Great to hear from you. Happy to send the cells.”

Well, you may have guessed how this ends. In theory it sounds easy to process multiple cell lines together through complicated assays; it sounds easy to balance different projects. It is, most of us find, not that easy. Especially when my primary project began taking on intriguing new dimensions. The work from my first postdoc did indeed serve as useful controls, but they have not served for anything more.

“We need to look over your goals,” my current PI said shortly after the new year. He’s big on making goals in writing and revisiting them regularly. We looked over the list of goals I’d written in the fall. One of the first was to complete that project from my first postdoc lab, and get out a minor publication on it. “I think we’ll going to have to drop this one,” I said regretfully.

“You don’t want to do it anymore?” he asked.

“I would LOVE to do it,” I answered. “But I just don’t think we can.”

“It would benefit you more than me,” he said honestly. “I think you’re right. I don’t like having my people drop their goals, but you’re right.”

I don’t like it either, but my primary project, the R01-funded project that funds me and this lab, is the one of primary importance. It’s the project that will help determine, in a few year’s time, whether or not this assistant professor gets his R01 renewed and this lab survives. And that primary project has taken off. It’s soaring. And it’s in a wide open field—I have no competitors (that I know of). That side project I dreamed of, an old observation of branching cells? It’s in a competitive area, and the work involved to bring it to publication would be a risky commitment, and far more than I can afford.

So I find myself again saying goodbye to a past mystery, even while the mysteries of my current project deepen. I wonder if anyone will follow up on that long-ago observation I made in my first postdoc? Nothing has been published on it. Perhaps no one has yet noticed the effect?

That old mystery may someday be solved. But—like the mysteries of my grad school lab--it will not be by me.

New Year's resolutions: 2011 edition

2011-01-09T20:48:00.000-08:00

I have one resolution for this New Year. Just one. To fit in two 30 min work-outs a week. It's now Jan 10, and I can grandly say that I've kept this up for an entire week. With discipline, I might even be able to keep this up for a month!

(It helps enormously that my Institute has opened a small fitness center in the basement. Really, I don't have any excuses now.)

I was fairly pleased at how my resolutions for 2010 worked out. I might not have kept all of those up for an entire year, but I did have a good run at them, and I did actually cross several off my list.

GOALS FROM 2010

Health goals

--Exercise at least 2-3 times a week.
--Take a pilates/yoga class (went to the first class last week—public humiliation).
--Eat more fruits, veggies and whole grains.

During my five month stay-at-home stint, I actually did all those things. I took a combination Pilates/yoga/tai chi class which was utterly humiliating for the first three sessions. By the end, I found that I really enjoyed it, and of late I've found myself missing it. I would love to take a class like that again, but there is simply no logistical way to fit it in.

Creative writing goals

--Finish second short story, send out to some trusted readers, eventually submit and hopefully publish somewhere.

--Start a new story.

--Revise and submit a very old story.

--Try daily journaling/writing.

I finished that short story, sent it out to a trusted reader, and realized it just didn't work. It's still sitting in my desk drawer.

I started and completed a new story. Score! Was accepted to a small, but up-and-coming online literary journal.

Revised very old story, submitted it to a few literary journals, got some form rejections and one seemingly nice rejection.

Daily writing? HA! This blog is as close as it gets.

Home goals (domesticity)

--Sort and donate old clothing (done!)

--Sort, get rid of, organize the toys taking over our house.

--Organize the home office

--Print and organize backlog of family photos

Progress on these home goals? HA HA HA HA!!!

Yes friends, I'll be pretty pleased with myself if I can just keep up a weak workout routine for the next year.

Lull

2010-12-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

It is damn hard to work the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The end-of-the year goals I had—to finish off this review article, to organize all my constructs, cell lines, and viral supernatants (yes, good times), to clean off my desk, organize my papers, and read through and revamp my old project goals—those are all falling by the wayside, collapsing into puffs of dust. People have been trickling intermittently in and out of the lab all week—an hour here and an hour there, a morning shift of students that leaves at 10 am (just as I’m getting in) for lunch, another shift that rolls in at noon and leaves at three. I assume there’s probably a late afternoon/evening shift, but I’m not around to see it. The cafeteria is still open and reasonably busy at noon, the Christmas lights are up and cheery, but thank god the Christmas carols are banished from the cafeteria speakers and off my car radio.

Christmas was here, chaotic and fun. Six extra adults, all members of my family, moved temporarily into our house and stayed for two nights (well, the sister from California stayed for three). Dinners were the usual mishmash of Thai/Chinese/American. Are Christmas dinners usually like that? my poor non-Asian brother-in-law asked at brunch on the 26th, after my parents had departed. I agreed with him that Christmas day dinner had clashed a bit more than usual, though it was partially his pregnant wife’s (my middle sister’s) fault for demanding cooked sushi rolls. And my mother’s, of course, for bringing out an entire pot of Thai brown eggs (kaipalow). And tempura-fried soft-shell crabs. Which did not entirely mesh with the braised lamb leg and brussel sprout gratin that Husband and I had prepared.

We learned that the little Legume must not be woken early on Christmas morning. She spent the last part of the season quite hostile to the concept of Christmas presents. “Santa won’t bring you presents if you’re naughty,” I overheard Bean-girl lecturing her. “I don’t want presents!” Legume cried. “I want to be naughty!” And true to her word, she was naughty and kept yelling that she wanted no presents at all. Okay, no presents for you, Husband and I soothed. We wrapped her gifts late at night with help from our houseguests and placed them under the tree. The girls put our milk and cookies for Santa before bed. In the morning, Bean-girl was up at 7:30 am, hopping with excitement, eyes bright. Husband was excited, too. While waiting for the others to wake, he showed her a computer animation of Santa purportedly still flying his sled through the night sky, still delivering presents to children on the other side of the world (I was both annoyed and impressed by the animation; I detest the deception of Santa, but that’s a whole other post. We keep up the Santa myth because my husband beat me to the punch by telling Bean-girl all about Santa when she was only two, and now I can say nothing against it). After waiting a scarce seven minutes, neither my husband nor Bean-girl could take it anymore, and went upstairs to peek at Legume and see if she were awake. A few minutes later I heard an angry cry, and an angry, sleepy-eyed Legume appeared on the stairs. She may well be the only child in the world who is not cheered by the sight of Christmas presents. As her older sister tore happily at wrapping paper, Legume sat sulkily before her gifts. Husband unwrapped a huge truck for her, and Legume angrily pushed it away. “I hate it!” she cried. The sky lightened, other family members stirred, Legume continued to sulk. I went up to take a shower. An hour later, Legume cheered up, and she later spent most of the day playing/riding on her new yellow truck.

It’s hard to sum up a holiday with my family, as they are so very very crazy. I am aware that everyone thinks their parents and siblings are insane, but I really do think mine are unusually so. Sometimes I think I should start a Twitter feed titled “Shit my family says” ala the famous “Shit my dad says” that garnered a book deal and sitcom deal for one enterprising young man. My feed would lists posts like this:

My father upon learning what my youngest sister paid for her car rental: “I don’t care how smart you are, you act stupid every day of your life.”

My sister, being impervious to insult, simply continued to rant about the political and economic philosophy of Henry George, kombucha tea, alternative medicine, religion, sugar beets and jello scuplture.
****************************************************

It’s quiet now, the family guests gone, the mess at least partially cleared. Husband has most of the week off, and played stay-at-home parent today. I’ve been trying to finish this review article, but it’s hard to stay motivated when everyone else is drifting in and out of the lab for only an hour or so. Bean-girl and I are on a Narnia kick: our Tivo recorded “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” which she saw about 9 times over the course of one weekend. Then TiVo recorded “Prince Caspian,” which she has seen an additional three times (I didn’t know how violent the sequel was, or I wouldn’t have let her watch it the first time). Now at night we are reading “Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” and making plans to watch the film this weekend. My head is full of dashing boy kings and girl queens and Telmarine armies (weirdly speaking in Spanish accents in the movie) and talking mice and dragons. I plan to cuddle with the girls this weekend, maybe get a little shopping done, and indulge in some fantasy escapism.

Anyone have any good recommendations for escapist fantasy when we’re done with our Narnia kick?

And that scientific review article, and those construct lists, and those dozen other items on the work to-do list?

They’re going to have to wait until after the New Year.

(Happy 2011 to everyone!)

What's important

2010-11-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

This fall has been a blur. Can it really be Thanksgiving in a few days? Downtown buildings and streetlights are already wrapped in lights and Christmas greenery. Announcements and requests for holiday giving (from various sources—school, community, work) are piled up by this home computer. The calendar is booked, the deadline for my review article is looming, everything seems to be rush rush rushing toward the end of the year, time gathering itself and speeding into the vortex of December.

Somebody died last month. I didn’t know him well. But he was only 24, and he had a truly brilliant future ahead of him. He was a young, healthy 24-year old researcher at our institute—an athlete, a scholar, a valuable colleague and a wonderful friend to those who knew him well. We throw around words like “promising” and “bright,” but this young man truly had those qualities. He was a technician in the lab that I worked for last year when I did my stint as a scientific writer/editor. I am not exaggerating when I say that I trusted his scientific abilities more than I did some of the postdocs in that lab. And beyond all that: he was a truly caring and supportive person, always more than ready to go out of his way to help anyone at all who needed it.

I am not going to pretend to grieve, as I can’t say I knew him that well. Sitting in my office in front of the computer, I didn’t have quite the camaraderie with the lab group as one usually develops sharing a tissue culture room and squabbling over equipment and spent reagents. I still saw him in the hallways when I moved to my new lab, and we always said hello. I asked him for his protocol for growing cells in soft agar. He promptly e-mailed it to me, and at every sighting after he would ask if I needed any help with it, how I was coming along, to please let him know if I had any questions or needed any help with it at all.

Our institute is not large, and everyone knows everyone else, even if we don’t all know everyone well. A large number of people from work went to his memorial service. The line stretched down the hall. His college hockey jersey hung on the wall. Memorabilia of a life was displayed in the room—framed photos on tables, photos displayed on posterboard. On one table was a copy of the manuscript he’d been working on during the week he died, the manuscript which he had just finished. His first-ever first-author paper. His parents were so proud.

It’s sometimes at places like this that you learn for the first time of the life a colleague had outside of work. All the many activities and causes and groups he’d poured his energy into. He was a youth pastor. He taught Sunday school and also taught science classes for children at church. Who knew? Well, I guess it wasn’t a surprise after all—it fit perfectly.

I offered my condolences to his younger brother, who looked like a smaller, thinner copy of his older brother. He loved the Institute, his brother told me. He was so passionate about learning. And he’d just received word that he’d been accepted to medical school.

Around me I heard people murmuring platitudes, because really, that’s the only thing you can say at times like these. “It’s times like these,” I heard one colleague tell another, “that you remember what’s really important. We get all hung up on our egos, on getting into medical school, and our careers, and reputations, and things like that. But those aren’t really the important things in life at all.”

After greeting the boy’s brother and father, I waited an hour to shake hands with his mother (that’s how long the receiving lines were. And they were still growing when I left). The boy’s mother was such a picture of grace in tragedy that I cannot even describe it.

Then I walked outside, into the bright sunshine of a beautiful fall day.

*********************************************************

I guess there was another reminder of what’s important this past week.

One of our laboratory technicians (and my best friend in the lab) is pregnant. Our PI is trying to finish a screen before the holidays, and she has been working hard. She’s also been working hard outside the lab, as her family is in the midst of moving into a new house. On Wednesday, she and a team of two or others were scheduled to spend a crazy 16-hour day with their round-the-clock screening assay. On Tuesday (the day before the Crazy Day), she was in the midst of work preparations and found herself bleeding.

She left work and went to her doctor, who said that she and her baby were both fine. But she was scared—who wouldn’t be? And she was tired. So she took the rest of the week off to take care of herself at home.

I wasn’t actually at work when all this drama occurred, because I was out sick myself that day. I then got scared myself the next day when I saw our PI’s e-mail regarding the incident: it was a general lab e-mail to say that he’d spoken with her, that both she and the baby were fine, and that he was sending her flowers in the name of the entire lab (the next day she texted him her thanks for the flowers). Another lab mate took her spot for the crazy 16-hour work day, and the screen went off without a hitch.

So I guess the point of this entire long post is just to say. . . or just to remind us all. . . of what’s really important again? Not papers, or medical school, or siRNA screens, even those all have their place?

Something like that, I guess.

Still alive

2010-11-15T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm still alive.

Vancouver was awesome, and deserves its own post. We wandered around the city, ate great Chinese food (not easy to get in my Midwestern town), and discovered that it's a wonderfully family-friendly place if you know where to go. Luckily, I have blog-friends who pointed me where to go. And I actually got to meet two of them on our trip!

Then back home and full-speed into the holiday season. Bean-girl turned six. There was Halloween, and Halloween parties, and her first at-home birthday party (which I survived). And my first lab meeting, and now Thanksgiving is looming and Christmas music is already playing 24-7 on the radio and I'm writing a scientific review on a field I know almost nothing about, while simultaneously trying to do lab experiments...

Yeah, I've been busy. And now I've come down with a cold.

So that Vancouver blog post (wherein I pretend to be a travel writer) is going to have to wait, like so many things these days.

But hey, check out this article and the accompanying video. Watch the F-ATP synthases spin!

Suggestions on what to do in Vancouver?

2010-10-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

The family and I headed to Vancouver for vacation in a bit over a week. Well, it's a "vacation" for the kids, at least; Husband will be attending a medical conference while I wrangle the children around town. So I ask you blog-readers: any tips on what to do and see with a two-year old and five-almost-six year old in Vancouver? (We'll be staying downtown, and I will not be driving).

October

2010-10-07T19:37:00.000-07:00

The days are pure October—the air crisp and brimming with sunlight, the trees aflame under a brilliant blue sky. I barely see any of it. I’m in the lab all day, in a room with windows that look out only into the hallway. I catch glimpses of autumn as I drive in to work, as I pass under tunnels of leaves that are red and gold and rust. “Look,” I tell my girls. “The trees are so pretty!” They take it for granted, yet another of the inexplicable marvels of their world.

“Did you have a good day?” I asked Bean-girl as I picked her up from after-school daycare today. She came running to me across the playground, her jacket off as usual. (She is always taking her jacket off and even trying to leave it behind, for all that I’m always trying to put it on). I already knew that she’d had a great day: today was the day that her class had a field trip to an apple orchard, followed by a school-wide fundraising hike around the block (the school’s big annual fundraising activity for the year.) “Today was a play day!” she exulted. “It was nothing but play! And mom—“ her voice lowered dramatically—“we had cider and doughnuts!”

Her backpack was full of apples that she had picked at the orchard, as well as a small pumpkin. We met Husband and Legume at home and went out to dinner at our favorite neighborhood restaurant. Why not make Bean-girl’s day absolutely perfect? Dessert was ordered—little glass cups of lemon custard, chocolate mousse and tiramisu. Chocolate mint sticks with the check.

Bath time. Story. Sleep.

I feel the days rushing past. I wanted to make the most of the summer season—to take the girls to the beach, the park, the pool. But the pressure of this autumn season seems even more intense, and the season yet more fleeting. There seems just this brief window to fit it all in—apple orchards and cider and Halloween fun houses, pumpkin patches and corn mazes and jack’o lanterns and walks and bike rides before the season turns too cold. It’s near the middle of October already, and it’s all going by too fast.

Things at work are going by way too fast. The data is pouring in before I can properly analyze it. My lab notebook is a disaster. My desk and bench are disasters. I am seeing awesome cool phenotypes in my system. “Fucking awesome,” I kept repeating under my breath at the microscope earlier this week. “Fucking awesome.” It’s gone better than I could have dared to hope when I first re-entered the lab this past June. But I’m running too fast for comfort. I’m hooked on experiments, but I need time to read and think.

And oh, yeah—I have this review I’m supposed to write. By December. On a field which is integral to the lab, but which is only tangentially related to my own current line of research. And I need to take the time to work on that, but I’m rather resentful because doing experiments is just so much fun.

So yeah, time is fleeing away here. I feel a forced rest in the lab coming soon—we’re scheduled to take a family vacation to Far-off City in two weeks. Which just puts more pressure on me in both the lab and in outside life. (Halloween costumes? No, haven’t bought any yet. Bean-girl’s upcoming birthday party? No plans made. And I haven’t even mentioned Legume’s potty training—or lack of—and her defiant “I-am-three-hear-me-shout-“NO!” phase.)

I love it. I’m tense and exhausted.

And tonight, I feel happy.

On The Hunger Games trilogy, writing, and character (and why I haven't been posting)

2010-09-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Over the past two weeks I’ve been in the grip of delirium, staying up way past my bedtime, dragging to work bleary-eyed, and then staying up too late again the next night. No, the kids aren’t sick. No, I’m not writing a grant or investing this time in other practical matters. I just finished Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games trilogy. Now that I’ve finished the series, the fever should be broken and I should be able to get on with life. . . but her characters still haunt, and I think they will for a long time.

I don’t want to say too much about the last book, Mockingjay, because I don’t want to give away spoilers and because I’m still processing it. Let’s just say I’m still ambivalent about its final chapter. But I feel no ambivalence toward the first two books in the series, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, which I flat-out love. It’s an interesting example for me of how very different kinds of writing can succeed. Collins’ prose is unadorned and even workman-like for the most part; no one could accuse her prose of lyrical beauties. But she’s a master of plotting, of edge-of-your-seat-can’t-put-the-book-down tension. She builds an entire world in her trilogy. She’s terrific with the snappy and memorable dialogue. And most important of all, she creates characters that you come to care deeply for. You don’t always like them, but you desperately hope that they turn out okay. I can’t remember the last time I fell for fictional characters like this—and most especially for one particular character in her series, a mild-seeming baker’s son with unexpected reserves of courage, strength, and nobility (and he also frosts a mean cake!)

It makes me ponder the veneration that many of the literarti (and I) hold for beautiful writing. Collins’ writing style is not particularly beautiful. Her background is in television writing, and I read an interview where she admitted that she has a difficult time with descriptive passages in her novels, because script writers don’t write extended description. But I think that a heart-grabbing character trumps the most gorgeously turned line. I’ve finished whole books of beautiful prose, nodding my head in pleasure at the well-wrought lines, and then forgotten everything about the book—plot, character, everything—after shutting its pages. I know I’ll never forget the characters of Katniss and Peeta in the Hunger Games.

Creating character is a gift. Someone once said that all great fictional characters have a touch of mystery to them. It’s the mystery that real-life people have. Collins’ characters, like real people, often surprise, behaving in ways that are unpredictable and yet also in keeping with their characters as we have come to know them. They exhibit a constellation of traits that have a certain recognizable consistency, and yet within those bounds they continuously surprise. They grow. And they remain themselves (save for what I see as a few missteps in the very last novel).

I dabble a little in short-story writing, and the descriptive passages come easily to me. I like imagery and mood. But what I would give to be able to envision and write real characters. That is what makes writing memorable.

Self-indulgent meta-blogging

2010-08-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

Over the summer, I’ve watched with bemusement—and understanding—as various bloggers sign off from the blogosphere, or merely threaten/contemplate doing so. I’ve thought of signing off myself. No big announcement—simply drifting off into silence, a chapter closed, the original purposes of blogging having changed, over, done.

I can’t do it, though. Busy weeks pass; I’m happily absorbed in life, but too long without writing and I start to get antsy.

And in writing this I’ve broken one of my sacred personal blog-rules: no blogging about blogging! Then again, I think I’ve probably already broken that rule somewhere in my sordid past.

When I first started this blog over three years ago, I was in the midst of transition. I had recently left academic science and was adjusting to my new role as full-time stay-at-home mother. I had a brand new mewling infant daughter and a sweet-faced toddler. I was struggling with transitions of many kinds, on different levels. This blog was mostly a chronicle of my children’s growth. It was also a way for me to deal with the changes of motherhood and career, and it became an outlet that probably saved my sanity. Over time, to my welcome surprise, it also brought me a rich sense of community.

I’m not a stay-at-home mother anymore, and the infant and toddler are both gone, replaced with a head-strong three-year old and confident first-grader. The original intentions that drove the start of this blog are also gone, replaced with—well, with what? I still want to record stories about my children, but the Bean-girl is getting older, and whether she yet knows it or not, she is starting to deserve more privacy. I feel no inhibitions about posting Legume’s ridiculous preschool comments and antics (not that I’ve done it in a while), but the day will come when I no longer feel free to do that. There is always science, of course. When I started my new job this spring, I looked forward to participating more fully in science conversations online. But I feel inhibited, there, too. Like many of you, I feel restrained by my anonymity, but afraid to leave it. I would like to post more openly about my research. I don’t want to resort to coy pseudonyms to describe my work (however clever and cute those pseudonyms may be). I would like to dish about all the crazy characters and antics that occur at my institute, to make you gasp with disbelief and horror, simmer with envy at some of the cool shit that we do have going for us, and laugh out loud at honest-to-god real events. I would like to blog openly about my geographical location, an underrated town that I have truly come to love. But (1) I don’t want to get into any trouble (2) I would just die if anyone from my institute stumbled upon this blog and recognized me. And if they work at my institute they will recognize me (trust me on this).

So where now with The Bean Chronicles? I’ve flirted with the idea of changing the name. Shifting focus. Finding focus. But I’m a creature of inertia who is too lazy to even update my blogroll, let alone decide on a new masthead. I’m not reliant on this space for the privilege of community; having found you, I can continue to greet you in the comments sections of your blogs, and I even know a few of you on Facebook. But even with my self-imposed restraints and inhibitions, this particular blog-space means something to me. Maybe not what it once did, but still. . . Scratch-pad, verbal doodle pad, personal journal, place to blow off steam, place to indulge in navel-gazing until I twist myself inside-out. Maybe just a spot to jot down a line I read and liked, or a place to comment on the local weather. And maybe a place where, perhaps, I might ever so delicately write now and then about science and motherhood.

No promises, though. This place is evolving, like all of us. I might not be here as much, but I continue to follow you all.

End of navel-gazing meta-blog. As you were.

On returning to the bench

2010-07-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

There are times that it feels as though I never left. I’m in a new lab, learning new techniques. I still don’t know where everything is; I don’t even know how to use the pH meter here yet (so many common lab stocks, I haven’t needed to!) But the rhythms of lab work, the balancing of multiple tasks, the beeping of the lab timer and the planning of positive control, negative control—all have come back as though I’d never left. More than three years went by while I was off the bench, but it’s as though I walked straight from my old post-doc to this new one without pause.

You’ll be fine, my husband had reassured me repeatedly, even with a little irritation. He went through his own absence from benchwork; after completing the Ph.D. portion of his M.D.-Ph.D., he went through a four-year hiatus during which he completed medical school and residency. He stepped back into the lab for his medical fellowship, and appeared to have no trouble easing back into experiments. Was it hard to go back? I kept asking. He shrugged. No, he said. And added, You won’t have any trouble.

All in all, I think my husband was right.

**********************************

In the sunlit café, I sat with a new friend from the Research Institute. We were trading pieces of the stories of our lives, as new friends do. She was reflecting on her past, and the journey that has led her to this current position. She was talking about both science and life. I’ve learned so much in the past six years, she reflected. Do you ever look back and think that, too?

I nodded. I’ve learned a lot… but not just about science. I’ve learned that there are things more important than science. Science is still important to me—that’s why I came back to it. But it’s not the most important thing.

And that is the most important thing I’ve learned during my unintended hiatus. Being a scientist is a big part of my identity. But it is not the biggest part. Years ago, I let myself define myself too closely with my profession; I let my self-esteem and identity ride with a particular standard of professional “success.” I will not let myself do that again. It was a rough lesson to be learned, and not one that I took willingly. But having learned it, I will not let that lesson go.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” That’s another lesson, one that I see more easily now. My success or failure as a scientist does not ride on a single RT-PCR experiment. It does not ride on any single individual experiment. I’ve been given the gift of a three-year grant, and I have three years to prove myself. Three years to pace myself. It does not all need to be done this day, this week, or even this month. I need to keep myself healthy and happy over the course of years; there is no point in burning myself out early.

****************************

Summer is already more than half over. The days are flying past. The kids have been spending their days running through sprinklers and going to swimming pools and parks at their respective daycare/day-camp. They are brown as nuts, bronzed deeply on bare legs and arms. We go out for ice cream at least once a week, often more. The kids are exhausted by the end of the day, and fall asleep minutes after the last story is read.

I am tired, too. Sometimes, I admit, I wish I had a little more time with them. And sometimes, I admit, I welcome Mondays with relief after a long, exhausting weekend at home. Being a working mother is tiring, but in truth, I don’t think it’s any more tiring for me than being a full-time at-home mother. As Cloud so eloquently wrote, any way you do it is hard. Our mornings are a little more hectic, as Husband and I rush the kids through the morning routine so we can get to work at a decent hour. But the flexibility of academia is a blessing. If need be, I can run into work to finish something up after the kids are asleep; I can read papers at night. I’m in charge of my own project. Like many academic advisors, mine gives his lab members a great deal of freedom, and we make our own hours, set our own goals, and do whatever we can within our own power and constraints to meet those goals (with his support, of course).

I think of this article that I mentioned before. I like the author’s point about being happy and healthy even while pursuing a demanding career. When I have felt occasionally overwhelmed, I remember that I made this choice to have children and to also go back to the lab. This is my choice. And if at any time I feel that it’s not working—if I’m not healthy and sane and relatively happy—if my family is not happy—then I can walk away from it. That’s a choice, too.

Link to article in Molecular Cell: "How to Survive and Thirve in the Mother-Mentor Marathon."

2010-06-29T20:34:00.000-07:00

How did I miss this?

Oh, I guess because I don't scan through the contents of Molecular Cell on a regular basis (although I should, just as I should scan through the table of contents of, oh, a dozen more journals in my field.)

But a grad student in my lab found this article and forwarded it on to a number of women at our institute. I forwarded it on to a few more. I sense this article will pass in this way through many e-mail boxes.

There are number of things to say about Dr. Galit Lahav's piece, "How To Survive and Thrive in the Mother-Mentor Marathon." My favorite part comes at the end: the reminder that it is a marathon, not a sprint. The reminder that although it is hard, there is also flexbility and joy in the academic lifestyle. I'll let the authors's last words speak for themselves:

"...Yes, it is a marathon, and clearly a long and exhausting one. Remind yourself the things that brought you here; celebrate your achievements and don't beat yourself up for not running fast enough. Remember your values and make your choices according to them. Remember to breathe, to live and to smile. After all, if you run without joy, it really doesn't matter if you are the first to get to the finish line."

Sound bites

2010-06-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

A conversation in the lab today:

Young postdoc: "The worst thing you can do to a scientist is to turn 'em into a business person."

Me, old and jaded: "But if they get big enough, they all turn into business people."

Young postdoc, with equal parts resignation and disdain: "Yeaaaaaaaah."

Summer's here

2010-06-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

Summer came too quickly this year. The spring flashed by—the lilacs have bloomed and are gone, nameless bright wildflowers burst open by the side of the road, only to be replaced now by other (mostly equally nameless) summer species. Bean-girl graduated from kindergarten. Legume turned three. Husband just turned 42 this week, and I started my new job two weeks ago.

My little girls are growing every day, as I tell them whenever they step on a scale. Just this week Bean-girl decided to put herself to sleep at night. We no longer lie next to her after turning off the light, waiting for her eyes to close and breath to slow before sneaking away. At the age of five, she’s finally learned the trick of falling asleep on her own. “I close my eyes and think of something nice,” she told me. Did you tell her that method? I asked my husband. Nope, she learned it all on her own.
And Legume? What to say about this headstrong, defiant, exasperating toddler with the killer-cute grin? She’s three. For any parent who’s been there, enough said. The “terrible twos” get all the press, but the early threes have it beat, hands down. I will say that I think she actually enjoys getting time-outs.

Last weekend we happened upon a carnival in the parking lot of a strip mall. I saw the carnival there last year, too—it doesn’t advertise, it just pops up without warning, like mushrooms after a rain. “The carnival!” the girls started crying. We’d been to a carnival near the zoo a month before, and the girls had talked about it continually for days afterward, reliving elephant ears and the glory of a carousel and children’s train ride. “If you eat a good dinner and if it’s not raining, we’ll stop by the carnival,” Husband promised. We continued on to our restaurant destination, and after dinner we stopped by the carnival as promised. Legume clasped her horse on the carousel and stared straight ahead with solemn eyes as she does every time she gets on a carousel, seemingly more frightened than happy. Bean-girl, on the other hand, beamed radiantly. Most of the rides were for kids older than Legume, but we piled onto the Ferris wheel as a single group. “It looks scary!” both Bean-girl said, and Legume hung back. I pushed/carried them into the swinging car, Legume struggling against me. I wanted them to know this. Husband held Legume, and Bean-girl pressed against me as the car rose into the air. We were soaring, and the air rushed against us. Bean-girl began smiling her radiant smile. She moved away from me, saying that she didn’t need to be near me after all. She grasped the ring at the center of the car. “Look, look! There’s our car down there!” Legume said (it wasn’t). We were at the top of the sky.

***************************

The card in Bean-girl’s report card said “Mark your calendar. School open house on Sept 1.” I dutifully marked it in black ink on our calendar. I flipped past and then backward through the intervening months: June, July, August. June already completely marked up, filled up, half-way over. The summer hasn’t even officially begun, and it seemed to be going too fast. Bean-girl has a full calendar at summer camp—field trips at least once, sometimes twice, a week. Sprinkler days and water play for Legume at her own daycare center. And me? Such ambitious plans I have for work this summer—experiments to be validated, cells lines to be created, proteins to be knocked down.

I just have to remember to get out and see this summer, too, before it’s gone.

Passages: the first week.

2010-06-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

I must have spent many many Saturdays passaging cells during the course of my grad school and postdoc career. Like everyone, I’ve bitched over the feeding and care of cells in culture. I’ve dragged myself to work to feed them when I’d rather be anywhere but. And then I left research, and didn’t see cell culture again for more than three years.

This afternoon I drove to my new lab to split some cells, and it felt oddly like coming home.

I started my new job this past Monday. It’s been exciting, disorienting, both busy and slow. I’m still trying to figure out where everything is, as I suspect I will be doing for at least a month. I still don’t have a lab coat, although my timer and eppendorf racks (bright red!) came in on Thursday. I have an empty lab bench, and a blank lab notebook waiting to be filled. I have a brand new set of pipetmans (pipetmen?) I have colleagues who appear genuinely supportive and wonderful, a PI who is beyond awesome, an environment that seems to offer all that I could dream of. Did I mention the shiny new toys? There are some AWESOME toys in this lab.

I am aware that I am in the new lab/new job/honeymoon phase, a phase that I have gone through with every single one of my positions. I will also say that I honestly believe there is ample objective evidence that this lab really is what I feel it to be. And maybe it’s partly a reaction to my time away—but I can’t remember the infatuation ever biting me so hard.

There’s a steep learning curve ahead. I will be learning new technologies as well as a new field. siRNA? I’ve seen you around, of course. I followed you when you first burst onto the scene, and you started appearing in all the sexy journals. Of course, you’re now ubiquitous, a common tramp. But I’ve yet to lay hands on you myself. Or to have touched a number of the methods in use in this lab.

But I thawed out a new vial of cells this week, and they took just fine. I looked at them daily under the scope, seeing with approval the familiar growth patterns and cobblestone morphology of this particular cell line. And today I passaged them, my hands moving with confidence in old rhythms. Touch has a memory, as they say. And I was reminded that there is something soothing about cell culture work—a kind of mindless focus that is needed, an attention to detail and awareness of your movements—but in a non-taxing, simultaneously thoughtless kind of way.

We’re just see if those cells are still growing normally on Monday.

Mother's Day 2010 recap

2010-05-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

I think it would be impossible to survive parenthood without a sense of humor.

Yesterday morning the children had been playing peacefully upstairs for way too long. When I finally went up to check on them, I found Legume bum-naked in my bedroom, standing on a little red child-sized chair. Bean-girl was playing on the floor beside her. Um, why is Legume naked? I asked, and Bean-girl helpfully replied, “Because she asked me to take off her clothes and give her a bath so I did.”

Oh.

And that explained the mess I later found in the bathroom, and the shampoo bottle leaking onto the floor.

Actually, if you don’t already have a sense of humor, wouldn’t the crazy things that kids do bring one out in you? And if you never developed one, wouldn’t you go ape-shit crazy and homicidal sometime in the first year?

In its essence, it was a wonderful Mother’s Day. I had a bouquet of lavender roses, picked up earlier by my husband and girls from Costco. Husband had to work early this morning, so I had to make my own pancakes for the girls and I. But his early appearance at work meant that he was able to get out early and take us all out to lunch. We tried out a new pan-Asian restaurant, which was, miraculously, uncrowded when we walked in just before noon. “Hibachi table?” the hostess asked us. I hesitated, actually more in the mood for the Thai menu. “It’s up to you,” my husband deferred to me. What the hell. Hibachi cooking could be entertaining for the children. “Hibachi”, I decided, and the hostess led us to the table-top grill. As the kids waited, excited, for the entertainment to begin, I decided that I’d made the right call.

Big mistake.

Legume was terrified of the hibachi flames. The cook squirted oil onto the grill and lit a match, sending a wall of flame shooting sky-ward. The heat hit our faces. Legume covered her face with her hands. Then the fire was out, but Legume spent the rest of her meal with her hands covering her mouth, then spread over her cheeks, then hiding her eyes. When the flames started leaping at neighboring grills around us, she had too much and burst out crying. I had to take her to the waiting area (now crowded with people) and hold her as we waited for Husband and Bean-girl to finish their meals. (Bean-girl, on the other hand, had a great time with the hibachi entertainment and ate heartily, according to Bean-girl standards).

Legume cheered up when reminded that we were next headed to the botanical gardens, and cheered even more at getting a Hostess cupcake from the garden vending machine. A special exhibit has just opened at these gardens, and the glass sculptures —curving shapes like plants and seashells, blue forms dipping like abstract herons, neon-colored chandeliers and a twisting form Bean-girl compared to a gigantic octopus—really were spectacular in the garden setting. “Take a picture of this one! Now take a picture of this one!” Bean-girl kept demanding. Legume found what had to be the very last butterfly left over from the April butterfly exhibit. And the children ran through the children’s garden maze, beating drums and clanging a bell.

Then Husband made smoked ribs, corn-on-the-cob, and boiled potatoes for dinner.

It was a pretty great Mother’s Day, actually. Beautiful sunlight, good food, family time. And it was a day like most any other—tantrums, tears, frustrations and little tiffs along with the smiles and laughs. All mixed up together in this crazy stew of life.

Hope all the mothers out there had a great day, too.

I got the grant

2010-04-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

I just received a phone call.

The NCI has recommended that my grant application for a re-entry research fellowship be funded.

Back from spring break--updated

2010-04-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

Back from one of the craziest family spring breaks ever. Uh, not in a good way.

Well, there were some good times. Ritz-Carlton hotel. Zoo and science museums. A streak of good weather at the end.

Bad weather in the middle. Sniffles and runny noses all around. And oh yeah--on the next-to-the-last night I had to go to the ER in Old Post-doc City for painful treatment of a relatively non-serious but painful and embarassing medical condition (let's just say it's a feminine issue and leave it at that. And I now feel the way I did in the aftermath of giving birth.)

Good times.

And my husband still wants to leave for his conference this week, leaving me alone with the two kids while still recovering from my admittedly minor outpatient surgery. Um, remember where I said it feels like the aftermath of giving birth?

I would call him a name here, but restraint wins out.

Updated: Thank you for the well wishes! My husband came to his senses and canceled his conference. Last night, as our children ran around the dinner table and created their usual havoc, he admitted that it would have been "cruel" to leave me alone with them in my state. Damn right.

I have decided to forgive him his temporary lapse in judgement/sanity.

And I have a prescription for a new set of antibiotics and am feeling much better.

Spring puddles

2010-03-15T09:11:00.001-07:00

In the blink of an eye, winter melted away. We had a glorious week of sun and birdsong, and then the March rains came, leaving puddles in their wake. Although only a few last sad mounds of dirty snow remain, I’ve been sending the girls to school with their snow boots and snow pants every day. The schools are adamant on this point.

“Do you still really have to wear snow pants and boots at recess?” I asked Bean-girl every day last week.

She nodded.

“Even though there’s hardly any snow?”

“It’s because of the puddles,” Bean-girl informed me. Then she went on to tell me about the perilous water in the schoolyard. “There’s one puddle,” she told me, “that is sooo deep!” And she raised her hand to a level just below her chin.

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “How do you know it’s that deep?”

“Because my friend, Hadley, said so.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “And how did she know that it’s that deep? Did she measure it?”

“No. But she saw a boy stick his shoe partway in it. And he said, ‘I can’t feel the bottom!’ And he ran away.”

“Oh. You know, you could measure it with a stick.”

“We don’t play around puddles. I think you might get a white slip for doing that. And you could drown.”

“Okay.”

It does make sense not to play around dirty water. But I smile to think of Bean-girl and her friends playing in this schoolyard of mystery and danger. Where fathomless pools of water lurk, immeasurable to any.

"Research Scientist" postions; waiting

2010-03-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

I feel unsettled these days, restless. Did I once say that I was enjoying my time off from work? Well, I was, but I think I’m at my limit now.

I’d dreamed of having time and space to write creatively. But I think my dream of being a writer is just that—a dream. I don’t have the guts for it. I don’t have the discipline, and I can’t take the silence. I don’t know how real writers and aspiring writers—those who have pinned their true career hopes on this, who truly pour their souls and self-esteem into this work—can possibly do it.

I finished a short story and showed it to an acquaintance of mine—a published novelist and the editor who handled my first published piece. She kindly pointed out that it needed work. I showed it someone else, who gently agreed. I can’t bear to look at the thing again. My critics are correct, but I’ve fallen in love with certain passages and turns of phrase, and I can’t bear to rip them out. And I can’t bear the rejection forms of journals. I had beginner’s luck last year, and I suppose it went to my head. But faced with the reality of time to write? I can’t do it. I surf the net and fritter time away. I think I wrote more effectively when I had an outside job and external structure to my days; I was more efficient when writing time was squeezed into an hour here or there at night. Left to my own devices a few days a week, my discipline relaxes like wet spaghetti.

Anyway. Perhaps this is all just prologue to say: I am really really looking forward to heading back to the lab.

My potential PI e-mailed me out of the blue last week to ask me: Have you heard anything about the grant? I had to laugh when I mentioned it to my husband. Um, it’s the PI who is the PI of the grant, and whose name and contact information is listed. Not the lowly trainee applicant (me), who currently even isn’t affiliated with an institution. Nice to know that my potential PI still remembers me and our application, though.

I’ve been advising someone who is applying (and has just gotten an interview!) for teaching positions at undergraduate-based institutions. And I’m hearing rumors through the grapevine of big changes at my former institution. Not all good changes, either, in my opinion. One rumor is that the Research Scientist position will be eliminated, meaning that postdocs can no longer be promoted to non-PI staff positions. If the institute’s current 5-year limit on postdoc positions holds, this means that all postdocs at the institute will automatically be kicked out at the end of five years. This really makes no sense to me, because our institute has great difficulty in recruiting postdocs as is. This difficulty means that PIs have generally sought to retain senior postdocs if funding permits, meaning that a great number of our postdocs were promoted to Research Scientist. I am assuming that this perhaps became too expensive for the institute to handle? (I’ve no clue as to how financing of these positions is handled) And yet our PIs will be in trouble if they cannot retain their skilled talent; it’s very difficult to recruit people to this little-known corner of the Midwest, and I know of PIs who have been searching for postdoc candidates for over a year. It seems that forced turnover of senior postdocs/scientists would only increase these gaps in staffing coverage.

Of course, I have concern for more than PIs at heart. I myself was hoping to eventually land on the Research Scientist track.

It all seems to be going backwards to me, although of course I don’t have the full story. These are rumors, after all, relayed to me second-hand by people who rank fairly low on the research hierarchy. Pity if it should come to pass as described, however. As described in this post, I think the creation (or increase) of the number of professional, permanent Ph.D-credentialed but non-lab-head research staff in the world would go a long way to both increasing research efficiency and absorbing the postdoc glut.

But of course, given my own unstable position, I’m kinda biased.

For ScienceGirl

2010-02-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

Ecogeofemme is hosting a virtual baby shower for ScienceGirl!

So are here some humble words of advice and support, Sciencegirl and family:

Congratulations! You and your husband are about to begin an incredible adventure. You’re probably a little nervous. That is perfectly normal. In a few months, when you leave the hospital with a fragile newborn in your care, you will be completely petrified. That is also normal.

Just a few things to keep in mind through those first months:

1) Babies actually aren’t that fragile. They might not be able to lift their own heads, but they’re actually pretty resilient. I realized this for the first time when I saw the nurses manhandling my first-born at the hospital. The nurses swaddling, changing diapers, and examining the baby Bean certainly weren’t afraid of breaking her! And my husband, a pediatrician, wasn’t afraid either (it does help to be married to a pediatrician)

2) Poop comes in weird colors, consistencies, and on varying schedules.
That ghastly green-black stool that first comes out? That’s called meconium and it’s perfectly normal. And then those weird mustardy seedy stools? That’s normal, too. At first the baby may seem to go poop every five minutes. Normal. Then (if you’re breastfeeding) the baby might go only once a week. That’s normal, too. It’s also normal if he doesn’t.

3) You and your husband will be talking about baby poop a lot.

4) If you breastfeed, buy lanolin nursing cream.

5) SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS!!! Forget about those dishes in the sink and the state of the house!

6) Let other people help.

7) Find a support group of other mothers who understand what you’re going through and don’t mind—indeed, will enthusiastically participate in—conversations about baby poop.

8) Colic may seem like it will last forever, but it IS temporary.

9) It’s all temporary. The good and the bad, both.

10) Your science will still be waiting for you when you get back from maternity leave.

11) You are going to be one awesome rocking mama.

Valentine

2010-02-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

When I first met my husband, it all seemed so easy. That old saw about relationships being hard work? It made no sense to me. Our relationship was pure play, effortless as breathing. The furthest thing from work.

More than a decade out, wedding bands on our fingers, two children, the numerous small disappointments and difficulties of life. . . yeah, I get it now. Relationships are work.

Fortunately, my husband is wiser, more perceptive, and stronger than me on this front as on others. Just before Valentine’s Day last week we had a fight—a ridiculous, angry, go-to-bed-with-tears-in-my-eyes fight over something completely absurd. It was the kind of fight we very rarely have, because we are both naturally easy-going and terribly averse to conflict of any kind. Afterward, my husband talked to me. He talked about where we are in our relationship, and how we should pay attention to it, spend time on it. Cultivate it. Work it.

It’s been easy for me to drop my marriage to the bottom of the to-do list. To take it, and my husband, for granted. After 10+ years, it’s still easier for me to withdraw in fear and shyness from my mate, rather than share with him thoughts and parts of my self that I think he might possibly laugh at. After more than a decade, we are still far from knowing each other. If someone had explained all this to me on my wedding day, I would have laughed. I thought I knew everything.

Today there are three beautiful bouquets on the kitchen table: a vase of roses, a vase of tulips, and a vase of aster lilies. My husband ordered them last week before our fight. They were supposed to come on three consecutive days, culminating in the grand finale of red roses. By accident, the floral company shipped them all out on the same day, so I opened the garage door to what seemed a lush forest of blooms.

The roses were slightly open when I got them, and have been steadily expanding since. The red and pink tulips (my favorite) are now at their lush peak. The aster lilies are still folded in slim buds; only two have begun to open, shyly revealing themselves.

My daughter is quite interested in what it will look like when all the flowers are in bloom. I am as well.

And after I finish this post, I am going to e-mail my husband a short love note… just as we once used to do, a long time ago.

Sisters

2010-01-29T09:16:00.000-08:00

These days, the Bean-girl and Legume get into the type of passionate quarrels that only a 5-year old and 2-year old can engage in.

Scene: Kids eating yogurt at the breakfast table.

Bean-girl: I’m eating berry yogurt.

Legume: I’m eating berry yogurt, too!

Bean-girl: You’re eating peach yogurt. Peach is not a berry.

Legume: Peach is a berry!

Bean-girl: Peach is not a berry!

Legume: Peach is a berry!

Bean-girl: Peach is not a berry!

Legume: Peach is a berry!

Bean-girl: A blackberry is a berry.

Legume: Blackberry is not a berry!

I think you get the idea.

I think of that famous quote from The Tempest, where Caliban tells Prospero: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is/ I know how to curse.” I think it could be modified for our little Legume as “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is/ I know how to argue.”

Never mind, of course, that her arguments make no logical sense. “No,” “nope,” and “I don’t want to” can actually take you pretty far. A reflexive negation of whatever statement another person (usually the Bean-girl) has just said is also a pretty fun trick.

Bean-girl runs through the house. Legume is determinedly on her tail. Bean-girl snakes her way through the living room, twisting and turning, and her little sister is right behind; they form a two-person congo line. Mooommmm, Bean-girl wails, Legume is following me and I want her to stop!

Then later: Legume is in my room and I want her out!

And: Legume won’t leave me alone!

It’s on the tip of my tongue to reply, Now you know how I feel about you sometimes, my Bean-girl, but of course I don’t.

It’s a little heart-breaking, really, to see Legume clamoring for her big sister’s attention at times. Bean-girl, will you play with me? she says with the most winsome smile. Bean-girl ignores her, and Legume tries again. Bean-girl, will you play with me? She repeats herself in rapid fire like a demented robot Bean-girlwillyouplaywithmeBean-girlwillyouplaywithmeBean-girlwillyouplaywithme?

I’m the oldest of three sisters. I have a natural sympathy and identification with Bean-girl. But now, for the first time, I see things through the eyes of the younger sibling.

This morning I carried Legume up the stairs for the daily tooth-brushing/getting dressed routine. Bean-girl followed us, and Legume twisted in my arms to watch and laugh at her big sister. I put Legume down, and Bean-girl suddenly zoomed past us. Legume ran after, but Bean-girl raced ahead into her bedroom and slammed the door shut. I don’t want Legume in my room! Bean-girl said, muffled behind her door. Legume’s face was stunned, on the verge of tears. I scooped her up quickly, trying to forestall them. Bean-girl, come out of your room, Legume said softly, plaintively. Bean-girl, come out of your room.

I danced with Legume in my arms to try to distract her. Bean-girl will come out soon, I said.

I don’t want Bean-girl in my room, Legume told me.

And then a few minutes later Bean-girl was out of her room and the two were laughing and rolling on the floor of Legume's room, in shared hysterics over who-knows-what.

Sisters.

Goals for 2010 and uncertainty

2010-01-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

This month I am on vacation.

Not on vacation traveling with the kids. Or on vacation at home with the kids. No, really on vacation sans children. Part-time anyway. (A slightly under-the-weather Legume is with me right now, snoring peacefully away in her bed).

I can’t remember the last time I had such luxury. Oh, right—that’s because I’ve never had it before! I’ve either been working, in school, or raising kids (or some combination)—but to have a little free time without employment and without kids?

Being a stay-at-home mom, I remarked to a friend at the gym the other day, is actually a lot of fun when you’re not really staying at home with the kids.

As I alluded to before, I am unemployed for at least the next few months. My husband and I are keeping the kids in daycare/schoolcare part-time for a number of reasons. We don’t want to take a chance on losing our daycare spots, of course. We don’t want to disrupt the children’s routines. Legume and Bean-girl truly love school now (they were both sooooo happy to be back after the long Christmas break; Legume just kept smiling and smiling when I dropped her off on the first day) and I think preschool is particularly good for little Legume now. But my reasons are also purely selfish. I like having a little free time to myself during the week; there are things I want to get done for myself; and being in charge of the children 24-7 frankly drives this momma bonkers.

So what do I want to get done for myself over the next few months?

This is time to play New Year’s Resolutions, of course. Folded into a 2-3 month time span. I have the usual pledge to exercise and get in shape. As well as other goals. I found last year that breaking up vague goals into concrete proposals helped enormously (especially helps when your aims are particularly modest!) I even mostly fulfilled last year’s very modest goals! (I did get that short story published, and I pitched an article–and was turned down—by Favorite Trade Journal. But at least I made the attempt).

So after the success of the “Goals for 2009” experiment (it did get me off my butt to at least work toward those goals), I now publically declare my overly ambitious Goals for 2010. To make it all the more grandiose, I divide the goals into several fields with pretentious titles.

Health (physical)

--Exercise at least 2-3 times a week.
--Take a pilates/yoga class (went to the first class last week—public humiliation).
--Eat more fruits, veggies and whole grains.

Creative writing (and emotional health)

--Finish second short story, send out to some trusted readers, eventually submit and hopefully publish somewhere.

--Start a new story.

--Revise and submit a very old story.

--Try daily journaling/writing.

Science

--Master the literature of an entire new subfield of cell biology (ambitious much?)
*Sub-aim: Try to see if there is a way to link intriguing results from old postdoc to the direction of my (hopeful) new lab to create a coherent and intelligent research plan that brings it all together.

Home (domesticity)

--Sort and donate old clothing (done!)

--Sort, get rid of, organize the toys taking over our house.

--Organize the home office

--Print and organize backlog of family photos.

--Hang up some of those pictures we unpacked three years ago (which are still stacked up on the floor of our den)

Now how many of these goals can I actually accomplish over the next few months? We’ll see….

******************

Although I enjoy this freedom now, I wonder if the lack of external structure will soon start wearing on me. And then I wonder if I’ll get too used to doing my own thing, living a freelance life (I have potential freelance editing contracts starting February). Then I wonder if the notice of funding and call to lab work might come early—as my potential PI thinks it will—and whether I’ll be ready for it, whether I’ll fall apart and my family fall apart and perhaps I’ll humiliate myself after all these years off the bench and disappoint the PI who took me on. . . And perhaps that call to work might not come at all, our grant application gets turned down, the PI’s other grant gets turned down, and despite his assurances he’ll have no money or way to take me in. . . .

It has all happened, as Jennifer Rohn so eloquently writes in her post. I envision all outcomes. I envision a future in which I leave science entirely—leave even the writing and editing of science. And I see another future where I’m back at the bench, happy as a clam. And I look backward and see all those junctures where things might have gone a different way—where the road forked and I took one path and not the other. The road keeps forking ahead; I look both backward and forward, and where does it all lead?

I love Jennifer Rohn’s blog. Go read it if you haven’t—I am in that same bubble of uncertainty.

(And the discussion comments following her post are, as usual, quite wonderful.)

Cleaning up, saying goodbye

2009-12-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

There is a certain devil-may-care thrill in the clean-up that precedes leaving a lab. In my case, I am not pitching boxes of plasmids and spent reagents willy-nilly into the trash; instead, I am throwing papers--lots and lots of them--with abandon into the recycle bin. Pitching pdfs like this always carries a thrill of doubt--will I need these papers again? Will I ever want to look them up? But that old doubt is now assuaged somewhat by one of mankind's great developments: Mendelely. Thanks to Mendeley, my pdfs are all saved to the "cloud", stored on the Web and accessible from any computer at all. Progress is indeed great.

I am leaving the Institute for now, but I am hoping to be back. I'm counting on it, actually. After all, they just opened a fancy new cafeteria with a panini station (saving us the three-minute hike across the street to the hospital cafeteria).

A few weeks ago, I submitted a grant with a rising star of PI. Unlike the other grants I worked on this year, this grant application was for myself. If it gets funded, I will have up to three years of funding to work in the lab of this amazing PI. I think we have a good shot on this one--it's not a typical peer-reviewed grant, but an adminstratively reviewed career re-entry grant which suits my situation to a T. We should know of the official decision in April, although my (potential) PI hopes to get word of "intent to fund" before that time. If the application is not funded? I'll deal with that then. More I don't want to say right now--but I do really really want to work for this guy. I officially interviewed with his lab this past summer; since then, we've met multiple times to map out this grant application and plot out a research project which perfectly marries my past research experience with the current interests of his lab. It all meshes so beautifully--one would think that I'd planned my career steps to lead this way.

But it's goodbye for now--goodbye for at least a few months. Friday will be my last day. I wasn't kidding when I wrote once (a long year ago) that the camraderie of the scientific community is what I truly missed most during my time at home. And again, it will be what I miss most this time around, too.

****************************

I turn 35 on Saturday. 35 sounds so old. I take comfort that my husband will be forever older, and somehow age doesn't seem so old on him. But still. 35. Jeez.

I have white hairs at my temples. A body that betrays a slowing metabolism and the birth of two children. I am nowhere near where I dreamed I would be professionally back when I was a callow grad student--more than eight long years past.

But other dreams did come to pass--dreams I didn't even know I had. And as for the future? I am a cynic and pessimist at heart. And maybe still a dreamer, for all that.

Holiday photo FAIL

2009-12-10T18:44:00.000-08:00

All I wanted was a nice photo of the girls in their holiday dresses, standing together before the Christmas tree. Something that we could perhaps use as a holiday photo card to send out to friends.

Turns out we could get a shot of one girl at a time in front of the tree, looking at the camera. But two girls in the same frame, with at least semi-normal expressions? A bit beyond my husband and me.

I don't think we'll be sending any of these out this year.

First Snow

2009-12-04T20:51:00.000-08:00

The first snowfall of the season. It began last night, the white fluff piling up rapidly in between dinner and bath time. Bean-girl scooped up a cup of snow from the back deck, and she and Legume poked at it with their fingers and squealed. This morning we opened our eyes to a powdered sugar wonderland. “Look, Snow Forest came back!” I said to Bean-girl, pointing to the small stand of trees in our back yard which changes monikers with the season—from “Spring Forest” to plain “Forest” to “Fall Forest” and now “Snow Forest” again. (Bean-girl is responsible for these names). “Yeah, Snow Forest is back!” she cried.

Poor Husband took the snow blower out for a spin and it promptly died, a wire snapping before he could even clear two lengths of the driveway. He shoveled clear a path by hand and came back into the house huffing and puffing and soaked with sweat. I was scheduled to give lab journal club, and rushed out into snow, leaving him to deal with the two kids. The snow kept falling, and I realized it was nearly white-out conditions. Cars crawled. Halfway to work, I realized that the schools might well be canceled, and that lab meeting might well be canceled, too. I pulled into a suspiciously (near) empty parking garage. Sure enough, a quick check of e-mail on my computer told me that lab meeting had been pushed back until Monday. And the public schools were closed, too. It was still an official work day at the institute, but there was no work for me to do. I sent off a quick e-mail to my boss, tried and failed to get in touch with Husband, and drove slowly back home (more white-out! Cars on the side of the road!) By the time I finally got in touch with him, I learned that he’d brought Bean-girl into work with him and had dropped Legume off at her daycare (which had remained open). He had the afternoon off, and would bring Bean-girl back home for lunch.

What does a mother do with an unexpected morning off? Stand frozen with the shock of it all. Then grab a shovel and finish clearing out the driveway. I had just finished when Husband turned up with Bean-girl in tow. He, too, was taking off early from work. Obsessed with the broken snow blower, he went on the Internet to track down parts and then drove 14 miles (in terrible road conditions) to track down the replacement wire and belt. Indulgent and lazy mom that I am, I let Bean-girl watch “Polar Express” for the third time. Later, I bundled her up in snowpants and coat so that she looked like the Marshmallow Man. She plowed through drifts with her body like a little human snow plow, giggled, and fell on all fours to make her own bizarre versions of snow angels. Hot chocolate after and then more “Polar Express.” Bean-dad fixed his snow blower and fetched Legume early from daycare. Gnocchi with roasted squash and asiago cheese sauce for dinner. Family time on the couch in front of the tv (yes, I know, we watch—or rather, the kids watch—too much tv). Bath, bed.

The snow seems to have finally stopped for the night. The sky is lit with the pearled luminescence of a snow-lit evening. The kids are asleep; Husband has fallen asleep with them, and I have this time all to myself. Finally. Our Christmas tree is up, the stockings hung. Christmas is only a few weeks away.

The truth is that I hate the snow. All through the fall we Midwesterners start griping about the coming winter. “I hate snow!” Bean-girl told us a few days ago. But yesterday her eyes shone when she saw the first snowfall of the season. And today she loved it.

I felt that way, too.

Nemesis, grudge

2009-11-20T19:46:00.000-08:00

I hold grudges.

I remember the little insults. The negative remarks. You may say a dozen sweet things to make up for it, but I will forget them all. Only the occasional stray thoughtless remark burns in my memory, taking on increasing weight with the years.

My older daughter is a girl after my heart. She holds grudges, too. She is only five years old, but her memory is long.

There is a boy at school whom she hates. She despises this boy. He took a glue stick from her during the first week of class. She will never forgive. They were sitting side by side, engaged in an art project. He asked her if he could borrow the glue stick; she gave it to him; after a few minutes, she asked for it back. He refused. She cried and cried. The teacher came over to see what the problem was and the Bean-girl, hysterical, could not explain. The teacher gave her a hole punch in her daily “Great Day card,” signifying a “Tough Day.” Bean-girl was appalled, and kindergarten pretty much went downhill from there.

(Note: kindergarten is actually going much better now. Thanks for all the supportive remarks! I will never hold anything against you, fair readers.)

I still do not know the boy’s name, but Bean-girl refers to him as the “mean boy.” He always does “mean things” to her. In truth, as far as my husband and I can determine, there has only been one other incident of “meaness.” Bean-girl’s class was spending a week on the concept of patterns—looking for patterns in the world, making and designing their own patterns. They were cutting and gluing shapes on a strip of paper to make their own patterns. The mean boy told Bean-girl that her pattern was not actually a pattern. This was obviously a very mean thing to say, because it was a pattern! But Bean-girl showed us her strip of paper, and well, that little boy was right. My Husband and I could not discern a pattern in the string of cut-out shapes she presented us. If it was a pattern, it was on a scale that we could not see.

So on the weight of two tiny incidents, Bean-girl has declared a nemesis for life.

“Why does that mean boy say that he likes me, but does mean things to me?” Bean-girl asked one morning while putting on her shoes.

“He says that he likes you?” I repeated.

She nodded. “He says that he likes me but he does mean things!”

“He told you that he likes you?” I say again, just to be clear.

She nodded, exasperated with my dimwittedness.

“Well…” I said slowly. “Sometimes boys like you but don’t know how to show it in the right way. So it comes off as kind of mean.”

“When they get older, will they learn to show it better?”

“Usually, Bean-girl.”

I haven’t heard much about “the mean boy” lately, and I wonder how he’s doing and if Bean-girl and he have interacted lately.

They do get better about showing how they like you, Bean-girl. But yeah, when they mess up and it comes out wrong—I get plenty mad, too.

Bean-girl's 5th birthday, mother-in-law visit

2009-11-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

This morning I still found helium balloons in strange places. One balloon hung limply from a window shade. Another was tied to the vacuum cleaner in the corner of our kitchen, the balloon's long blue ribbon wound around and around the vacuum's handle. Balloon in various states of deflation bobbed and sank in the living room. Yesterday afternoon I peeked at Legume during her nap. "Awwww," I said to my husband when I came downstairs. "Legume fell asleep cuddled with balloons!"

"What!" said Husband. "I took them away from her!"

Bean-girl smiled. "I put them on Legume!" she said.

"Why on earth did you do that?" we asked.

"I put them on her to make her look cute!"

"You sneaked into the room and put balloons on top of Legume to make her look cute?"

Bean-girl nodded.

That's the kind of thing that happens around here....

********************

The balloons are left over from Bean-girl's fifth birthday party. Her actual birthday was a week ago, but her children's party was this past weekend. Seven children (five kindergartener/preschoolers and two toddlers) took over the craft studio of our favorite independent artsy flaming-liberal (for this corner of the Midwest)toystore. They decorated a birthday banner, made hats, paraded about the store, then made pizza and frosted cupcakes in the adjoining cafe. Bean-girl's best friend had a little meltdown at the sight of kids that she didn't know, but eventually cheered up (pink frosting has that effect). Bean-girl beamed nearly the entire time.

"Amah"--the children's paternal grandmother--was there for the party. She was here for ten days, and it was, ahem, rather trying at times. Let us just say there are gulfs of generational and cultural opinion. And although my own mother shares some of "Amah's" ethnicity, the two are really polar opposites in almost all ways... except for in those really really annoying ways in which they AREN'T.

"So, Bean-girl," Husband said after he'd dropped his mother off at the airport. "Did you like having Amah around?"

Bean-girl gave us a dazzling smile. "Raise your hand if you don't like Amah!" she said, and raised her own hand high.

Husband and I burst out laughing. He is well aware of how difficult his mother can be--he has, after all, known her his entire life. She made Bean-girl cry while she was here (scolding and trying to shame her) and she said that Legume had the face of a Chinese peasant (not a compliment).

Husband immediately got on the phone to his sister to relate Bean-girl's remark. His sister's children are themselves petrified of their grandmother. Instead of laughing at Bean-girl's comment, Husband's sister responded with a worried "Oh, I knew she'd been there a while. I was wondering how you were getting on."

"Oh, it's fine," Husband laughed. "She [Amah] gets everyone else all riled up, but I'm fine."

Yeah, my husband is, seriously, a very model of equanimity. I suppose he had his training early, and although the results are admirable that perfect even-keeledness can also be freaking annoying.

***************

Bean-girl still has rough moments at school. She's clearly well-liked by her classmates--she has so many friends. She comes home chattering about a new game or song learned at school, and shows off her awesome art projects. But she still cries many days at drop-off. She almost NEVER cried at drop-off at her old daycare. She says kindergarten is not as much fun as daycare because you have to "sit and listen" instead of having free play. She says that she feels she "has to be perfect" in kindergarten. She doesn't seem to have trouble with the school's Kindercare (the daycare program run in the mornings before p.m. kindergarten). She loves the school's daycare. It's KINDERGARTEN that stresses the Bean-girl out. And I am still at a loss on how to help her through this.

Baby Legume (not really a baby)--28 months.

2009-10-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

This is the cute age, a friend said of our two-year old children. Her blond son draws smiles wherever he goes. She holds him with frank adoration. I can hardly keep my hands off my own two-year old Legume. They walk! They run! They even talk! And yet they still have round cheeks, round arms, dimpled thighs. Babies with personalities, babies with (semi) thinking minds!

I’m not a baby, Legume tells me.

She tells me other things, too, not all of which I understand. Did I really hear her sing about going to “the miracle moon?” Or was it “miracle room?” Do you know what your sister is saying? I ask Bean-girl, and Bean-girl, absorbed with a toy, says indifferently, No.

She is fastidious, our Legume. Which is sad, in a way, because she is also so very very sloppy. Which directly contradicts her fastidious intents. I spilled! she screams at dinner as a spoonful of soup slops onto the table. I spilled! she yells when food ends up on her chair and her shirt. She is constantly asking for napkins to clean up. Yesterday our family went out to lunch at a casual restaurant, and Legume mistook the cracks in the booth seat for some kind of spill or marking. Frantically she tried to wipe them away with a napkin. No, no, it’s fine, her father said, and tried to seat her on the cracked seating. Legume screamed in the purest panic that I’ve ever heard. (I rescued her by seating her next to me on my un-cracked seat).

Is it funny? she asks me, holding up a toy or showing me some simple object or action.

Um, okay, maybe a little bit funny, I say.

A little bit funny?

A little bit funny.

Is it a little bit funny?

Just a little bit.

It’s a little bit funny?

Only a little bit.

Is it a little bit funny?

And so on . . .

She is mysterious, this funny funny little girl. How can she eat so much and still be so tiny? What solo game is she playing as she arranges books and toys in complex patterns on the floor? Why does she hate it when I pour water on her head in the bath, but laughs when Bean-girl does it? Why does she erupt into laughter at the scary part of a movie? What on earth goes on behind those glinting black eyes?

Do you understand what she’s saying? I ask Bean-girl again, as Legume repeats a mysterious, incomprehensible phrase.

No, Bean-girl says, again indifferently.

So much for older siblings interpreting for the younger ones. . .

***********************

I haven’t been writing much, lately. I had thought—hoped—that I might have more time when I went to part-time status at my job. But really, once you have kids I think you never have time. Full-time stay-at-home mom, full-time working out-of-the-home mom, part-time working-from-home mom and part-time working-out-of- the-home mom—I’ve been through all the permutations now, and in every single case there STILL IS NO TIME! In some cases there is more time spent with the children, sometimes there is more time for work or home-cooked meals, but THERE IS STILL NEVER ANY PERSONAL TIME!

I admit that I fantasize about personal time. I imagine working out a gym, toning my abs and honing arms like Michelle Obama’s (my husband would be snorting if he were allowed to read this now). I imagine decking myself in the latest fall fashions, becoming one of the stylish, thin women I see and envy on the street. I imagine finally printing out the family photos that are stored in the computer, hanging up pictures and decorating our home to look like a magazine spread or at least like the other suburban bourgeois homes I see. I imagine that I have time to write, that I finally finish this damn short story I’ve been working on. I dream that I write a series of lovely, heart-catching short stories; I publish a book to critical acclaim. And along the way, I succeed in science and publish a few Nature/Science/Cell papers along the way.

And yeah, I imagine that I do all this while still retaining the status (both outward and inward) of “good mommy.”

*********************

Not sure where I’m going with this post. Guess I just wanted to say: I’m still here. I want to try to keep up with your blogs, your lives. I want to have the time to keep up with my own.

Short comments

2009-10-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

--Why are the "Supplemental Data" sections of papers often bigger than the main data sections themselves? And now there are even "Supplemental Discussions" to go along with the "Supplemental Methods" and "Supplemental Data." Somebody please make this stop.

--It's gray and cold. I have the kids bundled in winter-coat mode already. Happily, we are leaving for vacation to Florida tomorrow =)

--Bean-girl still cries when I take her to kindergarten.

--Hopefully, I'll have more interesting things to write when I get back.

New post at The Alternative Scientist!

2009-09-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

I have a new post over at The Alternative Scientist! The lovely Emily Monosson has generously agreed to let me post the responses from her survey of a number of different science writers (including yours truly). And if you don't know who Dr. Monosson is, check out her book and blog here.

Growing pains---redshirting is in and we're the outsiders who didn't do it

2009-09-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t get easier, more experienced mothers have warned me darkly. As the kids get older, school activities start piling up and it just gets crazier and crazier. The kids still need you—in some ways, they need you even more.

I want to close my ears when these battle-hardened mothers speak, and I want to shout LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

But I’m beginning to understand what they mean.

Bean-girl has only just started kindergarten and our family calendar is booked with school meetings and events to remember; there are still endless forms to fill and a parade fund-raisers to remember. Wow, my husband said, standing in front of the calendar. Yeah, I said grimly. Think of what it will be like when both of them are in school.

And it’s not just the new notes and folders and projects to keep track of… Bean-girl has hit a bit of a rough patch this week. And bean-mom’s confidence has been shaken a bit as well.

The rose is off the bloom, as my husband would say. The first week of kindergarten was filled with the excitement of novelty—there was kindergarten itself, and the “Kinder-care” pre-kindergarten daycare program in the morning (which she says is more fun than actual kindergarten), and then a separate after-care program after 3:30 pm. Bean-girl was shuttled from one room and environment to another and seemed to find it all thrilling. Her very first full day she did something astonishing—she went down the playground’s tall, twisty slide, encouraged by some older school girls in the after-care program who have taken her under their wing. This is the same girl who for years refused to go down even the meekest toddler slide—and suddenly she was happily going down the biggest slide on the playground! Bean-girl seemed to be making new friends easily, and everything was sunlight and roses.

Then the second week rolled around, and it seemed to sink in that she wasn’t going to be seeing her old friends from her old daycare anymore. The novelty began to seem confusing and intimidating. “I miss my old friends,” she said, tearing up in the backseat on the way to her new school. “You’ll see L (her best friend) at ballet this week!” I replied heartily. “But I miss my other friends, too!” Bean-girl replied. Then she began to talk about how she wished she were back at her old preschool/daycare. She said the teachers were nicer there, the kids were more fun, and that she missed the physical look of the room itself.

She was in that daycare/preschool for two solid years. From the ages of 2 to 4. She met her first and best friend in that room, and they grew up there together like sisters.

Bean-girl has already bonded closely with a new girl in her Kinder-care program and already been invited to the birthday party of her new friend. But understandably, she still misses her old school. Last week she had, in her kindergarten teacher’s parlance, a Tough Day, and started crying in frustration about something. And today, when I dropped her off for the afternoon kindergarten session, I asked her to walk down to the classroom herself, following all the other children who were walking by themselves and leaving their mothers in the school lobby. Bean-girl got upset, and before I could even change my mind, the school chaperone took her hand and led her away, saying that she was a big girl who should leave mommy behind (all the other kids have been walking in on their own for days now).

Bean-girl was led away crying.

The school counselor called me at home later that afternoon to let know how Bean-girl was doing. Apparently, the counselor saw Bean-girl crying in the hallway and followed her into the classroom to talk to her and help her calm down. She had a difficult time. She calmed down, but then a stray word set her off again, and she had to spend a little quiet time with the counselor in a separate classroom. It’s perfectly normal, the counselor assured me. I just wanted to let you know how she’s doing. We’re trying to teach her techniques—like taking deep breaths—to bring herself under control. By the way, is she a perfectionist? (She is, I admitted). I thought so, the counselor said. We’ve noticed the way she gets frustrated at some tasks.

All this is feeding into new insecurities raised by a new acquaintance of mine. There is a phenomenon known as “redshirting” where parents deliberately hold their children back from kindergarten an extra year to give them more time to mature. Bean-girl is on the cusp of the cut-off age for kindergarten in our state—she turns five in November, and in our state children who turn five after December are not allowed to enroll in kindergarten. We had the option to put her in the school’s “Young-5s” program instead of regular kindergarten, but we figured she was ready for the real thing. Some people expressed surprise at this, and suggested that we should hold her back, but we shrugged them off.

But most of the kids in the Young-5s program are OLDER than she is. It seems every single kid in the district who has a September birthday or later is enrolled in Young-5s as opposed to kindergarten.

And these are kids who are bright. These are kids who are mature. These are kids who can read and write and are clearly ready for kindergarten. But they are being deliberately held back by their parents for a social advantage.

“Did you know that Bean-girl is the youngest kindergartener in the entire school?” a new acquaintance called to tell me, worried. Worried Acquaintance (let’s call her “A”) helps to put the school directory together, and decided to look up all the children’s birthdays. “I know this is bold of me, but did you think of enrolling her in Young 5s?”

I’ve only just met “A.” She’s the mother of Bean-girl’s new best friend from the school’s daycare program—a very smart girl who is already 5 years old, who stands a full head taller than the Bean-girl, and who is in Young5s instead of kindergarten.

“I know it seems brazen, but I just want to talk to you as one mother to another,” A told me on the phone. “I have older children—my oldest is in high school now. I just want to tell you that this is a VERY competitive school district. We struggled with the decision to put our youngest in kindergarten, because we know she is so bright, but we’re looking ahead to the years down the line. We want her to fit in socially and be able to handle the pressures to come.”

I was taken aback, but I could tell that A was sincerely concerned for her daughter’s new best friend. I thanked her for her concern, and said that while I understood these reasons, I was philosophically opposed to holding a child back just for these social advantages.

“Oh, I hate it too,” the mother responded. “I HATE it. But you have to understand that everyone in this district does it. 99.9%. Everyone.”

And she’s right. It appears that everyone really does do it here.

Have I doomed my Bean-girl by putting her in kindergarten according to the supposedly regular schedule? I don’t think so. I think in the long run she’ll be fine either way—although perhaps I should have thought more about Young5s, and perhaps she would benefit from it. Apparently, Young5s, is the new kindergarten, which makes kindergarten the new first grade and first grade the new second grade… Bean-girl’s kindergarten teacher said she would check to see if a transfer to Young5s is even possible at this stage, just to see. I have a late December birthday myself and was always the youngest student in school. I was shy and socially awkward, but I attribute that more to innate temperament than to the accident of my date of birth.

But it just keeps getting clearer and clearer: school is not what it was when my husband and I went through the system. For both better and worse. And it does not get easier as they get older. The tug of the heart is as painful as ever.

Lab trajectories

2009-09-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

Labs go through boom-and-bust cycles. I've been on the downhill side, seeing a formerly high-flying lab lose major funding, half the trainees kicked out or running for the hills. In the last few years, I saw and heard of more and more labs losing funding, downsizing or shuttering altogether.

During graduate school, I did my Ph.D. in a stable, middle-of-the road lab. That lab had gone apparently gone through a hairy period before I entered it, but it was pretty stable when I entered. Years after I graduated, that particular lab is still doing well, and still pretty much at the same level. It is neither expanding or contracting--it seems to have achieved a nice steady state.

Then there are the labs on an explosive trajectory. I think I may be soon entering one of these.

Several months ago, our research institute made available a large sum of internal funding in support of high-priority institute goals. PIs were invited to submit applications. It was a mad scramble, very similar to the craziness that occurred for the NIH Challenge Grants. And like the insanity that was the Challenge Grants, it seemed that everyone here submitted multiple applications for the Internal Pseudo-Challenge Grants.

Last night, the word came down on the internal grants. My current boss, sadly, did not get any of his applications funded.

But Hot Young PI, with whom I plan to work next year, did very well.

Today I had a meeting with Hot Young PI to discuss my career grant application with his lab. He'd e-mailed me to say that he had some exciting updates to share. I wrote back that I'd already heard of some of them.

Me, walking into his office: Congratulations! I heard you got 6 out of 7 internal grants funded!

PI: Oh, not really. (Slight pause) It was 7 out of 8.

Me: agog and speechless.

Still working (but enjoying this weekend)

2009-09-12T07:40:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was supposed to be my last day of work at the Institute.

But in an almost literal last moment reprieve... my boss made the decision to extend my contract through the end of the year. Because I had already altered my daycare arrangements, I told them that I would only be able to work full three days a week. So as of next week, I'm officially on a 24-hour work schedule (and going to try my darndest to be disciplined enough to to keep it that way. I will NOT work on official days off!)

In a way, I'm actually a little sad about the loss of the freedom I'd envisioned working as a freelancer. Working part-time is better, of course--not just monetarily, but for other reasons as well. This way I still have continous access to the resources of the Institute, including access to cool seminars (yeah, I'm a geek about that) as well as the structure, camraderie, and steady income of a salaried position. And now it will be much easier to keep in contact with Hot Young PI as we work together on a re-entry grant for this winter.

(Yup, I'm still planning to submit a grant with Hot Young PI. And to hopefully transition to his laboratory at some point in the new year. So the timing and length of my current contract extension actually works out just perfectly.)

So things took an unexpected but happy turn... I took two days off this week to use up my last official vacation time and see the Bean-girl off to kindergarten. She is doing amazingly well, and is so excited and happy for the new adventures each day at her new school! Everything is thrilling for her--the kindergarten class, the pre-kindergarten daycare, using a locker, going down the twisty slide, making friends with older kids on the playground... In fact, she told me she'd rather go to school all day than spend some mornings at home with her mommy!

Bean-girl. At. Kindergarten! Legume kept saying after we'd dropped Bean-girl off. Bean-girl. At. Kindergarten! She said it over and over as she drifted off at naptime that first day. Then woke, bleary-eyed, but game to put on her shoes and go pick up her sister at school. Bean-girl. At. Kindergarten!

And when we picked her up, Bean-girl pouted tha we hadn't let her ride the bus home.

***************************************************

In mid-September, summer finally makes her late appearance. The weather is gorgeous. Our city throws an end-of-summer bash at this time each year. My husband and I took the kids downtown last night to see the festivities. We sat eating strawberry ice-cream on an open deck, watching fireworks explode over the river. Baby Legume quietly chattered her wonder. Green! Pur-ple! Pop, pop, pop! Wow-wow-wow!

Talking Legume

2009-08-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, in the midst of baby babble, fully formed sentences started appearing. At first we were unsure—is she just parroting us? Repeating without understanding? But now Legume is talking in full force. I’d say about half of what she says is intelligible and the other half is clearly intended as coherent language—we’re just too dumb to understand it.

“Ah wan jaba gooba,” she tells me intently, looking me right in the eye.

Um, you want something, Legume? I can’t understand what you’re saying.

“Ah wan jaba gooba,” she repeats more insistently.

Bean-girl, can you understand what you’re sister is saying?

“AH WAN JABA GOOBA!”

Um, here have a cookie instead.

That cheers her up and makes her instantly forget about the mysterious jaba gooba.

Then she walks into the kitchen and tells me, apropos of nothing, “Ah wan slurpee!”

Oh, this I understand. No slurpee now. Slurpees from the 7-eleven are special treats. We can get slurpees another day.

“Slurpees anotha day!” she beams and walks contentedly away.

She has, mysteriously, picked up a Southern accent. “Mah teddy beah!” (translation: My teddy bear) she cries in the breathy drawl of a southerner. “Mah bicycle! Mah panda! Mah toothbrush! Mah, mah, mah!”

“I like mommy!” she proclaimed the other day. “I like sister! I like tissue box! I like Daddy!”

“Oh, great, I rank below the tissue box,” her father said.

Prairie reverie

2009-08-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of parenthood is rediscovering your favorite books of childhood with your own children. The Bean-girl and I have started the “Little House on the Prairie” series; the other week we finished the first book, “Little House in the Big Woods,” and are already several chapters into the second book, “Little House on the Prairie.”

It’s strange, re-reading these novels aloud. I remembered the description of a pig butchering, the scene where Laura and Mary use a blown-up pig bladder as a ball (toy stores being in scarce supply at the time); the scenes of Pa fiddling at night and the cozy warmth of the log house in the deep snow. Bean-girl loves these adventures, too. She laughs and her eyes widen when Ma and Laura face a bear, and when Grandpa Ingalls is chased by a panther. She identifies with Laura, of course, a little girl not much older than the Bean-girl herself when the series starts. But reading with adult eyes, I wonder now about Ma. I wonder—how did she do it? How did she raise those three little girls, all alone during the day in a cabin in the deep woods, miles from town or the nearest neighbor? Today’s suburban stay-at-home moms complain about their isolation—we’ve got nothing on these pioneer gals. And then in the second book, Pa Ingalls uproots the family and takes them even further into the wilderness. They leave a community where extended family—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—lived at least within a wagon-ride distance and could gather together for Christmas and special occasions. But Pa claims that the Wisconsin woods are getting too crowded for his taste and feels the need to move West. The family travels by covered wagon to the great prairies. There is nothing and no one about them—only the tall grasses, the birds singing and flying overhead, the wagon tracks stretching before them and the wilderness all around. Roughing it for weeks with a baby and two preschool-aged children—can you imagine?

And here’s the kicker, the scene that I can’t stop talking about to any adult who will listen. In the middle of the great prairie, miles from civilization, Ma Ingalls stop to do the wash. She washes the children’s petticoats and underpants and dresses. She leaves them to dry flat in the sun. And then she happily irons them. She irons! Hell, my husband and I don’t bother to iron anything and we and our kids have to go out in public every day. Laura Ingalls Wilders describes the scene lovingly—the heating of the irons, the hiss of steam, the smooth pressing of cloth. All for the pleasure of freshly pressed frocks that no one outside the family will even see.

Way to make me feel like a slacker, Ma Ingalls.

**************************************************************************

There are patchwork remnants of prairie about our house. An overgrown field lies next to our property, just the other side of a little footpath. The field is tall now with grasses higher than my head, with Queen Anne’s lace and red clover and chicory. Wild raspberry bushes grow amidst the weeds near the bottom of the path. Little birds chirp hidden in the grass and then fly out suddenly.

“This is what it must have been like in Laura’s day,” I tell the Bean-girl. “Imagine, the whole country was once nothing but wild meadow just like this.”

My husband and I marvel at the idea, and Bean-girl and her sister Legume ignore us, running free in the golden light.

Interview date!

2009-07-28T20:03:00.001-07:00

Hey, I finally got a date for my job interview! Next Thursday. I'll be presenting a seminar on research I did over three years ago.

Wish me luck, and I"ll keep my peeps updated =)

Summer silence

2009-07-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

The summer is already more than half over—too fast, as always. Beach days, pool dates, —still left undone. It’s been unseasonably cool here, mid 70s, and I actually miss the muggy days that usually spell a Midwestern summer.

I’m in a state of waiting these days. I decided to contact a hot young PI at my institute to inquire about research opportunities with his lab. I had actually met this person three years ago during an informational interview, and I wanted to work with him then; unfortunately, he was just starting his lab and had no funding (and I was expecting a new baby). But he just got his first RO1 this year and a few additional private grants. He squeezed in 20 minutes for me, told me that he had lots of money and exciting projects, was interested in me, and would like to schedule a formal interview with me including formal research seminar. He ended the meeting by saying that he’d like to get in touch the following week to discuss things in more detail. And then. . . silence.

Well, not complete silence. A round of e-mail tag and then silence. He’s been busy traveling, and writing additional grants, and then traveling again. . . You get the idea. Summer is one of the worst times to try to catch the typical PI. My own current supervisor has been gone for nearly two months now, leaving manuscripts and projects adrift. I help his postdocs shape their manuscripts and grant ideas (believe me, some of them really need it) but at a certain point one needs the approval/input of a certain authority to move on.

Actually, I don’t have much to do at work right now, so I’ve been doing a lot of general reading, which includes reading in the field that I would like to move into. Because I really *do* want to join this other lab!

Anyway. . . it’s been silent here at my blog, too. No real reason for it. Just waiting for news on the job front and trying to enjoy this fleeting summer (as I bite my nails.) Legume has been talking a storm; she sounds like a high-pitched parrot as she mimics everything anyone says. Bean-girl alternates between oversensitive preschool dramatics and delightful, perfect cover child. I took Bean-girl to her first swim lesson last weekend and she loved it! I was so relieved, for she’s often a nervous child and I remember being traumatized by own childhood swim lessons. But her first swim class consisted of me holding her while she sang “Wheels on the Bus” and “Twinkle little star” in the pool while splashing and making hand motions with the other children and their mommies. . . and hey, what’s not to like about that?

Bedtime

2009-06-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

Bean-girl: Mommy, do you love your two children more than anything and no matter what we do and do you love us more than anything at all in the world and think we are the most wonderful and bestest in all the world?

Um, yes.

Now please don’t make me think about all that when I say it to you. Your mommy hates getting sappy and teary.

Precious memories

2009-06-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

You know what's really gross? When your two-year old is sitting on your lap (because she refuses to sit in her own chair)stuffing your scrambled eggs into her mouth with her hands. And then she spits out the scrambled eggs onto your plate. And then she re-stuffs them into her mouth and eats them.

Weekend moments

2009-06-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

What is it about children and bugs? Bean-girl is indifferent to the bright finches and cardinals that come to our bird-feeder, but is held rapt at the sight of an ant on the ground. Ladybugs, caterpillars, spiders and worms—all are fascinating, no matter how many times she’s seen them before. Legume is similarly thrilled.

This weekend I bought the girls a bug-hunting kit from a local nature center. One of the best six dollars I’ve ever spent. A simple net, a cheap pair of binoculars and magnifying class (which are too out-of-focus to really let you distinguish anything), and this nifty little bug-catcher, two halves of a plastic ball mounted on what look like the edges of scissors. You squeeze the handles of the bug-catcher together and the plastic halves close in and trap the bug in a sphere (studded with breathing holes, to boot).

The past two evenings we’ve been on bug-hunting walks. Bean-girl was absolutely thrilled to come upon a wriggling red worm on the sidewalk and carefully placed her net over the worm, proud that she’d finally caught something. She was so proud that, in fact, she “caught” the worm several times, repeatedly putting the net over it and then taking it off. Various ants and beetles on the sidewalk were caught in similar fashion. Legume grabbed the plastic ball bug-catcher and proceeded to flip bugs on their backs and pound/grind them to oblivion. There was a nasty moment when I thought she would do the same to a second worm we encountered, and I picked her up (howling her dismay) to prevent this occurrence.

Tonight we headed down the hill behind our house and through the open campus of the community rec center, skirting the edges of wild prairie-grass. Bean-girl thrashed the tall grass with her net. Legume plunged down a small path someone had trampled in the grass, and we had no choice but to follow her. Gnats and small grasshoppers (?) hopped and whirred, too fast for Bean-girl to deliberately catch. Then, heading back home, she noticed that her net was full of tiny bugs after all, prompting a moment of serious study, then much shaking to be rid of them.

**********************************************************************

Tonight I put Bean-girl to sleep and Husband put Legume to bed. As Bean-girl and I said goodnight to Legume, Legume waved happily (not crying for once). Unprompted, she said for the first time on her own, “I love oo.” And then, “Have a good night.”

Welcome, two.

2009-06-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

The cousins invaded last week, as I’d been warning Bean-girl for weeks. My sister-in-law and her four children arrived for their first visit to our home. I now have the barest inkling of the life Jon and Kate Gosselin might lead (minus tabloids and product endorsements, of course). When food landed on the kitchen table, it seemed to instantaneously vanish under the serving ladle. Whole bags of fruit—cherries, strawberries, grapes—evaporated from the fridge. The fridge mysteriously cleared itself out every evening. We go through four gallons of milk a week, my sister-in-law told me, and it’s no exaggeration. Little girls were everywhere in our house—laughing, chattering, long hair swinging. Bean-girl was in heaven, with the attention of four cousins, three of them sudden “older sisters” to play with. After her initial reservations, Legume warmed up and also plunged into the noise and chaos.

My husband’s amazing sister has triplet pre-teens—three 10-year old girls. Plus one fifteen year old boy. All of them beautiful and charming, with no trace of fabled teen sulkiness. It strikes me how young they all seem to me. I thought ten would seem old compared to Bean-girl’s four—isn’t ten practically puberty these days, according to media reports? But ten is still very much an age of childhood. My ten year old nieces can make their own sandwiches, scramble their own eggs. But they also still play games of make-believe. They giggle as madly at nonsensical jokes as any four-year old. They’re all in a zillion sports—track, swim team, horseback riding. They’ve read the Stephanie Meijer “Twilight” series and tell me that these books are all the rage in their school (a statement which rather took me aback). Yet they clamor Mommy, mommy! in the same tones as a preschooler demanding for their mother to Look at this! See me! Help me! Pay attention!

And the fifteen year old boy, despite having a drivers’ permit, seems young to me as well. Still affectionate with his younger sisters, unapologetically close to his family—none of the reserve that I imagined would come with his age, or the reserve that I imagine I felt at that age (and did I? Can I really remember?) Still so young they all seem—open and unguarded as summer blooms.

Bean-girl and Legume stayed home with their father and relatives all of last week. Husband took the week off work (I had to go into work, alas). Nearly every day brought an outing for the kids—to the zoo, the botanical gardens, the beach. Nights brought popcorn and movies at home. Despite the crowd, I will say that my kitchen was neater than it usually is, with conscientious house-guests jumping up to lend a hand. And there were four older kids to keep an eye on Bean-girl and Legume, to take them outside to play or entertain them while the adults cleaned up and maybe even relaxed.

Bean-girl bonded most especially with cousin M. They spent hours together, just the two of them. Holed up in Bean-girl’s room telling stories, playing with stuffed animals, cuddling in bed. One of their favorite games was one in which Bean-girl pretended she was M and M pretended that she was Bean-girl. They found this game endlessly, inexplicably amusing.

And in the midst of all this, Legume turned two. Exactly one week ago. It wasn’t a well-thought out party. My gifts, I’m rather ashamed to say, were picked up at a local toy store that very evening. Auntie E and the cousins made a cake. Helium balloons were left over from a trip to the grandparents the day before. Legume sat bemused in her high chair and ate her cake. She enjoyed her gifts, particularly the cheap $2 wind-up duck she chose for herself at the toy store. Two-year olds are easily impressed.

She is sleeping now, my little girl. I’ve been denying it, but my baby walked away from me months ago. When I wasn’t looking, a little girl took her place.

Hi there, big little girl Legume.

Grant writing crunch

2009-05-21T19:15:00.001-07:00

--Bean-girl was in her first big dance recital this past weekend. She and her friends did wonderfully!

--Legume is walking up and down the stairs by herself, putting on her pants by herself, talking a lot more, and growing up too fast.

--I am in the home stretch of grant writing purgatory.

--And I was amazed to read this article in the New York times and learn that "Rooster brand" Sriracha sauce is made in America. All my life I've assumed it was a Thai import.

Okay, back to my stack of scientific journal articles. I've missed you, oh blogosphere, and promise to be back soon.

love,
Bean-mom

Inspiration: Rachel Carson, scientist and writer

2009-05-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

I belong to the Council of Science editors and receive their monthly news publication, “Science Editor.” April’s issue had an eye-opening profile of Rachel Carson, the environmental activist best known for her book, “Silent Spring.”

I admit that I’ve never read “Silent Spring” or any of her other books. Actually, I know almost nothing of Carson other than that she was a famous environmental activist best known for “Silent Spring.” But the article I read makes it clear that Rachel Carson was a remarkable person with a remarkable career path and life. And it brought home to me (yet again) that career paths are often unpredictable, that they turn and twist in unexpected ways, and that long-held dreams can blossom late in unlooked-for spaces.

Adapted from “Rachel Carson, Science Editor” by Olga Kuchment. Science Editor (April 2009) Vol 32: 39-42. (Too bad there’s no online access to the journal!)

Rachel Carter was born in a rural setting in 1907. She started writing at an early age, and early on she dreamed of becoming a professional writer. But she was introduced to zoology at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) and fell in love with the subject. She switched her major from English to zoology and decided to become a scientist. At the time she “thought she would have to give up writing.” (Kuchment, 2009).

She earned a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins University and tried to continue for a Ph.D. But her family was poor, the Great Depression hit, and she was unable to afford the tuition to continue her training. (Hmmm, seems you actually had to pay for a science Ph.D. in those days?) Rachel Carson became the main economic support for her widowed mother, sister, and nieces. She took a job at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she wrote scripts for a radio program on marine biology. The radio scripts jump-started her writing career; she reworked the scripts into articles that were published in the Baltimore Sun. On the urging of her boss, she reworked one of her government assignments into an article that was published in The Atlantic. She secured a book deal and wrote her first book “Under the Sea Wind.”

Her first book was not a commercial success, and she stayed on as a scientific writer/editor with the government for many years, eventually rising to the position of editor-in-chief of the publishing program of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Kuchment’s article in the Science Editor quotes interviews from admiring colleagues who praised Carson as both an editor/scientist and person. Carson continued to work on personal writing projects in her spare time, and eventually hit commercial success with “The Sea Around Us.” She then retired from her civil service job and worked full-time on her own writing projects. “Silent Spring” was her last book.

I love this story. A dream deferred, put aside—the early dream of being a professional writer. A new dream and its loss—what a bitter pill it must have been to not be able to finish her Ph.D.! But then the marrying of interests—her initial job title with the government was “junior aquatic biologist”; she went out into the field and interacted with scientists; it seems that one could still call her a scientist, as well as a writer/editor. And then, at the age of 45, the realization of her dream to work full-time as a creative writer pursuing her own interests. Interests that sprang directly from her training and love for science.

Spring break recap

2009-05-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

Every morning, we woke up to this outside our bedroom window.

The blue waters of this Caribbean island are like nothing I've seen elsewhere. I spent the week trying to think of a name for this shade of blue. In person, it's an electric color that is almost green.

We spent a lot of time at the pool

And at the resort's splash park.

And the kids were enraptured by Elmo.

Sesame Street characters cavorting in the Caribbean sounds crazy, yes. But it works.

The Bean family's second annual trip to the Turks and Caicos was a smashing success, I'd say. It really did feel like paradise there. But spring in the Midwest, with the tulips abloom and all the pear trees on our street in full white flower? Coming back to that wasn't so bad after all. =)

1 am posting

2009-04-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

It's 1 am. I fell asleep with the baby around a little after 9 pm, woke when Husband stumbled into bed, lay awake for a few minutes, then followed the silent glow of the computer monitor (calling me from all the way downstairs) to this place.

I could be editing pieces of a Challenge Grant that, in light of the gazillion impending applications this Monday, has a vanishingly small chance of being funded. Or I could read a review article or write another paragraph of the RO1 that I think may actually have a chance. These thoughts actually flickered through my mind as I walked down the stairs. But of course, I instead spent the last half hour wandering aimlessly through the blogosphere.

Because I need the down-time, people.

Husband and I feel that we have no down-time. And it's not even so much to do with work, really. It's the work plus kids thing. And heck, if I weren't working outside the home, it would just be the kids thing alone. In some way, I thought going back to work would actually free up more time for myself--more of a mental space, at least, where I could think about an intellectual subject for more than two minutes straight before being pelted with the demands of toddler/pre-schooler. In a way, I was right about that. But although it's a nice change of scenery for someone who sincerely needs to work outside the house for her own sanity--still, work isn't exactly downtime. (A reason, I suppose, why it's called "work.")

Fretting about the future, sorting through a tangled mix of ambitions and plotting (or rather, trying to plot) my way through a new, undefined career--that's not "downtime" either.

Only this--alone, completely alone, while all the family sleeps. Mad Hatter had a nice post up about work/family balance a few days ago. A number of commenters mentioned their need for "alone" time. Isn't it funny, when the commute to work becomes the most cherished portion of solitude in the day?

Not too long ago, I had lunch with two other mothers after Bean-girl's ballet class. Our children ran about the nearly-empty pizza parlor as the mothers chattered over the ruins of lunch. Yes, one of the other moms exclaimed, I so understand about getting time alone in the car! That commute time is the best! And the other mother, who works part-time with toddler twins and a preschooler, said ruefully I don't even get that much! I pick up the kids and drop them off from school, so I never get time alone in the car. And my husband just doesn't get it!

And then we chatted about kindergarten, and the mother of three nearly teared up as she talked about placing her oldest girl in a full-time kindergarten this fall. We nodded sympathetically. Five minutes ago, this mother (who is at home part-time) had sighed for a break from the kids. And now, at the prospect of a small break, the mother was sad about letting her daughter go. No one commented on the contradiction.

Parenthood is weird.

April

2009-04-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

--T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland.

I’m not sure about cruelest month. But it is an unsettled month here in my region of the Midwest, where the weather careens wildly about, soaring into sunlight and the 70s on one day, plunging into the 30s and frost on the next. Impatience swells, and Midwesterners take any excuse to break out sun-dresses, shorts, and flip-flops. Joggers and bikers start crowding the sides of the roads, even as I am still shivering in my fleece jacket (Despite the alluring sunlight, it is still NOT shorts-weather to me!) The first tight buds appear on bare branches; the dry lawn suddenly unfurls itself in lush green. To step outside is to be pelted with a riot of birdsong.

But the season is still unsettled; memory and desire are mixed. We fidget restlessly, longing for full-blown summer, warmth and swimming pools, beach days and melting ice cream in the park. The first tulips are starting to open. The spring light is brilliantly clear. And there is a feeling of fragility in this moment, an aching sense of the briefness of the spring. The air is cool, and the new mist of green in the trees seems almost unbearably tender.

Legume, 22 months

2009-04-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

She’s warm and just slightly sticky, her breath sweet with strawberries and ice cream. She is sun-warmed toffee, a glazed Cinnabon. Grasping hands reaching for me, a warmth held against me as we cuddle off to sleep.

She is a loud and dramatic toddler. Mercurial in temperament, sunshine and tears. Today she happily picked out a purple sweater, laughing. Then burst into tears when I pulled the sweater over her head. Then stopped crying and beamed. She cries when you tell her to wash her hands. She cries when you stop her from playing in the waste basket. She cries when you tell her “No.” She cries when you hand her a bowl of cheerios. There are days that she cries at anything.

She's like a moody teenager who can't talk (other than a few understandable words) but expects you to read her mind.

She is a fashion diva. She loves hats, shoes, purses. She loves to wear her big sister’s ladybug Halloween costume (last year’s Halloween costume, discovered in a closet). She has very definite taste in clothes. A month ago we went on a little family vacation to an indoor water park resort. There, my husband introduced Legume to a pair of blue toddler Crocs to wear around the pool. Now Legume wants to wear those crocs all the time.

She is her big sister’s shadow. Her sister’s copycat, her acolyte, her worshipper and pupil and rival. Bean-girl gets up from the dining table to spin in circles on the floor? Legume begs to be released from her high chair so that she can do the same. Bean-girl practices her ballet moves? Legume must try as well. It’s no longer enough that Legume drink from the same color cup that Bean-girl uses. Now Legume is demanding Bean-girl’s cup itself! (it’s the same milk in both cups, little Legume). Whatever Bean-girl has, Legume must have as well.

Legume’s favorite words? “No” and “Gimmee.”

She refuses to use a toddler spoon now. She eats only with big-people utensils. At the table, she drinks only from an open-mouthed cup. She’s started to walk up the stairs, holding onto the railings with one hand (this makes me very nervous). She is slowly, all on her own, giving up nursing. We don’t even nurse every night now—not even when I’m the one putting her to sleep.

She’s not a baby anymore, as husband saw fit to remind me today.

She’s 22 months, and growing up so fast.

She’s not a baby, but she’ll always be my baby.

Oh, well.

2009-03-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

Guess I'm working on an NIH challenge grant after all.

There goes April.

Bean-girl is a geek in the making

2009-03-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

When the last story book has been read and the lights are off, Bean-girl will often ask my husband or I for a story told “out of your head.” I sometimes re-tell her stories about how her father and I met, or of our wedding (she loves these), or of the day she was born or the day that Baby Legume was born. Sometimes I make up a story about Moon the white unicorn, a chapter in our private serial involving unicorns and the Bean-girl. She’s got a unicorn obsession these days, along with her dinosaur obsession. Moon the silver-white unicorn usually takes Bean-girl on a flight somewhere, or sometimes goes to Bean-girl’s school for show-and-tell. I have a poor imagination, so the other day I threw in some Tolkien, and had Moon and Bean-girl taking tea with Bilbo Baggins in the forest. But after I had explained what a hobbit was, Bean-girl insisted that the hobbit be female, so the story morphed into one of Moon and Bean-girl taking tea with Rose the hobbit (I told you, I have a poor imagination).

What stories does the Bean-dad tell his four-year old at night? He tells her the saga of Anakin Skywalker and the Skywalker twins.

Not long ago, I overhead him telling Bean-girl about how Anakin gets his hand cut off by Obi-wan Kenobe. “Is that really an appropriate story for her at this age?” I thought, but did not voice. Then over the past two weeks, both trilogies of the Star Wars series were shown on cable TV. Last weekend I saw Bean-girl and her father cuddled on the couch, watching the climactic battle scene between Anakin and Obi-wan, fought above rivers of flowing lava (shades of Mount Doom…). “Do you really think this is appropriate for Bean-girl,” I said aloud this time. Husband waved me off, and Bean-girl watched as Anakin first got his hand sliced off, then burst into flame and was abandoned to die by his mentor. She appeared fascinated.

This morning the kids invaded our bed as usual. Bean-girl demanded to watch cartoons, and Husband sleepily reached for the remote. “Empire Strikes Back” was playing. In a scene that I had completely forgotten, Luke Skywalker was captured by what appeared to be the Abominable Snowman. To escape, Luke sliced off the Abominable Snowman’s hand. “There is a LOT of slicing off of hands in this series!” I announced.

Thankfully, we had places to be and things to do, and the Star Wars marathon was temporarily halted. But tonight, as I went to collect Bean-girl for bed, I found her sitting with her father, watching the end of “Empire Strikes Back”, nearing the climactic scene where Luke get his hand sliced off.

“I DON’T think Bean-girl should be watching this,” I said, and swept Bean-girl away just before Luke followed family tradition and got his hand severed.

“But Mom,” Bean-girl wailed. “I LOVE Star Wars! I really do! And I’m not scared at all, not at all, and I don’t know why you won’t let me watch it and I LOVE it!”

Uh, right. Can a four-year old really love this stuff?

She’s such a little chicken, scared of the playground slide and going too fast on a swing, stopping me when a bedtime story gets too scary for her, bursting into tears the time we took her to a movie theatre to see “Horton Hears a Who.” Shouldn’t watching dismemberment be at least as disturbing?

Then again, one of the last times her grandfather was here, Bean-girl joined him in watching “Dr. Who” and the scary Daleks and whatever ugly monster race was featured that week. I dragged her away to bed, and she spent the next two days proclaiming that she loved Dr. Who and had to find out what happened at the end of that episode…

Between a mama who tell crazy unicorn/hobbit stories and a dad who lets her watch Star Wars, Bean-girl is going to grow up to be a helpless geek, isn’t she?

Hopefully she won't be traumatized as well.

*By the way, though I count myself as a sci-fi geek, I never ever could get into the Star Wars saga. Not even during college, when I was subjected to multiple marathon viewing sessions in the dorms. It has always just seemed rather cheesy to me. And don’t get me started on the wretched “Phantom Menace”, the only one of the “new” trilogy that I’ve seen all the way through. *

Why I loved my job today

2009-03-04T20:16:00.000-08:00

Since starting in my current position, I have worked closely with one particular postdoc, helping her to prepare an RO1 based on her work. While I was gone on vacation these past several days, she finally completed a crucial experiment. You know, the obvious experiment that all the reviewers will demand. The one that you demand, to know whether or not this project is really viable. The big-time experiment that will make or break your entire hypothesis.

It worked.

She got awesome, beautiful data. She didn’t tell me until I wandered by her desk this afternoon… but it is gorgeous. Has the boss seen this? I demanded. Boss has indeed seen it, and was so excited that he took it to our new institute director (and that is an entirely separate and probably unbloggable topic—the major reorganization at our institute). Big Pharma Collaborator/Representative apparently also stopped by the lab while I was on vacation, saw the data, and got super excited. I’m excited and I’m just a bystander in this all. The postdoc has the wary demeanor I recognize, the I’m-not-going-to-jinx-this-so-I’ll-just-play-it-real-cool demeanor. In her place, I would think that I’d be jumping out of my frigging skin (maybe she did, when she first saw her results in private).

It’s not the same as being the first person in the world to see the data, the first person to understand something new about our universe. But peering over someone else’s shoulders will do for me. And I don’t envy having to do mouse work at all.

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Today I had an interesting chat with the staff science editor at our institute. S.E. is the editor for our entire institute, working with any lab who requests his services. I work for only one laboratory. S.E. edits other people’s words, but I actually do a lot of de novo writing and very substantive editing (to the point where the line between editing and writing becomes very blurred).

S.E. was involved in my hiring, and today I asked him something I’ve been long curious about. What were the backgrounds of the other candidates who interviewed for my job?

I should note that I applied for this position with naïve confidence. Our institute is not a well-known one, and it is located in flyover country. I know that our location makes recruitment of American Ph.Ds. difficult. The faculty are all great (heck, people will accept faculty jobs wherever they can get them, right?). But there are very very few American postdocs here. The few that are here all have family ties of some kind to the area.

So I figured the job posting I applied to probably wouldn’t get many qualified American Ph.D.s The job description did not formally require a Ph.D., although the degree was described as useful. I applied with inward swagger, thinking: I have a Ph.D. from a prestigious program and a postdoc from Big Research U! Who could possible be my competition?

Well, today S.E. told me who my competitors were. Folks, it is a brutal world out there (like you didn’t already know that).

The job wasn’t nationally advertised, but yeah, there were other Ph.D.s applying for this position. Ph.Ds with postdoctoral experience. The other leading candidate was a faculty member from a teaching-oriented school several hours away. I was floored that a faculty member would apply for such an editing job. Apparently, the hiring committee was also surprised, and concerned about how committed this faculty member really was to the position (hence my hiring).

Then S.E. told me about other positions he’d hired for. S.E. is a long-time editor; he’s worked at a number of places, including Big Pharma, and in different fields. He told me that once he was hiring for an assistant editor and got flooded with 50 applications from people with advanced degrees. It was incredible, S.E. recalled. Most people had Ph.Ds., and it was a position that did not require a Ph.D. One person had a J.D. (I didn’t get that at all, S.E. told me. He was a lawyer—why wasn’t he out making good money as a lawyer? Maybe he hated being a lawyer? I offered).

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Even before this latest economic downturn, there was a desperate postdoc glut and plenty of trained scientists looking for a way out. I am luckier than I thought. And the job market—even in “alternative” fields—is more brutal than I had believed.

What you should be reading

2009-03-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

A while back Sciencegirl gave me this lovely Inspiration Award.

Following Cath’s example, I am bending the rules and passing it on to one special blogger. SciMom’s blog was one of the first women-in-science blogs I stumbled upon. I never commented back then, but when she left blogging two years ago I missed her and always wondered how she was doing with her transition from academic research to industry.

Guess what? SciMom is back! And the last two years of her life have been tumultuous indeed. I hope she doesn’t mind if I quote from one of her introductory posts to her new blog:

"I haven't blogged for awhile because I realized my previous blog, which I called Doubleloop, just didn't fit my life anymore. So I've updated my blog look and changed the name (Tripleloop) to acknowledge what I now accept - that the last year's trip through breast cancer diagnosis and treatment has changed things. It's a part of my every day life now and what I blog about will often have some component related to that life changing experience.I will still write about academic science, hopefully in a more positive note with the new incoming administration. I will also blog about what it's like to juggle two science careers with two small children. I will blog about what it's like to be an "academic" in the world of biotech. And I will blog about breast cancer research, survivorship and it's impact on my life."

Check out SciMom's Tripleloop. An “Inspiration Award” seems more than appropriate.

Bean-girl's first symphony concert

2009-02-23T20:45:00.000-08:00

“She’s changed so much in just three weeks!” my mother exclaimed of Baby Legume. Indeed, both children seem to be going through both mental and physical growth spurts. It’s more noticeable with Legume, who’s going through the fabled toddler language explosion. Just last week she learned the word “No”—pronounced more like “Neh!” in Legume-speak. So it has been “Neh, neh, neh!” around here, emphasized with a shaking head. I also swear that I heard her say “mine!” when she was tussling with Bean-girl over some thing. And she has finally learned to say Bean-girl’s name, much to Bean-girl’s amusement. “She doesn’t say it quite right,” Bean-girl pointed out.

The grandparents were in town last week, filling up on grandkid time before they take a month long overseas trip. Legume cried, as usual, when she saw her grandmother’s face. But this time she calmed down more quickly, and was soon sitting on grandma’s lap, listening to stories and playing. My mother is enamoured. “She’s good to me now, she likes me!” my mom kept saying of her youngest granddaughter. And Bean-girl has always warmed to her grandparents, from the very beginning. When she hears that they are coming for a visit she asks for how long, and is disappointed if they don’t stay the night.

Bean-girl went to her first symphony concert this weekend. There is a sleek modern community arts center down the hill from our house, in walking distance. We wandered through an art exhibit there when we first moved to this house, but had never attended a performance there. I saw in the paper that a childrens’ production of “Cinderella” was being staged over the weekend, with music provided by our city’s symphony orchestra. It seemed a good time to introduce the Bean to a little culture. My husband took a nap with the Legume while Bean-girl and I made our escape. The grandparents joined in on the pre-concert festivities—there was a “renaissance faire” (high school kids in medieval costumes wandering the lobby); medieval-themed crafts projects, and an orchestra petting zoo that Bean-girl took zero interest in. But she loved the crafts and the concert itself. I hadn’t realized that half an hour would be devoted solely to classical music from the symphony. Excepting the Police concert this past summer, I hadn’t heard any live music in years. The last time I attended a symphony concert was in grad school. There is something about the swelling of live music that cannot be replicated by any stereo sound system. The orchestra started off with an excerpt of the William Tell overture. “Hey, this music is like the Little Einsteins,” Bean-girl told me, referring to a favorite children’s cartoon series that features classical music in each episode. “Music can tell a story,” the conductor told the audience of children. “What story do you think that piece was telling?” “The Little Einsteins!” Bean-girl shouted from the balcony (I don’t think he heard her).

The conductor did a marvelous job of introducing short pieces to the children and explaining how music could mimic a rainstorm, or the bounce of Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket, or the flight of Baba Yaga the witch. Bean-girl beamed on my lap (although she also covered her ears at some parts of the musical rainstorm). Then the “Cinderella” production started. From the newspaper description I had expected a puppet show, but this “puppet show” was actually a ballet featuring masked dancers and dancers manipulating life-sized puppets. Bean-girl squirmed and got a little restless toward the end, but overall seemed to enjoy it. We went home afterward with her cardboard crafted dragon and sword, and she affirmed that she would certainly like to see a similar show again.

And I was reminded that someday, Husband and I will have to get out on the town ourselves for a full-length symphony concert or bit o’culture. It’s been quite a while. But this past Sunday it was also lovely to share the moment on a one-on-one date with my bestest Bean-girl.

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Things have been busy here, what with work, kids, relatives, etc. Blog posting and reading are both taking a hit. I hope to remedy that soon. . . But it’ll have to wait a little while longer. The Bean family is taking a short vacation this Wednesday to a water park resort. Umm, it’s not the kind of vacation I would have planned sans kids. But other parents have all raved about this place.

Interview meme

2009-02-11T20:06:00.000-08:00

The five-question interview meme has been sweeping the blogosphere! Scientistmother asked me these:

1. Are you done with having kids or is there a possibility of more?

I admit that sometimes, holding my no-longer-a-baby Legume close to me, I feel a twinge and momentary longing for another baby. But the moment passes.

I have the two little girls I always dreamed of, and I can’t really imagine adding another to the mix. Husband and I have agreed that we are done having kids. In fact, we’re so sure that next month Husband has an appointment with a doctor to really make sure. (Oversharing? That’s what the Internet is for!)

2. What do you hope your girls want to be when they grow up?

Short answer? Whatever will make them happy and fulfilled.

Okay, that sounds too easy, but it’s true. I want them to be able to follow their bliss. I’m aware that following your bliss doesn’t always work out (sometimes it conflicts with things like paying rent, sometimes it ends in utter heartbreak) but my dream is that they will be able to follow their dreams.

A few weeks ago my four-year old announced that she wanted to be a doctor and an artist. And that she also wanted to be a mommy and take care of her kids as a third job. Lately she has added the position of paleontologist to the mix. I would be thrilled if she could do all that. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she and her sister never felt as though they had to sacrifice one passion for another? If, for instance, they could concurrently pursue interests in both science and art without feeling like they had to give one of them up? And if they could feel that it is possible to choose both career and motherhood without backlash, negative career consequences, discrimination or guilt? That’s my dream for them.

Now having said this, if Bean-girl comes to me in 18 years saying she is really torn between medical school, art school, or paleontology... okay, I’d have to say that med school would be a whole lot more practical.

3. What is your favorite drink?

You mean alcoholic, don’t you? I have to admit that I’m not much of a drinker. When I do drink, I favor those fruity girly drinks. I like dry white wines and can’t stand the red stuff. Mostly I drink lemonade. Whenever I go to a restaurant I order lemonade.

4. What would you be doing if you didn't have kids?

Hmmm, reading more novels and watching “Battlestar Galactica” instead of “Dora the Explorer”?
I might actually still be at the lab bench, still trying to fight my way through academic research or trying to make my way in industry. I really don’t know where I’d be. To tell the truth, I really can’t imagine it.

5. If you could invite any person (living or dead) over for dinner, who would you invite?

Gar, this is going to sound completely lame … but the first person that always pops into my head when asked this party-game question is John Keats. Yeah, John Keats the poet. I came across his poetry at an impressionable age. I have a collection of his letters—and in many ways, the letters are even more interesting than his poetry, and give such a vivid picture of an extraordinarily sensitive, passionate, brilliant, and yes, romantic young man. I admit that as a teenager I developed something of a crush on the personality evident in those letters, a crush that (evidently) persists.

Now what would I say if I had young mister Keats at my dinner table? No idea, of course. Ask him to expound upon his literary theories of “negative capability?”

Now it's your turn! Do you want to be interviewed?If you do - here are the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me" AND leave your email address (or blog link) in the comment!
2. I will respond by emailing you (or commenting on your blog with) five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions. (If you don't have a blog, I can post your answers here).
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Gaming and talking

2009-01-26T19:54:00.001-08:00

The children are bursting with sweetness, all cute sayings and doings and new tricks. Bean-girl has learned to confidently use the computer mouse, and now she is a full-fledged gaming geek. I now know what it’s like to live with a teenager. Or maybe I have a hint of how she feels when I’m absorbed at the computer, reading blogs. This past weekend Bean-girl spent nearly every free moment at the computer, playing a Diego-and-dinosaur game. She’s got a fierce competitive streak. She couldn’t let the game go, because she had to advance through the levels to assemble as many dinosaur skeletons as possible. Somehow she even figured out how to click on the screen showing the highest scores earned; she took great interest in learning her highest scoring games (which really aren’t that high, actually). Today the gaming fever seemed to at last abate a bit, and I had the pleasure of interacting a little with my four-year old before she went to bed. She played hide-and-seek with me, and she and Legume padded about together after their bath, wearing matching fuzzy pink robes.

And Legume? Legume is learning to talk. When she was just a little over one she learned to say, “ball.” (Or rather, “baa.”). And there she paused for a very long time. She was soaking words in, and she understood perfectly what was said to her. But would she open her mouth to say any words in response? She even stopped saying her first word, “ball.” She was our silent little enigma.

Neither I nor husband really worried about it. But when I mentioned her lack of speech to the pediatrician at a check-up, the doctor saw fit to call the county early childhood development specialists on us. A specialist came out to the house to play with Baby Legume, and told us to our great surprise that Legume’s expressive speech (how well she talks) was months behind—our 18-month old’s speech patterns were at the level of a 9 or 10 month old, the specialist claimed! On the other hand, Legume could point correctly to all the animals and objects in a picture book, and could even point correctly to depicted actions (a child sleeping versus a child eating or running). So Legume’s “receptive speech” (how well she understands speech) was above age level, and closer to a two-year old’s.

“Is she always this quiet?” the specialist asked of Legume. “Or is she just so quiet because I’m here?”

“No,” I said resignedly. “She’s always this quiet.”

Fast forward a month and a half. We are living with an echo that can’t be turned off. Legume repeats everything that we say. “Stop!” she cries, echoing her father as he tells Bean-girl to stop doing something. “Red!” she echoes as someone mentions the color of an object. “Socks!” she says, as we pull socks on her pudgy feet. Her diction still needs work, and “bear,” “ball,” and “book” are distinguished mostly by context. But she can be understood. “BEAH,” she cries, showing me a picture of a bear in a book. “BEAH, BEAH!” she shoves the book in my face. Yes, yes, Baby Legume, it’s a bear. “BEAH!!” she insists, now practically shoving the book up my nose for emphasis.

Last week a second county speech therapist came to our house for a follow-up evaluation of Baby Legume. The verdict? Her expressive speech now falls within “normal” standards.

“I told you not to worry,” says Husband.

Sleepy time

2009-01-17T20:21:00.000-08:00

What I like is how the kids can be practically stumbling about in tiredness, wilting on the vine, big purple bags under their eyes—and yet they loudly protest that THEY ARE NOT TIRED (one protests with words, the other protests without words), THEY ARE NOT TIRED and THEY ARE NEVER GOING TO SLEEP!!! Bean-girl insists, in fact, that she NEVER GETS TIRED and she NEVER SLEEPS! We may think she is sleeping when she lies in her bed with eyes closed all night, but really she is just lying there with eyes closed pretending to sleep. That’s what she says. Because, you know, the Bean-girl never ever ever sleeps. And then two minutes later, after mighty protestations, she is out like a light.

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Last weekend the Bean-girl came down with a terrible stomach flu, couldn’t keep anything down for a day. She was the most compliant little patient I’ve ever seen. She hated “spitting up” (actually, it was throwing up) so much that she would do anything to avoid it. She sat there sipping her Pedialyte, calling it her “medicine juice.” Later that weekend the nausea hit me, and Bean-girl suggested that I drink some Pedialyte, too.

“Did I make you sick, mommy?” she asked. “I think so, but it’s not your fault,” I said. “The germs in your body made me sick.”

“I think the germs snuck into my body when I was sleeping,” Bean-girl said. “And then they snuck into your body.”

Bean-girl crashed out on the couch. Baby Legume came by to lovingly pat her sister’s back. One of Legume’s favorite games is patting baby dolls and stuffed animals to sleep. Now she had a real live big sister doll to pat.

Husband caught this picture. It’s one of the few that we have with both girls in the same frame. Trying to take pictures of the two children together is, well, in my sleep-deprived state I’m having trouble coming up with a clever analogy. Let’s just say it’s very difficult.

When Bean-girl woke from her nap, she insisted she had never fallen asleep at all. Confronted with the evidence, she could only laugh and claim that she’d been resting her eyes.

(Note: Baby Legume came down with the same stomach flu a few days later. Fun times.)

Goals for 2009

2008-12-30T19:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions. They're usually vague, cliched, unmeasurable fluff. I resolve to get in shape. To take care of myself. To be more patient. To get in touch with my spiritual self. To savor the moment.

Yesterday I ran across a thread on the ScienceCareers discussion forum about career resolutions for 2009. People were posting specific, measurable goals. Publish remaining work from Ph.D. Publish first-person article. Join a professional society. Move to a new city. That kind of thing.

I, too, am going to set some very specific, measurable goals. Relatively modest goals. In fact, I am setting down here only two very modest career goals for 2009. I have a tendency to feel overwhelmed and anxious, so it's best for me to take it easy =)

1. Revise short story from this summer and resubmit to encouraging editor.

2. Publish one article with Favorite Trade Journal (this is designated Favorite Trade Journal because they published a book review I wrote for them this summer. Now that the editor knows me, I should really follow up.)

If either of these resolutions are fulfilled, I promise to share the results here. And if anyone out there has some advice on freelance writing--scientific or otherwise--I'd love to hear it. Ummm, anyone with advice on conducting interviews for magazine pieces? I don't even know where to start with that, although "getting the quote" seems a necessity. Anyone with experiences using Skype to record phone interviews?

Barely 24 hours left before the New Year. Time for me to get some sleep. Tommorrow I'll be home all day with the bean girls, trying to fit in grant-writing, cooking, laundry (and maybe some sales shopping!) around the edges. Oh yeah, and trying to savor the moment, too.

End of the year odds and ends

2008-12-22T21:18:00.000-08:00

It’s been snowing for days now, it seems. The snow keeps coming, swirling down as large, fluffy flakes, piling up in drifts as tall as our mailbox. This evening the other mothers and I complained as we picked up our preschoolers and herded them out the door. “Yeah, it’s pretty,” one of the women said. “As long as you can be inside, just looking at it.” We grumbled, but our children were enthralled, begging to be allowed to run through the snow (NO! the parents said, it’s time to go HOME!) Bean-girl and her friends lagged behind. Bean-girl scooped up handfuls of fluffy snow with her bare hands, then held her hands out to show me their prize. I lifted Baby Legume up, and Legume tilted her face up to the sky, raising one arm in delight at the snowfall.

It took almost 40 minutes to get home—more than twice the time as usual. The children were content in their backseats, Legume quietly sucking her fingers and Bean-girl firing away her usual string of unanswerable questions (“Why don’t we see Santa’s elves around? Why do the elves stay at the North Pole? Why don’t they come down to see children at the mall the way Santa does?”) The roads were iced with packed snow. I drove carefully, and perhaps I should have been annoyed at the delay, the traffic jam, the white stuff that kept falling from the sky. But the truth is that the snow was indeed beautiful.

***********************************************************

This morning the Bean-girl and I had the following conversation:

Bean-girl: Mommy, will I have kids when I get bigger someday?
Me: You can have kids one day if you want, Bean-girl. If you want to, you can.
Bean-girl (as plaintively as any lovelorn teenager): But what if I don’t find a nice man??!
Me: Um, hopefully you will.
Bean-girl: But what if I don’t?
Me: Uhh….
Bean-girl: Why did you marry Daddy?
Me: Because I thought he was funny and cute?
Bean-girl: I wish I could marry Daddy.

*******************************

A few days ago, Scientistmother wrote this about not keeping up with her blog:

"I also know that I'm not supposed stress out about the blog but its not stressed out need to cross this off my list type of stress, its the OMG I so haven't talked to my BFF and I totally miss her need to find time for her type of stress."

And that’s exactly how I feel when I’ve been away from the blogosphere for a while. Like I’ve missed seeing a friend. And I have indeed been missing my friends—missed catching up with you, seeing how everyone is doing. I haven’t been around as much to read and comment. Family is visiting, children are tugging at my legs, work is getting busy. Tomorrow my mother and sibling are supposed to drive several hours through the snow to join my own family and me for Christmas in our home. It will be the first time that Husband and I have hosted Christmas. The radio predicts snowstorms for the next two days. Hopefully they will all make it (but if the weather is truly bad I hope they all stay put!) Anyway. Merry Christmas, blogosphere. Or happy holidays, if you prefer. I hope to catch up with all of you soon.

Late Haiku--apology

2008-12-13T05:41:00.000-08:00

Apology to Sciencemama

Instead of writing

a haiku, I fell asleep

with Baby Legume.

On leaving the bench

2008-12-10T21:32:00.000-08:00

It’s surprising how much I still feel like a postdoc. I still go to work in the usual postdoc uniform of jeans and sneakers. I still go to seminars, journal clubs, lab meetings. I sit at a computer right in the middle of a lab bench, surrounded by the glassware, conical tubes, equipment and buzz of a research laboratory. I shoot the breeze with my labmates, and I find myself part of scientific discussions. And to my surprise and gratitude, I find that my scientific opinions are solicited and respected. I’m not just a copyeditor, correcting typos and English grammar. As part of my job, I am often required to evaluate the quality of the data going into manuscripts, and I make suggestions on how to tighten a paper, what to cull, what points to bring forward, and (sometimes) how to reorganize figures for a better flow.

I really thought that I would miss the benchwork. To my surprise, I don’t.

The postdoc at the adjoining bench tells me heartbreaking stories of failed projects and projects scooped by his competitors. He is currently getting results that are very exciting. But the previous five years have been a desert, with not a publication in sight--and the stress and disappointment show in his eyes. I don’t miss that stress. I don’t miss that hounding pressure of GOTTA PRODUCE, GOTTA GET PUBLISHED OR MY LIFE IS OVER! I don’t miss the frustration of fruitless screens, of watching a year or more of work spiral down the drain.

Yet I loved bench research, I really did. I remember standing in the darkroom on a Sunday afternoon, heart pounding, waiting for that film to slip out of the X-ray machine. The thrill of holding a blot up to the red light, squinting to make out the dark bands that will tell you where your protein is expressed, or whether or not it interacts with another protein of interest. Looking down a microscope to see to how your cells have reacted in response to a particular treatment—did the cells proliferate, did they spread and migrate, did they round up and die? Pacing impatiently before the scintillation counter, waiting for the results of an enzyme assay. There is nothing like the feeling of being the first person in the world to know some new fact about our universe. Even if it is a fact that even 99.99% of scientists couldn’t care less about—that, for instance, protein X is found in liver cells but not kidney cells. Still, at that moment, you are the only person in the entire world with that knowledge. It is a feeling that is very difficult to convey to those who have not experienced it. I’m not sure that it can be conveyed.

When my experiments were cooking, when my science was working—it was fantastic. It was an utter high. When the experiments weren’t working, it was the deepest low. It was like being on a roller coaster ride, but a ride that spent most of its time creaking tortuously through a subterranean tunnel. I remember sitting around a lunch table with friends in grad school, chatting about school and science in general. One of the students said thoughtfully about research, “You know, about once a year I have a good moment.” I always thought that quote should be printed on the cover of every graduate school brochure.

To mix metaphors still further, I recall once reading that research science is like playing the slots at a casino. (And if, dear reader, I read that on your blog, I do sincerely apologize. Drop me a line and I’ll give you the credit =) Most of the time you come up empty. But every once in a while you’ll get a payout. Just enough to get you excited, to keep you feeding tokens and pulling that damn lever. We all live with the dream of hitting that big jackpot. We feed off the smaller wins, or just the memories of past wins. The hope, the adrenaline, keeps us going through the dry spells.

I don’t have that rush of adrenaline anymore. But neither do I have the crushing lows and stress. I see people around me so desperate to continue their research careers. I know a former postdoc who took a position as associate director of a core facility. She took the job with the understanding that she would be able to continue her research interests. But now she finds that there is neither money nor support for her research. She is struggling on her own, trying to live off reagents and equipment donated by collaborating labs, coming in every weekend to work on her “side” projects. I see someone like that, and I think Man, I just don’t have the heart for that. I loved research, but I don’t have the fire to continue in the face of those kinds of odds.

I did not plan to leave academic research. It was never a part of any five-year plan. I was devastated when I left (er, was laid off from) my former postdoc, and I don’t want to underplay that.

But I see a new path opening up before me now. I see a chink of light, and feel a breath of freedom that would never have been possible on the old road. I have flexibility to work from home when needed and spend all weekends with my family. And there is now a glimmering dream of someday going completely freelance as a science writer and editor—working when I want, on what I want, on my own terms.

I’m still in science. I don’t do the experiments, but I help interpret and communicate them. I even (as in the grant I’m now working on) have some input in experimental design. And I’m once again part of an active scientific research community, once again privy to unpublished, cool data, once again part of the “leading edge” of science. I don’t need the glory of a first authorship. I had thought that I missed benchwork the most, and that I would continue to miss it. But it turns out that this—being part of an active scientific community—is what I really missed most of all.

Friday winter haiku

2008-12-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Baby Legume on a winter's morning

Snow in your dark hair

Like a fall of stars against

a sweep of night sky

Thanksgiving weekend, heart-break Bean

2008-11-30T20:37:00.000-08:00

The holiday weekend has a passed in a blur, a rush of snotty noses and mucous-weeping eyes (Baby Legume’s), travel and relatives and too much food, shopping and toddler tantrums and preschool tantrums to boot. I’ve had no time, no space, to sit and write. But today the snow swirled down, bringing a kind of visual silence. The girls went out briefly on the back deck to stamp footprints in the snow. Then inside for a rest and, later, hot chocolate (I fed Baby Legume hot chocolate from a spoon).

We went down to my parents’ for Thanksgiving this year. Sister B and her husband joined us. My mother elected to have a supermarket-provided Thanksgiving meal—prepared turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. It wasn’t that great, to be honest. But in our family, the traditional American Thanksgiving staples are not the stars. My mother’s Thai dishes are the true attraction. Her spring rolls are the real holiday staple. I’ve eaten so many this weekend that it’s embarrassing. She lays out an ever-changing buffet of Thai appetizers and side dishes. There are snacks as you walk in the door, and more dishes come out throughout the day. In the morning there’s jook, or noodle soup, stir-fried noodles with gravy (lad nah), or pad thai…

Bean-girl decided to eat just cranberry sauce. And chocolate.

Legume, of course, eats pretty much everything. I’m pleased to report that she no longer cries at the sight of her grandmother’s face. Indeed, she allowed her grandparents and aunt to hold her, and even smiled as they did so. She seems to have worked through her stranger anxiety, and has become a much more outgoing girl over these past few months.

And we all got through Thanksgiving with a minimum of family tension and squabbling (save the usual squabbling between my parents, who have been at it now for thirty-plus years).

***************************************************************

Tonight we took the girls with us to Husband’s department Christmas party. One of Bean-girl’s friends from preschool/daycare, a little curly-haired boy I’ll call “A”, was at the party, too. Bean-girl used to behave as though all boys had cooties, but perhaps she is coming around. She was certainly excited to hear that A was at the party, although nowhere near as excited as A himself. “A” kept jumping up and down, beaming at her. He trailed her about the room. Bean-girl hid coyly behind my legs. “That’s right, play hard-to-get,” one of the women at the party advised Bean-girl. Bean-girl told me in a confidential tone, “’A’ is excited because I am here.”

Later, the two kids stood together and examined the restaurant’s Christmas tree. Little “A” continued jumping up and down. “Do you know why A is so excited?” Bean-girl asked her father coyly. “He’s excited about the Christmas tree,” Husband replied heartily. “Hey, A, you’re really excited about that Christmas tree aren’t you?” “No, Dad,” Bean-girl answered. “He’s so excited because I’m here!”

The Bean-girl knows a thing when she sees it.

The party took place in a private banquet room. Later, the kids gathered on the floor with a bunch of books and trains, brought by A’s parents. Legume looked at books, A’s little sister tried to toddle about, and Bean-girl and A took turns drawing on a doodle-pad, then chased each other around and around the room. When it came time to say goodbyes, A hugged the Bean-girl and proclaimed, “Bean-girl, I love you sooo much!”

Although Bean-girl didn’t go quite that far, she did ask when A might come over for a playdate. So I think, at the mature age of four, she’s decided that not all boys have cooties, after all.

And I suspect that she will be quite the heart-breaker one day.

Random tidbits and memes

2008-11-22T14:10:00.000-08:00

Every time I say the word “blister,” Baby Legume stretches open her palms and stares at her little blistered fingers. It is both the saddest and cutest thing.
I love the way Bean-girl insists on calling McDonald’s (the fast-food chain) “Old McDonald’s” (from the children’s song).
Sometimes, I really love McDonald’s. Like earlier this week, when Husband brought home Happy Meals and Big Macs and dinner was done!

Baby Legume still has her hand-foot- and-mouth disease, and is now developing a cold on top of that, courtesy of the Bean-girl. Bean-girl’s cold has now infected the bean parents. I don’t have the energy for a coherent post. So it’s time to do a meme!

And I have two memes today. The first is from Sciencegirl, and I think I was tagged with it ages ago.

Six things meme

The rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.2. Post the rules on your blog.3. Write 6 random things about yourself.4. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them.5. Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog.6. Let the tagger know when your entry has posted.

My random six things.

1. I fear that I am a Luddite.
I do not own and have never even used an iPod. I only just registered for a Facebook account (pressured into it by my youngest sister). Computers and technology intimidate me. When I had to use the confocal microscope as a postdoc I was always petrified that I would break something. (I really could have used Scientistmother’s help there). I do have this blog, but do you see any fancy templates, interesting doo-dads or bells and whistles here?

2. When I was in kindergarten, I was asked to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I remember drawing a picture of a woman in a lab coat peering down a microscope. I said that I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

3. Despite that initial statement, I spent most of the rest of my youth (even up to college) telling people that I wanted to be a writer.

4. I was a sci-fi/fantasy geek. And the “Lord of the Rings” remains my sacred text.

5. I took my first college-level biology course only to please my parents, who wanted me to be pre-med. But to my surprise, I fell head-over-hells in love with molecular biology.

6. I want to start writing fiction again.

The second meme is from fabulous new blogger, Ambivalent Academic. This meme makes me feel old.

5 things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. Falling in love with soon-to-be-Husband.
2. Watching my first thesis project implode.
3. Trying to come up with a viable second project (I did, and it produced two papers and my ticket out of grad school).
4. Living in a tiny studio apartment that my sister referred to as a “hobbit-hole.”
5. Eating lots of Subway sandwiches (I had a great fondness for the “cold-cut trio.”)

5 things on my to-do list today:

1. Finish this post.
2. Come up with menu plan for the week and go grocery shopping.
3. Laundry.
4. Clean up the house a bit (ha!)
5. Order photo presents of the kids for the grandparents.

5 snacks I love:

1. Cheese
2. Good bread.
3. Spring rolls (my mother's recipe)
4. Chips and guacamole
5. Anything salty and crispy.

5 things I would do if I was a millionaire:
Does it sound churlish to say that a million doesn’t go so far these days? Anyway if I had a free million I would:

1. Donate more to charity.
(Maybe start my own foundation? How far would a million go for that?)
2. Invest for my children’s futures.
3. Pay off my kid sister’s student loans.
4. Go to the Caribbean or any place warm for winter break.
5. Go on a mini Sarah Palin-style shopping spree (I’ve been meaning to update my wardrobe anyway)

5 places I've lived:

1. Tiny Midwestern town.
2. Los Angeles.
3. Large Midwestern city (large according to Midwestern standards)
4. Overrated college town.
5.Current under-the-radar, underrated location.

5 jobs I've had:

1. Research technician.
2. Postdoc.
3. Adjunct instructor/ “Visiting Lecturer” (take your pick of titles, the crappy pay is the same) at Regional State U.
4. Scientific writer and editor
5. Mom.

I think both of these memes have made their way around to most people I know. If you haven’t done one of these yet, and would like to, consider yourself tagged!

Haiku challenge--bringing my game

2008-11-21T18:06:00.000-08:00

Baby Legume Meets a Coxsackievirus, or

Hand, foot, and Mouth Disease

The red pinprick rash

erupted into blisters

on her hands and feet.

Baby spreads her palm

and gazes curiously

at tender white moons.

Call for thoughts on science blogging

2008-11-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

Graduate student and new blogger mouse is writing an article on the science blogging community. She would like to hear your thoughts on science blogging. I’ll let her speak in her own words (an excerpt of her e-mail to me, published here with her permission):

One of the avenues I've pursued in the interests of developing my writing skills is to take on a quarterly column for the Association for Women in Science magazine. The theme for my column will be balancing life and work, and the theme for the next issue is science, technology, and popular culture. I had thought it might be interesting to write my first column about the science blogging community, with a particular focus on female science bloggers. Our society has become very mobile now--people move between states a lot, and most people have family and friends spread all over the country. This can often mean that we don't have a support system of lifelong friends and neighbors right down the street anymore to discuss the daily successes and disappointments of our lives. To some extent, I feel like the internet and blogs are filling that gap. It connects people with similar backgrounds who are or have or will go through similar stages in their lives and careers, and lets them share their thoughts with each other regularly, even if they're from very different places. In the science blogging arena, women write about their experiments, their grants, their projects, and their work, but they also write about their lives outside of science. They post pictures of their children, they share recipes, they swap haikus (I really enjoyed that exchange on your blog), they talk about their families. And in the comments sections and discussions, they offer advice, support, reassurance, ideas, etc. Although most of the bloggers may never meet in person, they are a support network and a community for each other.

If you have any thoughts about blogging that you wouldn't mind sharing, I'd love to hear them :) Why you got started blogging, why you continue to blog, whether you do think that an informal community has formed between female science bloggers, and if you do, any thoughts you might have about the community and your own experience. Your favorite things about blogging, your favorite blogs, anything like that :) If you know of anyone else that would care to share their opinions, please pass them along to me too! I'll keep comments anonymous, unless anyone would like me to mention them or their blog in particular.

If you have any thoughts to share, please visit mouse’s site, Notes and Margins, and share your comments there!

Comment on a comment --publication of data that doesn't fit

2008-11-08T20:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, I really don't blog much about science here. But in response to what I had thought of as a light-hearted, amusing post (albeit one that also sums up some very frustrating things about my new workplace), ambivalent academic posted a very interesting comment.

The authors are to be commended...if science is about figuring it out (rather than making it up) as we go along then it's important to include stuff that doesn't make any sense when communicating finds...then someone else might see how it fits or changes the working model and *presto* get it figured out. Unfortunately that only works if the stuff that doesn't make sense ends up in the publication so other people can see it...but it won't get published with stuff that the authors can't explain...I think that this is a major flaw in the way we report our findings.

And I started to respond to this in the comments, but then it got so long that I just decided to throw it out as a post. It's my blog, I can do that. And it's a very interesting point.

The data that's confusing, that doesn't fit a paper's hypothesis, usually isn't published. No suprise--why would any author include data that contradicts or confuses the story she/he is trying to tell? Negative results usually also aren't published. That transgeneic mouse with no phenotype? Will probably languish unknown. But if the experiements were rigorous and carefully controlled, then even puzzling and negative data is valid data. And when that data is not communicated, it can be to the detriment of the whole scientific community, as researchers waste time and money heading down blind ends . . .

But by convention, the scientific paper isn't a "data dump." By convention, it's a place to tell a clean, coherent, succint, and hopefully compelling scientific story. As with any story, extraneous and confusing details only (well, usually only) detract.

This isn't to say that puzzling data that dosn't fit the main hypothesis/story line is never published. I have included the odd pieces myself in a paper--sometimes this is necessary, as there may be a major experiment which *must* be done, and so you must report on it even when you don't quite understand all the results. But if you do have odd, confusing results, you better damn well try to explain or at least address it in your text, instead of just throwing it in there and hoping no one notices.

Or worst, not understanding that it's confusing in the first place (as seems to have happened in the manuscript I mentioned in the original post).

It is an odd business. Nature is messy, science is messy, but we try to tie it all up in a neat package for the journals, crafting a condensed, clear storyline out of months or years of frustration, failed experiments, trial and error, and sometimes entirely serendipitous discovery. And then we reframe the whole thing to make it appear as though blind luck was really brilliant foresight all along.

I agree that there needs to be a mechanism to more effectively communicate those puzzling results and negative data that don't get published in the peer-reviewed journals. I don’t know what the answer is. I suspect (hope?) the answer will have something to do with the growth of online scientific communities and of increased sharing of raw data in online databases. . .

Thoughts, anyone?

The science philosopher is now off to sleep. . .

Election 2008--The day after

2008-11-05T19:46:00.001-08:00

Even as I watched state after state falling to Obama on the news last night . . . even when the news anchors announced that there was now no path for a McCain victory . . . even as the electoral counts mounted, reached, and then surpassed the "magic" number of 270 . . . still, I had trouble believing Obama would really be our next president. It seemed like a dream. (we know how the Democrats have f----- up the last two shots they had).

Husband and I didn't actually watch his acceptance speech live. Yes, lame, I know. Husband had to get up early the next day, we were both tired, and we turned in.

Today I've been immersed in the election news (in my defense, slow day at work. I really really need more projects there). I've just watched Obama's electrifying acceptance speech on CNN, and McCain's extraordinarily gracious concession speech. It's sinking in. It's real.

I can't think of a time that I've been prouder of this country.

Birthday letter to the Bean

2008-11-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Bean-girl, you turned four this weekend. I am still having trouble comprehending this. It’s such a huge number! The day after your birthday, you sat on my lap and said, “Mommy, I’m four now. I’m not three anymore.” I think you are used to the idea, as you have spent what seemed like unending weeks talking about it.

You said that when you turned four you would go to sleep by yourself in your own bed. And for the past month you’ve been attempting it. When I or your father try to lie down in bed with you after story time, you firmly ask us to leave. You say you want to go to sleep by yourself. Then, two minutes later, you show up in our bedroom (or downstairs by the computer—you track us down) with your stuffed sting ray and stuffed penguin in tow and complain that you cannot fall asleep. So a parent treks backs with you to your room, and we do the usual snuggle-till-sleep routine. You spend most of this time complaining that you can’t sleep and won’t sleep, and you flip and flop and chatter ceaselessly until you finally pass out. Right now, as I type this, your father is passed out in your bed alongside you.

Your birthday party was a success. I am so pleased to report this. After days of rain and cloud, it warmed up for Halloween, and the day of your party was gorgeous. It was one of those perfect, dream-like autumn days, when everything seems both lit from within and bathed in golden light. Only two of your friends showed up (only two of 8 invitees even RSVPed! Bad manners!), and though both you and I had been initially disappointed by this, it turned out not to matter on the actual day of your party. Your best friend was there, with whom it would not be a good birthday. And a new classmate was there, little J, and her mother. It was the day after Halloween, and the orchard was nearly empty of people, so strangely deserted after the crowds of two weeks ago. It was as though everything—the petting zoo, the clear sky, the sunlight and golden trees—was there just for you. You and your friends ran past all the animals, marveled at the hen that had escaped its cage, pushed each other on a porch swing. You all LOVED the hayride, the first hayride for any of you. Your friend Lisa did not want to pick a miniature pumpkin at the pumpkin patch, but you picked out two smooth, flawless specimens—one for you and one for Baby Legume.

Everyone shook maracas as you blew out the candle on your cake.

You had a little tussle with your best friend in front of the corn maze. She wanted to go through the maze again, but our other little guest wanted to see the animals. As Lisa stepped to enter the maze, the other mommies and I started yelling No, wait! We’re going to see the animals first, Lisa! And in your panic to steer Lisa in the “right” direction, you grabbed Lisa’s hair. She promptly shoved you and yelled, "Don’t do that!" "No pushing, anyone!" I said sternly. Then, upon being told that you had pulled her hair (I didn’t actually see it), I told you to apologize to her. And you responded by crying. .

You cried all through the corn maze. Lisa had immediately gotten over the tiff, and kept yelling cheerfully, “Bean-girl, come on! Come on! Come with us!” But you would not run after your friends. Instead, I had to carry you as you sobbed great, loud, heaving, snot-spilling sobs. You were completely incoherent. One of the other mothers held Legume’s hand for me, and toddler Legume carefully and seriously put one foot after another through the length of the maze.

The other girls kept calling your name as they ran ahead of us (your father, if you wish to know, was left behind at the picnic area; I can’t now recall why). Finally, something snapped you out of your sobs; I can’t recall what that was either, just that you suddenly cheered, left my arms, and ran after your friends. Then you were all three of you running and laughing and shaking your cheap plastic maracas as the wind rustled through the dry corn stalks.

You and Lisa were best friends again. When it was time to say goodbye, you hugged and kissed as usual. “Happy birthday, Bean-girl,” Lisa said. And you said to her solemnly, “Lisa, for all of my birthdays, I would like to invite you.”

********************************************************************

Bean-girl, you are so grown-up sometimes, so articulate and resourceful and seemingly grown. Then you break down, you throw a tantrum, you get tired and the preschooler vanishes and a toddler-Bean (who doesn’t use her words) comes back. I am still trying to make sense of all this, as I know that you are as well.

When I saw you for the first time in the delivery room, I was stunned by your beauty. That perfect rosebud mouth. The shock of black hair. “She’s beautiful,” I recall saying in awe.

But I could not imagine then the beauty you are today. How perfect you still seem in your sleep. And the laughter and light in your eyes.

Happy fourth birthday, Bean-girl.

Fourth birthday party this weekend!

2008-10-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

I’m like a bride fretting about rain on her wedding day.

In our foolishness(?) hope (?), Husband and I booked Bean-girl’s fourth birthday party at an outdoor venue.

A year ago, I would have scorned a mother who fretted so about her little one’s birthday party. “Just let them eat cake!” I would have said. And then I would have ranted on about the overly elaborate birthday parties of today’s suburban, middle-class preschooler. After all, there were no party favors and “goody bags” (filled with plastic junk) during the parties of my and Husband’s childhood. No elaborate craft projects and entertainment. We had parties at home, maybe played pin-on-the-tail-on-the-donkey (I actually do have a vague memory of that), ate cake and opened presents, and everyone went home happy. See—there’s a picture of me in my parents’ photo album right there, blowing out candles. I look happy, and all the guests do, too.

But times are different now. And this year, Bean-girl started the preschool birthday circuit.

She’s only been to two parties, but one was at the local children’s museum, and the other was at the zoo. And so now she thinks (reasonably so, I give her) that birthday parties are functions that occur outside the home. Whenever I asked her, “Would you like to have your party at home, Bean-girl?” she would emphatically respond, “No way!”

Luckily, though, she’s pretty easy-going about where exactly outside the home to have her party. And I admit that I was not looking forward to cleaning my house and having 7-8 little girls and their parents running about in the small living room. Call me lazy that way.

I had a brainstorm. What about our favorite toy store? They have a wonderful craft studio, and there’s an adjoining café perfect for the cake and refreshments. “Would you like to have a birthday party at that toy store, Bean-girl?” I asked. She jumped up and down. “Oh, yes!”

We went to the toy store, talked to some people, planned out a lovely day. The managers said they would check with the store’s owner to make sure nothing else was scheduled on Bean-girl’s big day, but it all seemed perfect. Then we got home and a got a phone message: Sorry, but there was actually a huge store event on Bean-girl’s birthday. Would we like to reschedule?

So then I gave in to the Children’s Museum. “Would you like to have your party at the Children’s Museum?” I asked Bean-girl. She jumped up and down and said, “Oh, yes!”

The Children’s Museum got back to me after two days (you have to leave a message for their event planner). They were sorry to report that they would be closed that weekend for renovations.

The zoo, Husband and I thought desperately. Outdoors, yes, but their website said they had an indoors party facility, too. I didn’t tell Bean-girl about the zoo this time. After about a week, the zoo got back to me. Party already booked that day, they said.

By this point I was kicking myself over not planning Bean-girl’s party two or three months in advance, like any respectable mom. What about an apple orchard? Husband suggested then. There are only, like, a zillion apple orchards/farms in our area? And most have hayrides, petting zoos, restaurants, etc.

Eureka. And so this is how we ended up scheduling Bean-girl’s Nov 1 birthday at an apple farm. If all goes well, she and her guests will go on a hayride to a pumpkin patch, pick pumpkins (there’s the party favor), then have cider, doughnuts, and cake outside near a bonfire (to keep us warm). There’s a petting zoo, corn maze, and bizarre little story tent on the grounds, too.

If it rains/snows, we’re in trouble. The farm has table and chairs set up in a drafty old barn, but the seating space is small, and it won’t be too fun if the weather’s cold. Actually, I’m imagining sunshine but twenty degree weather and the kids all sniveling with red noses and frozen fingers and the parents quietly damning us under their breaths for dragging them out into the cold.

If it does rain/snow, we’re moving the party to our house. I’ll have to clean this place just in case, and then maybe I will have seven 3-4 year old girls running rampant in my small living room. The preschool craft project seems an essential part of this birthday ritual, so I’ve bought a bunch of miniature pumpkins for them to decorate. Of course, I’m not sure how to decorate them, and I’ve yet to buy the decorating supplies. Bean-girl still insists that a party at home will not be fun or “inresting” (interesting), but she seems mollified somewhat by the prospect of painting pumpkins.

A year ago, I would have never dreamed that I could work myself into a tizzy about something like this. Parenthood is full of suprises.

Gratuitous pumpkin/baby pics

2008-10-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

At home again

2008-10-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday we flew to Denver, the “Mile High City.” We stayed with my husband’s sister and her family. She She did everything to make our family feel right at home. Bean-girl had an absolute blast playing with her triplet cousins. And on Saturday morning, my husband and I got up and drove two hours to Vail for a wedding. We left the our girls in someone’s care overnight for the first time in their (and our) lives.

Some pictures from Vail. I should have taken more pics!

The wedding was beautiful—one of the last people in my husband’s circle of friends to get married. It felt so strange to be away from the girls; we kept talking about them, and I kept daydreaming of Legume’s fat baby cheeks. But of course it was also lovely to be alone together, in a romantic setting. That night, before turning in, we watched a bit of CNN. Now that doesn’t sound romantic, I know, but after a steady diet of children’s cartoons, I must admit that cable news is quite enticing. As was reading the New York Times in bed the next day. Of course, we did engage in other adult activities in between…

The bean girls did GREAT in our absence. I think Bean-girl scarcely even cared that we were gone, she had such a great time playing with her cousins. When we got back the next day she ran up to greet us, and then was gone a minute later to continue her play. Baby Legume was fine, too. Their aunt, uncle and cousins had tired them out the day before with a trip to the zoo, a trip to the mall, pizza and a stop at the mall’s Build-a-Bear workshop store (but Bean-girl politely declined an offer of a teddy bear. She can be weird like that). The kids were so exhausted that they quickly and without fuss fell asleep that night. . . for nine hours straight. My sister-in-law is gifted.

This week my Bean-girl asked me to please stop changing my work schedule. “I don’t like going to school so much,” she said. “I think it’s too much school.” Ouch. I cuddled her in bed and said that there would be only one more schedule change. I am starting full time in two weeks. Yes, ouch, five straight days a week of daycare/school. I explained that she would still have “mommy days”, two days a week. That two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday, would ALWAYS be mommy-days, no matter what. This seemed to satisfy her. Perhaps she was afraid that every single day would be a school day? It’s a lot for a little girl, I know.

I know that there are many people who would not approve of my choice to go back to work at this time. And it really is a choice for me—my family does not need my income (nearly half of which goes to daycare costs anyway). I was amused to get my first troll comment on this blog about it. More hurtfully, I sense doubts on the part of members of my own extended family. But I don’t do well staying home full time with young children. I just don’t. Things may change in the future; perhaps, as they enter the demanding pre-teen/teen years, I’ll feel the need to step back and make more time for them at home again. Maybe this gig won’t go well, and I’ll feel the need to step back or quit six months from now. Maybe I’ll be in a position to negotiate a work-from-home or flex-time schedule in the future. The truth is that the job is quite flexible right now—I haven’t given up the flexibility of research academia (nor the jeans and sneakers dress code!) But I was not happy at home, and I had to make this change now. My mother was not happy as a stay-at-home mother, and it was something that I could see even at an early age. My mother has confirmed this unhappiness to me herself. And my witness to her frustration and boredom has colored my own thoughts, my plans and hopes for motherhood/career from the very beginning.

Things at work have actually slowed now, and I’m a bit at loose ends there. My PI finally came to his senses last week and realized that he was in no position to submit an RO1 this grant cycle. We’ll submit it for February. He wanted to submit a big program grant for next month, but the program goals for this program grant had changed considerably since the last funding announcement, and his projects are no longer suitable for the grant. So. . . I guess it’s a bit of laid-back reading and polishing of the RO1 until the PI returns from his overseas trip and some more substantial projects come my way. Not a bad life, for right now.

"This is what I think of your new job, Mommy!"

2008-09-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

Baby Legume got hold of the paystub for my first paycheck last week.

. . . She put the paystub in her sister's old potty chair. . .

. . . then dragged it out into the center of the living room for

me to see.

Nothing like children to keep you humble.

Gratuitous photo of Legume, who will be 16 months old

next week!

Elegy for the season

2008-09-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Last week I took the girls to studio craft time at our favorite toy store. Bean-girl picked up a leaf in the parking lot and brought it inside with her. After painting two pictures in the craft room, she traced the leaf on a piece of paper, and drew a big circle around the leaf-trace to represent a tree. She drew a bird in the tree. And in the corner of the picture, she drew a red flower.

Bean-girl said the picture was a story, and the woman supervising craft-time kindly wrote Bean's story on the back of her paper.

The last flower of the season. There is a tree and it is raining and it is the last flower of the season.

The first week at work

2008-09-15T20:07:00.000-07:00

Should I and Baby Legume go to the store with you, Bean-girl? Husband asked today after dinner. Or would you like alone time with mommy at the store?

I want you and Baby Legume to come, Bean-girl said.

Oh, how sweet, I commented. You really do love your sister.

Bean-girl nodded. Even though I sometimes do mean things to Legume, I still love her.

Do you do mean things to her? I asked.

Yes, I know that I sometimes do mean things, but I love her anyway.

Note: I haven’t really seen Bean-girl do any mean things to her sister. Um, not that I’ve noticed, anyway.

*********************************************
The past week has been exhausting, stressful, discombobulating. I started a new job and got thrown right into an RO1-deadline frenzy. I got repeatedly lost—lost on the downtown streets busy with construction, lost finding the parking garage, lost finding my way through the maze of the parking structure and Institute. The Baby Legume got sick. Fever-sick, stay-home-from-daycare sick, cry-all-night-and-keep-everyone-else-awake type sickness. I got sick. Husband got sick. Bean-girl, so far, is not too sick. We had random school/social/family functions, and I spent all weekend writing and editing, and desperately trying to read up on and digest a new field of research (thankfully, not too new from what I’ve done before!)

The past week has also been exhilarating. I get to sit in a corner of sunlight, at a quiet study carrel, in a gorgeous, glass enclosed building looking over the heart of downtown. I get to sit and think and read quietly for long, unbroken stretches of time. I find that I can actually concentrate. My attention is not blown to bits every few seconds by a toddler tugging on my leg, sticking her hands in the toilet, trying to fall down the stairs, dumping out the kitchen cabinets, and getting into any of an infinite variety of mischiefs. Nor is my attention shattered by a preschooler whining for candy, milk, a cartoon, a comic book; whining that her little sister is looking at her the wrong way; crying because I’ve looked at her the wrong way, or any of an infinite number of things that can disturb and distress a sensitive three-year old. I actually had lunch downtown with my husband last week. Just the two of us. While we were on our official lunch breaks. Imagine.

I get to walk through this dazzling Research Institute with my ID badge swinging from my neck, feeling like I am once more part of the Real World, the Outer World, the Working World. I’m not doing experiments, but I’m reading and learning about cutting-edge research. I get to go to seminars, journal clubs, and research-in-progress reports. I interact with scientists. I’m learning about grants and the administrative details behind grants—the administrative support that goes into actually running a research institute. The people in the lab seem genial, although quiet and reserved. I’ve only really talked to one or two people in the group, although I’ve chatted with people from other labs in the breakroom. Friendships will come over time, I trust.

Today I had a meeting with the PI and a postdoc about the grant that we are submitting. The postdoc has some very cool data, and the PI is rushing to shape an RO1 for the October deadline. So this meeting was actually a brainstorming session—what kind of specific aims should we have? What specific avenues should we explore? How can we specifically address these questions, and in a form that is appropriate for an RO1? I’ve never been involved in something like that before. Until last year, I had never even read an RO1 in its entirety. No PI that I’d worked for had ever bothered to give me, a lowly grad student and then postdoc, a sample RO1 to read, much less discussed one with me. My previous PIs closeted themselves in their offices and wrote silently for weeks when it was grant time, not discussing their ideas with anyone in the lab (except to emerge every so often to ask a student for a copy of this figure or that figure. Without discussing how the figure, or data, was actually being used). So this is all very new for me.

I am going to try my darndest to hold up my end of the project. I am officially working only part-time, but I’ve had to put in some extra hours at home. My best friend warned me that this could happen—full-time work for part-time pay. But it’s only temporary, only for this month. And I suppose I’ve never had a clock-punching job, anyway.

Both children seemed happy and healthy today (knock on wood).

I thought that I would miss the bench. In fact, my “desk”, or rather, work station (it’s not a real desk) is smack dab in the center of a lab bench. I have a pH meter to the left of me, pipettes to the right, an unidentifiable piece of electronics in “my” area. And my papers jostle for space with a colleague’s ice bucket. I thought that, watching my colleagues work all around me, I would feel a twinge for experimental work. I thought that I might pine for it. But the past week, watching my colleagues trot about with their insulated ice buckets—I found that I did not miss it at all.

Not yet, at least. We’ll see how this falls out.

Quick post on new job

2008-09-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

The bean children were awful the night before my first day on the job. They took turns waking up every few hours, and both ended up in bed with Husband and I. Where they both flailed and flopped about. Baby Legume kicked Bean-girl in the face, making her cry. They settled down. . . then Bean-girl started loudly crying for her stuffed penguin (which was right next to her), making the baby cry. Fun times.

But I got to work on time, found the visitor parking lot, spent the obligatory time with human resources. . . I'll have to spend another post comparing my initial impressions of work at a traditional academic research center with work here at this private, nonprofit research center. I will say here that this institute is physically absolutely gorgeous. And the core facilities, and IT support and infrastructure, are incredible.

And. . . I am supposed to be helping with an RO1 due Oct 5! None of which is yet written! Is the PI kidding me?!!

(off to bed now. . .)

Change of seasons

2008-09-06T19:16:00.000-07:00

I start my new job this Monday.

I’ve delayed writing about this, for fear of somehow jinxing it. Because, you know, the final background check could turn up the evil doppelganger bean-mom who shares my name and has been convicted of several felonies. And then the offer would be rescinded, and I’d have proof of my umemployability and would have to cry into my pillow at night. There were so many false starts and stops in the whole application process. Hiring for a staff position at this institute certainly involves more buearacracy than hiring a postdoc at my former institution (they even do a credit check!) . But it looks like I really do have the job, and I start this Monday.

I have been hired as a science editor/writer for a large laboratory at a nonprofit research institute. The principal investigator of the laboratory has a joint appointment with an overseas institute, where he runs an even larger lab. The majority of his scientists (both in the States and abroad) are not native English speakers (no surprise, of course). And so I have been hired to help his students and postdocs prepare and polish their manuscripts for publication. I will also help out with the preparation of grant proposals, although that is expected to be secondary to the task of manuscript editing.

I’m excited, of course, and also a bit nervous about how this change will affect my family. Due to childcare issues, I will work only part-time this month, and then switch to full-time in October (when a full-time daycare slot opens up for Baby Legume). I’m thankful that my family and I will be able to ease into this change. Both Bean-girl and Legume have been going part-time to their daycare center for some time now. They are both doing well at the center, and this week the only change will be lengthened hours and an additional day.

There are other changes coming up, though. The entire daycare center is relocating to a new building this month. Baby Legume will soon be transitioning from the older infant room to the young toddler room (I can’t believe it!) Bean-girl is starting her first ballet class next Saturday (not my idea, but her best friend is going and Bean-girl wants to go as well. She keeps standing on one leg and calling herself a ballerina.) AND my husband and I will be leaving at the end of September for a brief couples’ getaway—the first time we have ever been away overnight from both our daughters. The first time we’ve gotten away together, since Baby Legume was born.

Big changes.

That’s life, I suppose. Last week I saw the first red maples, and this week I saw yellow leaves blowing across the road. The temperature abruptly dipped, and it’s already sweater weather; the bean girls are sleeping in long pajamas tonight. The seasons have shifted; we are sliding into fall. Those long, unstructured days of summer sun and warmth are gone.

But I’m excited about the change of seasons. Nervous, yes, and with recurring flutters of trepidation and doubt. But I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this will all play out.

Bean-girl growing up--some snippets

2008-09-05T19:36:00.001-07:00

About a year ago, my sister-in-law gave the Bean-girl a story book that I intensely dislike. It’s sappy, New Age twaddle. In the book, a little girl suffers slights from peers and scoldings from authority figures, feels misunderstood and down-hearted. Her guardian angel then appears and gives the little girl words of affirmation and completely incoherent New Age-y slanted babble. The angel wears a crown, and is surrounded by tiny winged fairies.

Bean-girl, naturally, loved the book and had to hear it over and over. Thankfully she then forgot all about it. Until tonight, when she found it on her bookshelf and asked for it to be read for night storytime.

The angel has wings, Bean-girl observed when we reached that page.

Yup, I said.

Angels have wings so they can fly, Bean-girl said.

Uh-huh, I agreed.

Angels are part bird and part woman, Bean-girl decided.

*********************************************************

There are so many cute stories of the Bean-girl I could tell. The things she says, the “jokes” and “riddles” she now makes up (she claims that her best friend, at least, finds her jokes funny). All the discoveries she is making at age three and a half, the way she is trying to grasp the complicated rules of the adult world. The pleasure of seeing her develop real friendships with her peers, and of seeing her and “Lisa” bond and try to figure out this world together. And, of course, the pleasure of seeing her care for and protect and play with her baby sister.

It’s not all sisterly fun and games, of course. As Baby Legume has gained mobility, she has gained the ability to knock down Bean-girl’s “art installations” (complicated structures of random toys heaped up on one another), tear her books, grab toys and cookies from her hands, and follow her everywhere. Bean-girl does not always take kindly to this, and has occasionally pushed the baby. But a stern reprimand pretty much put an end to the pushing, at least from Bean-girls’s end. Baby Legume herself feels no compunctions, and will readily grab the Bean-girl about the waist and pull her down to the floor. Sometimes they wrestle like tiny Greek wrestlers, or baby bears. They roll on the floor; Legume pulls at Bean-girl’s hair and clothes in delight, and Bean-girl laughs.

Don’t poke your sister’s eyes! I cry, as baby fingers jab.

Don’t worry, mommy, Bean-girl says, squishing her eyes closed. I’m squeezing my eyes shut.

Bean-girl’s friend Lisa has less patience for baby-toddlers, and has twice pushed my darling Legume down at playdates. “Go away, baby!” she yells as Legume toddles toward her and Bean-girl’s play. “This place is not for babies!” Poor Legume just wants to see what the big kids are doing! And she’s relentless; I may remove her from the big kid area, but she keeps going back, undeterred. I understand her. But I also understand the older kids’ point. They don’t want a toddler stomping on their intricate (if unfathomable) preschooler designs, knocking down and trying to eat their toys. Bean-girl wants to spend time with her own friend, and shouldn’t always be forced to play with the little one. Lisa has a little sibling of her own, still an immobile infant, relatively unthreatening. I predict that sparks will be flying in her household when her little brother learns to walk.

***********************************
One of Bean-girl's riddles:

Q :How do you make a kite float in the air if there is no wind?
A :You tie a balloon to it.

I thought that was pretty good, myself.

"Self-portrait" by Bean-girl, Summer 2008.

This is actually a pretty good likeness.

In which I interrupt regular bean stories for a political aside

2008-09-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

I have been mesmerized these past few days by the unfolding story of Sarah Palin’s nomination for the Republican vice presidential ticket. It’s like a car wreck in progress, a building on fire—I can’t look away from the spectacle, even as I feel sorry for the people trapped inside.

I was reading the first media responses to her nomination. (“Sarah who?” was my initial thought). Then, yes, I happened on the first Internet rumors that she had actually faked her last pregnancy to cover for the pregnancy of her teenage daughter. “Wackaloonery!” thought I (Physioprof’s language has been infecting my thoughts), but the conspiracy theorists did bring up some points that gave me pause. Then, of course, the bombshell that her seventeen year old daughter is indeed pregnant—not months ago, but right now.

The New York Times, our nations’s most esteemed newspaper, had, of course, to give a “mommy war” spin on the story. From the opening paragraphs of "In Palin, a New Twist in the Debate on Mothers":

“With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try.”

And my first, instinctive response to this article was to inwardly exclaim “New York Times, give us all a break!” I was in initial disbelief that this major newspaper would even bring up this concern and give it play in a full-length article. Aren’t we all supposed to be past this, after all? Employers aren’t even allowed to ask job candidates questions about their marital or parental status in job interviews. It’s not supposed to be a consideration. No one ever asks a father how he is going to balance a high-powered job with his family life. Barack Obama has two young children—does anyone question how he will balance the presidency with his family responsibilities? If Sara Palin were male, with five children including a special-needs infant and a pregnant teenage daughter, would anyone in the media publish this story?

But she’s not male, of course. (The cynical among us wonder if she was chosen primarily because she’s not male). She’s a mother, not a father; and so yes, people do wonder, they do judge. According to the NY Times piece, at least, (which appears to have been pieced together by eavesdropping in the mom blogosphere) mothers, in particular, wonder and judge.

And it’s not true that the private, family lives of male politicians are not also considered. When John Edwards was running for the presidential nomination, he was roundly criticized in some corners for hitting the campaign trail with a wife who had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. Some people said out loud that Edwards should be focused on his family rather than political office, and plenty of commentators wondered if Edwards would have the focus to act competently as commander-in-chief, should his wife’s condition worsen while he were in office.

Our politicians’ personal lives have always been the subject of gossip and debate. How do those private and public lives intersect? When is it appropriate for the media (and voters) to analyze that intersection?

I suppose that for me, the real questions are: will a candidate’s personal life negatively impact in any way her or his ability to perform the elected job? And do issues in the personal life raise serious questions about his or her judgement and conduct in the public realm?

Frankly, I don’t care a flying fig if the president of the U.S. is screwing about with the White House interns—as long as he leads the nation well, that’s all fine with me. I wouldn’t want to be such a president’s wife, but then again, I’m not; I’m just a constituent. And I would guess that past U.S. presidents have not had time to tuck their children into bed every night, make the school recital, or have every needed heart-to-heart talk with a troubled teen. Barack Obama and Sara Palin are probably both having only limited time with their young children right now. And while that may be kinda sad. . . it’s not really my problem now, is it? Any more than it was my problem when Bill cheated on Hillary. Each family makes its own choices; in the case of Governor Palin, she has a stable marriage with the father of her children, and financial resources and support that are unavailable to most Americans. The only questions should be if she is competent to serve as vice-president and, potentially, as president.

(For me, the answer is NO! but that is a whole other post).

But look, I’m a mother and a human, and so even after this righteous rant, I am also still going to wonder about Palin’s family dynamics and personal life. It’s getting to be a sordid hillbilly soap opera affair now, splayed out over the Internet and mass media. When I opened up my Web browser yesterday, I saw that Salon had already dredged up the Myspace page for Bristol Palin’s boyfriend, and was dumping the contents onscreen for the world to see. Every time I see that now famous photo of Bristol holding her infant brother in her arms, I wince. And that part of me that is a mom, that sits in judgement of other moms (we all have that censorious self, don’t we?)—that part of me thinks: Sara Palin, as a mother, how could you subject your daughter to this? Because you had to know that by accepting the nomination, this would all come out. You had to know that your daughter’s privacy would be invaded, that she’d be pinned in the media glare, that she would become, in the words of columnist Maureen Dowd this week, “tabloid roadkill.”

I try not to judge. It’s irrelevant. And I sure as heck was not planning to vote Republican anyway. But I do wonder.

YES!!!

2008-08-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight it was my turn to put Bean-girl to sleep.

It had been a long day. Husband could see how frazzled I was. And he volunteered to do the night-time routine with the Bean in my stead.

He and I stood together in Bean-girl's bedroom, and he asked, "Who do you want to put you to sleep, Bean-girl?"

She looked in turn at both of us, smiled slyly, and said. . . "Daddy!"

For the first time that I can ever remember. The first time in her three and a half years in this planet. She chose her father.

w00t!!!!

Summer time

2008-08-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

The sunlight fails earlier these days, blue dusk falling and shadows stretching into what once seemed endless hours of golden light. It’s now fully dark when Bean-girl goes to sleep, and her complaints of “But it’s still light!” no longer hold water. The teachers in my mothers’ group are already in the midst of curriculum training and preparation for the new school year. In a few short years, I’ll be preparing my own girls for school, buying notebooks and pencils and backpacks and new fall clothes (well, the fall clothes I can do already, at least!)

I cannot believe the summer is already passing. It seems I say that with the passing of every season. Each turn of the seasons leaves me slightly melancholy; even the passage of winter into spring had something bittersweet about it this year: that fragile new beginning, the vulnerable first buds of green and chill, unsettled winds. Now we tip into fall, the beginning of the earth’s long sleep. Soon this golden summer will be sealed and packed away, like the summer dresses and shorts that I’ll fold and put in untouched drawers and boxes.

For now, we have summer frozen in our refrigerator, in the form of homemade popsicles. My wonderful husband searched online and found rocket ship popsicle molds for the kids. Bean-girl loves pouring fruit juices in the molds. Both Bean-girl and Legume love the frozen results. Slurping them down on our back deck—soon another summer memory.

Blog bling

2008-08-20T18:49:00.000-07:00

Both ScienceGirl and Scientistmother gave me the lovely badge on the left! Thank you!

And part of the fun, of course, is passing this on. Many of my favorite bloggers have already received this award. But this still gives me the opportunity to update my blogroll (badly in need of updating) as I highlight some of the newer blogs I've found . . .

1. Mimi at Science, Food, Music, Art: the Meanderings of a Wannabe Wildlife Filmaker. She lives in the gorgeous Caribbean. She works at a butterfly farm. She studies biology, blogs a lot about science, and hopes to be a wildlife filmaker. How cool is all that?

2. Scientia Matris. She's a mother, a scientist, and she's making the big leap by starting her own research group. She gives us the low-down here.

3. Katie at Minor Revisions. You guys all know her, right? You should.

4. Wayfarer Scientista. You should all know her, too. Now this tough woman probably has good bear stories to tell! (Cath at VWXYnot? was telling bear stories the other day. Cath and I are terrified of bears).

Some non-science blogs:

5. Ophelia Rising just writes the most beautiful essays on, well, anything that she turns her mind toward. This is gorgeous writing.

6. MusingMommy--by turns funny, meditative, graceful, and always honest-- stories of motherhood and work (she runs an at-home daycare!!)in the Midwest.

7. Life as I Know It--warm, funny, insightful, and sometimes very moving.

Okay, here are the rules (if you want to play):

Put the logo on your blog.
Add a link to the person who awarded you.
Nominate at least seven other blogs.
Add links to those blogs on your blog.
Leave a message for your nominee on their blog.

Book meme

2008-08-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to this book meme! Mad Hatter tagged me about a week ago. I'm using her color scheme: bold means I've read it, red means I've read it more than once, and blue means I've tried to get through it but have not finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I read the first two books and then stopped. Honestly, I can't see what the big deal is about these books--and I know how unpopular a position that is. I actually thought the movies were much better)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I love this one. Beats the socks off Harry Potter)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Um, I've read the tragedies and what are considered the "major" plays. Haven't read all the poems, and haven't read the more minor histories and comedies).

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (working my way through these now)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (It's a great book; I just made the mistake of skimming the end, thus losing the mystery and driving compulsion to read it... then things came up . . . oh, well.)

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (saw the movie, loss motivation to finish it)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (just couldn't get into this one)

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And I tag . . . anyone who would like to have a go at it!

Quick post

2008-08-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

Baby Legume is saying "ball." So far, it's her only consistent word. Though of course, it comes out more as "baa."

Baby's new favorite thing is handing objects to people. Sometimes Bean-girl gets annoyed when the baby hands her things she doesn't want. Of course, she gets even more annoyed when the baby tries to take things from her (that she does want).

The mystery of corn:

This morning the kids lay in bed with us, watching cartoons and cuddling before Husband went into work. "Ugh!" Bean-girl announced. "Baby smells bad!"

"Did she have a poopy diaper! Husband and I asked. We sniffed.

"She smells bad!" Bean-girl insisted.

"What does she smell like?" we asked.

"Like corn!"

Corn?!

My husband and I sniffed and sniffed, turning the baby over. "What part of her smells like corn, Bean-girl?" Husband asked.

Bean-girl leaned in for a good whiff. "Her cheeks!" she announced.

And finally, in science related news . . . That science writing job may not be dead in the water after all. I'll let you know more, soon.

Wildness

2008-07-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

An unclaimed field nearly bumps up against our lawn, just on the other side of a paved footpath. Our neighborhood is still under development; there are still parcels of unsold land, and so we see scattered plots of wilderness, of prairie grass and wildflowers, growing between and behind the neat, crisp lawns and homes of suburbia.

Queen Anne’s lace grows tall in these wild fields, and red clover, and a little blue flower whose name I do not know. At one point in the early spring, my husband commented on our neighboring field as “unsightly,” but now, in the full lushness of summer, even he has conceded that these patchwork fragments of prairie are really quite lovely.

Science job update

2008-07-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I wrote this rather swoony post about career fluidity, and about returning to the scientific workforce in some capacity.

Well, I know at least some of you are interested in how that is going. . . So here goes. The one postdoc interview I had lined up was canceled when the position was eliminated due to lack of funds. And I have the feeling that the Science Writer position is headed the same way. After weeks of being put off as to an exact interview date, I finally got this e-mail from an admistrator (a few sentences have been removed to help maintain anonymity):

"I apologize for the delay; however, we have been instructed to hold off on pursuing the applicants for this position. . . I do not know when we will be able to schedule these as this is outside of my control."

Doesn't sound good.

Revelation for the Bean

2008-07-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

This morning I coaxed the girls out to Friday story time at a bookstore, and then lunch in the adjoining café. Bean-girl noticed that the family seated next to us had three children.

Bean-girl: That family has THREE children!

Me: That’s right.

Bean-girl: Why do they have three children?

Me: Some parents have three children, Bean-girl.

Bean-girl: But you only have two daughters.

Me: That’s right. But some mommies and daddies have more. Some have three children. (dramatic pause). And some have four children. Or even five. Or six!

Bean-girl’s eyes get bigger and bigger as I count off these numbers. When I hit “six”, she just about falls off her chair, laughing.

Actually, I have the same reaction. And this is written with no offense intended toward anyone who comes from a large family, has a large family, or intends to have a large family. It’s just that these days, with these two little girls running me ragged—one 3-year old who no longer naps during the day, and the one-year old force of destruction that is the Baby Legume—well, the idea of three or more children is absolutely hysterical to me. Hysterical ha-ha, and also hysterical in the sense of padded room and tranquilizers, please.