Bring it on!

Aaaaaargh

Five minutes ago I was in the bedroom rating grant proposals, and I hear Joseph say to Sam in his wee little piping voice: "Put your sperm on me!" Clearly, I could not have heard what I thought that I heard, so I slip over to the doorway, and I hear it again: "Sam, you have to put your sperm on my eggs!" I peek around the corner, and see that both kids are huddled under the covers doing I have no idea what. I ask them what they are doing and Joseph tells me that they are both chickens and they are fertilizing the eggs so that they can have baby chicks. Both of them seem to be fully clothed and not actually making any kind of bodily contact. It would appear that this was a purely innocent re-enactment of the chicken life cycle depicted in one of their books. I am rarely at a loss for words, but I have no idea how to react to this. It did not violate the family rules about nudity, obscenity or keeping one's privates to oneself. It just skeeved me out. Aaaaaarggh!

Saturday night

So what is it that one is supposed to do on Saturday night? I recall that when I was a kid, Saturday nights were GREAT because I would get to watch the Love Boat, Fantasy Island and maybe even Hee Haw. (I hear that Daisy Mae left you for a cowboy--bitter? Yeah, and I bit him, too.) However, I always suspected that somewhere out there, some extra cool kids were doing some kind of unknown cool activity that was way more fun.
As a grown-up, I guess that I could do whatever I want, yet I still have no idea what people are supposed to do on Saturday nights.

Before we had kids, Danny and I would go dancing, dinner, parties, etc. However, with kids, going out at all costs at least $40 for the babysitter, on top of whatever else we do. Consequently, we don't go out much. I am sitting here alone (Danny is elsewhere in the house doing the taxes) watching The Return of the Jedi on basic cable. It occurs to me that this is exactly what I was doing on Saturday nights when I was 8. I can hear that the kids are totally whooping it up in their room, despite the fact that it is after 10:00 and they are supposed to be sleeping. So they are actually having a better time than me. Sigh.

Thawing doubt

What am I doing? Watching crickets mate. Are I happy about it? No, I think not. This current experiment has clearly not worked, and I am just accumulating data points to round out my sample size.

Also, the sub-80 freezer broke overnight, and although I spent a good deal of time making arrangements to get it fixed this morning, I have the vague feeling that my labmates are grousing about it on the other side of my closed office door. Perhaps if I cared more about pleasing people than getting my work done, I would have dropped everything to notify each of the 5 labs with samples in the freezer, find an alternative -80 freezer, evacuate their samples, and then stand in front of the freezer, wringing my hands until the service guy showed up and fixed it?

When I was a grad student, I would totally be standing there in the hallway. However, as a postdoc, I don't have relationships with the various people inconvenienced by the breakdown, and I don't want to become the "go-to" person for problems like this. Was I a "nicer" person as a grad student? Maybe. But my extended time as a grad student taught me that although everyone pressures you to "take one for the team," grad students who refuse to do all this crap succeed. Grad students who are competent at organizing and fixing things are thought of as a future lab tech for someone else, while grad students who do their research but are incapable of handling any practical issues are chucklingly considered future absent-minded professors. What the hell?

Many questions

Today Joseph has been uncharacteristically full of questions, including:

How does the oven make things hot?
How does the sound come out of the radio?
What does gas [gasoline] look like? What color is it? What does it smell like?
How does gas get into the pump?
Why does the car need gas?
What is energy?
Do we need energy?
What do plants do?
Why do we eat plants?
How do magnets work?

Danny and I are all worn out from explaining convection, radio transmission, internal combustion, photosynthesis, cellular metabolism, and magnetism. It is hard enough to provide satisfactory explanations of all this stuff to Sam, but reducing everything to preschool level is especially challenging. Answers have to be brief (less than 60 seconds) and fully descriptive without reference to unknown concepts or vocabulary. I think that the most unnerving part is how rapt Joseph is when we give him our answers. He is actually completely focussed--you can almost see the gears turning in his head. It is rather like some kind of high-stakes game show for parents: "60 Seconds of Science: Can you avoid mangling your kid's understanding of basic scientific principles?"

Joseph reads

I have been a little worried about how Joseph will do when he is expected to learn skills in kindergarten. He plays very well with other kids, but he has the rather remarkable ability to resist any and all peer pressure. Even if he sees all of the other kids in his class doing something, he won't copy them unless instructed to do so by an authority figure. He follows rules but he sees absolutely no reason to follow the crowd.
Peer pressure is not necessarily a bad thing--it can be helpful in civilizing kids. A lot of the rules that they follow are reinforced by peers noticing and evaluating each others' behavior. I have been worried that because Joseph doesn't care about achievement relative to other kids, he wouldn't have any motivation to learn structured things.
Although Joseph knows most letter sounds, I have been reluctant to push him to read--as you may have figured out, Joseph is a little contrary, and I didn't want to make an "issue" of it. However, he seems to have figured out how to read! Danny overheard Joseph reading Calvin and Hobbes to himself in bed. We tried to get catch him unawares on video, but Joseph heard the camera.

April Fool's

I have to assume that everyone else had a more eventful April Fool's Day than I did. I went to work for a few hours in the morning to do cricket mating trials, and then I stayed home sick with a fever. Under the circumstances, the only April Fool's that I could come up with was to put plastic insects in the kids' lunch boxes. When Joseph came home, he asked me if the spider in his lunch box was an April Fool, and seemed satisfied when I told him that it was. Sam pranked Joseph by switching the cereals in the cereal boxes. Otherwise, not so much in the way of April Fool's Day.

Did anyone do/have done to them any good April Fool's Day pranks?

Happy 2nd and orange belt

Today was Argos' 2nd birthday! He had the traditional birthday meal of pig in a blanket, cucumber, carrots and dog food.

When we brought Argos home from the rescue a year-and-a-half ago, 2-year old Joseph told me: "When Argos grows up, he will be a talking dog, and he will say 'Yes!'" Argos has indeed grown up, and although he doesn't talk he is a very positive dog and I'm sure that he would say "Yes!"

Here's Argos as a puppy. Before we civilized him, he was a climber. This is a picture of the time we came into the living room and found him just standing there on the dining room table.


In unrelated news, Sam tested for his orange belt in TaeKwonDo a million years ago, and it finally came!