“Look mommy, the moon! The moon is there by the door!”
“Oh, really?” I didn’t actually think she was looking at the moon, she tends to call many white circles moons, and I’d seen the moon the night before, and it was waning, so no longer a circle.
“The moon, right there!”
I look, and she’s right, it’s right out the window on the back door. Quite bright this morning. When I was in high school and college, and still thought I’d be a geologist, I studied rocks that were deposited by tides – tides that were controlled by the lunar cycles. I learned so much about all the different cycles of the moon: the synodic, the tropical, the perigee and apogee. The sketches of those cycles as circles around circles are etched in my memory. I love the moon, love how it looks, how it changes, how it moves, and I admit, I’m proud that Zoe recognized it, and was so excited to see it.
“Look daddy, the moon! The moon is in Minneapolis!”
So it looks like we maybe probably will be moving. We’ve been thinking for a while that we’d like a little bit more space, and especially if we do succeed in having a second child, the extra room would be needed. So we’ve interviewed a couple of realtors and we’ll choose one some time next week and see if we can do this thing.
One of the things that all the realtors have said – and it’s something we already knew – is that we’ll have to do some major decluttering. Neither Chris nor I are particularly good at throwing things away, and the fact that our house doesn’t have a lot of good storage options doesn’t help. So we’ve started the purging process. I’m actually enjoying it a bit. I know that I save too much, and I kind of relish the chance – no, not chance, motivation? excuse? need? – anyway, I’m glad to be decluttering because I know that I won’t do it unless something really pushes me there. And I know that it feels great to get a lot of the accumulated stuff out of my life. We’ve only just begun, but already it feels lighter, even though I know we have miles to go before we could ever consider ourselves decluttered. And we probably won’t actually get there, we’ll probably end up stashing a lot of stuff in a storage locker some where.
But we have started trying to go through and toss or store away things we don’t need. Last week I went through the dining room and living room and got rid of a few things that seemed obvious. I threw out some of Zoe’s old teethers, the ones filled with liquid because all of a sudden they just seemed like a bad idea to keep them around.
I didn’t think that Zoe noticed, but clearly she did. This evening in the car she asked me why I threw away the baby toys. After a bit of clarifying, I realized she meant the teethers.
“But when I have a baby sister, she’ll need them,” said Zoe. I assured her that if ever such a baby sister came about, we’d get the baby her own teethers.
“I think she will also need a carseat, and I can share with her my toys.” I hadn’t realized how much thought she’d put into it. I tried to gently bring up the idea that she might not have a sibling. Chris tried to explain that if she did, there was an equal chance that it might be a baby brother. Neither of the ideas upset her, she simply discarded them and kept talking about her baby sister.
I kept waiting for the gut punch, for it to sting, or even annoy me that I can’t promise her this. But it never came. It was actually pretty sweet, how she said she’d help out with the baby when she cried at night and give her toys (though she wouldn’t play with her, the baby would just play by herself). I decided to just go along with it, join in the fantasy of a second baby, and an older sibling who isn’t jealous. I ignored for the moment the fact that the sweeter the fantasy, the more it hurts at the end of a cycle, and listened to Zoe plan out where the baby will sit, and how she’d grow from a baby to a toddler to a preschooler, with no question or thought that it might not happen. Zoe agreed that the baby won’t come until she starts pre-k, which I think is still more than 9 months from now. So there’s that.
Do other cities still have winter lights up? I don’t want to call the Christmas lights, the Christmas decorations, the nativities, the Santas, the candy canes, and the reindeer, they’re all put away. But there’s still the little twinkling lights in much of the neighborhood. A tree covered in little blue stars in this yard, a front porch outlined in white lights over there, a sparkling purple shrub across the street. Zoe calls them “sparklies” and likes to point them out on our drive home.
I know as an environmentalist I should complain about the waste of energy, but I love the lights. In fact, I don’t think they’re a waste at all. The dark still comes so early in January and February, and I need a little bit of brightness to light the way home.
I took an ovulation predictor kit this afternoon in the college library’s bathroom – it’s where I work. The library. Not the bathroom therein. As I sat there waiting for the dang thing to give me it’s answer, I thought about the fact that anyone going through the trash in this stall would probably think it was a pregnancy test. On a campus where people take lots of tests, I imagine that those of the pee-on-a-stick variety are usually pregnancy tests. And the women that take the tests in bathroom stalls are probably hoping for negatives.
I also thought about how these stupid tests take way too long to give you an answer and how much I hate waiting for the stupid happy face that means ovulation, or the empty circle that tells you try again tomorrow. I don’t really spend all that much time thinking about the fact that we’re trying, it comes up occasionally, but for the most part, I’ve been keeping myself busy thinking about other things. Like the fact that we may be trying to move to a bigger house (gah). More on that some other time. But when I have to take these stupid ovulation predictor kit tests, I have nothing to do but sit there and watch the stupid stick for an answer. It’s part of the reason I stopped taking my temperature, and why will not take a pregnancy test and instead just find out the old fashioned way that it didn’t work this month. That time while waiting for the thermometer to beep, or the test to flash an answer is time that I’m just in my head, thinking about the fact that we’re trying, steeling myself for a negative result, all the while hoping for a positive one, peeking to see if there’s a result yet, and then going back into my head and my thoughts.
It ended up being positive. It’s the 10th (11th? I’ve lost count) time I’ve ovulated since March, so I shouldn’t be surprised anymore that my body seems to be working this time around. But two years of uncooperative ovaries has really skewed my trust in my body. I keep expecting that this month will be the month that the shoe falls, or that the ovaries go back to their uncooperative ways. But no. There’s still hope. And in two weeks, I won’t test. I’ll wait for my body to tell me what’s up. Because I don’t want to sit in that space in my head waiting for a test to give me its results.
So I’ve missed (inter)national delurking week (it was last week) here on this blog. Seeing all the posts on other people’s blogs got me to realize how often I want to comment, but don’t, and it reminded me of how much I enjoy getting comments. So I have been trying to do my best to move beyond my lurking ways and actually comment on at least some of the blogs I read. I’m so much more comfortable being an observer – sitting quietly at a party and watching all the interactions that go on, rather than trying to jump in to all the interesting conversations. Plus, I worry about how to word things “just so.”
In any case, this isn’t so much about my (poor) commenting habit. I feel like I’ve been a bit of a lurker on my own blog. I keep composing posts in my head, but they never get written, and then when I think of another I want to write, I think, well gosh, I ought to write that post about new year’s resolutions, but before that, I ought to write about our DC trip, or a Christmas post, or, or, or.
When I started this blog, one of my goals was to get practice writing. Not just to improve my writing, but also to make it easier. Writing is hard for me, the words don’t come naturally, but I felt like there was a time when it was getting better. I want to get back to that, but it turns out that in order to get practice writing, I have to actually write. So here’s to a new year, a new decade, and to delurking. My new goal is to just write. Not to worry about whether my posts are totally chronologically correct, or whether they are just so, but to actually get them out of my head and through my fingers and on to the screen.
Today was our neighborhood’s annual kite festival. It’s one of my favorite of the winter festivals and it at the lake that’s just a few blocks from our house. There’s something wonderfully crazy about saying to the elements, “all right, it’s cold – bitter cold – and so the lake is frozen solid. We could stay home and snuggle under blankeys, but instead, we’re going out and we’re going to celebrate that frozen lake and fly kites in the wintery wind!” (click on any of the pictures to see larger versions).
the kite festival on Lake Harriet
It was extremely cold this morning, but had warmed up to 0° F (that’s -18° C for my Celsius-loving friends) by the time we got to the lake early in the afternoon. Still, the extreme cold means that the sky is a very beautiful clear blue. Walking up we saw lots of people scattered across the ice and little brightly colored specs in the air, and one huge teddy bear kite.
the huge teddy bear kite was a big hit
This year, Chris’s dad picked up a kite for us to try to fly.
the fish kite
flying the kite
Zoe tries to get the kite
helping dad with the kite
against the very clear, very blue sky
The have a warming tent on the ice too where kids can try ice fishing, and learn about the local fish in our lake.
Zoe tries her hand at ice fishing. She didn't catch anything, but one kid did catch a small fish while we were there (they threw it back).
Back on the shore, they had hot cocoa, hot cider, marshmallows for roasting, and horse-drawn wagon rides.
roasting marshmallows
Zoe was a big fan of the marshmallow.
the horses pulling the wagon. They had heavy, warm blankets in the wagon to snuggle under.
We really had a great time this year. I couldn’t stop looking back at all the kites. I just love the bright colors against the cold blues and whites that dominate the winter landscape.
our kite is on the right side in the middle
kites over the bandshell as we walked away to our car
one last look at the teddy bear kite through the windows of the bandshell
Today was the first snowfall of year with any accumulation. The snow fell in tiny flakes, not the big, gorgeous, fat flakes, these were tiny cold crystals that made the world look just a little greyer.
I had to get to a grocery store over lunch, so I walked to the one nearest to the campus where I work – maybe half a mile away. On the way back to work, I walked through downtown, and my walk was filled with the noise of traffic driving through dirty slush.
But on the walk to the store (you’ll have to forgive my non-chronologicalness in telling this story), I walked through the quiet residential streets, where no one else was out and about. It was quiet, but in between the crunch of my steps, I could hear the snow falling through the branches and the last of the leaves that never did fall. It was almost musical. Like the sound of rain, but gentler, and crystalline. Which it turns out, is exactly what snow is. Still, it’s the first time I remember hearing that sound.
I’ve been thinking about thankfulness (not too surprisingly, given that today is Thanksgiving). I keep getting caught in the big things to be thankful for – the family / health / friends / house / job / food things. It’s not that I’m not thankful for these, just the opposite, I’m extremely thankful for them, and know that I’m so lucky to have all these things in my life, that it’s hard to look past them. But I know that there’s so much more to be thankful for. So here, are some of the little things that I’m thankful for.
- My vanpool. That I can zone out on the ride in and back from work, that I’ve been able to meet and make friends that I might not otherwise have gotten to know.
- Yeast. Such little guys. So essential for bread, beer, wine, and other alcohols. Our Thanksgiving dinner would be far poorer without yeast.
- Which reminds me: wine and beer. And coffee for that matter. And all that goes in to bringing them to me. Coffee and wine, especially, use ingredients that do not normally grow in Minnesota, and while I’m a fan of eating local, I make exceptions. I’ll admit, I’d happily give these up for a while if I were pregnant, but since I’m not, I will thankfully enjoy these.
- Chocolate. Not much to add here, but it bears repeating. Chocolate. Choc. O. Late. Yeah.
- The Internet. All right, this once isn’t small. Still, the fact that we can be connected with friends and family regardless of geography, that we can meet and talk with others in similar situations, no matter how far away they are, is awesome. I’m thankful for that.
- The universe. Ok, this is also not small, in fact, the opposite of small, but I had to include it. How cool is it that we live in a universe with billions of stars, planets, nebula, and other wonders? How cool that there is so much out there to explore and learn about. And on that note, I’ll end with this tribute to the universe (and Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking).
I love science. My job involves searching for the published record of scientific studies, but much as I’d love to, I don’t get to participate in any actual sciencing much anymore. Today, though, Zoe got to be the one helping science get done.
The University of Minnesota has an Institute of Child Development which (unsurprisingly, based on the name) runs studies on how children develop. What’s cool is that the researchers are students, and the research subjects are kids living nearby. When Zoe was first born, we signed up as being willing to have her in some studies, but we’d never been called in until this week. One of the labs is looking at cognitive flexibility in young children. The full name of the study is “Executive Function Training in the Preschool Years,” which sounds a lot like sending your 3 year old to business school for an MBA, but really, they want to know if children could be trained to switch gears cognitively. They did this by having her play a computer game where one of two shapes might show up. She was the press the button that matched the shape. Then they switched the rules of the game on her and asked her to press the button based on the color not the shape. We came in first on Wednesday, and she played the games, and then one of the researchers practiced switching between the two games with her. Today we came back in, and she played the games again, to see if she’d learned to switch more easily between the games. Then they also had her take part in a vocabulary test.
Oh, and the whole time, she was wearing an EEG head net to measure her brain waves. It was very science fiction. In fact, the researchers tell the kids that the head net is an astronaut helmet. And they had her watch a little clip about a spaceship and space robots at the beginning of each session, I think to get things calibrated, particularly in terms of recording where she’s looking (they had her blink 5 times, had her look at one specific spot for a long time, and then had her close her eyes). She couldn’t wear her glasses while in the head net, though, which was a little annoying. Luckily, she was able to see the screen without them, and the pictures were simple enough that it wasn’t too bad. Still, makes me wonder if what would have happened if she hadn’t been able to see the screen.
Zoe all hooked up to the EEG and ready to go
It was fascinating to watch her in all of this. She complained in the beginning that the EEG net was “a little tickly” but otherwise, she was happy to go along with the game. Because of how the room was set up, I couldn’t actually see whether she was hitting the right buttons, so I don’t know how she did. But they did say they’d send a newsletter out with the findings once they had collected all the data.
Zoe said this part was "a little tickly"
In the pictures, she doesn’t look like she’s having a great time, but besides getting to spend the morning with new people who were happy to play new games with her, Zoe got stickers for learning the games, M&Ms for completing the games, and a t-shirt and a puzzle from the institute at the end of the whole thing. She’s pretty convinced that it was the best thing ever. I would highly recommend getting in the participant pool if you’re in the area.
In a bit of a strange coincidence, Cribsheet (a parenting blog for our local paper) had a post about another study at the same institute looking at how babies develop the ability to perceive 3 dimensions from cues other than motion and binocular vision (using shading and perspective). That’s a pretty fascinating read, too.
A friend and I were talking the other day, and realized that 1989 was 20 years ago. (Yeah, the math department may not be too pleased to find out that their librarian is not super fast at the subtraction – luckily mental calculations aren’t really required in librarianship. We know how to look up the answers). Usually, if you name a year in the past, I have to do a lot of (slow) mental calculations to remind myself how old I was at the time, where I was in my school or career, and what might have been happening. But not 1989. When I hear that year, I immediately remember the fall of ‘89. For all I know, the winter, spring, and summer may not have actually happened, they’re pretty hazy. But the fall is crystal clear.
I started my freshman year of high school.
We moved to Indiana.
I had my first kiss.
The Berlin Wall fell.
They probably weren’t all related.
Thinking back to the news that the Berlin Wall had fallen, and seeing the footage of the dancing and the celebration still fills me with happiness. And it’s so very vivid – we had visited Germany that summer, though we never got to Berlin. One of our relatives in Germany told us while we were visiting that something would surely happen when Hungary opened its borders with Austria that August. And wow did it. I did get to Berlin quite a few times in 1992-3 as an exchange student, but by then, there wasn’t much of anything left of the wall, though the East and West divisions were certainly still evident. The New York Times has some pretty spectacular pictures of Berlin now and 20 years ago here.
This public photo documentation wall (including the displayed image) was released and featured by the Senate of Berlin.
