Election Day

I remember 4 years ago I took Nora with me, as a baby, in a sling to the polling place. It was November and it was insanely warm. I wore a skirt and a t-shirt, and it was 75 degrees out and sunny. Incredible!

Today I dropped the kids off at preschool before voting. I'm wearing jeans and a shirt and a sweater and a jacket. When I got back home, it started snowing. I took a crummy picture out the front door with my phone. It might not be easy to see, but trust me, it's snowing.

Brrr! My grad students and I will be collecting data until 7:30 tonight. I imagine that'll be a good distraction as we wait for results.

My mother agreed to come out to watch the kids so that I can travel to CA to give the address to the California Math Council. Hooray! I've booked my ticket, I've booked my rental car, and I'm kind of psyched to return to the bay area even if it's just for a couple of days. I won't have time to see everybody, but I'll be returning in April for a longer stretch of time and will make up for it then.

Oh, also, it's an internet law that every facebooker, google+er, twitterer, and blogger must post an obligatory smug self portrait with an "I voted" sticker, so here's mine!

Talks

I just got back from a conference yesterday evening and my morning project meeting was cancelled, and now my lunch meeting has also been cancelled, which means I get to work from home! This is good because I am still recovering. It was awesomely fun, but I dragged myself down too much by staying up too late, getting up too early, never resting, and then fighting off a virus that's still lingering with me.

Because the conference was only about a 5-hour drive away, we chartered a bus and 21 of us traveled that way. It was so much fun to do it like that. We got a lot of chances to talk and play games and we even took some time on Thursday to do some transcript analysis. We were 4 professors (2 couldn't make it), 3 post docs, and the rest grad students, plus one of the post doc's husband and baby. They're all great and I feel so grateful to have such a vibrant, connected community here.

Now that I'm back I have 4 more speaking invitations than I had a week ago. Two of them are to give colloquia, and I'm excited to do them. One of them is at a university in the pacific northwest close to my family, so I'm thinking of trying to bring the kids and hopefully Jake and making a little trip / reunion out of it. One of them is in North Carolina and that one is exciting precisely because the invitation was issued from a giant in the field who I respect a lot. One of them is to a small invited conference, to act as a discussant on a paper and to lead a working group. That one is in Georgia and I feel compelled to go because the invitation came from another giant in the field, and the people who will attend will probably be all the right people for me to be spending time with. And then this morning I got an invite to give a keynote for the NCTM regional conference in Assilmar, CA in less than a month.

On the surface, sounds pretty impressive, right? A keynote? (Definitely a first for me). But no, it is not actually impressive because the only reason they want me to do it is because Mentor, who was scheduled to do it, had to cancel. So basically they emailed me saying, "Hey, the guy we really wanted can't make it, and your name came up as a good replacement." Uh...thanks? I'm not sure what to think about that. Jake would probably object to me taking another trip so soon. I'm not sure whether to do it or not. If it were closer I'd probably just do it, but it takes practically a day to travel out there anyway, which is tough for a 2-3 day trip. Meh.

The kids appeared to have had a great time at the indoor water park while I was gone. They have been telling me about all of the slides they went down, the colors of the slides, which ones twisted and turned, which ones were dark inside, and so forth. Jake said everybody had a nice time. It's good to be back with the kids and back with Jake. On the bus the grad students asked me about work/life balance and everything about that, for me, kept coming back to Jake and how solid he is and how that makes everything I do in my work possible. (Will he be solid enough to agree to let me go out to CA in 3.5 weeks? Time will tell...)

Halloween

Oh did the kids have a great time on Halloween today. Nora was Batman and Milo was Spiderman. After they got back, Milo found a little bag of Skittles in his candy bag that looked a lot like a bag of M&Ms. He saw the "S" on the bag and asked, "Are these called S&Ms?" No, my son, no they are not, but that'd be awesome if they were.

This afternoon a couple of grad students interviewed the kids about some math tasks. Nora went first and they started off by asking her to just count. She counted to 10, then to 20 when they asked her to keep going, then to 30 when they asked her again. Then finally she just said, "I can count higher than you think I can!" I realized that an important skill when interviewing 4-year olds would be to not laugh when they say funny stuff!

It has still been crazy busy. I am doing all of my duties and many of Mentor's as he spends his days and nights at the hospital with his son, who is very ill. Complaining about being busy and tired feels very trivial in comparison to that. Tomorrow morning, 21 of us are getting on a bus we chartered to go to the neighboring state for a conference. The bus has couches and stuff, and hopefully it'll be a fun time! One of my projects alone has 4 talks at this conference! Fortunately I personally only have to do one of them.

While I'm gone, Jake's parents are coming and then they're going to spend one night in a hotel in another part of the state that has an indoor water park. Jake seems pretty weary about the whole thing. Hopefully the kids will have a blast, though.

Jeans

Tonight I'm cutting Nora's bangs and she must have taken in parts of our previous weird conversation, because suddenly she says, "Mommy, when I grow up I'm going to look just like you, because I'm your daughter."

Me: You probably won't look exactly like me, but you might look something like me, because we share the same genes.

Milo: I have jeans too!

I don't remember identifying with my parents to this degree. How normal is this? Nora's attachment is still extremely strong, and she'd rather be with me than do anything else. She always wants me to play with her. I wonder if Nora is just wired a little differently than me in this manner. I remember being pretty independent. However, there is some glimmer of separation that rears its head sometimes. The other day, the kids were pestering Jake to watch a video. Jake said, "What's so great about videos anyway?"

Milo: Watching them.

Nora: And it gives us a little time away from you.

Me and Jake: ?!?

Jake: Well you don't need a video for that!

Me: By all means, you can have time to yourselves any time you want!

Nora & Milo: [Blank stares]

Tonight I was making dinner and Nora was in a foul mood. Milo was happily playing a game with Jake, but Nora didn't want to do that and instead preferred to be in the kitchen with me engaging in a non-stop monologue of complaints and hardships. I finally gave her a carrot to grate to keep her occupied. The next time I took a look she had grated away half the carrot, but tonight, at dinner, she actually ate some of the carrot. I think that might be a first.

I never even told her I was a vegetarian

Nora: Mommy, when I grow up, I am going to become the exact same person as you.

Me: ...?

Nora: And I will be a vegetarian.

Me: Well, you will probably be like me in some ways, but not in all ways, because you are your own person.

Nora: What?!?

Me: You might look a little like me, because you're my daughter, and you'll be like me in some ways, but different in other ways.

Nora: Mom, did you know that there are more bees in [our town] than there are people?

Kids. They switch so quickly from profound to unintelligible to mundane you get mental whiplash.

Questions

How am I going to have time to polish up field notes (must be done within a day before my memory fades), analyze two transcripts, compile survey/interview items across 9 project members' contributions, figure out homework and class activities for next week's 3-hour professional development session, finish my slides for an upcoming talk, and oh shit read those two massive articles I assigned to my reading group that I just remembered right this minute, all by Friday morning?

Why did I agree to lead this independent reading group? It's like a class without getting the credit for teaching a class.

Why did I choose two articles that were so long? Seriously, who writes an 82-page paper anymore?

Why did I forget that data collection is always hectic and a crapload of work?

Why am I working all day and every night until 11 but somehow not actually finding any time in the space of an entire week to actually write anything?

Seriously, WTF? Something is seriously off.

On top of all that, I just inherited Mentor's Friday morning grad seminar for the foreseeable future as he deals with a family emergency. This is something I am more than happy to help out with (and I volunteered to do it), but man I am really unsure about how I will find the time for everything.

Will I find time this weekend to complete the journal review that's due Monday?

How many emails have I neglected today?

And why does the cat keep tearing up the foam alphabet mat in the sunroom?

This Week

This week I drove down to a university about 2 hours away to give a colloquium. It made for a long day. I was nervous about it because I was giving the talk in a math department, and I'm always nervous that the mathematicians will be skeptical or will argue with my math -- even though that has yet to actually happen to me personally. However, the talk was well attended and everybody was nice. Only one person fell asleep. The questions were also nice ones, mostly along the lines of "Wow, I can't believe your 8th graders could do that stuff - could you come teach our calc classes for us? Har har har."

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Yesterday we had some friends over with a 17-month old. Nora and Milo were pretty good with her, even though she's mostly still too little to play with them much. Being around a baby of that age reminded us of how good we have it now. No more diapers! Our kids can feed themselves! Life is good. The baby is adorable, but my goodness those first couple of years are a lot of work.

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This week I had coffee with my student scholar. I am part of a program called the chancellor's scholars program for students of color and first-generation college students. These students were high performers in high school and received full scholarships to college. Once here, they are part of a highly structured program aimed at retention and fostering success while in college. The scholars must attend regular group sessions, become involved in service activities, meet regularly with an academic advisor, and be paired up with a faculty or staff mentor. I serve as a mentor and my scholar is now a senior. We were paired when she was an incoming freshman and back then it was difficult and awkward to mentor her. She was very quiet and somewhat shy, and I'm not typically outgoing enough to make it easy to draw quiet people out of their shells. So we would meet regularly and both struggle to find things to talk about, working hard to make conversation with each other.

In time, she began to develop a lot of questions about her academic decisions and issues, and we would discuss them. My scholar came in to college with two competing ideas about what she wanted to do with her academic career. One was driven by her family's expectations for her and her sense of what she should do to become successful. The other was driven by her internal sense of what she found interesting and what she wanted to do with her life. My job as I saw it was not to tell her what to do, but to listen and ask questions and help her figure out how to make her own decisions. In time, she ultimately chose a third way that was fairly different from either of the initial two things she wanted to do. Because the third way was leading her down a path towards future grad school and possibly academia, she became more interested over time about my life and work as a professor and what that's like. As the years passed we found it easier to talk to each other, picking up on common threads where we had last left off.

Now she is a senior and is not so shy anymore. It is easy for my scholar to make conversation, and she has a strong sense of herself and her future. She has been successful in college. She recently decided to delay graduate school for 2 years and join the peace corps after graduation. She will find out in a couple of months where she will be stationed. It has been awesome watching her grow and develop over the years from a shy, uncertain freshman to the confident senior she is now. Like everybody in her life, I'm eager to find out where she'll be stationed next year.

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A house came on the market this week that looks awesome. It's a weird time to be on the market. Our market is highly seasonal is this academic town, so most houses sell in the spring and the early summer. On paper the house looks awesome so we're going to view it today. We'll see how it goes.

Big Legs

Tonight at dinner I was sitting on my knees with my legs folded in half, like I often do.

Nora: Mom, why are your legs so big?
Me: What? Big?
Nora: Yeah, they're so big.
Me: My legs aren't big, are they?
Nora: They are. Maybe you grew.
Milo: Oh! I know! They got big from a bug bite!
Me: ...Well, I like my big, powerful legs. They're strong and I can run fast.
Nora: I want big, powerful legs!
Me: Well, you can have that when you're a grown up.

My initial reaction to Nora's pronouncement was not exactly positive, but I'm glad that I had the presence of mind to then compliment my own legs. Body acceptance and even celebration is what I want to model for her.

Counting

At dinner I remark to Jake that I wrote 3,000 words today. Nora said, "3,000? Even I can't count that high, and I'm really extremely good at counting!"

The Good Things

I leaned on the fence and watched the horses and miniature pigs as I heard Milo and Nora scramble around on the giant haystack behind me. "Meow! Meow! We're cats! Only cats can come up here!" they called to one another, jumping from hay bale to hay bale with their friend M. Barn swallows fluttered in the rafters and one of the horses licked my hand with her giant, velvety tongue.

I hadn't wanted to come out to this party, the second of three scheduled for one weekend, but I was so glad to be here.

The day before I had gotten to work at 9 a.m. to attend a seminar, and then spent the next 8 hours literally going from one meeting / talk / discussion group to the next. At 5 p.m., I wondered how it was possible to be so exhausted and harried without actually having done any productive work -- or so it felt.

As I pulled on my hat and buttoned my jacket, I thought, "Maybe I should just go home. I'm too tired to have fun at the learning sciences party. What I really want to do is change into some pajamas and watch a movie." But I hate it when people say they're going to go to a party and then don't show up, so I knew I didn't want to do that to my friend throwing it. Instead of walking home, I turned right and walked to his neighborhood, kicking up piles of swirling leaves with my boots.

An hour later, full of wine and laughing until my stomach hurt about shared memories of my non-departmental mentor jabbing a giant needle into my ass during a conference in Chicago years ago, I was of course glad I had come. ("You really did go above and beyond the duties of a mentor," I told her. She said, "The craziest thing is that you're not even the first person I've done that for!") As the night wound down we talked about how unusual we have it here in the sense that all of the people closely and loosely related to my field actually get along, even though we cross disciplinary boundaries and don't share theoretical assumptions. Earlier that day, during  an independent study session, one of my grad students had told me that one of his favorite things about our program is how collegial the faculty are. He had come from a master's program in which that wasn't the case, which he found miserable. The grad student said, "I think this is pretty much the best place to be a grad student, period." Hooray, I thought. Finally a student who is happy and shares it!

After such a packed day it was difficult to drag myself out of bed and check off the endless list of chores that needed to be completed before we set out in the afternoon for a party at a farm 45 minutes from home. Groceries. Soup for tonight. Baking for Monday's faculty meeting. Cleaning. Ugh, and when am I going to find time to plant my tulip bulbs? Not to mention read my post doc's paper draft by Monday morning? I was harried and irritated as we piled the kids in the car and set off for the farm.

But oh. I forgot how beautiful it is here. I forgot about how, after 10 minutes of driving, you're in the country, passing farms and meadows and hills covered in trees with the leaves changing to orange, red, yellow. One of our new faculty members bought a small farm outside of a small town 40 miles from our university, and it is breathtakingly pretty. It was rainy and misty all day, but as we pulled in to his driveway I noticed the rain had stopped.

This is the view my friend sees every morning. He and his partner have a gorgeous farm house, a giant barn, and plenty of land for their horses, donkeys, miniature pigs, llamas, miniature goats, and too many dogs to count. As if that weren't enough, he also has, on his land, an old one-room schoolhouse founded over a century ago.

Inside are wooden floors, original moulding, and a wood-burning stove. A perfect place for a party.

Nora and Milo enjoyed petting and feeding the animals, but not as much as they enjoyed playing on the hay bales in the barn. If you're four, your can while away a whole afternoon playing in the hay.

After our fun in the hay it was time for food and drinks in the schoolhouse and, of course, no party is complete without puppies. Lots and lots of puppies.

Here Milo, have a puppy!

Don't mind if I do.

Cannot resist the puppy cuteness!

Driving home through the winding hills, Milo said, "I want to go back soon!" Nora agreed, "Yeah. I didn't think it was going to be very good, but that was a good party."

It's so easy to get caught up in the annoying things, and forget that I live and work in a place where people like each other, where there are miniature goats to pet, where my neighbors' kids can babysit, where I am still tempted to take photo after photo of the changing leaves every year, 8 years in.

Wanted

One time, many months ago, Nora asked me how I decided to have a boy and a girl. I explained that you don't get to decide what you get. Either you have a boy or a girl in your belly when you're pregnant, but you don't get to choose which. And sometimes you get to find out with an ultrasound before the baby is born. I explained that when we found out we were having a boy and a girl, we were so excited and happy, because I had always wanted both.

Nora was interested in that. "You always wanted a boy and a girl?" she asked. I explained, "Yes. I always wanted both a girl and a boy. So I was so lucky that I got to have you and Milo. You were exactly what I wanted!"

This story has stuck with Nora and she likes to revisit it. She'll bring it up at certain times and she likes to repeat the important parts. We'll be taking a walk, for instance, and Nora will suddenly pipe up, "Were you so lucky that you got to have a boy and a girl?" And I'll agree that I was so lucky, because that was exactly what I always wanted.

Or we'll be driving to the grocery store and Nora will ask, out of the blue, "Did you always want to have a boy and a girl? Were we exactly what you wanted?" And I'll say, "Yes. You are exactly what I always wanted!"

Nora likes to tell this story to herself. I think she likes to hear the story about how much she was wanted, and that I was so lucky because I got her and Milo.

And that sure is the truth. I want them to know how wanted they were. There is just one time in my life that I remember literally crying from happiness, and that was the time when we had our first ultrasound and our doctor told us that he saw two little sacs and two beating hearts. And I started sobbing, right there on the table, out of joy and relief. Some day I will tell Nora that story too. Two beating hearts.

Just what I always wanted.

Day and Night

Wow. Our short trip to New York was so much fun. Yesterday was post doc's 30th birthday, so we were in a celebratory mood all day. She wanted to do some cheesy things like visit Louis CK's comedy cellar and pizza place, so we did that. We also spent an hour after lunch wandering around the village and the meatpacking district. Lunch was at NYU's faculty club, which was ridiculously fancy for a midwestern yokel like me. (They gave me diet coke in a goblet.) Dinner was at a place called Jane, and it was pretty fabulous.

Neither of us slept much our first night for two reasons. One, it wasn't cold enough outside for the hotel heat to kick in, so our rooms were freezing. Two, our rooms must have been near the boiler room or something similar because all night long we were kept awake by continual clanking noises. However, being tired didn't really dissuade us at all. We were still happy to be there and excited about our meetings.

The other great thing about our trip is that our meeting was really productive. We have a new grant with colleagues at NYU, so this was our chance to lay out a game plan and get on the same page with next steps and theoretical ideas. I had been concerned about our collaborator because on the phone she is so talkative and such an interrupter that it's hard to get a word in edgewise. Because I was raised with the idea that interrupting is incredibly rude, I cannot make myself do it in normal conversation, and I find it offensive when others do it. Not explicitly -- I mean, I know that it's a more standard part of discourse in certain parts of the country and therefore not rude -- but implicitly it always makes me uncomfortable. However, it was much better in person. I left our day liking our collaborator a lot more, and feeling psyched about how we're pretty much on the same page with our ideas.

One silver lining of not having mentor be there is that I got to take the lead. When mentor is there, everybody else in the room automatically defers to him, and I am always relegated to #2. This isn't something he purposefully makes happen, and in fact he's actually good about deferring to me and promoting my ideas, but it's something that everybody else always does when he's around. And, frankly, when you're a senior person who is accustomed to everybody deferring to you and paying attention to you and looking to you for ideas, that's just your normal way of operating. Spending my whole career as second in command isn't something I really want to do. So setting up the tone for our grant moving forward on my own was actually a pretty nice opportunity. Later that night our collaborator said, "I noticed that never once during the day did you stop and say, 'I'll have to check with Mentor.'" Which is true, because we couldn't really avoid moving forward with making decisions, but now that I am back I'm trying to be careful to include him and ask for his input.

It's a good thing that I have my separate line of research apart from our joint stuff. My own line of research is my primary academic identity, by far, and I think it's good that our joint work is secondary.

At dinner we met up with our collaborator and her doctoral students and new professor and giant famous professor (also known as the guy who criticized my work after a talk in June, then read my paper this fall and kindly provided feedback, etc., etc.) It was a nice time and it was interesting to notice that giant famous professor seemed almost...shy? Just a little bit. Anyway, after dinner and drinks and going for a walk and snapping pictures and saying goodbye to folks, post doc and I wound up on our hotel steps. We looked at our watches and said, you know, it's only 10. Let's not go to bed yet! Let's just hop on the subway and go to Times Square! I know, again cheesy, but it was fun and bizarre and weird and fascinating to take that in. We walked all over the place, and rode the subway, and just enjoyed a sense of adventure on my post doc's birthday.

I could not resist taking photographs of Batman and Ironman because I knew the kids would be so freaked out to see them. Tonight, back home, I showed them the pictures and Nora said, "I can't believe you actually met the real Iron Man!"

Random disturbing event: Tonight, coming home from school, Milo asked if tomorrow is a home day. I said yes. Milo said, "Hah! Then Rosemary can't teach me a lesson tomorrow!" Turns out that his classmate, Rosemary, who is FOUR by the way, has told Milo that she's going to teach him a lesson.

WTF?!? I never know if stuff like this is normal 4-year old weirdness or genuinely disturbing evil bully behavior that should be communicated to their teacher. Milo doesn't seem all that worried about the lesson. He said, "If she is mean I'll just run away!"

It feels good to be home again, if only for 3 weeks. Sometimes I get a little bit stressed out about traveling but I have to say, what an awesome job that takes me to places like these and gives me the kinds of experiences and connections I get to have with people! It's pretty sweet.

Life is a Gift

Oh wow, it's only been a few hours but I am having a blast in the village! It is so beautiful! So fun! So exciting!

After we got to our hotel, my post doc and I took off walking around. (Digression: It was supposed to be me, Mentor, and post doc on this trip. However, Mentor had to cancel at the last minute because his son is in the hospital, hopefully to be discharged tomorrow. So this definitely stinks for him, and I'm sorry for him, especially since he was looking forward to the trip a lot. And it's hell to watch your kid suffer in pain. But it looks like his son should be okay in the end, and meanwhile, post doc and I have soldiered on without him.)

Anyhoo, so we took off walking and ran into about a thousand fabulous looking restaurants, and ended up eating in this nice cozy Thai place, warm inside while it rained outside. And the food was sooooooo good, as were the cocktails, and it was just awesome. Then we went for a walk in the rain around Washington Square Park and enjoyed the sights and sounds. Even the rain couldn't deter us.

My post doc and I are in the same frame of mind about living in NYC: Why have we never done that? How did I get to be as old as I am without ever having lived here? I know, the reality wouldn't stand up to the fantasy, but right now I am enjoying my fantasy.

My entire life, beginning with Harriet the Spy, I have read literature and seen movies and t.v. shows set in New York. It is such a common setting that walking around, I feel like I've already been here many times before. It all feels familiar, even though it's not. I feel like a more awesome version of myself just by being in this setting.

Now if only I could figure out how to turn on the heat...

Poor Family

Oh, goodness gracious. Poor Milo is sick. So today he's home with me and I cancelled my attendance at a seminar, I cancelled my every-other-week lunch with my advisees, and I'm skyping in to my meeting with my independent study students. And then I told my advisees I'd have lunch with them next week, which means I have to cancel my lunch date with my friend, and basically what I think this all means is that there is way too little wiggle room in my work schedule this semester to accommodate for sick kids.

But it's okay. I've got tenure, and it'll all work out.

Poor Nora felt so insecure at drop off this morning. She has been fine every morning but now, having to face a day without Milo, she felt scared and teary when it was time to say goodbye. Her teacher did a good job distracting her with a big bag of apples and talking about all of the comparing and counting they'll do with the apples.

Poor Jake has been feeling lousy too, so we haven't had much time together. We are trying to plan out a surgery he has to have, probably in the summer or perhaps the fall. It is an unusual type of corneal transplant -- or maybe I should say unique, because Jake's doctor is unaware of any other situation like his -- that requires a number of different specialists to coordinate their schedules. Then you also need to make sure there is a donor. Jake's doctor told him that summer is a good time because there are a lot of donors due to motorcycle accidents. (Ugh. I know, grim.)

The down sides: this is a complicated surgery that will require a long recovery time. The estimate is a month off work for Jake. I shudder to think about what that is going to be like for him, and how painful the recovery might be. The up side is, I guess, that if this happens in the summer or fall, at least I'll be on sabbatical. So I can afford the time to stay home with him, simultaneously taking care of both the kids and Jake for several weeks. The other up side is that if the surgery is successful, it will eliminate or greatly reduce Jake's pain. Currently he suffers from chronic daily pain and it is getting progressively worse over the years. The only possible solution is a transplant, and if that doesn't work they'll have to remove his eye. There is also a possibility that he could have a little bit of restored vision in that eye as well.

The whole scenario bothers me because Jake's specialists can't provide any good probabilities of success. So it's hard to know whether the difficult surgery and recovery process is going to be worth it in the end.

Obviously all of this blathering on means that I am worried about Jake. I hope it'll work out and he will be okay. It would be nice to see him not have to deal with pain every single day of his life.

Milo

This morning I woke up to the sound of Milo's door opening. I stumbled into the hallway and encountered Milo in the bathroom. He said, "I already made my bed and turned off my noise machine Mommy. Now I'm going to get dressed." He said this with a cute little smile on his face. I replied, "Wow, thank you! You're such a big boy!" and Milo grinned and wiggled with happiness.

Milo just loves to please. He gets this from Jake. Potty training Milo was a piece of cake because he lived for the simple reward of praise. He'd go on the potty, we'd jump up and down and clap and he would just be so, so thrilled at our pleasure. Boom; task completed.

Milo is just an easy kid in this manner. If you tell him to do something, he does it. If there's a rule, he follows it. A year ago we instituted certain basic chores like making beds, and by golly, that kid makes his bed every single morning before he even leaves his room. Milo is a normal kid like any other, which means that sometimes he acts out (especially when it comes to doing things like hitting his sister), and sometimes he freaks out over tiny things (getting frustrated when he can't get something to work just so). But these events are predictable and easily overcome. Milo can be distracted out of whatever's bothering him. He's just a straightforward, easygoing kid.

Milo is also cheerful as all heck. He smiles, he's open, he's a bouncy, happy little kid. I don't worry a lot about Milo, because I have this sense that life is going to be pretty good for him due to his easygoing, happy-go-lucky temperament.

That's not to say Milo isn't sensitive. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Currently, he's going through a phase of extra-strong attachment to Jake, so he feels very sad whenever Jake leaves. Yesterday morning Jake was around during breakfast, which was a break in the routine because usually Jake has left for work before the kids wake up. Yesterday Jake left later to go to the eye doctor, and as his car pulled away Milo started crying. He wants every day to be a stay-home-with-dad day. But, on the up side, Milo is easily distractible. I suggested we use the time to wrap some presents for Daddy's birthday, and that was enough to cheer him up.

Milo is a big boy now, all long legs and arms flying in every direction. Sometimes I miss the roly poly big tummy toddler Milo, the Milo who would still consent to cuddle with me and snuggle on my lap. Now I have to make due with a brief hug in the morning when we say goodbye in the classroom, and carrying him up the stairs each night. Nora still wants as much contact with me as she always did. She wants to be in my lap, she wants to hold my hand, touch my arm, sit close. Milo, though, is no Mommy's boy. He'd rather wrestle with Dad, thank you very much, and I have to content myself with kissing him on the forehead every night when we say goodnight.

Lovely Colleagues

Lovely Colleague #1: We went to coffee and she gave me all sorts of literacy tips and tricks. She also happens to have a big private library of true beginning reader books (much more beginning than the level 1 books in the store), so she let me take out a bunch of books from her collection for Nora to read on her own. It's like we've got this extra library of books for new readers right in our building, and I never knew!

Lovely Colleague #2: Today we were in a meeting. LC2 and I had our laptops open and were typing away. The leader of the meeting suggested that we have somebody take notes during the meeting. She said, "How about Amy do it, since she has her laptop open." I was about to agree when LC2 said, "Actually, let's subvert gender norms and I'd be happy to take notes instead of Amy." Oh, LC2, you are pretty much the only guy ever who has noticed that it is always a woman who gets asked to take notes. Not only did you notice that, but then you stepped up to interrupt that norm. You are genuinely awesome.

Smokers and Apple Picking

It's decided. Nora is Batman for Halloween and Milo is Spiderman. Is this karmic justice for my lifetime of disdain for dudes in their parents' basements who are way too into comic books?

The firefighter theme is still strong with the kids, too.

They've got their fire hats, their fire boots, and their "smokers". Smokers are what you put over your face when you're in a lot of smoke, of course.

In a related note, it's so hard to get these kids to stand still for a picture! 

Good things about my life right now:

1) I had to do this filming project today, and I've been kind of dreading it for a while now. So I'm happy that it's over. I did it once before a couple of years ago in Arkansas and wasn't super thrilled with how it turned out. I'm hopeful that it turned out better today, at least in terms of me looking a little less goofy.

2) I get to see President Obama speak live on Thursday. I got my ticket this morning. Exciting!

3) I get to go to NYC on Sunday. Exciting! The last (and only) time I was there was in the 90s as a chaperone on a Model UN trip. There's only so much you can see while trying to keep track of a couple dozen high school kids. Of course, this is a work trip so it's not like we'll be out and about a ton, but I'm still excited to go. 

4) The kids get to go apple picking tomorrow. I'm just loving autumn. Apples, pumpkin patches, changing colors, warm days and cool nights, football games, cider, squash. Maybe I'll even get some decorative gourds and artfully arrange them on my front stoop. Okay. No. Who am I kidding.

That's a Good Question

Why did I think it was acceptable to agree to an itinerary that involved a half-hour layover?

Well, here are positive things to keep in mind: if I miss my flight, I'll get home eventually. It's early enough in the day that I'll hopefully get on another flight. And it's an open, empty Friday so being late won't be a disaster.

Whaaa?

This was just supposed to be a colloquium, not another stealth interview with a hard sell to try to get me to think about moving!

I doubt this is one I'll pursue, though.

Outlaws

Tomorrow I'm going to smallish midwestern college town. I'll be there for a couple of days to give a colloquium and stuff. My hosts are actually hosting me in their house, which was a first. Well, this did actually happen one other time, at a university that was a big football university. My first night in that town, there happened to be a game and all of the hotels were booked up like a year in advance, so they put me and Jake up at their house. Anyway, this time, the hosts said, "You could either stay in a hotel, or you could stay with us, and either would be fine." And I said, "Uh, okay, either is fine with me, whatever's easier." So, yeah, I'm staying at their house. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it; my hosts are super awesome smart scholars who do really cool work.

Here is an interaction typical of Jake and his mom. His mom called him up, at work, to tell him we should go up north to stay with them this coming weekend. It might be the last non-freezing weekend of autumn! We should go up there! Jake said no, we're pretty busy. His mom kept pestering him. She called back, and again pressured him to have the family go up there. He said, that wouldn't work well because Amy's out of town and isn't returning until Friday anyway. (Mistake mistake mistake!) 

Note that his parents were just here a couple of weeks ago. Basically they show up when they want, with little notice to us. They see the kids every few weeks throughout the summer.

So then she's all, oh, then I'll come down there to "help"! And Jake is all, no, that's fine, she's only gone for a couple of days and the kids are in school anyway so you wouldn't be able to spend any time with them. Jake doesn't want her here because having her here, especially without his dad along to entertain her and smooth things over, is enormously stressful for him. His mom has a lot of needs and taking care of them is a lot of work. She needs three full hot meals a day, planned out in advance, plus snacks. She needs constant entertainment - like, she can't handle just hanging out at the park for an afternoon. Any day must be packed with activities. Taking care of his mom's needs is more work for Jake than simply taking care of the kids on his own, which is why he kept telling her that there was no need to come down, it wasn't worth it for such a short trip, etc.

However, his mom wouldn't take no for an answer and Jake is incapable of standing up to her or ever putting his foot down with her. So therefore, she is now coming down here tomorrow.

An additional stressor is that Jake's mother is unreliable. She will help with the kids when it suits her and isn't too boring, but if something else comes up that is more to her convenience, she'll change her plans at the very last minute, or even spontaneously. So we've learned to never tell the kids in advance that Grandma and Grandpa are coming. If she gets offended or perceives an insult, she has been known to suddenly just pack up and leave in a huff.

For instance, a couple of years ago she and Jake's dad came down for Halloween. They wanted to be here to take the kids trick or treating. They got here in the morning. At some point in the morning they became offended over the issue of a coffee pot. Jake's mom dislikes his coffee pot because it is too small. (I don't drink coffee, and our kitchen is small, so Jake has a small coffeepot for himself. That means when there are several people here who all want multiple cups of coffee, you have to, uh, run the coffee pot more than once? Or whatever. I don't know how these things work. I think the issue is that it takes more time.) Anyway, she didn't like how it takes longer, so she had told Jake that she wants to give him a new coffee pot for his birthday. And Jake said, no thank you, we don't have room for a big coffee pot. I like my small one. Then they showed up with a present for him - a huge coffee pot. And we were both sort of like, oh. Maybe we can store it in the basement and then when you stay with us, we'll bring it out and use it. Jake's mom got really offended about our reaction to the coffee pot and the next thing I knew, I came down from upstairs and they were pulling out of the driveway! At, like, 11 a.m.! And I'm all, uh, weren't they staying here tonight to take the kids trick or treating? And Jake said, I guess she felt unwelcome or unappreciated so they decided to leave. (Try explaining that one to your kids.)

So, now I will be gone, and Jake gets to handle his mom. He is now stressed out about this, but it's what always happens. Jake can't say no to her or upset her. He is constitutionally incapable of conflict in that way. This puts me in a rather tough position, as you might imagine, especially when her requests / suggestions are unreasonable. Basically, I try to stay out of it as much as I can.

My major goal is to not discuss any discomfort or negative experiences / feelings around the kids. So I stick with the facts and act upbeat and cheerful about Grandma and Grandpa visiting. I don't want my deep dislike of Jake's mother to influence the kids or infect their relationship with her. Hopefully, they will have a happy relationship with their grandparents and have happy memories of times with them. I don't want to poison that or take away their opportunity to enjoy being at Jake's childhood home and spending time with Jake's family. Since they're only 4, it's easy now. I hope that as they get older they'll still have good experiences. Jake's mom's particular brand of irrational selfishness has, of course, affected the kids, but not in ways they've really noticed or been aware of yet. Hopefully it'll stay that way. If it doesn't, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.