Light and Momentary

Snow Day

In my dreams	In reality
I react to the news of an early dismissal with delight.  I miss those boys when they're away!	I say noooooooooo when I see the announcement on the district website. I say, It's not even raining! I say, I have statistics homework to finish!
We have a cozy chat about what there was of the school day.	My oldest wants computer time the instant he walks in the door and bursts into unexpected tears when I say we're supposed to have a cozy chat.
I make hot cocoa and we drink it together peacefully.	Four of the five hot cocoa drinkers (me included) manage to spill their cocoa.
Together we finish putting stamps and return address labels on the Christmas letters.	The toddler insists on a turn with the roll of 500 address labels.  He dunks them in his cocoa.  Twice.
Enthusiastically we plan our St. Andrew's Day dinner, a family tradition since our return in 2000 from a two-year sojourn in Scotland.	The boys declare that it ought to be a gift-giving occasion (i.e., gifts given to them, not by them).  The mom contemplates that fine Scottish tradition, Chinese takeout (takeaway, in Edinburgh).
We curl up together on the couch and I read E. Nesbit to them.	They do battle with imaginary dragons until I threaten to send them out in the sleet.
After a delightful afternoon and evening, I tuck them in at bedtime.	If I set the clocks ahead, could I get away with sending them to bed at 5:15?

No Mo' LoBloPoFo

I had good intentions of posting every day for two weeks, and then Thanksgiving struck.  The end of the semester is looking busy and I am in the middle of an awkward and unbloggable situation with a friend.  But hello!  Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving, wherever you were.

I asked Joe what he would especially like to do today and he said, "Go to Starbox!"  (Marty started the Starbox mispronunciation a few years ago and it has stuck.  Last week he was reading my "Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Starbucks" shirt, a gift from my sister in the days when she brewed espresso in an independent Ohio coffeehouse, and he couldn't figure out what "star-bucks" could be.  "Oh, yeah!" he said at last. "It means Starbox.")  We stopped in after I had my teeth cleaned this morning and I am now resolved to stay out of retail establishments as much as possible until about January 15.  Lordy, do I hate "Little Drummer Boy."  I especially hate it on a warm November Monday in Ordinary Time.  I say bah, humbug to Christmas music before Advent.

Do you think the WMF on my cup stands for Weapon of Mass Fattification?  (It was actually a white mocha frappuccino.)  I need to change a poopy diaper and run the vacuum before naptime is upon me.  See ya.

Addendum

For three weeks I looked forward to yesterday.  I had the usual Tuesday arrangements in place for the kids but I had no class.  I was going to crank through so much work.

Count not thy chickens before the hatching concludeth, ladies.  At 8:20 I got a call from school saying I needed to pick up Marty because he had fallen on the way to school and had a giant goose egg.  I zipped right down to school to find a boy whose head was much improved.  "I feel perfect," he said.  He asked if he could stay.  They said he had to come home, though, so I could watch him for signs of concussion.

I dropped Joe off at preschool and saw a big sign saying school ended at noon yesterday, not 1:00.  It was the first I'd heard about that.  The woman who babysits Pete during my class lives right around the corner.  I'll just do as much as I can in the window I have, I thought.  But she wasn't home.  Fifteen minutes later she pulled into the driveway, apologetic.

Marty and I went up to the university library together.  Library time is a scarce commodity for me, and I was gearing up to make the most of it.  Get this: the whole computer system was down.  The entire library was at a standstill.

At the student union's computer shop I was able to google the references I needed (since I couldn't retrieve them from my university email account), and by the time I returned to the library the computer system was limping along.  The lab, where I had planned to work on my stats problem set, was still shut down.  But I was able to print out and copy the articles I need for the next segment of my lit review.  By the time I finished in the stacks, the lab computers were running and I raced through my stats assignment. 

I let Marty pick a place to go for lunch as a thank-you for his patience (he read Calvin & Hobbes while I worked, in between asking me questions about statistics) and then we went to pick up Joe.  During the hour when I had anticipated working in a silent house, with three kids at school and one asleep, I had three kids at home.  (Nap? Pete said. Why would I do a crazy thing like nap when my brothers are home in the middle of the day?)

All this to say: yesterday was a crazy day (that's not even the whole story, but I'll spare you the rest of the details) and I was pretty tired when I sat down to post last night.  What doesn't come through, I don't think, is how much I am enjoying what I'm doing.

I haven't written much about our transition out of homeschooling, in part because I don't want to alarm any prospective homeschooling mothers.  The truth is that I am finding life as a part-time doctoral student far easier than life as a homeschooling mother.  The laundry is always caught up, dinner is usually planned, the Christmas shopping is all but finished, and I'm on track to finish the semester with an A in statistics and a completed lit review.

Some of the reasons why I found homeschooling difficult (satisfying, absolutely, but also difficult) are specific to our particular situation:  perfectionist mother not using a packaged curriculum, plus a high-voltage kid (both in terms of the brightness of the bulb and the vulnerability of the circuit to shorts).  I am realizing in hindsight that I was overlooking my need for stretches of silence last year, and I am relishing the quiet minutes I have this semester. 

But whatever the mix of temperaments in your house, I think homeschooling is hard.  Even if your children get along swimmingly 95% of the time and fling themselves into their work with gusto, homeschooling requires organization and patience and creativity.  In some circles there's an ugly stereotype of homeschooling mothers as denim-jumper-clad hausfraus who don't have what it takes to make it in corporate America.  But you know what?  I bet someone like Danielle or Lissa could rule the free world without breaking a sweat.  (Are you reading this, Danielle and Lissa?  I'm looking for a good candidate in '08.  Bean-Wiley? Wiley-Bean?  Think about it.)

Anyway: if you're reading this as a mother curious about homeschooling, please don't let me deter you.  My point  here is just to say that so far, fitting grad school into my life has been fairly straightforward.  There's plenty of work to do.  But at this point, three months into my first semester, I'm doing it gladly.

So flew'd, so sanded

Lisa C. asked:  So is the doctoral program just completely freaking hard, or just a lot of work?

Sometimes it's really hard.  I was just up in the bathtub reading this article and trying to make sense of this bit: 

Oxytocin enhanced the phosphorylation of CREB to the same degree as did the PKA activator forskolin. In contrast, 11R-PK1 inhibited the forskolin-induced CREB phosphorylation, but did not affect oxytocin-induced CREB phosphorylation.

Dude.  (She said articulately.)

Part of my trouble is maintaining realistic expectations of myself.  I don't have to be a neuroscientist.  I have to wade through that stuff and find what's relevant for my project.*  I have to recognize the limitations of this article (mice brains ≠ human brains) and summarize it accurately and concisely for my lit review.  If I need to learn more about neuroscience, I have to figure out a plan for doing so.  I don't have to understand that paragraph on the first run-through.  Or the fourth, or the eighth.

(*The reason I am reading this article is that part of my lit review looks at breastfeeding and cognition and of course I am writing about that dumb BMJ paper that got so much press last month.  My favorite rapid response was headed:  "Nice stats, too bad about the biology."  The authors controlled for maternal cognition and found that doing so pretty much wiped out the difference between breastfed and bottle-fed children on measures of IQ.  The authors have been criticized far and wide for comparing partially breastfed children with other partially breastfed children, but my first reaction was a little different.  What if you shouldn't control for maternal IQ?  What if those women are smarter in part because they were breastfed?  We know that family support makes a difference in breastfeeding initiation and duration rates, so women who were themselves breastfed may well be overrepresented among the mothers of breastfed children.  And what if the lactational hormonal milieu alters brain structure or function?  Mama rats have more dendritic spines than virgin rats -- how much of that change arises from pregnancy and how much from lactation?

(All this to explain my totally un-PC but statistically plausible T-shirt idea:  SMART WOMEN BREASTFEED.)

In statistics there are layers of understanding.  First you can give intellectual assent to the idea of a t-distribution.  Then you can solve sample problems intended to teach the difference between one-sample, dependent sample, and independent sample t-tests.  And eventually you can look at a research problem or a set of real-life data and decide whether t-tests are the appropriate tool for answering the question at hand.  I understand what my professors expect me to understand at this point.  It's just that there's so much to know.

This semester I keep thinking about two quotes from C.S. Lewis.  One is from The Screwtape Letters, when Screwtape counsels Wormwood to make the most of his patient's struggles as a young Christian.  I'm paraphrasing here, but the idea is that any time you settle in to do something you've dreamed of, whether learning classical Greek or being married to your sweetheart, it's discouraging.  You have to trudge up the learning curve before you can admire the view from the top.  On the tough days, I just keep trudging.

On the good days, I think about Ransom setting out across the Perelandran sea in pursuit of Weston. He is sore and weary, but he has unexpected help in tracking his quarry.  "My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew'd, so sanded," he shouts (so technically I guess I'm thinking of a Shakespeare quote, not a Lewis quote).  I don't know exactly why that image keeps coming back to me, because it's not as if I'm out to prevent a second Fall on another planet.  But I am tracking down an answer to a question I have wondered about for years.  I am looking at the intersection of two subjects I am passionate about: the development of speech in children, and the choices families make about infant feeding. 

The last time I met with my project director to go over the draft of my lit review, she said, "This is really interesting to read."  I said, "Isn't it? I think it's fascinating."  I didn't realize until later that she had paid me a compliment, that she must read a lot of boring lit reviews.  I do think it's utterly intriguing.  I feel really blessed to be able to do this right now.  And my teething baby is waking up to nurse again, so I'll wrap it up and say goodnight.

Could you insert a clever title here while you're at it?

Recently 4yo Joe woke up cranky and climbed into the big bed.  I was so tired (it had been a rough night with Pete) that I couldn't quite dropkick myself into wakefulness.  I knew he was talking to me about something important, something he wanted to be different.  But his voice turned into part of my dream, in which he was saying, "No, Mom, I didn't want a one-sample t-test -- I wanted an independent samples t-test!"

Insert Clever Title Here (because the toddler just woke up coughing and I have to run and settle him down)

My husband often listens to Midnight Special online in the evenings after the smaller kids are in bed.  (He does this while playing online bridge, which I think pushes him perilously close to "too geeky to live" territory.)  Today Alex and I were in the car when Garrison Keillor started singing about his old piano.  "Hey," said Alex, "is this the start of Midnight Special?"  He corrected himself -- "Oh, no, this is Prairie Home Companion."

As the geeky twig is bent...

He'll probably complain bitterly in high school about the radio programming around here.  Until then, I'll keep getting a chuckle out of his standard request for ketchup:  "Please pass the natural mellowing agents."

Wait, my original title doesn't make any sense now.

Would you believe not one Scout showed up for last night's den meeting?  In vain did I hacksaw.  The weird thing is that I got no calls, no emails, nothing saying, "We can't make it" from any of the other six sets of parents.  I had to check my sent-mail folder to see if my reminder email had expressed my true feelings on Tuesday — along the lines of, "I wouldn't mind if you blew off Friday's den meeting, because seven six-year-olds in one living room equals more chaos than I have the energy to handle right now."  It did not.  Hmph.

Perhaps I will take my pieces of PVC pipe and turn them into a most attractive necklace, akin to a pasta necklace only without the irritating pokiness of penne or macaroni's exasperating tendency to break up into sharp little bits that inevitably make their way into one's bra.  Or perhaps I'll try to figure out how to recycle this month's craft to fit next month's theme.

Thoughts of PVC pipe necklaces (the pieces have a trompe l'oeil rigatoni appearance) led me to thoughts of CafePress T-shirts like the one Blest devised.  (Still working on a slogan.)  Unfortunately, a few minutes of noodling around (hee hee) with The Gimp and a line drawing of a piece of pasta aren't going to do the trick tonight, and I need to wash dishes and read about F-tests.

Oddly enough, I sat down to write about funeral planning.  If not for LoBloPoFo, I would have put this post out of its misery instead of hitting save.  Maybe tomorrow will be a better blogging day.

LoBloPoFo

I thought about doing NaBloPoMo, but I thought it was probably not wise.  Instead I'm going to do Localized Blog Posting Fortnight, and write something each day until November 30.  Jump in and join me if you're so inclined.

Life is busy just now and I am working hard to stay on top of things.  This morning I led a mothers' meeting and then came home to hacksaw PVC pipe in preparation for tonight's Cub Scout meeting.  (At this moment, agreeing to lead the Tiger den feels like an act of madness.)  It was Northeast Feast day for the fourth grade, so I just got back from school.  I'm hoping to get the laundry all folded before I have to turn around again and pick the kids up, which means I need to keep this brief.

In my stats class lately I've been whimpering quietly, because we've moved past what I remember from the course I took as a master's student, and I need to sit down with my book and my problem sets and get some things straightened out in my head.  I have been tempted to write sad little posts that say, "Barbie was right! Math is hard!" but it occurs to me that blogging during lecture is not the best strategy for diminishing my confusion.

I have been hesitant about asking stats questions of my husband because I don't have good math intuition.  I can get it -- I've never yet not been able to get it -- but I have to think about it.  I remember in high school being very suspicious of the distributive property.  I was on board with 9*4 + 9*3 = 9(4+3), but to propose a (b + c) = ab + ac as axiomatic -- well, I was skeptical about that for a while.  I've been asking my husband math questions for 19 years now, since differential calculus in my first quarter at college, and his mind makes leaps that mine does not.  For me getting to the other side means rappelling down one side of the question, trudging across the bottom of the figurative canyon, and climbing laboriously up the other side to the answer.

Recently Elwood was trying to explain the Fisher-Rao metric to me.  "I don't understand your question," I said flatly.  "Maybe you should try to understand it," he said (nicely).  "Okay," I grumbled, "let's try it in small bites."  I was following for a while and then I waved my arms and said, "Mouth is full now!"  Did you ever play Chubby Bunnies at camp?  You stuff jumbo marshmallows into your mouth and say "chubby bunnies" around them.  The winner is the person who can speak around the most marshmallows.  It's got to be illegal now, you figure? Choking hazard, obesity risk, and general weirdness?  Anyway, our "small bite" conversation turned into a chubby bunnies flashback moment.  But I do know more than I did about Fisher information.

What a gloomy post.  Sleep deprivation makes me gloomy, and Pete is not sleeping well lately.  LoBloPoFo:  it can only get cheerier from here.

Bleg

Can anybody tell me where to find the riff on "Welcome to Holland" that was written by the frustrated mother of a child with autism?  Maybe it's called something like "Welcome to Uzbekistan"?

And that's why I'm not in the MBA program.

We've been eating lots of beans here in the Gladly house lately.  I've been trying to stick with a weekly blueprint for meals, and the current version has me cooking beans on Tuesday and Friday.  We'll see how long it is before the crew mutinies against this leguminous bounty, but I've been having good luck serving leftover beans if I do something creative with them.  The remainder of last Friday's black bean soup was mixed with leftover canned tomatoes and some chili spices and then baked under cornbread.  They ate it right up.

Tuesday's lentil-cheese bake (okay, okay -- I know it sounds dreadful) was not greeted with shouts of acclaim.  "I could take the boys to McDonald's," said my husband who hates McDonald's.  I was trying to think of a way to disguise it for dinner tonight.  Hm, I thought, maybe teeny Groucho Marx glasses for each individual lentil.

I opted for baking sweet potatoes and suggesting that they be cut open and eaten with a scoop of lentil-cheese bake inside, under a blob of sour cream because sour cream covers a multitude of sins, like love only with more saturated fat.  This meant that two boys ate sweet potatoes with sour cream, one boy protested loudly because he was prevented from eating sour cream out of the carton with a spoon, and one boy ate lentils and cheese with no sweet potato.  I think I'll be eating the remaining lentil-cheese bake until I can't face it any longer.  Perhaps I should print out a copy of this paragraph and tape it next to that recipe in More With Less.

Amid the periprandial frenzy, I found a fundraising flyer from the school.  They would like us to buy electric candle warmers at $22 per.  The school keeps a whopping $2 of that $22.  Do candles get cold, can we infer?  Who knew?

Harrumphingly, I tossed the flyer.  Why can't they sell something useful, I wondered to myself, like tiny Groucho Marx glasses for leftover lentils?

Brilliant, yes?  I'll be waiting for the CEO of the candle warmer company to come knocking on my door now.  Any day, I'm sure.

Statsblogging, live

Pssst, it's me.  I am supposed to be listening attentively to my stats prof but he has been talking for an hour!and!thirteen!minutes! about our course project.  I am 36 years old and I've been good with noun-verb agreement for at least 30 of those years.

The boredom is interspersed with funny moments, like when he was talking about his grading rubric: "In addition to having me curse you for all eternity, you lose five points."  That would make for an interesting report card, huh?  "B, but cursed for all eternity."

The Porch Problem

When the painters put the second coat on, our house got brighter.  I'm still pleased with the color of the siding, but I thought a purple porch would push us into Easter egg territory.  I opted for a deep blue-green instead.

At least I thought I had opted for a deep blue-green.  When I first saw the guy painting the edges of the porch, I flinched and shielded my eyes.  "Is that going to get darker as it dries?" I asked him.

It's not any darker.

It's awful.  It's the color of some wrongheaded Bertie Botts flavor, like Radioactive Sludge.  It's as if my porch has been coated in Prell, or Palmolive.  And no matter what Madge says on the matter, I don't want to be soaking in it.  I would take a picture for you but looking directly at it hurts my eyes.

"It adds color!" said the painters.  Yeah, it sure does.  Twice now I have seen people driving by, slowing down and staring at the house.  "What were those people thinking?" I expect they're saying.

They're going to re-do it for the cost of the paint.  I'm going for a nice mellow medium-dark sage green this time.  I think.

By the Numbers

Pairs of spiderweb cupcakes taken to school Monday for Marty's birthday (decorating was completed with "help" from a wiggly toddler in the sling, which may explain the architecturally dubious spiderwebs):  13

Sculpey teeth glued to Joe's dragon head:  12

Years in which I expect Pete to complain about the pictures showing him in a kitty costume with a pink fluffy nose and pink ribbon whiskers:  11

Approximate percentage of households distributing items other than candy:  10

IQ point boost for premies given 100% mother's milk during their hospitalization, compared to premies given no mother's milk (this item gleaned from the paper read while soaking in the bath after the chaos was finally All Over):  9

Snickers elicited by the name of Marty's costume inspiration, his Neopet (he has no idea that this name is hilarious to less innocent ears, along the lines of Mr. Honkin' Johnson):  8

Points missed on my statistics midterm, out of 100:  7

Foam dragon claws sewn into red mitts:  6

Rejected methods of securing dragon head:  5

Years running that my oldest has been a headless man for Halloween:  4

Pieces of our leftover trick-or-treat candy eaten in the middle of the night, when I woke up to load the dishwasher and put on my pajamas after falling asleep tucking one of the boys in:  3

Pieces of candy fished out of Pete's mouth already this morning (he just bites through the wrapper):  2

Tired mamas in this house:  1