Field Notes from an Evolutionary Psychologist

My Oldest Newfoundland

2011-09-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

My oldest Newfie made herself at home on a slight hill in the backyard today, on a bed of dead grass straw, stuffing her face with prunes. The slight hill? I'm pretty sure it's made of years of fallen plums. Her buried 'bones' I guess.

My crotchety old Newfoundland lounging in a straw pile eating prunes.

I quit my day job.

2011-09-21T15:53:00.001-07:00

While the decision was a long and sometimes agonizing one, now that I'm on my second week of no longer working on daily deadline as a copy editor at the newspaper, I can safely say that I am quite comfortable, happy, and relieved to have a burden and mornings full of stress lifted. My daughter watches less Sesame Street and we have better quality time together. I am able to develop my business in ways that I couldn't before, and I can meet Mr. Field Notes for coffee breaks.

That's not to say that I don't miss bits and pieces of it. The security of a known-quantity paycheck. Some social interaction. A mainline to news that never shows up in mainstream, online outlets. Yup. That's about it. I'll get used to the fluctuating income, find new social outlets, and find news when I want to.

Business has tapered, but that's the seasonal nature of it. I have a looooooong to-do list of various work and non-work projects I'd like to do, and if it keeps tapering I won't have to juggle 600 things at once. Sweet!

And the best, best part of no longer working at the newspaper is that I get to be politically active again if I'd like to. Very nice. I love politics!

I am thinking about quitting my job.

2011-08-19T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about quitting my day job. There I said it. That instantly makes it more real. It represents, in a small way, a commitment to follow through on something I have been thinking for months now. Over the last eight months, I've enjoyed phenomenal success at the business I started. I'm finally turning a livable profit after taxes, expenses, etc. and it looks sustainable. I have doubts, but I'm willing to ride it out and see where it goes.

Looking into the future has also prompted me to look at the past and how I got here. Sometimes I think it must seem a little weird to those who know I spent a good amount of my life energy in graduate school, toiling away to earn a PhD, to not be using it. Every once in a while someone makes a comment implying it's a waste. I understand where that notion comes from, but to me, it hasn't been a waste. I don't believe I have squandered my education because I'm not a professor, a practicing psychologist, or doing research somewhere.

The truth is, I've had opportunities to go down that path and I've decided not to take them. It's a matter of quality of life. I enjoyed teaching. I didn't enjoy preparing lectures or powerpoint slides. I really hated the rigamarole of publishing research. Conducting research had its excitement, but mostly it was complete drudgery. I enjoyed some grading, and some reading of papers, but I hated developing the tests and assessment measures. In the end, the overwhelming amount of work involved meant I had to make a lot of sacrifices. I sacrificed relaxation. I sacrificed spending time with my family. I sacrificed exercising. I sacrificed having friends. It was awful.

So by choosing to avoid academia, I made a decision to add all of those things back to my life and was successful, at least up until the start of the last 8 months. Along the way, I picked up a job working at a daily newspaper on deadline, designing and editing pages, writing headlines and cutlines. That work was *easy* money. Compared to what I had been doing, and the demands on my brain, ironically daily newspaper deadline work made me feel like a slacker. Right around the time I started doing that to bide my time while I searched for the *perfect academic position* <<<----doesn't exist, I started my papermaking business. When I found the wedding market, and the wedding market found me, things exploded. I started working 80 hour weeks again.

So now here I am 8 months later, right back where I was, working too many hours, losing sleep, not getting exercise, not spending quality time with my family.

I've come to realize that keeping the newspaper job I picked up has become incompatible with my life. So I am think I need to give my notice. Unfortunately this epiphany, if that's what it's called, will come at a really bad time for them. Another newsroom person who played a vital role gave his notice a week ago. Rather than hiring a replacement, they've decided to redistribute his work to other people in the department, and I am one of them. I think that has played a small role in the impetus to do something now rather than later. I just feel bad. Bad because they won't replace me, so my coworkers will e asked to do more work and they haven't been getting raises, benefits have been cut, etc. The newspaper industry is what it is. In a decline. You could say I am fleeing the sinking ship.

I've been working there 4 years now. I think it is one of the longest, if not the longest, times I have spent working for one place. So it's not easy to leave, and I don't really want to because there are some aspects of the job that are very rewarding. A) There is nothing like working on a deadline, day after day, every day. It keeps you sharp. There is no room for procrastination or slacking. It's good to stay practiced at that. B) I love having a mainline to current events. C) My husband and I get to work together.

At this point though, the costs exceed the benefits so my plan tomorrow after I have a long deserved spa day, is to go talk to my boss to let him know. I may do it before I got to the spa so I can decompress afterward.

The bottom line is, I have got to make a change. But also, I am not ready to just completely quit. My hope is that I can convince them to keep me on 1 day a week and then fill in 'on call' and when someone else in on vacation. I don't know if that's going to be feasible for them, but it would be a way for me to keep a foot in the door, keep the quality of life benefits of working there, and allow them to not have to immediately find a replacement or overwork who is left. Should be interesting.

I put the poop in the pot.

2011-08-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

Toddler toilet training time....

On a recent well-child check-up, our pediatrician asked if Toddler FN has started toilet training yet. I said not really. We've got a pot. She can pull down her bottoms and pull them back up, knows when she needs to go, tells us most of the time, knows to sit on the pot, but so far has not made the connection about the order of things... He suggested I put the poop in her diaper into her pot so she could see and make the connection. Inside my head I cringed.

Yuck! Then I'll have to clean it. A bunch of times, until she makes the connection. I was thinking at least 6-8 months of toilet cleaning.

I am not enthused about that. But today, I decided upon seeing a solid poop staring me back that it's worth a whirl. Toddler FN was interested. I don't know if she made the connection or now thinks I'm some sort of idiot for adding extra steps to the process... why not just put the poop in the big toilet? Then at least I'd only have one toilet to clean.

The fact that I am writing several paragraphs about poop is evidence of how life has dramatically changed since four years ago when all I was concerned about was multiple regressions and making sure my research was defensible. I'm pretty sure at that time, I thought the rigamarole was crap too. At least I can say I know how to pile it high and deeper!

And, if any reader of this blog post knows how to toilet train with minimal messes and cleaning, please please please tell me.

I got her the chair shown above, on the advice of friends who recommended a kid's toilet that has a lift-out seat you can place over a real toilet, and that ones doubles as a stool when the lid is closed. (Can you tell I have an aversion to calling it a potty chair? Mr. Field Notes *abhors* the word potty so I've been trying really, really hard to never think it or use it...)

I looked at many other toilets and decided that one was the best value, but I didn't consider the splash guard. It seems to get in the way and my daughter doesn't like it. It's not removable either. And the lid closes on her when she leans back, and she does not like that either.

I thought about the Boon toilet, because it looks swanky and I like the TP storage area but the drop zone opening looks too small and you can't remove the seat to transition to the big pot.

The smart bet would be on just leaving the detachable seat from the kid toilet on the big toilet, but the lid doesn't shut and an adult's butt won't fit on it anyways, plus you're left with a place to store it if not in the kid's pot.

Given she doesn't seem to like the kid's pot, I am not really sure what to do, besides look online for one without a splash guard and without the falling down lid problem.

Like I need another thing to do.

What did our parents do? A lot more cleaning and a lot less second-guessing. I'll think I'll start there!

Coming back from vacation is WORK.

2011-07-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

If you have to work twice as hard in the 2 weeks after a 2 week vacation, is it really worth it to take a vacation?

That's the question I've been asking myself since I returned home from a grand road trip through FOUR National Parks in Canada. It was a fabulous adventure traveling with a 2-year-old and I am so happy to report that Little Miss Field Notes did not throw up in the car a single time. There were minimal amounts of fussing - remarkable given she had to sit in a car seat for many hours each day.

As for me, I love road trips. And this one we didn't even listen to that much music so there was hardly any singing in the car, and if anyone did, chances were that we'd hear a shout out request for Elmo. There are some great Sesame Street pop music guest appearances with the cheerful red monster man, but Adam Sandler, Katy Perry, Feist, and Will.I.Am get old! So we largely avoided that in the car and just watched for breathtaking scenery and charismatic megafauna like bears, woodland caribou, mountain goats, moose, etc. We saw them ALL! It was fabulous and the bear somehow was larger than I remember them from seeing them as a child.

During slow stretches, we chatted and played word games. Someone suggested what turned out to be a surprisingly hard one. Try thinking of words that end in "ous" alphabetically! Yeah, it sounded so easy at the time but for some reason all of my words sounded like a I ripped them out of the Sarah Palin dictionary. Hopefully I was just tired... but it did make me worry about how my dramatic shift in how I spend my time has probably taken a toll on my intellectual development.

I feel rusty. Really, really rusty. So, somehow I need to come up with a plan for how to stay academically engaged. At this point I suffer from both a motivational problem and a lack of time. Ugh.

I need a plan! (I'll come up with that right around the time I dig out from under about 2 weeks worth of work to catch up on).

Field Notes Jr - First birthday pic

2011-06-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Close to a year ago, the newfs helped us celebrate the first birthday or the youngest primate of the house. They were even kind enough to wear the hats long enough for a photo. I may have posted this before, but I honestly can't remember how long it's been and how much catching up I need to do on this blog! I also need some inspiration for some interesting academic topics. Maybe I'll cruise my old lecture notes. After all I have a mountain of files just taking up precious space in a corner of the house I am sure Mr. Field Notes would be happy to use.

I'm back!

2011-06-08T14:53:00.001-07:00

At long last, I think I may finally feel like blogging again. The long and short of it is that my little home business of making plantable paper really took off over the last year and the last six months it has practically exploded. I'm a work-at-home mama to a toddler not yet two years old, with a part-time job and what has now become an almost-full time business. My daughter has been a handful. Business has been a handful, and I hardly ever have free time to myself. And I really like writing, so I think I will give blogging a try again — to share notes from my new field of full-time papermaking, to share new crafts, new stories, pictures, projects, and to vent about being a WAHM (work-at-home-mom), a totally different bear than SAHM (not that being a stay-at-home-mom doesn't involve work)!

Here are a few snapshots of some projects and a little pic of how much "Baby Field Notes" has grown. We've been having chats lately about whether she's a "baby" or a "kid."

Seashell Plantable Beach Wedding Favors

Plantable Wedding Favors Boxed Kit
"Baby Field Notes"

Window into Working Motherhood

2010-05-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

Imagine that while taking a test — which you're doing finally because it is the only time you get to actually think straight because it is finally quiet and you're able to take the test — you are having a sensitive part of your anatomy pulled, tugged, hit, squeezed and bitten.

This is why mamas need a Mother's Day, and back rubs, and meals cooked for them, and houses cleaned, and gift certificates for spa days! Believe me, I am looking forward to the day when mother's efforts are recognized. Part of me wants to just spend the day in bed sleeping without having to do anything baby related. But the truth is, I would miss her.

For the past several months now, my morning routine has been to get up and work around 8am and finish sometimes around noon. I don't use child care; this is partly out of personal choice but also a little bit of necessity. There just isn't a good reason, or a good place to take her if I wanted someone else to watch her for a few hours while I work, so I work and take care of her at the same time.

Usually this isn't a problem, I think, because I have years of practice at multi-tasking and being over-extended and am good at it, but every once in a while — by this I mean once every 2 months — she becomes a nearly unbearable handful.

I think that right now this is related to her being in full on teething mode. She sprouted her first tooth 2 weeks ago. She's a classically 'easy' baby temperament-wise so it really stands out when she fusses. And, OMG, it got so bad one day I put on my gun shooting ear muffs. I use them when I run the blender during papermaking. And sometimes I put them on her when I have to have her nearby while I make paper. I felt bad putting them on just to drown out her fussing, but I just could not work, on a deadline, with all the fussing. I had tried everything else up until that point.

And an amazing thing happened when I put them on.

The distraction stopped her fussing immediately.

She stayed quiet for quite a good amount of time while she studied my new appearance. Phew! What luck. The dogs have been helpful distractions for her, but they're not reliable. They don't perform on command. And I sympathize with her teething discomfort. When I have had endo-related pain I can be a real grump too.

I shall have to log this general 'distraction technique' to memory and bust out other forms of distraction as needed later. Working motherhood is definitely an exercise in creative problem-solving on the fly.

Every Picture Tells a Story

2010-04-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

There's so much I could say about this photo. It speaks volumes to how my life has both changed and stayed just the same.

Also, I have been informed my blog is full of great stuff to plagiarize. I suspected this, but the kind people at Term Papers just let me know. Great..... so I don't know what to do about that besides put a warning up on my most-trafficked posts and hope profs can catch plagiarists.

Argh.

Maybe since I don't have a lot of spare time, I'll just have to start plagiarizing myself. I have a lot of really good, but old, posts buried on this blog after all.

A Huge Week: Developmental Milestones Galore

2010-04-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

Phew! What a week. Baby Field Notes must have finally flipped whatever switch gets flipped when a whole new cognitive system comes online. All in the last week we saw some big developmental milestones.

It started with sitting herself up from lying down on her back and then later that afternoon I felt her first sharp tooth emerging from her gums. The next day she took her first steps while holding onto my hands. Previously she only 'walked' by me moving her legs for her. She seemed to like the sensation and accomplishment of moving forward in spite of the great physical exertion. Physical therapy is hard work! But no way did expect that in just days she would be stepping forward on her own. The first time she bent her knee, lifted her foot up and set it down in front of her I was surprised. I thought it was just a fluke, like the day she said BIG, but then she did it over and over again, for twenty feet! And then she kept stepping — more that night — and has been doing it ever since.

And then just today she clapped her hands together. When I noticed I exclaimed to Mr. Field Notes who told me she had actually done that yesterday while we were all out on a stroller walk. Yesterday. It has been very exciting around here the last several days!

It is amazing to me both how slowly — and how quickly — human development progresses. Being a primatologist, I am anxiously awaiting her first attempt at grooming. That will be super exciting. No one, as far as I know, has cared to note when that starts happening for humans, and it's not something I've looked into much for other primates, but I do recall somewhere that either Jane Goodall or Anne Pusey has noted when young chimpanzees first start to groom others. I see signs that Baby Field Notes is getting ready to groom. She notices smaller bits of stuff on the floor and has the fine motor skills now to pick up small things, like a tiny leaf, for example, so I know physically she could do it, but I am not sure she yet has the cognitive capacity to intentionally 'clean' something.

Her babbles are getting more prolific now too:
n-n-n-nay
mmmmmm
g-g-g
th-th-thuh
b-b-bah
puh-puh-puh-up
d-d-d-dah-dad

We've heard some ma-mas and some da-das but not for the specific parent. I half expect her to say Yuki or Katy before Mommy, honestly. Those dogs continue to entertain her, and her them. Yuki, the slightly smaller, younger Newf is her BFF. Katy is interesting too, but not nearly, and I think isn't nearly so because she is more stand-offish. Big K is just harder to get to know!

Best Bunny Ears Photo, So Far

2010-04-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

This is the best I could do given the time; it was a tremendously busy week! What worked out... taking the dogs for a big walk, making them wear the ears, even if only for ten seconds at a time, repeatedly for the last couple of days — and dangling pancakes as a reward. They'll do a lot for a pancake! Making them tired first was the biggest help.

One Tutu + 3 sets of Bunny Ears: Is a card-worthy picture possible in 3 days?

2010-03-31T21:10:00.000-07:00

I need a strategy for dog and baby wrangling, stat! I've got this crazy idea to take a charming photo of Baby Field Notes sitting between her two canine companions, the three of them sporting bunny ears and her in a tutu. I'm aiming for Shoebox greetings level cute saturation here! What could be more drool-worthy than the world's cutest baby in tulle flanked by two Newfoundlands in goofy hats?

And I need a strategy. Getting everyone looking at the camera at the same time is going to be the biggest challenge, I think. But it might actually be getting the dogs to keep the bunny ears on long enough to get to that point! This afternoon I started to get them habituated to having the ears on their heads and made good progress with Katy, the older one. She's naturally more agreeable than our younger Newfy pup, Yuki. I may have to give up on Yuki, she can be stubborn. Intractable, really.

As far as getting them all to look at the camera, I can only use a squeaker so many times before they either start drooling too much or get too excited to hold still. Getting Baby Field Notes to smile instead of stick out her tongue will be another challenge. That's one of her favorite things these days.

I've also got to figure out where to do the shoot. I'm thinking outside since that'll give us the best lighting. I'll need a backup plan for indoors though, in case it's too cloudy, cold, or wet. I need a backdrop too, like a big white sheet or something, which I don't have... hmmm.

Whatever photo we end up with, I am sure that getting it will be hilarious.

Above, Yuki eyeballs Katy's new cranium accessory.
I wonder what she's thinking.

We have a talking ape now! Baby's First 'Real" Word

2010-03-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Today Baby Field Notes said her first 'real' word: UP.

Previously she has said 'BIG,' which blew me away because, a) she's a very quiet child who doesn't really babble on and on so we've rarely heard vowel and and even fewer consonant sounds, b) was late to giggle, c) was only about 8 months old, and d) perfectly enunciated the word: BIG. It really surprised me. She's certainly heard that word a lot, what with two enormous dogs keeping her company!

This time was different though, because she used UP in the right context, intentionally, and along with the right gesture. When she said BIG it probably was unintentional. I think she was just experimenting with her tongue and mouth and voice. It wasn't in the right situation, at least not without making up a story, and wasn't coincident with any meaningful gesture, so it really can't be considered language.

But what is language? It's complicated but you can glean a lot from this excellent discussion, if you click here.

Work: A topic I rarely talk about.

2010-03-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

My wheels have been spinning for some time now about what to do about my nearly complete lack of zeal for my current job and whether I can or even want to have a full time job in academia ever again.

That's pretty heavy stuff for any night, let alone a Saturday night. My how life has changed. And, having a baby certainly makes all of this a lot more important than it was before.

It means I can't just willy-nilly up and quit my job because I no longer find it fulfilling. It also means I can't just go out and get a different one without making some major decisions that are potentially life-altering.

I have some ideas on what I could do within the capacity of my current job to make it temporarily more fulfilling, which feels good. I feel like I have at least identified a problem and have come up with a way to go about fixing it that may actually be feasible. Unfortunately the more expedient way of solving the problem would never fly with the higher ups and would severely compromise my position if I even brought it up. So, I really, really like having a plan that could work.

It's totally exciting.

I hope my proposal is well-received and that it will result not only in some more pay for me but more importantly, more fulfilling work that affords me more flexibility and more creativity while simultaneously producing a higher quality 'product.'

Now that I put it that way, it seems ambitious.

Maybe it is, but I need a change. I cannot just up and quit my job, for a number of reasons, so I have got to find a way to make it more fulfilling — and meaningful.

Oh — and I don't know what I think of it yet, but I also came to the realization recently that I am 'over' primates. I just have not had any interest in new primate research or even in talking about existing primate research.

I love monkeys. I really do, but I am not in love with them anymore. As you can see, I definitely need a change. Unfortunately, this temporary solution I have concocted is only temporary....... what to do, what to do.

Construction Quilt - Finished

2010-03-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

Made this one for my nephew's birthday, using scrap fabric and some construction fabric I found on etsy. He's three, and I don't know if blankets are really his speed still, but he loves construction equipment, so hopefully he will 'dig' it a little bit.. eh, I might have to go find a truck or something to go with it.

I had been wanting to make a quilt for my nephew, Jackson, using the Michael Miller 'dig it' fabric for a while now, but I wasn't feeling particularly inspired with a design, so I just chose a design similar to one that I bought on etsy for Little Field Notes. I had to offset the letters of his name to get them all to fit the space I set aside for them. That wasn't part of the plan, but it fits in more ways than one.

Sapporo Snow Festival

2010-02-19T18:34:00.001-08:00

For a week in February, the northernmost island in Japan hosts a fantastic snow festival. The sculptures made of snow are a highlight. Some are enormous — even larger than this one. I haven't been to the festival yet myself, but Mr. Field Notes' dad has been a number of times. He shared this photo and I thought it was so neat I had to share it too. The detail in the leopard's spots and the orangutan's cheek pouches is awesome. It's estimated that 2 million people visit the festival. Here's a little insight into how the massive sculptures are constructed: how to make
a giant snow statue.

In Japan, as here too, it won't be much longer before festivities culminate around a different occasion — the appearance of the spring blossoms — something that is an even bigger event in Japan than this snow festival. I haven't been to Japan yet for the plum and cherry blossoms, but I think this year, Mr. Field Notes and I might have to break out the sake boxes and furoshiki we got in Japan and make our own mini party under our plum tree.

In anticipation of the spring, I've started farting around with a new spring line up for my etsy store. There are a lot more plantable paper offerers on etsy and the competition has had an effect on my sales. It's mostly fine, because I would rather hang out with my gorgeous daughter, but I do need to keep creating or I won't be able to keep buying nifty things on etsy! To that end, I recently received some new paper punches, an ume (plum) flower shape and a sakura (cherry) flower shape. This is what I've decided to do with them (the first one is an old hydrangea shape):

I need better photos and a prettier assortment of colors, but it's a start. I'm not sure, but I think I will offer them as a DIY wedding package, one that is very affordable (under $25). What do you think? I'd love some feedback...!

NEW: Flowers made out of paper that grows!

2010-02-17T19:22:00.000-08:00

Spring comes quickly around here, and with the tops of the bulbs already peeking out of the ground, I have a limited amount of time to develop my new line of recycled paper products before planting season is here. For a few years now I have been making 'plantable paper' in my spare time, mostly custom requests from people who are getting married. Plantable paper is embedded with seeds. As the paper biodegrades in soil and water, the seeds sprout and grow out of the paper. It's a really nifty way to give seeds and also makes a perfect, inexpensive favor to give away at weddings. Over the years I've been asked to make butterflies, hearts, cones to hold flower petals, printed table place cards in various shapes and most recently — 200 paper flowers. They are going to be placed in little pots along with a smaller paper butterfly and flower. Soon this years flowers will be growing from the scraps of this project. In the meantime, I am putting them up for sale as a new regular item in my store on etsy. Happy planting!

I have a baby APE!

2010-02-12T16:36:00.000-08:00

Why it took me so long to realize this, I have no idea. But, I truly do have a baby ape. For the past 2 days as we leave the bedroom, Baby Field Notes has reached toward the mobile hanging from the overhead light. She's had her eye on this thing since the day she came home.

A couple of years ago I admired it in a shop in Japan. It's not really intended for babies, it's just a cool little doodad that I liked and brought home. It matched the bedroom, so I hung it up there. Eventually it just faded to the background.... until Baby Field Notes moved in. It caught her eye, being black against the white of the ceiling.

And now, finally, she's developmentally able to gesture to get lifted up to touch the end of it. There's a little bell there. When she realized she could make it make noise, she came unglued. So I've been lifting her up so she can make its bell ring. Well, today she grabbed hold of the little bell and would not let go. I had already lifted her up several times so I was getting tired. I think I made her feel off balance when I hoisted her up the last time and that's why she latched onto the bell so firmly.

When mama's unsteady, better grab anything close... branch, vine, mobile. I thought she was going to take the whole light fixture down with her. Babies are stronger than they look, afterall, and for good reason too. It wasn't all that long ago geologically-speaking, that young apes were able to hang on to mom all by themselves.

So there she was, my little ape hanging on for dear life, wobbling while I was trying to figure out how to get her to let go without being able to pry the bell out of her hands myself.

I forgot what I did, but not the lesson learned: Don't do that again!

Totally Easy Quilt - A good one for prompting geography lessons!

2010-02-11T15:15:00.001-08:00

This quilt is an absolute cinch to make. For about $20 (on etsy) you can buy the world map fabric. You will also need some red (or yellow, blue, whatever you like best) smooth minky fabric and some batting. I recommend looking at your local Joann's and buying it when you can use a 50% off coupon. You'll need 2 yards of minky or other fabric for the backing.

Just pin the three layers, stitch along the lines of latitude and longitude using a clear presser foot (no free motion foot needed), start in the middle of the quilt and work your way out. When done with all the lines, fold over the minky, pin and sew it down (I did the binding by hand because it looks nicer especially when you have minky bindings). I used black for the lines and red bobbin thread.

Voila! The finished quilt is about 32 x 56 inches — large enough for a play mat or lap quilt. And best of all, you can use it to start all kinds of fun talks about the world for years to come.

I plan to sew fench knots onto the places Baby Field Notes visits. Another idea is to sew them into places I'd like for her to visit and then take them out when she has, replacing the knots with a different colored thread. I've got a few places on my list and I am sure she will add her own. Today I fell in love with Krabi, Thailand after seeing my friend's vacation pictures. Picture white sand beach along crystal clear turquoise water with not a soul in sight. Just you, the fish and the ocean breeze — I'd go tomorrow (and leave BFN with one of her grandparents so the Mr and I can enjoy ourselves!)

First Gift Quilt - Finished!

2010-02-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

Made mostly from 'Paula Prass Flights of Fancy' fabric I purchased on etsy, this one took me from Fri-Monday to finish last weekend. The thing I really like about quilting as opposed to other projects is that I can pick up and set it down easily. I'm not inclined to set down projects. I prefer to just barrel through and finish but with a baby around, there are distractions galore and they cannot wait.

One time, however, I was so determined to finish a part of one quilt (the blue-green one) that I figured out how to nurse and rip seems at the same time while sitting at my machine bench. It was awkward and uncomfortable but I got both jobs got done. And this week I managed to nurse BFN while sitting on the floor of her room working at my laptop while taking a phone call. Babies are the reason women were forced to become excellent multitaskers.

Although baby and I still prefer to NAK (--> cute Nursing @ Keyboard onesies designed by my SIL), I'm finding that I'm becoming much more at ease with not NAKing. And most of the time BFN moves from NAKing to SNAKing, it's a relief. She falls alseep in my lap and then I can, maybe just maybe, move her still sleeping, still nestled in the quilts I've bunched around her to support her, to another place so I can get up ..... and get back to quilting, or take a shower, or make lunch for myself, etc. I've got a gallery of saved pics of her lying on her bedroom rug in all different arrangments of her cozy quilt coccoons. They're amusing. I'll have to make a gallery of them sometime. So, this particular quilt — in its nearly finished form at the left — is my first quilt that is a gift. I used the free motion foot to embroider a message on it along one edge and 'wrote' the year too. That was fun. It turned out much better than I expected. Have you ever tried to write while moving the paper instead of the pen? Hard! Try it with a sewing machine.

Learned a couple things with this one too. My seams met much more closely and I had almost no need to rip out seams because of bunching. I have changed my technique for prepping the layer for top quilting. If I start the free motion stitching in the middle of the quilt and re-stretch and re-pin as I move out toward the edges, I've found everything stays much more taut. The other thing I'm doing now is using safety pins to keep the layer together. They don't fall out and get lost as I move the quilt around.

My best quilt so far, I think!

Baby's 'First' Meal

2010-02-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

Yuki has appointed herself to a new 'job' — cleanup duty for baby meals. She is so eager that I've decided we need a mealtime protocol, mostly to manage her enthusiasm. I am not a germaphobe regarding the dogs, and they have already given little Baby Field Notes lots of kisses, but they're not exactly welcome all the way through the meal. I am aiming for a good cleanup at the end and maybe some spot cleanups here and there when I say it's okay. Hopefully it won't take too log for all of us to get on board with the new program. She already knows how to back off on command, and when there is food involved, Yuki is very eager to 'perform' so it probably won't be long before she demonstrates she's learned a new word: Cleanup.

Baby Field Notes, like Yuki, has really leaped whole hog into solid foods. There's no such thing as partial pig with her. She has gone so gung-ho for solids virtually overnight that it's kind of hard to believe that just 2 weeks ago she was gagging on food. Now she gulps with gusto and is so interested in solid food that I am a little worried she is going to wean herself too soon. I want to continue breastfeeding her for 2 years, at least. Not only because it is good for her, but good for me too. It is so good for me that my goal is to keep lactating until menopause. Crazy, isn't it? I just hope she doesn't make me start pumping all the time. It is not nearly as pleasant as her doing the work, lol.

So far we have done really well with making our own baby food. We've got a food processor to puree anything we'd want to give her. The purees get poured into ice cube trays. They can be popped out and put into freezer bags and then defrosted one by one, or in BFN's case, 2 or 3 at a time, as needed. It is easy, cheaper than buying jars, and easier on the environment because it creates less waste.

So far, she's wolfed down cream-of-wheat, squash, applesauce and bananas, and kidney beans. The beans were the first solid food we gave her that she swallowed. We had been trying rice cereal but she wouldn't have any of it. Then one night while I was eating a dish of kidney beans, rice, barley, tomatoes, onions and chicken (an awesome mix!) I decided to give her a small taste off my finger. She took it readily and seemed to especially love the squished beans. And why not? They are delicious. And these ones were a little spicy. I don't know, but maybe she liked the spicy food more than the flavorless rice cereal. Who could blame her?

Six Quilts Down, 6 to go!

2010-01-26T15:23:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I finished quilt number six. I really don't know where I find the time to teach myself something new. It must be somewhere in between work, sleep, breastfeeding the baby, cleaning the house and mopping up after the dogs. This one went smoothly for my first quilt not using square edges. I think I did pretty well with lining up the seams, B+ anyway.

I have 2 more using this design in the works and 4 others planned. A while ago, I bought fabric I liked on etsy and didn't know what to do with it until now. For the next two I am thinking about doing a new pattern for the top stitching. I don't know what yet, maybe a vine and leaf pattern. Up to this point I've only done a 'stipple' pattern for the top-stitching part so doing something else will be a huge challenge. I am going to try to draw the pattern with washable pencil so I have something to follow along while I'm stitching. The only hang up will be whether I can use the pencils on the fuzzy fabric I'm planning to use. I've decided it would be easier to move the fabric along if the fuzzy stuff was on the top rather than bottom while I stitch. That might help prevent some of the need to rip up seams, I think. It will be an experiment anyway.

Baby Field Notes loves all of the quilts. I use them to prop her up while I feed her and then when she finally falls asleep I can scoop her up in her quilt cocoon and lay her down still sleeping, snuggly and warm.

Finally - Uproarious Laughter out of Baby

2010-01-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

We have waited a long time to hear genuine giggles from little Field Notes. She has laughed out loud, LOL, but never anything remotely resembling giggles. We've made silly sounds. We've played peek-a-boo and made goofy faces. We've tickled her belly, under her chin, her arm pits. We've laughed ourselves silly, hoping that would get her going — yet nothing. One time I got a single 'heh' out of her by kneeling over her and panting like a dog.

She's 6 months old. You'd think we'd get some giggles out of her.

Then finally last night, while Mr. Field Notes had her facing forward in one of our baby carriers, she started giggling almost uncontrollably while he tossed french fries to the dogs. What tipped her over the edge was when Yuki snapped at a french fry and bounced it off her nose.

I so wish I could have instant replayed it. The giggles didn't last nearly long enough!

Those two newfs are going to be the center of her world, I have a feeling. The first time she smiled was when I told her "Here come your sisters!" when Mr. Field Notes approached the car with the two big girls so we could all go to the dog park together. Then later, her first laugh out loud was when I panted like a dog. And now, dog-induced giggles.

I love it.

Magnetic Felt Food - 'Peelable' Cantaloupe Slice - Pattern!!

2010-01-07T19:10:00.000-08:00

Ha! Here is my stroke of felt food genius - a piece of cantaloupe with rind that can be sliced off. The peel is held to the fruit by magnets that are completely concealed. I use the tiny but super strong neodymium ones. They are also lightweight. (Okay, in all honesty, it was Mr. Field Notes who suggested a fruit slice with removable peel. He's smart, too. It's just that usually he takes my good ideas and makes them even better, not the other way around. But the funky crust and cantaloupe part was all mine, neener neener. (We're not competitive with each other at all, the Mr. and I......)). Yeah, so enough about us — onto the cantaloupe.

So, this project is one you can do yourself - choosing either the easy route (not peelable, no magnets) or the harder one. I've included a pattern down at the end.

Supplies:
6 magnets
felt in the following colors: light orange, lime/neon green, tan
thread: brown, tan and orange/yellow

It really helps if you can use a sewing machine to make the criss-cross brown stitches for the outer peel. It would be a big pain to hand embroider, but could be done. I get the felt in 8x11 inch sheets for 20 cents each at my local JoAnn's. I found really small, thin neodymium magnets for sale on etsy and used those for this project.

You can click on the pattern below and save it to print out and use to cut your own felt pieces. If you don't want to make a hidden magnet one that peels, you won't need the wider strip in orange, just the one in tan and the narrower one in orange. You can also use velcro instead of magnets.

I hid the magnets completely by sewing them in place between two pieces of felt, cut slightly narrower than the outer layers they hid behind. Basically, I sewed a little basket/nest of thread around them to hold them in place - at the top, middle, and bottom of the peel and the bottom of the fruit slice.

The hardest part is making sure the three magnets in the peel meet up just right with the three in the fruit. Even when they are oriented to attract each other, if they are a smidge out of alignment, they won't hold the peel and fruit together neatly. I used the force of the magnets to guide me.

I made an interior panel to hide the magnets in the peel by sewing three magnets inside little nests of thread in three places (top, middle and bottom) between two pieces of felt that I cut slightly narrower than the outer pieces of the peel that you actually see (the green and tan). Then I sewed this in between the green and tan piece. Next I made the interior panel for the magnets that are hidden in the fruit. I laid one of the interior orange strips for the fruit on top of the lime green side of the finished peel. I laid a magnet on top of that close to wherever the magnet was in the peel. If you get close, it will just slide into place, attracted by the magnetic force. Then I put the other interior piece of orange on top of it and picked up the magnet with the two pieces of orange felt around it and then fixed the magnet into place by sewing a network of thread all around it. I repeated this for the other two magnets in the peel.

I've admired a lot of felt food for sale on etsy and have never seen anything like this before, so I think I have something unique here. There are loads of other possibilities with this general style and technique, too. Watermelons, oranges, apples — just about any peelable fruit. Cool! And, more fun for a little one =D

The Third Way

2010-01-02T19:39:00.000-08:00

There are two common ways quilters bind the three layers (top, bottom and batting) of a quilt: free motion and 'stitch the ditch.' But there is a third way, and for lack of knowing if there's an actual quilting term for it, I am going to call it faux appliqué. It involves stitching around one or more of the shapes on one side of the cloth, essentially outlining it very carefully. Since people affix appliques by stitching around their edges, I like the term 'faux appliqué.' It can be a great way to bind what might otherwise be a tricky quilt because it is very forgiving of different tension that can exist between the top and bottom layers of a quilt.

This third way takes about the same amount of time to sew as the other two methods, and may actually be less time consuming because it totally eliminates any bunching and subsequent need to rip up and redo seams. This method is best suited for cloth that has a neat pattern you want to highlight. For my quilt I chose to outline the giraffes on the animal print on the other side.

There are two ways to make quilt bindings too, and now that I've tried both ways twice, I can say I definitely prefer one. The method I prefer is to fold over one side of the quilt that has been cut slightly larger than the other (about two inches) and then hand stitch it to the smaller side while being careful not to sew through both sides. If you want a different fabric for the trim, a variation of this method involves sewing that two inch strip of cloth to the edges first. The other method, which I think is inferior (perhaps because I can't make it look good) is to sew on pre-folded, using an iron to make the creases, strips of cloth to each edge which you then sew onto the top and bottom of the quilt at the same time. It is a much faster technique, even with the need to go back over your work and re-sew where the two sides don't match up, but it looks uglier because it is impossible to perfectly line up the two sets of stitches where they didn't line up correctly the first time.

Even though I used the inferior binding technique on this quilt, I think Baby Field Notes approves of it nonetheless.

Eventually I will get back to academic blogging but there just hasn't been anything really exciting to write about in that arena lately! I will entertain suggestions though =D

A Baby Milestone

2009-12-29T18:10:00.000-08:00

Baby Field Notes sat for the first time on her own on December 27 while at her grandma's house. It was pretty neat and totally unexpected. She still falls over right away most of the time, but it's a start!

Imperfect, but Finished Quilt

2009-12-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

Finally! Here are some pictures of the quilt I recently made, the one that was a giant pain in the but to top-stitch.

Two things made this harder than it needed to be for a beginner: minky backing (plush fabric is difficult to quilt) and extra-thick batting. Yes, I learned a lot from making this one! The back may be hilly, but it's soft and WARM.

I couldn't get a better photo of the scrunched back portions, or the screwy stitches, but you can get a sense of it from this.

1,000 quilts later...

2009-12-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

Quilting is quite the challenge. I am approaching my wit's end for the one I have been working on, but I am almost done with it, and yes, I am looking forward to the next one. I think I have finally found something I am not naturally gifted at. I mean, usually when I try something, it turns out really well. But not this. I feel like a compete failure at it. I suppose that is one reason I am looking forward to the next one — I want to succeed at this.

This afternoon I ripped up seams three times before I threw in the towel and considered the last try 'good enough.' The top stitching is what is really a giant pain. I have figured out how to do it, in general, but this time I am using this cloth called 'minky' cloth for the back. It's very soft and very fuzzy and I just cannot get it to move well. Top stitching requires being able to move the cloth around fluidly underneath the needle in a free motion sort of way. This minky stuff feels nice but it is a royal pain to move it along.

My quilt backing is bunchy and looks bad. Mr. Field Notes tried to give me pep talk about it when I pointed out the flaws, but it didn't really work. I just can't look at the bunches and see them as neat little hills.

Right now I am just making quilts for us, but eventually I would like to be able to make quilts that are good enough to give as gifts, or even to sell. I want them to be that high of quality. I have a long way to go. My seams don't line up, the backing isn't smooth and so on.

I am in awe of the woman who writes http://freemotionquilting.blogspot.com/
She's got some mad skills — definitely PhD-level free motion quilting genius. She posts videos of her free motion quilting. I am going to have to study her technique.

Fortunately today I realized that when I first started making handmade paper, I was terrible at it. Now of course, I am really good at it and people even pay me to make them paper for their special occasions. Ten years ago I would not have thought so. My first attempts at making paper were awful. The sheets were unevenly thick and some had holes or super thin spots. If you held them up to a light, you could see the lumps. And they were roughly textured, not the smooth sheets I make now. I have no idea how many sheets of paper I've made, but I'd guess that it is in the thousands.

I really hope I do not have to make 1,000 quilts before I get good at making them.

Kids and Toys: Avoiding the plastic crap trap.

2009-11-24T08:33:00.000-08:00

I am against plastic toys. Not for any sound, research-based reason, but because I just don't want a huge pile of that stuff hanging around the house.

So, I aim to stick to a few basic types of toys, which are those that cover all the basics. And, really, kids are resourcesful and inventive all on their own. They will make toys out of anything. One could argue that those cheap, ubiquitous plastic toys actually stunt kids' creativity.

But, there are a few toys that don't. Blocks are one. I finally finished the fabric blocks I set out to make. There are 9, one for each letter of Baby Field Notes' name. Each side has something different on it. On the reverse side of her name letters are numbers, and on a facing side are the numbers 1-9 in arabic. Because the numeral symbols we use are derived from arabic, there are a lot of similarities in the two sets of numbers. The white sided block, right underneath the division symbol in the photo here, is a 3, for example. In addition to some letters for her to spell out the two newfs' names, I threw in some mathematical symbols. Those sides she can have fun with later. I loved math as a kid and I won't be surprised if she does too.

As far as other toys for her to play with, we have been pretty spare. Better to not start that bad habit in the first place. I do not want to get in the habit of accumulating a bunch of plastic toys that only do one or two things and that quickly lose appeal.

So, I am trying to keep toy purchases and planned ones to a minimum of what is really essential in my opinion. Stuffed animals are essential, I think. They serve the same purpose as dolls as far as make-believe goes. They will also be a stepping stone to an interest in biology and the natural world, just like going on nature walks and playing in the garden will. She'll have her giant collection of felt food too — another one that is wonderful for play because she can pretend to not only serve meals and shop for them, she can pretend to operate a restaurant and farmer's market stand too, if she wants to. I am sure her stuffed animals and I will have to sit through more than one 'tea party' where sushi is served.

Every child needs to have a truck or two — the kind you use in a sand box or out at the beach or in the dirt and mud in the backyard. We've already got a dump truck. I get a kick out of the fact that it is in use as a handy place for us to keep a stash of diapers. More fun than leaving them in a box in the closet!

Other than trucks to play with in the dirt and sand, she'll need puzzles and blocks. Both are essential in my opinion. We've already got a few puzzles. I plan on getting her a really nice set of wood blocks to build towers and bridges and whatvever else she puts her mind to, if no one else does, but I have a feeling between her grandparents, aunts and uncles and great-grandparents, I probably won't need to buy her a thing! When she's older, we'll do the Legos. Mr. Field Notes still has the Legos he played with as a kid! Tangrams are awesome puzzles as well. They are excellent for practicing spatial skills and are fun for kids and adults alike... which is why we already have a set.

I really cannot think of other toys that kids really need. Paper, crayons, balls? That's more basic stuff we already have. Mr. Field Notes and I are really just big kids, so we've already got just about every basic type of toy I can think of. The only thing we really need from toy land for the next several years are wood blocks! Ha! I make it sound like we can get away with not buying toys for the next 4 years.

Check out all the monkeys! .... And a word on BPA and behavior

2009-11-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

Just about every day I check the snow monkey web cam at the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan. I've been doing it since we came back from Japan nearly a year ago. I've enjoyed seeing the changing of seasons and the comings and goings of tourists. This snapshot is remarkable for the numbers of monkeys hanging out at the hotsprings and the complete absence of tourists. The day we visited there were easily five times as many tourists as monkeys. I had a good time but it would have been way more awesome to have them all to ourselves!

The Arashiyama monkey park right outside Kyoto is far more accesible than Jigokudani and even though a similar number of tourists frequent it, the place is bigger and everyone is able to spread out more. People are also allowed to feed the monkeys at Arashiyama from inside a cage (the people are in the cage) which makes for a fun experience — at least it was for me. I had a blat hand feeding itsy bitsy pieces of apple to the babies and also observing a bit of a sense of entitlement on the part of older monkeys who displayed a considerable amount of disdain for such stingy handouts. If I offered a piece of apple that wasn't large enough, one monkey slapped it away, more than once (so I knew it wasn't an accident). He or she readily accepted larger chunks. Spoiled much?

So, monkeys are a curious bunch, and they've been on my mind again lately on account of some research that's started to make the rounds of news sites. It's on BPA — the chemical added to plastics to make them hard and is now known to pose health risks. Well, it also apparently feminizes male behavior in monkeys. The dangers appear to be most linked to prenatal exposure. In monkeys, research published this year in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology shows that prenatal exposure of monkeys to BPA causes male monkeys to cling less to their mothers and look away more while clinging. Supposedly this is more typical of female infants in the species of monkey studied (long-tailed macaques, a close relative of rhesus macaques).

Chemicals added to plastics to make them softer are also blamed for feminizing behavior — and this time the research comes from humans. It's not experimental data, but pilot research published in the International Journal of Andrology shows that preschool-aged boys with more exposure to phthalates in utero were less likely to engage in stereotypical boyish play, specifically play fighting and playing with trucks and guns.

Weird mailing prohibitions in foreign countries

2009-11-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

This morning I had to look up the USPS postal rate to send a letter to Germany, which was easy and I got just the info I was looking for: 98 cents. But I also found something I didn't expect: the inclusion of a strange item on a list of mailing prohibitions to the country — melatonin. Weird, but understandable. I wondered to myself what other weird exclusions might be found for international mailing, so I browsed the listings for other countries and discovered these.

Weird International Shipping Prohibitions:
Feeding bottles to France
Maps showing incorrect borders of Ecuador to Ecuador
Chain letters to the Czech Republic
“Musical” cards (that play a recording when opened) to Bulgaria
Leeches to Cyprus (why single out leeches?)
Police whistles to Guatemala
Bells to Italy
"Extravagant" clothes to Albania
Stilettos to the Dominican Republic
Rulers not in the metric system to Mali
Walkie-talkies to Great Britain
Blank invoices to Costa Rica
Pencils to Tunisia
Soap or socks to Syria
Newsprint paper to Guyana
Butter substitutes to Canada
Shaving brushes made in Japan to St. Lucia
Suitcases to Paraguay
Playing cards to Greece
Footballs to Iran (if they're made of pigskin)
Cassette tapes to Iraq (as if that's the only thing that's keeping terrorism alive there)

Paper and writing products (envelopes, ink, pencils, pens, erasers, chalk, etc.) to Sri Lanka.

... and whatever you are thinking of sending to Peru, forget about it because it's probably on the extensive list of things prohibited in mail sent to Peru.

Among many countries there are also the usual postal prohibitions, such as live plants, perishable food and material which may be offensive, such as pornography or religious material that isn't congruent with the state religion (such as Bibles to countries that are predominantly Muslim) as well as articles that may interfere with the country's commerce, such as leather shoes and straw hats to Ecuador, but the unexpected, other oddball prohibitions surprised me.

I also didn't expect so many countries to ban goods made by prisoners or convicts, but many do. Postal items bearing the mark of the Red Cross are also prohibited by a handful of countries in Africa, and many poor countries around the world prohibit people from mailing used clothing, be it shoes, hats or shirts. Maybe that's to prevent the spread of lice? I don't know. That would make sense, but newsprint to Guyana? Do they not want people to start up printed newspapers or what? It's not like newsprint is dangerous like stilettos are! Perhaps they really do not want people to produce printed material. Hell, in Sri Lanka, the government doesn't even want you to write.

Mealtime Psychology

2009-11-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

Spending a week with a toddler reminded me of exactly how valuable knowledge of basic psychology can be when it comes to mealtime with a 'picky' two-year old. They are notoriously picky about what they'll eat, but rather than giving in and catering to it, parents can use a few psychological tricks to get kids munching on healthy foods.

One easy one is to give kids a concrete goal and a reward. The reward doesn't have to be sugary treat like a cookie or candy either; it can be whatever the child wants to do more than eat. In psychology, this is known as Premack's principle. For my little charge, it was a newspaper ad insert for Toys-R-Us. With obvious enjoyment, he pages through it and points out toys he likes, naming each one, and can occupy himself for a good long time. So, when he got distracted at mealtime by its presence at the corner of the table, I used that as an opportunity. I eyed his plate and estimated he had about 6 bites left (about two less than he started the meal with) and told him he could look at the flier after he ate 6 bites. He knows numbers so he knows what that meant, roughly. After each bite I told him what a good job he'd done and made a rather embarrassingly big deal of it, exclaimed how many bites he had successfully eaten. I switched to the number of bites left when he had already eaten half of them. This way, he got 'social rewards' right away for doing some of the work and when he got close to being done, he had only a small, easily met problem ahead of him. Once he ate all the bites, I gave him the toy catalog. You have to follow through if you want this incentive-reward strategy to work, and you have to be imaginative with non-sugary rewards. The goal also has to be concrete and reasonably easy to meet.

Another trick is to make eating a game. "Airplaning" food in is an obvious trick, but food can also be animated. He had dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets one day that he didn't want to eat. So I stabbed one with a fork and walked it across the plate and made a game of him biting off the dino's head, then its tail, feet and so on. Toothpicks can be used to make little men out of food too. A grape head, cooked mini carrots for arms and legs, etc. One of his forklift trucks delivered a bite of sandwich.

Both goals and games work well for getting kids to eat food they don't want to eat, but there are a few things that can be done beforehand to prevent even getting to that point.

Arranging small amounts of different kinds of foods on their plate can help kids eat more and also eat a more well-rounded diet. If one type doesn't go over well, they only have to eat a few bites of it. Yes, it takes more time to prepare, but the extra effort I think is worth it and it sets up the habit of a lifetime of eating a well-balanced meal.

Color is a good one to use to advantage too. Colorful foods are also likely to be more nutritious and can be arranged in an artful way: faces are a good choice because they have concrete 'goal' parts that can be eaten. An ear here, an eye there and soon enough the meal will be in the tummy rather than on the plate still, or worse, the floor.

Kids can and should also help make their meal. It teaches them parents and others aren't there simply to wait on them, and it gives kids an opportunity to make decisions and take ownership of their food. If so inclined, kids can also help grow the food by starting a garden or helping maintain one. Every little bit of involvement can help.

When we get to the point of having li'l Baby Field Notes eat with us, I really hope some advance planning will help us avoid having a picky eater. I like the idea of never giving her an option to eat something different from what we're having. I think our little charge always had something different at dinner, and it was always less nutritious, which struck me as weird. If I ever need to babysit again for a stretch of time, for crying out loud, I am going to the freaking grocery store and buying fruits and vegetables! And I will cut them up into little tooth pick stick men and drive them in on a dump truck if that's what it takes.

"I Wanna Dumb Fuck"

2009-11-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

Got your attention with that one, I'm guessing.

"Dumb Fuck" is exactly what it sounds like my little nephew says when he says "dump truck." The first time I heard it, he was asking me to zoom one of his toy dump trucks around: "You dumb fuck!"

I could have died. And then I figured it out. It's a terribly unfortunate mispronunciation. Why couldn't he just say "dunk tuck" instead????

Later told us he wanted to go "see the dyke. " Ahhhrrrruh??? We figured out that he wanted to go see whether he could see in the dark after we bribed him to eat his carrots.

__________

And so began our introduction to toddler-speak. My pregnant sister's water broke 2 months early and she has had to stay put in the hospital on strict bed rest, IV fluids and antibiotics and steroids for the developing baby's lungs, and since her son had never been in daycare, we went to her house to take care of him for the week. Now it's my dad's turn. He's really good with kids and I am sure he won't have any trouble understanding the little guy.

It sure brought back memories of taking care of my little sisters. I had forgotten some of my favorite toddler speak:

Irtday Ardy! (Birthday party)
Chet Boyardee (those horrid raviolis in a can)
Fo Fo Fire (pacifier)

That last one stuck so much in my mind, that I still call pacifiers "fo fo fires" in jest. Around our house, being young adults of the 90s, we have warped it into a "Foo Fighter" because really, the magical plastic nipple does fight "foo," a catchall term that can encompass so many baby complaints.

I am really looking forward to some adult conversation. Seriously. I now understand why moms sometimes slip inadvertently into toddlereez. Once you've been immersed in a second language like that, it's hard not to slip back into it. I really do not want to be one of those people.

The other thing I observed about toddler 'language' is that he readily recognized symbols that are part of language, even if they aren't English letters. Baby Field Notes has a quilt to play on that has Japanese hirigana on it and as soon as he saw it, he pointed to them excitedly and exclaimed, "Letters!" I thought that was really cool.

It was also really neat how he repeated immediately, and in the same tone, something I said without thinking — and fortunately — it was G-rated! ((Phew!!))

Round and round the mulberry bush......

POP! Goes the weasel.

He had a toy that played the tune and I naturally sang along without realizing. Pop! Goes the weasel, he instantly repeated. Yep, we heard that an awful lot after that. I had assumed someone already had taught him the words to it, but when his dad came home from work, he asked if we taught him the song.

It's impressive, that the ability to repeat something heard or seen just once, and it is easy to take it for granted. It's one of those hallmark human abilities. Apes imitate, but not with nearly the same facility.

A L'il Lobstah for Ya!

2009-10-31T22:59:00.001-07:00

Here's one for my family since I haven't been able to send email lately. Gmail has been on the fritz for a few days now. Enjoy! I'll send along better ones as soon as I can =D

Under the Sea

2009-10-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

My most recent finished project is a smallish 'activity' quilt with marine animals hidden under waves. Inside the waves I tucked cellophane so they'd make a crinkle sound when folded down to reveal the hidden animals: a few small fish, a shark, octopus, manatee, turtle, sea lion, jellyfish and a small spotted ray.

For the reverse side I used a soft, fuzzy dark chocolate fabric and between the front and back I put some batting and tacked it down with some free motion quilting. All of the animals are appliqués from a yard of cotton fabric I found on etsy.

This project was a logistical challenge but it was fun. I first had to figure out the right order to do things so that I wouldn't have seems showing where I didn't want them, i.e. outlines of animals showing through the waves. I appliqued the animals onto the waves first, then sewed them to the fabric and then sewed the sides of the waves together. Once I had those done, I sewed some curved lines to the crests of the waves to hold down the cellophane. I did it freehand and I think in the future if I make another one of these, I'll use a wax pencil to draw the lines first so I have a a guide to follow for more tidy details.

When I had all of the wave details finished, I sewed the waves onto the lighter blue cloth background, then put the layer of batting between it and the brown for the back and started pinning, tucking in folded pieces of ribbon as I went.

All told, this one took me 9-10 hours, or just about as long as the baby's quilt did!

Finished my first quilt!

2009-10-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finished the first quilt I've ever made. Bold patterns in black, white and red cloth interest newborns the most, which is why I chose them. It took me a few weeks to find cloth in enough different patterns to make it. Some I bought online through etsy, most are from JoAnn's and a few .. are from Walfart. Each of the 20 squares is different. They are a little over 5 inches square so the entire quilt is not very big, but just big enough for BFN to squirm around and eventually crawl on.

Making a quilt can seem daunting, but it isn't hard — at least not for an easy pattern like this one. I finished it in 3 days, working a few hours at a time and never for more than about three hours at a time thanks to having a very hungry baby around. I broke it into 4 parts:

* cutting the cloth pieces
* pinning pieces and sewing them together as I went
* free motion stitching the top and bottom together
* sewing the binding on

Cutting the cloth pieces was made easy by a cutting mat, rotary cutter and clear plastic ruler/straight edge. This was probably the easiest step. Pinning was tedious, but I pinned and sewed one strip at a time, so the monotony of it was broken up. I pinned and sewed horizontal rows first, alternating short vertical strips of white cloth between patterned blocks. Then I sewed long strips of white cloth between each row.

Before I started pinning I took a snapshot of the patterned blocks that I had arranged on the floor so that I had something to reference just in case I were to jumble it once I started pinning. I never needed it, but I am glad I took it just in case. I really thought about how I wanted the blocks arranged and spent about 20 minutes arranging and rearranging them until they looked right to me. I wanted to keep similar patterns and colors away from each other and also keep a balance of light and dark.

After pinning and sewing came the worst part: laying down and pinning the batting between the top and bottom (black cloth with small Chinese characters in white). There has got to be a better way to do this but I don't know what it is. The first time I pinned them, I ended up with the top taut but the bottom piece wasn't. It looked awful so I unpinned it all except for along the top and then used that as an anchor and smoothed the cloth from the top and bottom as I pinned. It was a pain in the butt but by the time I was done, both top and bottom were equally taut.

I really had no idea what I was doing. I've never taken a quilting class and the last class I had on sewing was during some class resembling 'home ec" that I "took" during high school because it was either that or typing. I think I skipped out on much of it simply because I could get away with it. Home ec was just not my speed; I was always way more interested in math and science. It's amusing that now I would be sewing like crazy! In any case, I think a quilting class or two would probably help. My quilt has flaws, but as Mr. Field Notes reminded me, no one is going to notice but me. The flaws? They have to do with the layers not lining up just right, I think. But, it could also be I missed doing some crucial thing during the next step: free motion stitching.

To help nail down the top and bottom layers, quilters can use a special presser foot. It appears to be spring loaded and doesn't press down as hard on the fabric so there is a lot of movement to it. The trick is to move the fabric around in whichever direction you want. You can go forward, side to side and even backward, easily. But, as I was told when I bought it at a quilting shop, "It takes some practice." Ha! Does it ever!

At first I set my machine to the slowest possible speed setting because anything higher and I felt like the fabric was flying all over the place and I couldn't control where the stitches went, but then as I got more comfortable with how it moved and how I could move the fabric, I found the slowest setting wasn't optimal and settled on the middle speed. Even so, it took a lot of concentration to control where the stitches went even though the stitches were free form and not in any particular pattern — just random, wavy lines. This part was definitely the hardest, I thought, and made me think twice about whether to make another quilt.

After free motion quilting the top and bottom pieces, I prepped the binding. I suppose I could have sewn the binding onto the bottom of the quilt and then folded it over and sewed it to the top, but I didn't. Instead, I cut long narrow strips of red cloth and folded it over about 1/4 inch on both long sides and ironed it so it would stay folded. Then I ironed it in half lengthwise so I could tuck the whole piece over the edge of the quilt. I knew I would have some places where the top and bottom binding edges wouldn't match up perfectly and I was fine with having to re-sew or stitch those by hand. In the end, that only happened over about 20 percent of the edge and was easily fixed by gently tugging the part that wasn't sewn down and repinning and resewing. The binding went quickly.

All in all, this quilt took a lot, lot less time than I thought it would. I estimated it would take at least 2 weeks, but I had it finished basically over one weekend and despite numerous interruptions. I am already looking forward to the next one.

My 'Dubious' Dog Bell Plan

2009-10-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

For a few months now, I've been battling the problem of what to do about the back door. When I let the newfs out in the morning, I leave the door open just a crack so that it's shut but not latched. They wrestle around outside and some variable amount of time later, they barge back in. Usually, but not always, I notice when they come in and can go shut the door. It's those times I don't notice, when the door has been open for an hour, that I want to solve.

What I need is a simple alarm to alert me that the door is open. A bell on the backdoor is perfect, so at the craft store, I choose the biggest, loudest bell I could find and figured I could hang it on the door nob from a ribbon — except — that would scratch up the door. So, I made a little padded cushion to hang between it and the door. It'll still make a nice clang when they rush in, but it won't scratch the door.

I quilted the cushion using a new free motion presser foot for my sewing machine. I have really limited experience using it, and it takes practice, so I'm inventing all sorts of excuses for using it before I use it on my next project — a quilt for Baby Field Notes (my first quilt). This door bell cushion was a perfect excuse for practice.

It ought to do the trick, and it might have the added benefit of serving as a bell for when they ask to go out. Katy will vocalize to go out, but not Yuki. Instead, she just stares at the door. Sometimes she nudges the nob with her nose, so I'm thinking we might be able to get her to deliberately jingle the bell to ask to go out.

Katy needs none of these tricks. But she's stuck with it. (Notice the slobber hanging off her jowl?)

Katy has these amazingly disgusted looks she shoots at us when she thinks we're being dumb (which is pretty much all the time when she's not sleeping — or eating). She shot me one of her dubious looks when
I told her to wait by the back door after I balanced a treat on the nob. It's her equivalent of the teenager's rolled eyes. You can get a hint of it in the top photo. Perhaps amazingly is too much, but she's got a real skill for looking at us this way when we ask her to do something that's beneath her... like 'waiting' for a treat. Being a trick she learned long ago, it is so juvenile.

Behavior Change through FUN

2009-10-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

Can we get people to choose the stairs by making it more fun?

Here's a fun video that illustrates behavior modification:

How could you not take the stairs?

A Stylish Snooze

2009-10-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

Infant Handedness: Baby Field Notes a Lefty?

2009-10-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

A greater preponderance of left-handed U.S. Presidents aside, it has me concerned, a little, that Baby Field Notes might turn out to be a lefty. She's showing what I would call a strong preference for sucking her left hand, moving her left hand more, and holding things longer with her left hand.

The first question I had was whether there's any research to suggest that early hand preference correlates with handedness later. I'm still doing the research, but so far I've turned up some interesting stuff, all published in reputable journals like Developmental Psychobiology and the International Journal of Primatology.

Handedness is associated with brain lateralization and specialization, meaning that the two hemispheres are not exactly alike. The right and left hemispheres execute different functions. For example, most people process language in their left hemispheres. Spatial reasoning, such as mental rotation of objects, is processed in the right hemisphere. Although it's not a perfect relationship, the vast majority of right-handers (90%) process language in their left hemispheres, but only about 70% of left-handers do. A higher proportion of left-handed people process language in the wrong hemisphere, or both hemispheres. It's also said that they are more likely to be dyslexic.

Nonhuman primates are generally not thought to have much language capacity (there are exceptions!). They are also thought to not show much evidence of brain laterality, i.e. their cerebral hemispheres are more symmetrical in function and do not show a left hemisphere specialization for language (there are exceptions!). Furthermore, they are not thought to show a hand preference, i.e. they don't preferentially grasp or manipulate stuff their right hands (there are exceptions with this too!).

What all this means is that other apes don't have the amazing language abilities that humans have because they don't have the brain circuitry specialized for such a complex task and their lack of hand preference is one piece of evidence for that. However, I think that there is plenty of evidence that other apes have some language capacity and that it's likely early human ancestors (6 million years ago) also had language capacity. The human ability to write and recite nursery rhymes didn't just appear out of nowhere, it built upon earlier capabilities.

Left-hand preference may be just one symptom of something gone haywire in brain circuitry regarding language development given the links between the hemisphere dominance, handedness and language processing. In other words, it's not too surprising that more lefties would have language difficulties and I hope that Baby Field Notes doesn't! Language stuff aside, it would make life a lot easier for her to not have to deal with the hassles that lefties encounter.

A good example would be the rotary paper cutter we have. It, like the vast majority of paper cutters, is set up for right handers. The blade is on the right side and the grid and platform to rest the paper on is to the left. For a left handed person to use it, they would have to either operate the blade with their clumsier hand, or, they'd have to hold the paper with their right hand and reach across their right wrist and hand to grasp the arm or blade to cut the paper with their left hand — a recipe ripe for making a mistake and winding up injured.

Speaking of language I find it interesting that the word dexterous, meaning nimble or skillful, comes from the word dexter, which means right. The dexter hand is the right hand. In contrast, left in French is gauche, which in English means clumsy or boorish. Compliments that have a subversive, not so nice element to them are left-handed compliments. I'm just saying, left handers don't just die earlier (as research has found), our whole language schema paints them in a poor light.

However, left handedness/right brain dominance is also associated with being gifted analytically, particularly in mental rotation and three-dimensional problem solving.

In an effort to find out whether early left hand preference is associated with being a lefty, I skimmed a bunch of journal abstracts, and although I haven't yet found an answer, I did learn some other interesting stuff.

At just 5 months gestation, fetuses already show brain lateralization. Using ultrasound imaging, researchers measured the size of both lobes of the brain of around 100 fetuses and found that their left hemispheres were larger than their right hemispheres. Also interesting is that the girls had larger brains.

Fetuses suck their thumbs in utero, no surprise there, but they also show a preference for sucking their right thumb and this can show up as early as 15 weeks of gestation. Also, research on some primate species, including both monkeys and two kinds of apes (bonobos and chimps) has found that they have a nipple preference — left — which is also associated with a preference for turning their heads to the right, which would be toward the left breast when being carried and while suckling. What's noteworthy too, is that nonhuman primates and humans both show a bias for left-handed infant carrying and cradling.

Early on, BFN preferred the right boob, the atypical pattern. I also have a strong preference for carrying her and cradling her in my right arm. Mr. Field Notes does it in the more usual primate fashion — with his left arm — and was the first to observe that I don't. So I guess I am odd and maybe Baby FN is too.

In any case, Baby Field Notes may indeed turn out to be a lefty, and it's not likely I will be able to change that if she is. Handedness is not learned, a plethora of research suggests. Instead, it is "a spontaneous expression of the developing nervous system unaffected by the environment," as Dr. Johanna de Vries put it best.

However, other researchers, such as William Hopkins, point out that behavior can influence brain development, so use of the right hand can theoretically cause the brain to develop asymmetrically. [I think there's some merit to that, but how likely is the preference of right hand use to be just chance?] I think it's more likely hand preference is genetically determined and there's a good chance that no amount of me putting things in Baby Field Notes right hand will change anything if she is indeed a lefty.

My intuition is also that she is likely to be a lefty, given her hand preference now.

First Date in 3 months!!

2009-10-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

I didn't set out to make it a French day, but that's what it became. Leon Le Chameleon, a kids French song I discovered on iTunes, filled the morning air. By dinnertime I was dining in a French restaurant and sipping beaujolais. Afterward, we stopped at a patisserie on the walk home. Not bad for the first date I've had with Mr. FN in three months!

Needless to say, I freaking love love love living in this sleepy corner of the state. When we lived in this town 'the first time,' none of this would have been possible and I am so glad we waited to have a kid, even if that wasn't entirely by choice. We can provide so much more for her than we would have before — not just materially — but culturally, intellectually and emotionally.

The world wide interwebs certainly helps with that. It means I can locate French kids songs about reptiles, download them to my iPod and play them on our home stereo all without spending more than a buck and 5 minutes time. Truly awesome when you think about it. Using Facebook, I can connect with friends who also have babies and even chat with them virtually for free while I am nursing and they are 3,000 miles away. I can read research articles relevant to child physical and social development in peer-reviewed journals without having to actually go to a library. The internet makes all of that possible. Back when we lived here before, none of that would have been possible. Yes, I am a huge fan of the internet. It is truly awesome. and so is actually getting away from the computer to enjoy a night out with my honey, well honeeeeeeeeeeys, now.

The beaujolais wine, yum. I really like having a glass of red wine now and then. I think it's prefectly fine to do so even while nursing so long as you keep it to one glass, have it with a meal and drink it slowly right after nursing the baby and hours before the next breastfeeding session.

Now if I could just walk through the Louvre tomorrow morning...

A Coupla' Completed Projects

2009-10-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yeah baby! I finally bumped off two projects in the time I found while Baby Field Notes slept. One is a red, black and white fabric block with two loop tags and two animal silhouettes. The other is a jungle print diaper changing pad that is padded and closes up with a velcro strap.

Both are not exactly essential items, but they are nice to have. We've had to change junior's pants a number of times on the road and it's not always easy to find a clean, soft place to do it. We have been doing it in the seat of her stroller when we pop out her infant carrier, and that works, but won't be too cool if we are caught without a diaper under her butt. Uh oh — soiled and impossible to wash stroller seat! Yuck. Diaper changing pads solve that problem because they are easy to wash.

Another 'problem' solved by this little project is what to give Baby FN to look at when she has 'alone time' when I need to cook, clean or take care of my business. If she is relaxed and full, I can set her in her crib and she can entertain herself for 10-15 minutes. During that time, she loves to look, well more like stare, at the patterns on the blocks. Although she can't deliberately grasp anything yet, eventually she will and when I rattle the blocks that have bells inside, she perks up. I wish I had bells or something to put inside the block when I made it, so bells are on the list for a visit to the craft store this weekend.

Neither one took very much time, so I am planning to make more to gift to various people I know who have or are expecting babies.

The diaper changing pad cloth with the colorful animals was initially going to be part of her room's curtains, but I changed my mind about the cloth once I decided they clashed with her rug. The changing pad has a layer of quilt batting in the middle and fuzzy, soft brown cloth on the reverse side so it can also be used as a stroller blanket instead. The soft side also has an applique lion taken from some matching cloth I had. I thought it would make that side more cute and more finished. If I had it to do-over, which I certainly do since I have loads more of this fabric, I would add another layer of quilt batting and use dark brown velcro instead of tan.

A corner of Field Notes' room, is for the time being, my work space. She rested on the folded up blue blanket on the floor in front of me while I pinned the cloth. Mr. Field Notes teased her about having to get used to watching her mama do projects. Too true.

Learn to Count Auf Deutsch

2009-10-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

While I was looking for a version of "Eins Zwei Polizei" on YouTube, I stumbled on this stop-motion animation that teaches you how to count in German, at least up to funf (5). It's amusing and charming. At the end, the groundhog stacks several pretzels and munches one.

Here's "Eins Zwei Polizei," a really catchy techno song that Mr. Field Notes discovered recently on YouTube. He says it's a traditional bed time song, although this particular song's beat is not exactly soporific! In any case, it combines counting, rhymes and repetition — perfect stuff for kids — and is really catchy.

Click here for "Eins Zwei Polizei."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frgIofVHJ08

Alexandra enjoyed listening to it the other night.

Don't talk to your baby! Blackberry instead.

2009-10-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

She's just a little monkey at this point anyway.

The guilt trips that new mothers give themselves for not talking or playing enough with their infants is ridiculous — an unwarranted. Take for instance a mother of a 2 month old I know who put a sign up over her TV reminding her to talk to her daughter instead of watching TV while she breastfeeds her. Today I was reminded of this while reading a New York Times opinion piece, 'From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk,' on my iPhone while sitting next to my baby, who was alas, not asleep. While I could have spent the entire time talking to her while I was in the car waiting for Mr. Field Notes to return with a new supply of bulk nuts from the grocery store, I instead chose to read news on my NYT's iPhone app. I admit, I felt a twinge of guilt, but it quickly dissipated.

A 2-month-old is developmentally incapable of attaching meaning to what you say; it's far more important to just interact, which you can certainly do when your baby is in the mood. Babies don't always want to interact with their parents, and they definitely let you know when they are interested. The first sign is that they return or hold eye contact. Sometimes they just want to observe stimuli around them and sad to say it, but your face isn't always the most interesting thing in the room and certainly isn't when you're breastfeeding — then it is 99% about the boob.

When not eating, Baby Field Notes finds the overhead fan appealing. The dark blades stand out in stark contrast to the white ceiling. Ditto for the shelves on the wall. She will look at them, relaxed and attentive, after she's eaten, that is if she's still awake. I rarely talk to her while I feed her. She can't respond back anyways. Bonding over a meal while talking is something reserved for a later developmental stage. There's time enough to talk during other activities (like during diaper changes), so I say, go ahead and Blackberry or iPhone or text or do whatever you do while breastfeeding baby and don't feel guilty about it.

I don't spend much time 'talking' to Baby Field Notes and when do, I often make the sounds an ape would make to her infant — soft oooohs and aaaahs, some high pitched squeals and staccato giggle grunts too — because those are the sounds she responds to. I don't think that's an accident. At this stage, she really is more simian than human. I do speak to her, but I don't always enunciate, e.g. "I wub you," and I don't always use perfect grammer, e.g. "Oh, you so cute, cute, cute, so cute you!" As long as they are exposed to language during the critical period from birth to age 7 or so, children can speak and can acquire perfect grammar and syntax — the hallmarks of language. In fact, studies have shown that this "motherese" language pattern of using short, simplified sentences, repeating words often, and using high pitched intonation is a human universal, probably because it helps in language acquisition.

For some evidence that infants are more simian than human at this early stage of development, one need only look at the shape of their vocal tracts. Apes and adult humans have a noticeably different layout of the larynx (voice box), pharynx (throat) and tongue, as you can see in the diagram that I colored so you can more easily make them out. Compared to other apes, humans have an elongated pharynx (red) and a lower larynx (purple) that is situated below rather than behind the tongue (pink). The image to the right shows the layout of a human infant's vocal tract. You can see that it more closely resembles the nonhuman ape anatomy. As an infant matures, these parts shift toward their final, adult human form — and with it, the ability to make the full range of human sounds. Similar structural changes occur in the infant's developing brain. As the infant's tongue develops more coordination and control, so too do parts of the infant's brain related to speech.

At the tender age of 2 months and for several months more, babies can't understand speech, let alone what the heck you're carrying on about when you name all the random stuff in your field of view (as the woman in the NYT article did). Babies can only judge whether or not you respond in a timely and appropriate fashion to their calls for help — so go ahead and take care of that email, get caught up on those TV shows you enjoy, read that magazine article — and tend to that crying baby by feeding her when she's hungry, changing her diaper when it's wet and saying silly things to make her smile when she's bored. There will be plenty of time later for conversations.

The Evolutionary Psychology of Andrea Yates

2009-09-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Texas woman who drowned her 5 children in a bathtub has been on my mind nearly non-stop since my husband, Mr. Field Notes, was told by his new psychology prof that evolutionary psychology has nothing to say about the case, because her genes died with the kids, whereas the other perspectives of psychology do.

I have been trying to keep from going bananas about it. After all, he is only taking the class to satisfy a dumb prerequisite required for what he really wants to study. And it's only a dumb requirement because he already has a much larger knowledge of psychology than most students who take intro retain even after 6 months.

So anyway, he started taking an introductory psychology class online through our local community college and I didn't have high hopes that it would actually be a good class, and I agree that he should just do the minimal effort required to get an A and leave it at that.

But...

When the prof so summarily dismisses my field's perspective so early on, it sort of slams the door on that perspective being seen as valuable from there on out. I just don't like the foundation it sets for the rest of the class and he can, if he chooses to, defend the perspective and show that it actually has some value, not to mention increase everyone's knowledge. I don't know if he will speak up in the class discussion forum where it came up, but I kind of hope he does.

If I were him, I'd argue that Andrea Yates killing her kids is an example of female infanticide and that under certain circumstances, killing your own progeny can increase reproductive success. It wouldn't at first glance seem so, but evolution is not as simple or as black and white as it appears.

A woman who has a lifetime of reproductive years ahead of her and has a baby that is unhealthy, sick or disabled, or for whom she is unable to care for due to life circumstances such as poverty, lack of support, or ill health herself (including mental illness), may 'choose' to kill that child (or children) and try again for a healthy one or postpone having children until her situation changes so that when she does have another child, the child will have a better chance of actually surviving long enough to reproduce. By doing so, she cuts her losses and saves wasted energy.

Rarely do other animals continue to care for sick or disabled offspring. And, there are examples of animals, primates even, that postpone their reproduction until their circumstance becomes more favorable for reproduction. Tamarins are a great example of this. Often, the reproductively mature offspring of these small South American monkeys stay with their parents and take care of their younger siblings instead of moving away to start families of their own. They could move away from home, get 'knocked up' and try to take care of those babies on their own in an area where they cannot adequately defend enough territory to have food to eat and a safe place to sleep, but they don't. And they don't go off to have those babies, realize they made a mistake, kill the babies and try all over again when they can find a place with food and shelter. Instead, they don't even bother moving out; they stay put and become adult babysitters. They invest in the genes they share with their siblings and bide their time until they can successfully raise a family of their own.

We humans don't seem to be very good at delaying reproduction until better times even with access to condoms and birth control. There are plenty of news reports of babies found in the toilet and in garbage bins, and of course, humans have plenty of abortions. There are also plenty of examples of women who wait until they're done with school and have a career and an established social support system before they start a family (and sometimes they wait a little too long and find their fertility has dropped, making this strategy not entirely foolproof either).

My point is that people kill their own kids, more often before they are even born, and while it seems counter to evolutionary theory for them to do this since it kills their genes, it doesn't kill their ability to produce kids. They can still reproduce in the future and if being motivated to kill your kids under the right circumstances means that your reproductive success isn't zero, i.e. you still have a child that survives to reproduce later, then the genes that contribute to that motivation haven't been selected against. The only thing that would truly be inexplicable from an evolutionary perspective is why people would get a vasectomy or have their tubes tied before they ever reproduce. And even that can be predicted by evolutionary theory if those people tend to contribute to the reproductive success of their relatives, with whom they share many of the same genes.

In any case, evolutionary theory would predict that a woman would be most motivated to kill her own children if:
* They are severely sick, injured, or physically or mentally disabled to the point of being unlikely to reproduce as adults,
or
* She lacks the financial, emotional or social resources (social support) needed to effectively care for them,
and
* The woman is young enough to have a better chance of successfully reproducing later than if she continued to care for the child/children.
In such cases, the benefit could outweigh the cost. For the behavior of Andrea Yates to be a perfect example of this, she would have had to be younger than 45 (an age at which there is a significantly reduced chance of being able to become pregnant) and be poor or depressed or socially isolated or have ill or disabled kids. She was 36 at the time, young enough to be able to reproduce again, and from the Wikipedia account on her, sounds as though she had little social support to help care for the children, and was convinced the children were defective.

Steven Pinker, a respected evolutionary psychologist, argues in his book How The Mind Works, that post-partum depression is a mechanism that motivates a woman to kill her newborn in just these circumstances. It has been said that Andrea Yates had been experiencing post-partum depression.

I don't think Andrea Yates is a perfect example of the 'kill your kids to bide your time and reproduce again when conditions improve' strategy, but she does fit the bill for an individual who would be expected to be motivated to do so.

Felt Food: Meat & Other random stuff

2009-09-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

I made some more felt food! It's slow going on account of nearly always having a baby in my lap but I think these turned out pretty well.

A bowl of udon noodles, braised tofu and carrots:

A steak, tuna rolls and slices of mikon:

A fillet of salmon, cinnamon roll, deviled eggs, fruit slices and crackers:

Bacon and a T-bone steak:
The bacon has wire in it so it can be bent and stay that way. The steak has a cooked and un-cooked side so it can be flipped and 'cooked.' She has an amazing collection of felt food now — it fills 9 shoebox sized containers!

My baby looks like a Francois Langur!

2009-09-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

You'll just have to take my word for it, because I lack photographic evidence, but Baby Field Notes looks just like a newborn Francois Langur.

She gets the same drowsy, relaxed look on her face. She's got the pointy little monkey ears, the plump upper lip hanging over a receding chin... the almond eyes, the fluffy red hair. A hint of a spike mohawk.

There's no way to get around the superficial resemblance of baby humans to baby monkeys, but one thing you may not know about is another way that human and monkey infants are alike — the presence of a natal coat. A natal coat is the term for the different coloration of primates during infancy that later changes. Only about 10-20% of primate species are born with different hair color than they'll have as adults.

These francois langurs are relatives of silver leaf monkeys. Like the silver leaf monkeys, they give birth to bright orange babies that stand out in stark contrast to the significantly darker adults. Black and white colobus monkeys also have babies with a conspicuous natal coat. Theirs are completely white. Chimps are born with tufts of white hair on their rears (I think it makes them look especially cute!), and some human babies and toddlers go through a blond phase before they become brunette as adults. The natal coats that chimps and humans show are less conspicuous but no less noteworthy.

Primatologists, admittedly, don't know why primates are sometimes born with a different hair color, but they have some decent hypotheses. One is that the different coloration provides a signal to others that the baby is indeed a baby and that elicits extra care from elders. Another is that the stark contrast helps adults see the babies better in a dark forest and this may help the troop better protect them from predators (who could also see them more easily, but this cost is presumed to be smaller than the benefit of adults being able to readily see the baby). Both hypotheses propose the coloration denotes the individual is young and needing extra attention. Perhaps in the same way that little blond ringlets are cute on toddlers, orange fur on these primates makes them look especially cute to adults.

No one has studied the natal coat thing among humans, and it has really not been well studied among other primates, but I think it's an interesting subject for research. Some evolutionary psychologists think that the reason that blondes are so attractive in our society is that blond hair is a trait usually seen naturally only in the young and therefore blond hair on an adult woman signals youth and therefore, fertility.

Right now Baby Field Notes has golden red hair. In the sunlight it's the color of the baby francois langur pictured above. It will be interesting to see if she developes blond hair as toddler like Mr. Field Notes had. I never did.

SAHM vs Working Outside Home: How do other primates solve the work vs childcare dilemma?

2009-09-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

Before I ever got pregnant, I knew I wanted the early experience for my baby to be consistent with how most primates have grown up for eons. Lots of body-contact, including sleeping together in a 'night nest,' nursing on demand, prompt and appropriate responses to her needs, i.e. nursing on demand, grooming baby to sooth her, and exposing her to developmentally appropriate stimuli.

Being a stay-at-home-mom, SAHM, was the foundation of that plan. I didn't, and still don't, think that working outside the home (if it entails having to be away from your baby for long periods of time) is the best way to raise a baby from a primatological standpoint. Looking at other primates, it's akin to leaving your baby with someone else, often completely unrelated to you, while you forage all day for food. No other primate does this. And there ought to be no surprise as to why this doesn't happen. Leaving a baby with someone else has its hazards: Others are never as careful or as attentive as they would be if the baby was their own.

But, it's a risk we humans accept out of necessity. Unlike our primate relatives, humans can't usually take their kids to 'work' with them so we face the difficult choice of what to do about childcare. While there are certainly jobs that are unsafe to perform around infants and children, the jobs most women are engaged in are office or retail jobs that aren't dangerous. If allowed to, I have no doubt that women could, and would, bring their babies to work with them. And, some do indeed get to do this, but it's largely a privilege reserved for few women.

For moms who must work outside the home, the myriad ways they solve the childcare problem is actually mirrored in some other primates, which I think is really cool.

When in need of childcare help, primate moms can sometimes rely on one of the baby's blood relatives. A natural first choice is the baby's father because he shares more genes with the baby than anyone else does besides the mother. But, there aren't many primate dads who assume the bulk of childcare, mainly due to their lack of paternity certainty. Yet, where males can be reasonably certain they are the father and when mom needs help, they lend a hand. Guys who shoulder much of the burden of infant care can find company with the tamarins and marmosets of South America.

These monkeys, like humans, have infants that are so energetically demanding to care for that two, and sometimes more, helpers are required. Mothers of these monkey species usually give birth to twins that are rather large compared to the mother's body size. Put together, the twins are equivalent to a 120-pound human mom giving birth to a 30 pound baby! That size of baby is both metabolically costly to carry and to feed. Human infants are also difficult to care for, not because they are particularly huge, but because they are basically born premature and consequently are far more dependent at birth than any other primate.

Tamarins and marmosets have, for similar reasons as humans did, settled on the very same solution about how to take care of such demanding creatures. The dads of these monkey species carry the infants whenever the mom isn't nursing, two babies at a time. This spares mom the energy so she can save it to forage and get enough calories to make enough milk to feed two babies at a time. These monkey dads also scan the trees looking for predators — birds of prey and snakes. They even hand over small bites of food to older infants. This sort of food sharing is something almost completely unheard of in most other primates, except humans.

This need for two parents to 'work' to provide for the infant is very unusual. Most primate moms do quite well without the help of the infant's father, but many still get help. Most often it comes from other related females such as sisters and the maternal grandmother. Getting help from female kin is typical among the langurs of India. Among langurs there, males leave the troops they are born into at puberty to avoid inbreeding. Females stay and and breed with newcomer males. The females in the troop are blood relatives, kin, who help each other with infant care. Other related female langurs carry a mom's baby for her at least half of the day. This gives younger siblings valuable parenting practice before they have babies of their own. Even so, first infants die at a much higher rate than subsequent ones, mostly due to the inexperience of their mothers.

As a rule, primates rarely, if ever, allow a stranger to hold their infant. So hiring a daycare center, nanny, or babysitter to watch one's child is a distinctly human pattern. It's no surprise really, that there are so many rules of operation for daycare centers so parents can trust that strangers will take care of the child appropriately.

Nevertheless, nonhuman primates do occasionally 'take care' of stranger's infants. This is especially true of high ranked females without their own infants. Higher ranking females have a penchant for snatching the infants of lower ranked mothers — to carry around, play with, and inspect. They don't keep them for very long, and that's a good thing, too, because sometimes they are so careless the babies wind up injured, if not a little traumatized. Their mothers are frightened, too. They also don't let the infants go willingly. But, being lower ranked, they don't have much choice.

Infant-snatching is an especially smart strategy for higher ranked females who haven't yet had babies of their own — they can practice on someone else's baby.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it daycare, because it hardly qualifies as care, and is rarely chosen, but it is paid for. Lower ranked mothers do often wind up having their baby handled by a relative stranger whom they have 'paid' in the form of grooming (lower ranked primates tend to groom higher ranked ones more so than the other way around). It's just not really a beneficial arrangement for the mother of the infant who is snatched willy nilly whenever a higher ranking female feels like it. And, infants are really attractive to them.

The last strategy for infant care is an unusual one seen among bushbabies. They park their babies in a tree cavity at night while they go off to transact the important business of being a primate, all the while leaving their baby completely alone. It is thought that bushbabies can get away with this because the hiding spots are relatively secure and their milk is fatty enough they can be away for long stretches. It is pretty bizarre though, for a primate mom to basically leave her kid in parked car to disappear for hours to 'shop' and 'chit chat.' If a human mom did that, she'd be arrested. But, it works quite well for the bushbabies.

Although there are a few different strategies for childcare that primates have adopted, one thing I didn't consider was that being at SAHM would be a departure from the usual primate pattern in one regard: I'd tend to be alone most of the time, cut off from socializing with others. That's not a big deal for me personally, because I like alone time — a lot. But, at some point, Baby Field Notes is going to have to regularly play with other kids so she can develop some social skills!

Species top to bottom: emperor tamarin, silvery marmoset, gray langur, bushbaby

Visual Development - Part 3: Handmade Boppy Cover

2009-09-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

Baby Field Notes has finally started to track moving objects regularly now with her eyes and shows interest in objects she sees. Her eye contact is more steady too. The other day I caught her looking over my shoulder at my sock monkey collection, so now it is officially time to break out the things I've made for her to stimulate her eyes and more importantly, her brain.

Recently I finished a cover I sewed for the Boppy nursing pillow I have. It's got the same bold black, white and red fabrics I used for her fabric book and the taggie blankets. I used left over ribbon to edge the cover so she has something to tug on and finger during tummy time.

The thing is, I don't use the Boppy pillow anymore. A bunch of jumbled up blankets stuffed here and there around her is way better. I just could never really figure out how to fit the Boppy around my waist and position her on it to permit easy, comfortable breastfeeding. It purports to conform to 'all body types' but it doesn't work for me, or her, so I've abandoned it in favor of blankets.

But, I still have this awesome cover for the Boppy so I am hoping to discover a way to use it for something else.

p.s. Here she is with our newest sock monkey. Can you believe that grin?!?

Primate Parenting - A Stark Difference?

2009-09-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

When I saw this product, the BéBé Bottle Sling, at first I thought, hey cute! Monkeys! Then I thought, hold up a sec — that is weird and maybe a little wrong.

The bottle sling hangs from the handle of an infant carrier or car seat and positions the bottle right on front of the babies face. Babies learn coordination and figure out on there own how to take the bottle into their mouth and drink when they want. After they're done, the bottle returns to a spot right in front of the baby's face. It permits hands-free bottle feeding.

Cool concept.

I thought I could make one of those, how hard could it be? But then I realized, perhaps wanting to save myself from yet another project or perhaps recalling all of my many childhood pet hamsters, that this is like sticking your kid in a cage and hanging a bottle inside so they can drink/eat. A flash of a baby in a wire cage with cedar chips, running wheel and a bottle full of milk mounted to the side of the cage briefly flashed in my mind.

While I think this product is potentially interesting, and useful, it also highlights a major difference between nonhuman primates and human ones, especially those in western, industrialized countries anyway.

Nonhuman primates (most often moms but there are plenty of exceptions) have their babies with them all of the time, even at night, often in full body contact. Not until the babies are old enough to crawl on their own are they away from mom and even then they stay within arms reach. Ape babies can be in full contact with their moms for 3-4 years on average, nursing on demand the entire time, even at night while mom sleeps.

But human babies, especially those in the US, get bundled up in infant carriers, motorized swinging chairs, strollers and cribs in separate rooms starting in their first days of life.

I wonder what effect all of this 'baby parking' has on human attachment — the affectionate social bonds shared between baby and parent, and later between romantic partners. After all, it has been shown that it's a warm, responsive caregiver to cling to that young primates need for normal social development.

When that soft, warm, responsive body is taken out of the equation and replaced with a cold, hard nipple hitting you in the face, how can you possibly develop normally?

When primatologists who study parenting point out the stark difference between nonhuman and (Western) human parenting, they rarely come right out and say what effect this lack of constant body contact has on us as a species. Does it make us more prone to be solitary jerks as adults? Is that why we needed to invent stuff like religion to remind us to be kind?

I don't know what the answer is, but it is reasonable to ask.

Now, really, an argument can be made that this product allows a more natural approach to feeding if you're using a bottle. When nonhuman primates feed, they can cling to mom by themselves, riding along and nursing while she forages. Her nipples hang down and baby can latch on and drink whenever. The only real significant difference between this and and the BéBé bottle sling is the nipple and the temperature of the milk.

As long as baby gets interaction at other times, as most babies would, this product could come in very handy. I just can't envision myself using it, but they ..almost.. got me with that darling monkey design.

Handmade Gorilla-Adorned Taggie Blanket

2009-09-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Although I am still obsessed with making felt food for junior, I sense I am also bound to become obsessed with making taggie blankets.

I've already made three. They are all in a black, red and white theme. One for us, one for my sis and her baby on the way, and another is a surprise for someone who might read this blog. Each blanket has 9 quilted squares and on the reverse, red 'minky' cloth with a black felt applique — heart, butterfly, and a gorilla - all shapes I have a die cut for which makes it easier. Guess who gets the gorilla =D

Between the appliques and the 'minky' fabric, I put some crinkled cellophane for sound effects. Babies like the sound it makes when it's touched, in addition to the tactile stimulation all the ribbons provide. They give them something to clutch and suck on while mom's not immediately available. The bold black and white and red patterns are stimulating for infant eyes which is why I chose them. So it's an awesome design concept from a sensory standpoint. And, eventually it will have that smell than babies love to sniff on too. There you go — four senses in one piece: sight, sound, smell, touch. And, I suppose, taste too!

I could, in theory, sell these but they are so much work that I'd have to charge $75 for them and I think hardly anyone in the whole world would pay that price for them. But, you never know. If someone wants one though, for that price, I'd do it.

I keep buying fabric (and ribbons) to make more even though I rarely have time to work on them. And, I keep piling up more sewing projects! What am I thinking?! I still haven't made the curtains for Baby FN's room!

I caved and bought more fabric for them because I decided my original plan is unfeasible because it's too complicated. So now I'm just doing curtains in all chocolate brown except for a border of animal print at the bottom. I'll use the other fabric I bought and won't end up using to make her some alphabet pillows. I remember my kindergarten class had plastic blow-up letters. I thought they were cool. I must have anyway, because I remember them! I figure she'll be able to display them on her shelves and may even still like them as a teenager. At some point, she's bound to get ridicluously upset with me and spell out some fuck off message.. (maybe I will only make her one F). Yeah, she's going to swear. I don't care so long as she uses her curses judiciously. And I do have a plan for the swears.

A jar. You put in some amount of money or something your kid likes to play with and they earn it back by doing chores, or other desirable things. But never homework. I don't believe in rewards for doing your homework. Education is its own reward.

Education is its own reward.

Barkfest 2009 will go down as Barf-fest 2009

2009-09-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

No wonder it stunk.

A cowpie the size of a dinner plate was deposited right in front of my desk. So goes the start of day three of Barkfest 2009, otherwise known as the extravaganza of festivities surrounding the addition of a new roof on our house.

Barkfest 2009 began with a bang at 7 o'clock in the morning Monday with two giant, and scared, Newfoundlands barking their heads off. However, what began as Barkfest 2009 soon morphed into Barf-fest 2009. Both dogs were so nervous about the goings on overhead and all the attendant bangs, rattles, and nearly constant thuds, that they developed upset stomachs. Even Yuki, Miss Big Tough Bossy Bossins, ran around the house with her tail firmly curled between her hind legs. Katy was much cooler about it all by the end of day one, but it has all caught up to her. She's been barfing up green bile.

I had hoped that she would be able to blow it off and acclimate to it, but nope. Poor kid. Just what she needs, numerous strangers surrounding her house, and wrecking it too. If I were her, I suppose I'd barf too.

And it was she who left the enormous, foul smelling dump by my desk, I know it.

But this afternoon, it wasn't a funky fart left by a big nervous newf that perfumed the air, it was instead — another giant saucer sized dump. In the kitchen, and diarrhea no less, with all the little air bubbles and splatter surrounding it. A foot from it was the most enormous puddle — no pond — of urine I have ever seen.

Oh very wonderful. Just what I needed with a crying baby who isn't ready to go take a nap yet. I can't hold her and bend down to clean up poop goop at the same time, so I compromised.

I put her in her swinging chair, gave her a few shots of pumped breast milk from a bottle, popped the pacifier in and hoped for the best as I went to the kitchen to clean it up. To clean poop goop expediently, all you need to do is scrape it up between two pieces of cardboard (cereal box cardboard is ideal), wipe the area with TP, then scrub and dry.

Piece o'cake.

Well, not when you have a screaming baby who either wants:
A) to be held
B) to be fed or
C) her diaper to be changed (oh goody! More runny poo!).

I chose B.

Feeding her always buys me about 10-15 minutes, so I went for that route since changing her diaper means I have to do that, then feed her for 10 minutes to get her to quiet down and nod off enough to set her back down in her big comfy chair (that's what we call her swinging chair). And I can't clean poo goo one-handed.

So there I was going back and forth between the mess in the kitchen and the swinging chair to give her hits of the bottle. That breast pump sure comes in handy. It is definitely on my top three baby essentials list.

It took several trips back and forth, and eventually Baby FN fell asleep. I think it was the vacuum that pushed her over the edge into milk coma land. And, once you clean one floor, they all need to be cleaned. And windows washed, and surfaces dusted... and and and...

That's what you have to do when you finally have a sleeping baby: Clean house.

I feel for the dogs. They are having a right well rotten time of it now. It's too hot for walks most of the day and they can't go out for yard time because the roofers need to keep the gate open to get their work done. I know the newfas don't want to crap and pee in the house. They are good girls, but when their person can't help them, there's not much point in sitting on your tail very long I guess.

Needless to say, I think the floors in the house are now the cleanest they have been since the day they were installed.

I hope I figure out a solution to the dog needs to go out immediately, on a leash, to the backyard problem soon, because we have at least 2 more days of this. Leaving the baby inside to scream her head off is not a solution. It takes the dogs far too long to get relaxed enough to do their business with all the scary people and equipment around.

........ Be thankful I did not post pictures ........

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Monkey

2009-08-31T13:04:00.000-07:00

The classic movie starring Clint Eastwood as the 'Man With No Name' inspired this awesome sock monkey - another superstar monkey created just for us by Siansburys on etsy.

Sian is a whiz at creating movie star monkeys, so long as they come with weapons.

She's done Capt. Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Carribean, William Wallace from Braveheart and Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. She's also done a Die Hard monkey and Indiana Jones.

When my dad was here last I showed him the William Wallace and Jack Sparrow monkeys. He suggested a Man With No Name monkey. It took no time to figure out that was a killer idea for Sian's next movie star monkey. I just had to pile up the cash to pounce, and I am so glad I did. She turned out another awesome monkey. I love the cigar touch, that is typical Sian. She always finds a way to capture the essence of the character.

Now, which monkey will she have to do for 2010.... ?

"Monkey Park" CleanUp

2009-08-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

This is what happens to your nice white kitchen floors when your two Newfoundlands let themselves back inside after spending an hour outside unsupervised (I was working and ..babysitting.. and admit to completely forgetting about them).

The entire kitchen floor looked like this. And the kitchen is huge. I've never really appreciated or wanted to have such a large kitch, but it's the one we've got for better or worse. And today it was definitely for the worse.

Here are the beasts at the scene of their crime.

They always hang their enormous pink tongues out when excruciatingly proud of themselves. I couldn't get them both looking at the camera together, but trust me, it is almost enough to make you instantly forget all hints of their naughtiness. Almost.

Fortunately, all traces of the crime scene were cleaned up ..by me.. in about ten minutes.

It's days like this that make me feel like I'm cleaning up a zoo.

Monkey Park CleanUp

2009-08-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

When we visited the Jigokudani Monkey Park in Japan last January I never gave a second thought to whether or how the hot springs the Japanese macaques bathed in got clean. I just figured it was a natural feature of their environment and one that was left to 'nature' to deal with.

However, after regularly clicking in to view the monkey park's web cam, I've learned that their hot springs pool does get cleaned — regularly. Every week, if not every other day. When I check in during the morning hours, Japan time, I frequently see the pool drained and workers mopping up.

That surprised me. The other thing that surprised me is that there are large rocks inside the pool that come nearly to the waters surface. So, the monkeys I saw hanging around in the center of the hot springs while I was there were not treading water, they were lounging on rocks!

The other thing that surprised me, after watching the monkeys via web cam off and on for the last 8 months, is that they still go down to the hot springs during the summer. I wouldn't have guessed that. The water is rather warm and Japan is a hot, muggy place during the summer. But these highlander monkeys do live in the mountains where it is always cooler.

Even if the monkeys can be seen there year round, I still think it is far superior to see them in the winter with snow all around. After all, they are nicknamed Snow Monkeys.

Visual Stimulation, Part 2

2009-08-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

Nursing shirts ought to be made out of cloth with funky, bold black and white patterns. Or, burp cloths need to be. I concluded this after observing that Baby Field Notes spends a significant amount of time each day staring at my inner elbow, which has got to be utterly boring. She does eventually fall asleep, which can be welcome, but for a baby who is having trouble gaining weight, not something that is welcome after 5 minutes lazily munching away. Something more interesting to look at would be a good idea... not that I need yet another project.

I finished the visual stim cloth book, and although it isn't truly useful yet, it will be. You can check it out here. I've also finished the tag blankets, three of them, one for BFN and one for her soon-to-be-nephew and another one for her other nephew.

She's already using hers. I drape it over the ugly plastic tray on her swinging chair. She hangs out in there while I try to get work done after she's fed but before she's ready to fall asleep. Today it kept her quiet for 15 minutes before she crashed out on her milk induced coma.

New Baby = No Time/No Hands for Blogging!

2009-08-17T18:30:00.001-07:00

I was going to write a real blog post, even if it was going to be short and sweet, just to get a new one on the record so it looks like I haven't abandoned blogging, but just when I get a moment to myself — finally — I go back to having no hands available for typing.

I have for the sake of getting work done, figured out how to type one handed, albeit incredibly painstakingly slowly and even more pathetically with my left hand only, however, I lack the patience to blog one handed.

So, off I go to answer the call of nature. The hungry, crying baby that is.

Neeeeeeeeeh.

Planting a Crown Imperial Flower Bulb

2009-08-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

Native to Iran, Afghanistan and the foothills of the Himalayas, the Crown Imperial is not your garden variety flower. Before being gifted three bulbs, I had never even heard of them. They were among a huge lot of bulbs a work colleague gave us and I had to check it out to learn how and where to plant them — but also what they look like.

Showy, that is is. The flower grows 3 to 4 feet tall on a stalk that ends in a tuft of green fronds somewhat like palm trees with bright, vivid flowers hanging below. I have no idea what color ours will be but the orange ones certainly are pretty. They will look great with the purple hyacinths we have.

The Crown Victoria bulbs stink to high heaven. Until I figured out where the stench was coming from, I swore one of the neighborhood dogs surprised a skunk. The bulbs are said to repel rodents.

The bulbs resemble cinnamon rolls, with an indent on the top that can fill with water and rot the bulb so it's advised to plant them on the side so water won't collect there. The plant's shoot is still able to find the surface, which given that plants grow through streets and sidewalks, is no great shocker. But, good to know, because I would have planted it in the ground wrong. Well, actually Mr. Field Notes would have. He's outside gardening on my behalf. Darn it too — if it were my choice I'd be out there with him! But until I recover completely from surgery, the weather cools off, and Baby FN is big enough to ride in a sling, I am kickin' it indoors with the AC and the whining pooches, who really resent being stuck inside while one of their people is outside 'having fun.'

I hope the Crown Imperial flowers will survive and come up in the spring. They appear in April or May and bloom for about 3 weeks, allegedly. Fingers crossed!

Labor & Delivery

2009-08-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

How I went in wanting a completely natural, unmedicated birth and came out with my worst nightmare: a C-section.

On July 13 we went to the hospital around 5 pm to preregister. My due date was still a ways off (July 27) but I thought we were long overdue for preregistration and also for installing the car seat. So we headed to the hospital to take care of the easy one. I had already been having contractions but didn't realize it. The menstrual-cramp like contractions were not the same as the Braxton-Hicks contractions I had been having but I thought these new ones were just my body's way of prepping for the big day in advance. Well in advance.

After the incredibly easy check-in, we went up to the maternity ward to look around and said we were just visiting. I asked to see a birthing room. A nurse at the front desk asked whether I was having contractions and I said no, just cramps. The birthing room was surprisingly nice. It was spacious and looked comfortable. The only weird thing was the crucifix mounted on the wall smack dab on the wall facing the bed. I didn't like that, but it is a Catholic hospital and as I found out later, I had my eyes closed during the vast majority of my late labor anyway so I wasn't going to be weirded out by the presence of a little metallic Jesus anyway.

When a nurse showed us the room she asked if I was in labor, and I said no but then we got to talking and my answers to her questions resulted in me getting checked in. They hooked me up to monitors (fetal heart rate and contraction) and we waited for about an hour. As coincidence would have it, my OB was in the hospital and came by to check in on me. That was a nice surprise. He was leaving for vacation the next day and wasn't coming back until after my due date so that was probably the last I'd see of him. I asked him to check my dilation because I was curious. I was 1 cm and -2 station. He thought it could be another week or two, no way to know and said we could all go home but to come back if things get more serious. He wasn't super specific.

So we went home. As it turned out, I had contractions all night and morning and got no sleep but I didn't think much of the cramps, really. Having experienced severe endometriosis for years and years plus an ER visit due to a ruptured cyst, these cramps were no big deal. I wasn't feeling up for work in the morning so I bagged out of that. Although I didn't realize I was in labor, I was.

I called my mom in the morning around 9 am and had some three-way talks with her and my sister (who had recently had a baby) but nobody thought I was in labor. I had been timing the contractions/cramps on a my iPhone through an app called "Labor Mate." That made it super easy to find out how long contractions were, how much time passed in between them and also what the average time was. It's a really neat app. I'm glad I used it. And, you could email the log! Awesome. Not that it helped me figure out ..when.. to go to the hospital. The app should have a pop-up screen that asks: Have you lost your mucus plug? Are you having 'bloody show'? Then go to the hospital woman! Go!

I called my OB nurse sometime in the morning and asked her how regular the contractions had to be to go the hospital. She was equivocal but said if I have a bright pink discharge, it is time to go. I called Mr. Field Notes at around 11am (while he was on deadline at the newspaper) and told him it was probably time to be thinking about going to the hospital. He got the voicemail around 11:30 am and finished out work for the daily paper then came home. I think he might have even gone swimming after deadline and in between coming home. That's how convinced I was that I was having false labor. Ha ha ha. Was I ever wrong.

I got the bright pink discharge after Mr. FN got home around 1pm. I packed my bag for the hospital.. hadn't even done that yet! And we left. It was a short, short drive to the hospital. If I wasn't well on my way into contractions-land, we could have walked. And, really, that probably would have been better for my delivery but as far along as I was, I may have ended up giving birth on the sidewalk halfway there, assuming we could even have made it that far. Yeah, I am just that crazy — thinking I could WALK to the hospital while in labor. Overachiever? Yep.

But we drove.

I had been laboring on my left side, on all fours, bent over a counter, table or chair or leaning up against a wall.

I got a ride up to the maternity ward in a wheel chair pushed by the front-desk lady. I recalled it was quite a ways to go to get there and I was tired. I hadn't slept since Sunday night (it was Tuesday afternoon).

We got settled into the birthing room and asserted myself by not putting their stupid hospital gown on. I stayed in my T-shirt and just took my skirt off so I'd be more comfortable. Two nurses came in to start an IV line. And, just like last time I was in the hospital (to have surgery for endometriosis), they had a hell of a time finding a vein to get the line started. I didn't want to be hooked up, but it was hospital policy to at least open the line. They didn't actually hook me up to an IV until much, much later. I had poke marks all over both arms and hands. I think they eventually used the smallest bore needle they had. I did not enjoy being a pincushion.

I was definitely in labor now. No doubt about it in their mind. I thought I was going to have my mom there with me, but I was 2 weeks early and she was 500 miles away still. So it was just the Official Help You Labor Nurse (OHYLN) and Mr. FN in the room with me, besides Dr. WooooooJ (who was much cooler than his nickname). He wasn't my regular doc because mine had ..just.. left for vacation. Dr. Wooj and I clicked instantly so I felt good about the whole new doc I've never met before looking at my hoo ha. OHYLN did a quick check and found out I was at 8 cm.

8 cm dilated.

I got to 8 cm dilation at home — alone.

Yes, I am that bad ass.

Everybody thought I was within two hours of delivery. But from that point (around 1:30 pm) until around 10 p.m., I stayed at 8cm despite the contractions getting stronger. I labored on my left side (at home, too) for a long time, because that's what felt the best but the OHYLN had me use other positions to try to move my dilation along. I did the birth ball, hip rocking on the ball, on all fours, leaning over the back of the inclined bed, etc but nothing was working.

My cervix was swelling too and I reverted to 6cm dilated.

An apologetic Dr. Wooj said it was really time for me to try lying on my back, which I really did not want to do, both because I knew that would be a lot less comfortable and because we'd lose the effect of gravity, but I listened to my doc and did it. The point was to get my swollen cervix to ease up, and that would theoretically be helped by taking some of the pressure of the baby's head off.

By this point, my breathing changed to the deep breaths in and out and the moans and groans and animalistic grunts associated with late labor. I went into meditation mode for the next god-knows-how-long. My eyes were closed most of the time and I kept seeing the game Zip Word. It's an iPhone game like Boggle. I had been playing it for the previous week.

Yep, it wasn't the image of 'Our Savior Jesus Christ' that got me through labor, it was...

Zip Word.

At some point, maybe around dinnertime, 6pm or so, my water broke. I barfed at the time, right immediately before or right after — I can't recall. However, the sensation of my water breaking, the explosion, was Intense. I don't recall it as being painful, but it must have been to make me barf. My water breaking was the coolest, most unexpected neat-o thing that happened during labor and delivery. I can't really describe how it felt, just that it was like nothing else I'd ever experienced and was intense. It was not even remotely similar to any waters breaking I had ever seen in the movies. Not even close. And, I would totally love to experience that again because it was so intense, but it's never ever gonna happen, ever, ever again. Humpf.

So, I eventually got back up to 8cm after being down at 6cm.

At some point prior, but after my water broke, Dr. Wooj hooked me up with an internal sensor to measure contractions. It showed weak contractions that weren't doing anything. Also at some point prior but after my water broke, the baby's heart rate slowed too much for the doctor's comfort, so Wooj administered a drug to ease the contractions, which were doubling up and too close together yet also not achieving any progress. The contractions started intensifying a bit after the drug wore off, but never fully recovered and made no impact on dilation for hours, so Dr. Wooj suggested a C-section. I had been stagnate at 8cm for six to eight hours at least.

I asked if there was anything else we could try to move things along. He said we'd tried re-positioning me and that didn't work but we could try an epidural and pitocin. The epidural was to relax me / my uterus, which he thought had been under stress for too long. I got the pitocin to re-kickstart delivery-stage contractions.

Lurch, the anesthesiologist with the iPhone, administered the epi, and then the pitocin was infused, but only for about 20 minutes or so. At that point, Wooj said he thought it was time to cut bait because the contractions were not strong enough according to the internal sensor. As much as I didn't want to have a c-section, I knew that if I wanted to have this baby it looked like the best option given the fact that for a good ten hours I showed no increased dilation.

The baby was in a good position, not posterior or anything like that which would have made labor slower and harder — nope, just my god-damned back fucking luck.

At one point after we decided to go ahead with the section, Doc Wooj remarked, "You may look like you're 15, but you have a 35-year-old uterus and it just doesn't know what to do." It seems he was right.

Upon arriving at the hospital and finding out I was at 8cm, I had been so excited. So excited! I knew that baby was going to be here soon — and on Bastille Day to boot. Bastille Day is like the Fourth of July but for France. I taught myself French after college, to read St. Exupery's Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars for all you non-Francophiles) and also to prepare for doing field work in Africa where being able to converse in French makes the job easier. I never made it to Africa for fieldwork, but I retained a fondness for French stuff and did got to France a couple times after college. Although my accent was terrible, I am sure, I still got around splendidly. A fondness for France and French stuff is something I share with Mr. Field Notes' mom. For the longest time, I actually thought she was born on Bastille Day and I thought that was pretty cool. But she was born two days prior. When it came time for Baby Field Notes to be born, I was stoked that she was actually coming on Bastille Day!

So after the writing was on the wall for the c-section, I told Dr. Wooj that if I had to have a c-section I was cool with that if it could still happen that day, on Bastille Day. It was getting on toward 10 or 11pm at the time so they wheeled me down to the OR.

There, Lurch (he really did resemble the dude from the Addams Family), the anesthesiologist amped up the epidural and Dr. Wooj and another doc did the C-section. There were some other dudes in the room too, who may have been docs or just surgical nurses, I don't know, but in addition to me, there were at least 4 maybe 5 doctors who had to be there to get Baby Field Notes into this world. That's a lot of god-damned doctors!

Mr. FN had to disappear for a while to change into scrubs. I wish I had actually seen him in his scrubs, that would have been cool, but I never did. He sat up by my head and hung out for support, which was nice, but then as soon as Baby FN was cut out (11:05 pm, July 14) he was gone. He got to cut the umbilical cord. I didn't get to watch that, which makes me sad, really, but oh well. It's not like I had a choice. The tears rolling down my cheeks as I write this suggests it still matters a lot to me that I was robbed of that experience. Humpf.

For the next three hours — that's right — three painfully long hours, I laid alone (pretty much) waiting for my body to 'wake up.' God that was torture — mental torture. To lie there virtually motionless and with no one besides the wanker nurse to keep me company for three fucking hours was worse than labor. Much, much worse. I couldn't get the dipshit nurse to talk to me. Until I could wiggle my toes and bring my knees up, three hours later, I had to watch her stare at a computer or my chart. Or, I watched the clock. I wasn't even remotely tired and I was fucking paralyzed. Could they not get a fucking TV in the recovery room? Or a ream of paper and a basket to throw wads at? Anything for entertainment. Good god. Or at least a nurse who was talkative? She was brain dead. BRAIN DEAD. I just could not get her to talk to me. Even when she was right next to me staring at my god damned chart. And I am not a talkative person but I needed some social support then, even a modicum would have been nice. At one point, I must have been beyond frustrated at this point, I asked her if she was asleep! She said that's not allowed while working or would be bad while working, or something like that. Fortunately I realized quickly this lady was responsible for giving me meds and for ultimately getting me the heck out of there, so I recovered by saying, "Well you had a very studious look about you." Then I went back to hating her and atrophying from boredom.

I thought I was going to die of boredom, literally.

Why on earth I have not yet signed a DNR order is beyond me, because that lovely experience taught me I will be better off if someone just pulls the plug on me than to let me live paralyzed and helpless. I am no Steven Fucking Hawking. Let. me. tell. you. that. So, yeah, I hated that part.

While I was being sewn up and 'recovering,' I mean dying of boredom, Mr. Field Notes and Baby FN went up to the nursery for weighing, bracelets, other health checks, her first bath, plus lots of suctioning of meconium - yuck. Grandpa Field Notes arrived about 5 minutes after they got to the nursery.

I wish things had gone differently, but I am at peace with what happened. Yes, parts still make me sad, but I'm no longer blaming myself for having to have a c-section. I am no longer crying because "I didn't get to push" and therefore "don't deserve the push pressie" that Mr. Field Notes has for me. Instead, I didn't have to push. I didn't have to have an episiotomy or tear my perineum. My vagina isn't stretched out to kingdom come and back. Some things are not so bad about having a c-section. Some things. I still am not yet approved to drive anywhere and I can't lift anything over ten pounds. And that means I cannot walk those doggies, not for a very long time. But, I am recovering and it wasn't that bad. I can imagine doing it again.

One day Baby Field Notes will learn it took two scary surgeries to bring her into this world.

Whether she appreciates that or not, I am just relieved she's actually here now and so far, apparently healthy as can be!

Easy Early Language Immersion

2009-08-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Developmental psychologists say people must be exposed to (hear and speak) all the sounds of a language in order to be able to speak it without a discernible accent later in life. People who learn a second language as an adult miss out on the important early sounds so they always speak with an accent, it is said. I don't know if I completely 'buy' that or not. But, I still want Baby Field Notes to grow up with some foreign language familiarity so she's confident in learning new languages.

At the FN's house we speak English and ... newfie. Which is to say, barks and groans and yowls and yelps are regularly heard and we're pretty good at communicating back. I really don't want newfie to be her second language. If all goes well, and we get to stay living here in this awesome town, Baby Field Notes will grow up being exposed to lots of Spanish — mainly in elementary school where the school she'd attend has a funky dual language immersion program. Mr. FN and I both know a smattering of Spanish from having taken it in high school and college so that will help us learn with her, theoretically at least. Mr. FN also speaks some German and although I can no longer speak it very well, I can still read French and plan to improve my speaking and reading skills over the coming years. Mr. Field Notes also does reasonably well with Japanese and me with Arabic.

One of the first ways Baby FN will be introduced to foreign language is through music. She's already started listening to Outlandish, a hip hop group from Denmark that performs in English, Spanish and Arabic. I've also got a good collection of French pop music: Mister Gang, Isabelle Boulay, and Teri Moise.

We've got loads of kids books too, mostly in French for later and for me now. Some are from the series Le Petit Ours Brun (The Little Brown Bear), another is Les Oeufs Verts au Jambon (Green Eggs and Ham) and of course, Antoine de St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince. We've got that on audio too — an unabridged version. Dessine-moi un mouton! I've already been having fun with that.
We'll have no lack of language resources. We just need to find some native speakers and travel a lot along the way.

Our supply of Japanese immersion material is pretty limited, but what we do have is awesome — some flash cards, dictionaries of kanji, a neat iPhone app, and a conversational language learning program by Pimsleur. I found it was very helpful for learning some Arabic. I also commissioned a special quilt with letters from the Japanese hirigana alphabet from a Japanese quilt maker I randomly found on etsy. When I saw the alphabet quilts she was making, I knew I had to have one for Baby Field Notes to use as a play mat. Here's what we came up with:

Hirgana is used for Japanese words for which there is no kanji. EmiShimosato is the place to go to get your own quilt. She has excellent craftsmanship, is very friendly and also makes non-Japanese quilts. Perhaps eventually I'll have her make us a katakana quilt too. I am still kicking myself a bit for not buying the magnetic alphabet set I saw in a dollar store in Japan. I should have. Every kid needs magnetic letters for the fridge and Japanese ones would certainly be unique. I figure she'll have this in case she wants to learn Japanese.

I think people not exposed as a child to a foreign language can learn, albeit with difficulty, to pronounce unusual sounds from a foreign language that are not present in their native tongue. But it takes practice, a good ear and a keen sense of muscle coordination between the mouth and tongue. It's much easier to just be exposed early and regularly to the sounds so they don't 'fall out' of the lexicon in the first place.

Feeding the Babe ~ The Case Against Breastfeeding?

2009-08-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

When I first read Hanna Rosin's article "The Case Against Breastfeeding" in the April 2009 issue of the Atlantic, I walked away thinking she was just making excuses to justify her decision to not give her baby the best possible nourishment she could. In less charitable moments of reflection on the article, I thought she was weak. Weak. Weak. Weak.

Now I have a new appreciation for why Rosin was compelled to write about the difficulty, and lack of necessity (in her opinion), for breastfeeding.

In a nutshell, her argument against the 'breast is best' mentality focused on 1) there's a lack of real evidence that children fair better with breastmilk than formula, and 2) women who breastfeed (which can take 8 hours a day) don't apparently value their time.

That last one was the real head-scratcher for me, that is, until I found myself nursing on demand and spending the equivalent of a full-time job doing it (without pay, too boot). I can't say that I agree with her or support her decision. I couldn't care less if she nurses her child or not, but I do care that she sets a bad example for other women who can breastfeed their baby but choose not to. Her article gives all of us newly nursing moms an ally in the decision not to breastfeed.

But, I don't want an ally in the decision to give up and switch to formula because 'it's easier,' or 'pain-free,' or 'just as good in the long run as breastmilk,' or would free up time I wish I had more of.

No, instead, I want to tough it out. I want to find ways to type one-handed effectively and to type left-handed and to actually accomplish stuff while nursing. I know I can do it; I've always appreciated a good challenge and an excuse to multi-task.

However, I recently found myself rethinking that position after numerous daily bouts of trying like mad to get my baby to latch on, suckle for real and swallow (!) and escape .. somewhat.. the insane torture without too painfully sore nipples and boobs. Seriously, labor was a cakewalk compared to this. Really.

I am hanging in there though. I am determined to make it work. There's no way, and I don't care what the research Rosin found suggests is best, I will not give my baby anything other than what evolution has crafted over millions of years to be the ideal food for the early years. That is, if I have a choice.

So, to make my job more enjoyable, and to make sure I have other outlets besides Facebooking at 3am, I snagged some new books to read:

Parenting for Primates ~ written by a primatologist turned clinical psychologist who spent the first part of her career hand-rearing cotton-top tamarins — monkeys that co-parent their babies, usually twins.
Our Babies, Ourselves ~ written by one of my favorite primatologists, Meredith Small, whose other books and articles I've used in class. She talks about co-sleeping, breastfeeding, infant crying and other topics from a cross-cultural perspective. Much of what she has to say I am sure will come as no surprise to me, but it will still be fun to read. It will also probably reinvigorate my desire to 'go native' with babycare — once I get my strength back, and my abs.
Riddled With Life - written by Marlene Zuk, a biologist whose research and sense of humor I fell in love with during one of her talks at a conference I went to. Her work is a prescription for 'Darwinian medicine' and reminds us all that a too clean house is unhealthy. One of her memorable points? A trace amount of dog crap in the bed is ideal. That's good news for this house, let me tell you. Gross, but good for the immune system.

Awesome Baby Cow Quilt

2009-07-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

When Mr. Field Notes and I visited Japan in January, one of the more unconventional things we did was go to a quilt festival.

Although we saw quite a few traditional patchwork quilts, it was the unconventional quilts that caught my eye.

This cow themed quilt continues to be one of my favorites. It had upwards of 40 different cloth cows of various sizes, shapes and expressions. At the time I walked away from the quilt, I thought it would be wonderful to have one like it but with monkeys. I could adapt the OrnaMonkeys I've made for the purpose. That was the idea, anyway. My travel companions were enthusiastic about the idea, I think because they thought this whimsical cow quilt was fantastic too! They thought I should make the monkey quilt and enter it into the 2010 quilt show. I could compete for the prizes too and maybe win some big bucks... to pay for another trip to Japan??
Maybe I will make that quilt one day.

Until then I wanted to share the crazy clever cow quilt. Here are some close-ups.

Button Nose & Eyes

Rope Tail

Ring Nose & Alphabet Body
(I like the one to his right too!)

Metallic Mama & Baby Moo Moos

As you can see, the quilt is three-dimensional in a way most quilts aren't. I really like that aspect of this one.

An Academic Dream

2009-07-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I awoke from a dream — the kind I love; the kind that makes you think hey, what if Freud was right and dreams represent wish fulfillment, what if this is what I subconsciously wish to happen?

Mr. Field Notes had taken a couple of classes in psychology at the community college (Intro and Developmental) and loved them so much that he decided he wanted to go to graduate school and get a PhD in psychology too. He wrote his dissertation on the degree of bonding between dads and their newborns in c-sections versus vaginal deliveries. Then we moved to Maine where we shared a position in the psychology department of a small liberal arts college.

That would be freaky.

Of course now, I want to plan that study (I have an idea for the general hypothesis and an inkling of an idea on how to test it). I think it could reasonably get grant funding given the topic. This may be my new direction rather than his! And, this is also so like me. Once I have too much to do, I pile on more. And I thought an academic career didn't appeal. But then recent life experiences prompted me to realize a nifty study that could actually get some grant funding and would also be a nice extension of my own dissertation research, and I suddenly find myself wanting to sit down and do some background research to write up a proposal. Huh. How about that? One can get A LOT of background reading done while nursing.

Back to work!

2009-07-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

According to my present employer, I need to get a note from my doctor to go back to work. I've decided I'm ready to go back to work. I see him Tuesday and hopefully he'll sign off on the plan. I have no idea what to expect as far as my chances; I had a c-section so I am thinking he might think it's too early. BUT —

I have already gone back to work in the job of my own creation, selling my handmade paper. I've bundled up and sent out several orders since returning home. I've even collected '09 seeds for use in cards and paper for planting season '10: arctic poppies, bachelor buttons, dianthus and snapdragons so far. The zinnia will be ready soon.

It was a relief and highly gratifying to spend time outside gathering seed pods from my plants. I even took photos of a new product and listed it for sale online. Click the pic to see it up close! The flowers are confetti you can plant and use to grow flowers. The paper flowers are chock full of seeds I gathered from my garden plants. They really do grow too.

That's how I got these beauties at the left. I tell you, I cannot wait to teach Baby FN about plants!

I am ready to go back to work! I need it for my mental health. I hate being cooped up and cut off. That is a killer. So getting back to my former routine as much as possible will be good for my mental health and ultimately my physical health too - that mind/body connection is bona fide. That's the argument I will be making if my doc balks at the idea of me returning to work. I have an easy desk job that I do from home so I can't imagine I'll need to argue much, but I am prepared in case he does.

My doc (me, LOL) signed off on me going back to my papermaking job the first weekend I got home, about 4 days after delivering (and having a major abdominal surgery). I have been taking it easy. Really, I have.
I promise.

More on the labor and delivery soon. I am really eager to share the saga, even if no one is really interested, I need to write about it soon while it's still fresh in my mind.

I labored at home by myself and reached 8 cm dilation without needing pain meds or anybody around me. I don't know what the hell I was thinking, really. It just didn't hurt as much as I thought it would and the contractions were coming 2 weeks early so I didn't even think I was in real labor. Boy was I wrong!

It turned out to be a big week of work: The butterflies I make with seeds I embed in the pulp made an appearance on the front page of etsy. Click the photo to see the butterflies close up.

They didn't sell out, but several other things did that day! What a nice surprise to have. The last time I got that level of free advertising was a year ago. What timing! Fortunately, I have been teaching Mr. Field Notes how to press the paper so I can still make paper for orders. He does the hard, physical labor part while I do the creative, technical end. It's a great division of labor. I will really miss him when he's no longer taking leave time!

Vestigial Characteristics: Monkey Features of the Human Newborn

2009-07-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Newborn babies arrive with some pre-installed software and hardware that demonstrates, beyond a shadow of a doubt, our primate heritage.

Vestigial features like Darwin's point (see post below) evoke the pointed ears of Old World Monkeys — the ancestral line of nonhuman primates from which human primates descended. Old World Monkeys have pointy, Spock-like ears. You can see them perfectly in the photo of the baby saki monkey at the right.

The ears of Baby Field Notes have this point, named after Darwin because he was the first to observe and write about it. The arrow in the photo shows where she also has a tuft of hair growing from her ears. Right now the hairs are about 1/2 centimeter long. Like the hair growing on her shoulders, this hair will thin out with age.

Perhaps you can feel a small bump along the rim of your ear. Feel along. Not everyone has one that is pronounced and if so, it is often only present on one side. That little bump is a relic of your ancestors' descent from monkeys. So is the shoulder hair and ear hair of the newborn human primate.

In fact, humans are just as hairy as other primates, including other apes. We have just as many hairs per square inch as chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans. Ours are just so fine and so short that they appear to be invisible, thus giving humans their 'naked ape' label. We're not really naked and hairless at all. Look closely at your skin under good lighting the next time you get out of the shower and you'll see what I mean. Our faces are hairy too.

As for pre-installed software, newborns have a number of reflexes that would clearly have been evolutionarily advantageous. One, the Palmer grasp, wold have been useful for grasping onto mom's hair in an emergency if she had to move abruptly. Newborns can actually support their own weight with it. I am not willing to experiment with BFN, but you can see in the following video exactly how impressive this reflex is.

Palmer Grasp Reflex

The Palmer grasp can be seen in human newborn feet as well.

The Moro reflex is another reflex useful for keeping baby with mom when she moves. Other primates occasionally hold their babies when they move, but for the most part, nonhuman primate babies latch onto mom's hair on their own and can stay in contact with her while she moves even when mom doesn't provide support. Humans retain these reflexes in spite of not being able to take advantage of them. They are atavistic, vestigial traits. These reflexes, like the presence of a nonfunctional appendix, illustrate that not every trait that is a product of evolution has a function in its present form.

Moro reflex

A Better Photo of Baby Field Notes

2009-07-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

I love her so much!

Newfies Meet Baby: Nanny Dogs Extraordinaire!

2009-07-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

Katy the Newfoundland, Chief Baby Guard,
reports for duty!

Both newfs were justifiably curious about their new housemate and also very cautious. They were not afraid. They showed gentle, profound interest in what she was.

Sniffing.

Lots and lots of gentle sniffs to her fuzzy little noggin. Those became delicate kisses to her head and cheek.

I don't recall any excitable tail wagging during the introduction nor do I recall Yuki wandering around with her tail raised. She showed complete submission. I was very surprised we did not have to establish dominance over her — she just knew. I think that must be part of the Newfoundland's "nanny dog" reputation.

After they met and things calmed down we set Baby FN down in her 'bassinet.' Both dogs peeked over the sides to see and sniff her. As things returned to relative normal at home, both Katy and Yuki would periodically go in and check on her. She doesn't fuss, she just sleeps and makes little cooing noises when she wakes. She displays an amazingly 'easy' temperament right now. Perhaps too easy, her pediatrician says. She thinks my baby is "too content," so we're agitating her around feeding times to get her properly worked up into an eating frenzy so she'll put on good weight.

Yuki, if she knew, would be flabbergasted to hear BFN needs to be prodded to eat a bunch. Flabbergasted! And no surprise here, Yuki thinks I smell fascinating. Katy hasn't shown much curiosity there — she seems to get that I am nursing "puppies." Katy has always been very maternal toward Yuki so that's no surprise either!

Regarding Katy, she immediately took charge and bossed Yuki into being a better dog. And, for her part, Yuki appears to have grown up overnight. Well, it's more like 3 nights since I was in the hospital that long. I had to have a C-section. Ugh. More on that later.

Although Katy immediately assumed command of baby guard duty, she did allow Yuki a volunteer position. And, Yuki has already earned a promotion.

Brevet captain of the Baby Watchmen
after her battlefield promotion

Baby Field Notes Arrived!!

2009-07-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Baby Field Notes decided to join the primate family early! She made her grand appearance in dramatic fashion on Tuesday. I am already admiring her prehensile toes and monkey ears. Her ears even have little tufts of hair near the 'Darwin's point.' Click here to learn what Darwin's point is.

7 lbs, 20 inches
11:05 pm, July 14

When I have recovered, I will definitely write a labor and delivery post! Right now, we all just need to catch up on some ZZZZZZzzzzzzzs.

Artful Bento Food for Kids

2009-07-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

I know it's a long way off, but I think these would be a super cool way to make taking a 'sack' lunch to school more fun.

Mr. Field Notes and I searched high and low while we were in Japan for the perfect bento box for Baby Field Notes to use once she's old enough to take her lunch to school.

We decided, without discussion (I think) that she would be sent to school with food made at home rather than eat the lunches provided at school. It's something I think Mr. Field Notes is really excited to do, I know it. I think he wants to be just like the dad in the movie Eat Drink, Man Woman. It's a good movie about food, fatherhood and family ties. At one point in the movie the dad makes gourmet bento meals for a little girl every day for school - to the envy of all of her classmates.

We have yet to find the bento box, but we have plenty of time. She's not even here yet! Speaking of that, she'd better hurry her little butt up; I am getting tired of waiting.

So, I don't know if we'll actually be sending Junior Field Notes off to school with gourmet bento box lunches, but it's something to aspire to and these are certainly inspiration!

July Scientiae: Mirror, Mirror

2009-06-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

Patchi over at My Middle Years is hosting the July Scientiae, a round up of blog posts from fellow scientist bloggers, and her theme for the month of July is "Mirror, mirror on the wall." Now normally I don't participate in these things, but I figured this is a good excuse to reflect on life and who I am, seeing as how July may very well be the month that changes my identity forever.

She asks us to "Think about who you see when you look in the mirror. How do you see yourself? How do you think others see you? Who would you rather see? Some days it might be hard to even face the mirror, other days you might stare at your teenage self looking back at you and wonder what happened since. What do you think that person looking at you is thinking? What would happen if you could step through the looking glass?"

When I look in the mirror these days, I see grown woman who's finally got clear skin for the first time in, I don't know, say 24 years?! I also see a woman whose body has undergone major changes during pregnancy, namely, an evergrowing belly and chest. But I have not fundamentally changed. I don't view myself any differently, really. Some days, if it weren't for the mondo belly that is constantly on the move, having practice contractions, and kicking up horrendous heart burn and acid reflux, I wouldn't even believe I was pregnant. It is still a bit of a shocker that I am pregnant and will be a mom perhaps even sometime this month.

I will be someone's mom.

How will that change me? I have no idea. I can't predict that. Everyone says it changes you, but does it? Really?

I know the dynamics of the Field Notes' household will change. But I cannot imagine undergoing some radical or monumental shift in my own personality or identity. I'll still be Field Notes. The responsibilities will change, but not fundamentally. I'll still have to get out of bed everyday and tend to others' needs, clean house, stay informed, earn a living, pay bills, set a good example.

My whole life I have been preparing to be a teacher.

That is who I am. That is my identity.
Being a mother, a parent, is only a very specific kind of teacher.

Once upon a time, as a little girl, I would arrange my stuffed animals in a classroom and hand out papers, teaching them lessons. Later, as a teenager, I would teach my classmates and friends, and occasionally my sister when she'd have it. I actually made homework assignments and textbooks — not real, actual textbooks with hard bindings and all, but notebooks full of information and pictures — material for my 'students' to use to learn. I wish I still had the anatomy book I made. I remember being fascinated with anatomy and drawing colored diagrams for the book I made, complete with parts for the 'student' to label.

Eventually I became a college professor and got paid to teach! At some really, really top notch schools too. I loved teaching, but I hated some of the crap that went along with it, namely the expectation to publish, publish, publish and apply for grants and always be spectacular. Now that I've been on a break from all of that, I can see that I am and have been, much happier and much less stressed even though I have much, much less disposable income.

Will I ever go back to academia? I don't know. It might not be for me. But I vow to never, ever let myself believe that I am squandering my education if I don't.

I will always be a teacher; indeed, a great teacher.
Being a mother, a parent, is just a very specific kind of teacher.

And, it's exactly the teaching role I am looking forward to now. Bring it on!

Baby Book - Finished!

2009-06-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of after-lunch hours here and there and voilá,
The finished 'high contrast' baby book:

The front cover crinkles when touched and so do all of the pages with ribbon loops hanging off the edges. There are 6 pages.

My initial thought on which grommets to use didn't pan out — they were much too small. But before I even figured that out, I had an absolutely hilarious failure of a time 'winging it' to set the original grommets on test fabric. Problem — I didn't save the instructions and couldn't figure out that it's essential to punch a hole first and *then* set the grommets. Ooops! I finally figured out the right way to do it after visiting the king of knowledge: Google. And, thanks to Dr. Google, I picked up a new tool and learned how to set metal grommets.

The New iPhones Rock!!!

2009-06-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

First we dumped cable; then we dumped TMo. I still don't regret getting rid of cable. We never watch TV. And I doubt I'll regret switching over to you-know-who as part of the deal to get the iPhones. Mr. Field Notes and I both got the sooped up ones, the 32 GB 3GS.

We decided to get the larger capacity ones so we could shoot video easily and never really have to worry about how many songs, photos or videos are stored on them. The camera is suprisingly good. Here's a short video clip, one of the first we shot on the iPhone:

I've already started emailing my family photos and videos, so we can practice for when Baby Field Notes finally arrives. The camera and touch screen do take some getting used to, but is easy enough. And it is incredibly easy to email anyone photos and video taken completely on the phone. The only thing I don't like is that when I'm doing a gmail-based chat, the computer sometimes fills in words for me and changes spellings and entire words so I end up sending mangled garbage that makes no sense. I like chatting via gmail and Facebook to cut down on texting charges. The freebie games are pretty sweet too. "Paper Toss," a free game that involves tossing paper balls into an office garbage can with a fan blowing is pretty addictive. I think I've already given myself carpal, well actually forearm, tunnel syndrome at least once!

I even chatted via Facebook with a friend today while she was in labor. She certainly raises the bar for me! Not fair, not fair.

Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy — Well, does it?

2009-06-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am sure this article has been floating around the etsy world for a while now, but I just discovered it and thought it was worthy of discussing. It basically makes the argument that etsy.com as company peddles a fantasy to women that they can start their own home business and quit their day jobs. It's a fantasy because vanishingly few are actually able to do this, according to data which etsy has gathered. The article also observes that vanishingly few men sell stuff on etsy. Why? Because they can't make enough money there. It's a valid observation and explanation.

You can scroll down to the bottom if you'd like to read the original article.

So here are my off the cuff thoughts on the essay based on my experience selling on etsy, paying attention to what other sellers do and say (in the forums especially) and seeing how my own small niche in its marketplace has panned out over time.

First off, I think the article is dead on. Yes, it generalizes about how many etsy women are basically SAHMs who are being supported by their breadwinner husbands. Truth be told, I am not so far outside of that category. But there are plemnty of women who sell stuff on etsy who don't fit that mould.

Why are male sellers not well represented on etsy? Sure it may have something to do with there not being a lot of money in it. Now, I am not a "top seller" by any means, and I have not quit my day job, but I have made at least as much as the seller highlighted in the article, so I consider that a tremendous success.

That being said, I do not make even close to enough to make what I do a full time job with health insurance, etc and not be dependent on a second source of income. So, yes, I think the etsy allure of a feminist dream is pure fantasy. However, etsy as a company does not sell it so much as the community (of women) wanting, expecting and asking how to realize that dream.

I have a hunch that most of the people who sell on etsy do not have a marketing or business background and so are unprepared for exactly how to make their arts & crafts a truly profitable endeavor. And most probably have no idea or do not accept the fact that it is difficult if not nearly impossible to make self-employment truly work, let alone operate a profitable business from home that is based on arts and crafts. Perhaps in the 'good old days' it was more possible but now with cheap, foreign-made crap ubiquitous, all it takes is our disposable culture to make it damned near impossible to sell handmade goods at a price the market will bear.

Why buy a $95 handwoven scarf when you can get a perfectly decent scarf for $10 at any number of Big Box stores? And why buy handmade paper at $3 a sheet when you can get ten times as many sheets for the price by buying handmade paper that has been imported from Nepal? Sure, some people can afford the high-end handmade stuff that is Made in America. But there are not enough of them.

Figuring out what to charge for any given item is but one problem, but I see it as the biggest one.

The vast majority of sellers on etsy severely underpay themselves and undervalue their work. Prices are ridiculously low for the time it takes to make the items sold. Some women admit to charging only for the material/supplies! Many charge a modicum for their time. Perhaps they do this becasue they know the market will not support a higher price, for reasons I just stated.

But perhaps many women simply undervalue their time. It is as though that old shampoo ad motto never sunk in: Because I'm worth it!

This is a generalization, but I think men are less inclined than women to undervalue their time and so when they find out that the etsy marketplace (with its attendent competition with other sellers there and from brick and mortar stores) does not support the higher prices they set for their work, they ditch etsy altogether or find another venue for their work where they can get the price for their work that they demand. I'd love to see data on whether men start and then abandon etsy storefronts at a higher rate than women do.

When it comes to pricing on etsy, I think women are more likely to just lower the price of their work and accept less.

We have learned to do this our whole lives. I think if women demanded more for their work and set prices that gave them fair compensation for their time, prices on etsy would be higher. But the marketplace competition does seem to drive prices down, and without being able to mass produce more creations at a lower profit margin, the end result is that no one can make very much money there at all.

I've seen the going rate for certain things I sell cut in half when a new seller moves in who undercharges for (her) time. I know how long it takes to make the things and am unwilling to accept less for my time, so I just don't sell those items as much anymore. I'd rather do that than undervalue my time.

But...

I am a feminist.

And I have a day job.

And I have no delusions about the chance of successfully working from home selling arts and crafts.

But, I still really wish women would demand more than $4 an hour for their time! It's a tremendous disservice to everyone.

Here's the original article:
http://www.doublex.com/section/work/etsycom-peddles-false-feminist-fantasy

Practice makes perfect.

2009-06-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I will throw myself into a project without practicing first, figuring I'll nail it the first try. I do this all the time when giving a talk, and the vast majority of the time it works out really, really well. The first time I give a talk, it just goes better. It's not like a I don't prepare, because I do — I just never rehearse in front of crowd or even a person or dog first to practice. It's the same for most of my class lectures too. Maybe it's my enthusiasm for the topic the first time around that makes all the difference. This is not great when you have to teach a class over and over... and over. That's why it's important to constantly tinker with the subject matter and material so it's always fresh.

With other projects, I gravitate toward the same approach but sometimes have the good sense to actually do a real trial run. I am so glad I did that today with my sewing project. I had to fiddle with my sewing machine (I don't really know what I'm doing, really) to test out some stitches and adjust some nobs to see what they did..... trial and error style.

That's how Miss Yuki's new toy came to be. I knew I needed to practice stitching a sort of patch like thing onto something before I attempted something similar on the fabric book I am making and certainly want to get the new-to-me stitch perfected before attempting fabric alphabet blocks.

The Y on Yuki's new toy turned out well, I think, not that it matters at all to her, but it certainly looks extra cute hanging out of her mouth. I used scrap fabric from a blanket project, stuffing from old dead toys and a squeaker rescued from one of those mortuary toys. Yes, we have a mortuary for dead toys. This one will probably only last a week or so.... such is life with Newfies. They are very hard on toys but absolutely FLIP OUT for soft squeaker toys. So, I get many occasions to repair and sew new toys.

Poor Katy did not get a matching one with a big K on it... not that she noticed. Yuki actually shared this one enough to make Katy happy. And, truth be told, Katy would have rather been given a real bone.

Infant Visual Development - Supplies

2009-06-23T11:48:00.001-07:00

The best visual stimuli for developing babies' vision are bold, black and white patterns with lots of contrast. With that in mind, and with my glasses slipped down to the tip of my nose librarian style, I selected fabric for my next sewing project.

Newborn babies cannot see much of anything which is why bold, stark patterns are best. If you have exceedingly bad vision (20/500), like I do, you can get a sense of what the world looks like to a newborn baby by looking at things with your glasses off. Forget about making out fine patterns — only the big shapes bordered by significantly lighter or darker shapes stand out, and even they are blurry.

I chose fabric that offered a decent amount of contrast but also had some variety in shapes - some circles, some lines, some squiggles. Different portions of the visual cortex respond to different stimuli based on how lines are oriented so it's important to represent a variety of patterns. I also tried to achieve a variety of textures because tactile feedback is important too, but being in a small town, I had to settle for what I could get. And, I am satisfied I got what I needed for these:

• 'taggie' blanket small enough to take anywhere
• fabric book
• blocks

The blanket will have 9 squares on the front and the red 'minky' fabric on the reverse. Ribbon loops and braids of ribbon will hang from the edges and maybe from in between some of the squares. I may put some cellophane in between the batting in some places so it crinkles when touched.

The book will be 6 inches square and designed to lie open flat. I may add some concentric circles in contrasting colors to the fabric that doesn't have much contrast. Concentric circles appeal to babies, as do simple faces, so I may make one of them too. On some of the pages I am going to put some cellophane in between the batting so there's auditory feedback as well as well as visual stimulation.

The blocks I will save for last and hope to make 6 so each side can have a big, bold letter or number on it in red, white or black felt — for learning the alphabet.

With the scraps, if enough is left over I hope to make some stacking rings. They, like nesting cups, are a good toy for promoting cognitive development. They provide practice in planning, ordering and discriminating sizes.

I think the White Stripes would approve of my fabric selection, don't you?

Arctic poppies!

2009-06-16T13:06:00.000-07:00

Poppies rank high up, perhaps at the top, of my new list of garden favorites. Just like lavender and snapdragons, poppies grow extremely well in my yard. It has got to be the well-draining soil and sunny exposure.

This year, a California poppy plant overtook a lavender start I had planted in the front yard. The poppy plant grew and grew and got to be the largest poppy bush I have ever seen. It was at least three feet across and two feet tall. It was a giant. And I wasn't too disappointed it killed the lavender, after all, we have lavender coming out of our ears over here, so to speak.

And just within the last week, some arctic poppies bloomed and I see a whole bunch more buds getting ready to bloom. They started from seed from poppy plants I found growing over by the college. I used many of them in my papermaking. I always lose seeds off the surface of the finished paper so I collect them and toss them outside. In the fall I tossed a lot of different seeds in a blank spot right where the dryer vents out. The arctic poppies were one plant that took off there. It's so cool that one of the tiniest of the seeds I scattered, powder really, is what took off. The hollyhocks and lunaria are going great guns too, but I've grown them before so they aren't as exciting, or as pretty, in my opinion.

Arctic, or Icelandic poppies, are native to subarctic regions of North America and Europe and are a perennial, however as I learned today, they behave like annuals in areas with hot summers. It makes perfect sense. So, I'll be gathering seeds from them this year so we can have them again next year.

The trick with the arctic poppies is to sew the seeds where you want the plants to grow - they have sensitive roots so you can't ordinarily successfully transplant them unless you are a botanical transplant specialist, I suspect.

For some truly amazing close-up photos of poppies — to make you ooh and aaah and perhaps cultivate a love of botany — you simply have to visit this website: A Close-up View of the "Icelandic (Arctic Poppy) The photo of the poppy 'hatching from its coccoon' is my favorite.

Baby Birth Announcement: It's a Gorilla!

2009-06-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

(Credit: San Francisco Zoo)

A baby gorilla who was born 6 months ago at the San Francisco Zoo has started making some appearances now that he's old enough.

He is way too cute. I don't think there's anything in the world cuter than a baby gorilla, that's my bias. Maybe my own little baby 'gorilla' will be cuter, but I doubt it. Is that mean? What can I say, I am biased I admit it: I love baby gorillas.

As with most zoo birth stories, this little bugger was rejected by his birth mama but another female stepped in to care for him. She carries him on her back in the customary "jockey style" position. The babies ride face-forward sometimes, other times facing the reverse direction. Whatever feels good and works. Having hair makes it easy to hang on to mom, giving her the ability to move around more or less unencumbered, unlike human moms who must use at least one arm to support a baby she carries.

Even though human ancestors lost their hair a long time ago, for whatever reason — it's still a mystery even though there are some interesting theories — human babies have retained the moro reflex.

Babies up to around age 4-5 months, in response to being startled by a loud noise or falling sensation, will extend their legs and arms with hands open then bring them back to their body with their fists clenched.

It's an obvious safety mechanism left over from the days when that sort of automatic response would have helped the baby grab mom's hair in an emergency - having to quickly flee a spot, nearly falling out of a night nest up in the trees, etc. I don't know for sure since no one really makes a big deal of studying such obvious things, but I'd bet all primates have this reflex as newborns.

The absence of it in humans, or presence of it but only involving one side of the body, is a sure indicator of neurological problems.

There are lots of other cool reflexes babies have only during their first few months of life. I'm looking forward to seeing them.

And, yes, I am a little envious of the whole gorilla-baby-can-hang-on-to-mom-but-human-baby-can't thing. It means I'll have to find a sling to wear if I want to have both hands free. Ideally, I'd have one I could use to nurse hand's free. Gorillas don't have to wear diapers either...
I'm just saying. Not really looking forward to that end of things. But, I have smelled gorillas, and as much as I love them, holy man alive - they freaking reek!

Let's just say they have a distinctive odor. But they are still the cutest little beings on the planet. Little Hasani, whose name means 'Handsome,' even has a baby registry at the zoo in case you want to send him stuff.

You've got to see the video of him with his surrogate mama for the first time. You can see her playing the airplane game with him - putting him up in the air with her feet and hands while she lies on her back. Chimps do this with their babies too. It aids motor development. There's a lot of continuity among species in early primate development.

Mama Gorilla Plays Airplane Game With Baby Gorilla

Container Gardening Avec Les Chiens

2009-06-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

My mother in law came to visit for the weekend and wore me out! Actually, I think it was mutual at one point, but she's still standing while I ... am ... not.

Our big success was Container Gardening With The Dogs. Yuki came outside to supervise the entire thing, but I hope it wasn't because she was eyeballing which ones to uproot later. Fingers crossed she won't revert back to her old shenanigans! She did a truly commendable job of being companionable without being intrusive, which is to say she stayed within 2 feet of us the whole time, never stole anything, gave polite kisses, didn't knock over anything and actually curled up behind me to lie down once near the end. She was so well behaved, she could have easily passed for Katy, who was inside napping the entire time. Lazy bones had a good excuse though — she went on a giant walk the night before.

Just like usual, I bought more plants than I needed to fill the containers left over from last year so we had to root out the plastic ones from the garage. I also had to get 2 hanging planters of petunias. I love them and get 2 every year just to make the porch more cheerful. They usually bloom until October so it's well worth the cost.

Salvia, zinnia, snapdragons and some others I forgot the names of make up the rest.

Snapdragons are my favorite garden plant mostly because they grow extremely well here. Because Yuki destroyed most of my snapdragons from last year, the only ones I have growing now are either in their last year (perfect for gathering seeds for next year!) or got started this year from seed so they're really tiny. They will be amazing next year, as will the newbies who just moved in. The last few years I had red ones and also peach with yellow ones. This year and the next we'll have white, yellow and rose colored ones in addition to whatever takes from the seedlings.

I plum wore myself out! But, I did so in fantastic looking toes — we started the day with pedicures. Purrrrrrrfect!

Yuki's Path of Destruction: Ways to R&R puppy style

2009-06-11T15:38:00.001-07:00

Ever since her first day home, Yuki had a fondness for the garden lilies. It's just not a fondness I appreciated very much. After the number she did on my garden last year, it's a wonder how I managed to have any plants come back this spring. But, the lilies grew back and Yuki's back at them. This time, putting her ever-so-cute-I'm-not-gonna-get-in-trouble-spin on things.

Caught messing around once more in the lilies, she hammed it up for me by sticking her nose through the porch slats long enough for me to snap a photo to share. It really was adorable, that face. She still got asked to leave, though. Which she did, thankfully, and without too much damage done.

She's been running through the lilies ever since she got here. This shot I took right before she completely disappeared in them around this time last year when she was just 8 weeks old and small enough to hide in the long green fronds.

Yuki loves to R&R in unusual places.

Under the dishwasher..

Wedged between the toilet and bathtub..

** On **
Mr. Field Notes (he assures me this is actually very comfortable). They've also been napping like this since day one with no letting up now that she's approaching 100 pounds.

Further Forays into Felt Food: Squid Dinner plus Veggies

2009-06-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it's poor form to ape other artists, but I had to try to make the squid I saw in my favorite felt food artist's shop on etsy. I am not selling it, so it's okay to plagiarize, right? Actually, most of the art I have ever made in my life is totally copied (sh! our little secret). I think most art at some level is.

The veggies are really easy to make yourself:
Green beans - piece of cake to make - just cut some green rectangles, roll tightly and stitch shut.
Cooked carrot slices - also easy - cut two quarter sized orange pieces and a long strand. Stitch the strand to one round doodad then most of the other. Leave a centimeter unstitched as an opening to put fiberfill inside, then stitch closed.
Green onion stalk - cut two of the cream pieces and two long green pieces about 1.5 centimeters wide and 10 inches long. Fold the stalks in half, pin, and machine stitch closed down the middle. Then stitch the bulb around the edges leaving space at the top to push the green stalks into the pocket and hand stitch closed.

The garlic bread and squid take a bit of fenagling but are relatively easy to make. It just takes a bunch of time to stitch the squid legs and the french knots used to make the pepper for the bread can be tedious. Two of the ten squid tentacles have little cups at the ends that were fun to make, and surprisingly easy to pull off. But, the squid 'legs' are enough of a pain that I would make them another way if I had to make another squid. One can always just buy one from GoBuggy on etsy, if she's got them in stock! Her store is very popular, for good reason. I think she's got the best Japanese felt food on etsy. But curiously enough, she hasn't done sushi. Hmmm. I'm eager to try that myself, in fact.

Ew! Newfie slobber goes everywhere.

2009-06-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

When you share your life with even one Newfoundland you get used to slime, spit, slobber, drool — and all the places it lands. It starts with your lap. The cute puppies get a drink of water then head straight for you to show off how smart they are, having found the local watering hole. Then they move on to the couches. They make convenient napkins, just like pant legs. Eventually you notice the floors get their share of the drool too. More than their share. Soon you notice slime streaks on the walls. And every once in a while, you spot it practically on the ceiling.

That's where I found some today — a nice, big long streak of dried slobber complete with fur (a lot of it) stuck high up on the wall nearly at the ceiling above the bathroom door. Ew. Gross. Thanks guys. Did you have to put it so high up?

You can sort of make it out under the words in that photo. That grayish smudge is a ball of slimed, matted newfie hair the size of a quarter. A streak of dried slobber 8 inches long hangs down from it. Ew.

Who the culprit is I'll never know. Just a little present from one of them, thought I'd share. It's all part of the charm of having newfies. Since I had the camera out, I thought I'd take the opportunity to show off the other things now hanging on the walls. No, not cobwebs and more goofy newfie goobers, just good old-fashioned art. We finally hung our art, well, most of it.

Here's a little tour.

Some Japanese fabric (the so-called lucky cat you see everywhere in Japan). If you look closely in the background you can spot Yuki hanging out on the 'big comfy chair' watching traffic. I'm convinced she's got her own version of a trainspotting game going on given how much time she spends gazing out the window from that spot.

Of course, most days the window in front of her is so covered with her own nose print slime I doubt she sees much! I'd have to clean that window every day to keep it looking nice. Vacuuming once — sometimes twice and even up to four times a day — is about as much dog-inspired cleaning as I am comfortable 'scheduling' so the vast majority of the time, that window is ... dirty. But who cares. You make a lot of 'adjustments' to standards of cleanliness when you invite a big, black shagorrific dog (or two) into your home.

Moving on... on the wall in the living room containing Dirty Window we've now got some handy dandy shelves with real, handmade art on them!

The art is a series of three 14x14 inch custom pieces on canvas I commissioned from an artist on etsy.com. She did a wonderful job with minimal instructions to make a crow, bluebird and a green egret. The shelves are from Pottery Barn. I bought them, no kidding, in 2007 as a reward to myself for finally finishing some horrendous piece of statistical analysis for my dissertation. It took until now to finally deploy them. Delayed gratification.

More framed Japanese fabric from my favorite store in Kyoto: RAAK. They specialize in material for furoshiki - the cloth used in traditional wrapping of packages, gifts and lunches. RAAK is operated by a Kyoto-based textile company called Eirakuya, which was founded 390 years ago. A trip to RAAK is a must if you find yourself in Kyoto. They make just about everything out of their fabric — furoshiki, hats, wallets, purses, teddy bears and more. It's not cheap either (nothing in Japan is) so be prepared for a big bill if you go hog wild like I did.

I bought a TON (almost literally) of furoshiki cloth. I think it was my single biggest expense from Japan, but I knew I wouldn't be back for quite a long time so I allowed myself the splurge. The framed stuff isn't furoshiki, but I saw panels like this hung all over RAAK stores in Kyoto and thought a set of three would be perfect for the dining room. The choices were immense, and difficult, but in the end I chose these three for being iconic of Japanese culture and because they fit the color scheme of the dining room (red and black). All I had to do was find three that looked good together. Michaels craft store did the custom framing. They do a great job, but definitely wait until they have a good coupon. I used one that got me 60% off the entire framing order!

Kiwi Fruit: Making felt fruits makes you crave them!

2009-06-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

On a previous post I mentioned that I thought having kids play with healthy felt food would encourage them to adopt healthy eating habits. I haven't seen whether that's true (yet) but I did find that making felt kiwis definitely made me crave them!

During grad school I made a fruit smoothie a day (just about), sometimes with yogurt and sometimes with banana and orange juice as the base. One of my favorites was a combo of orange juice, kiwi, strawberry and whatever other fruits seemed good at the time: blackberries, papaya, mango. They were so yummy. I really have no idea why I stopped. But I think it would be good to try one; I just think it would totally aggravate my pregnancy-induced heartburn. Still, kiwis are so good for you — high in vitamin C and potassium, plus fiber (which is also good for pregnancy). And, they are super refreshing during the summer heat.

I think I may send Mr. Field Notes out on a run to buy kiwis... but he's already scheduled to give Big Katy a bath this afternoon. I would scrub her myself, but I can't bend over any more and the thought of simultaneously bending over, shampooing her hugeness and keeping her in the bath tub is just too much. I can't even begin to think about how much of a royal pain in the keester she'd be to dry off. That's why Mr. Field Notes picked up that assignment. He he. Pregnancy has its perks.

And really, the thought of heartburn from that kiwi smoothie makes me just want to have a McFlurry instead. Would you believe that both the M&M and Butterfinger ones are loaded with heartburn medication? I didn't either until I started eating them..

I can always start eating kiwis again, let's see, around July 28 or so!

Besides the felt kiwis, I also finished making a felt sub bun, tomato halves, onion slices and two pieces of ham for it. Some of the goodies for the sandwich I made previously can be used on the sub, which means more versatility for making sammies. Next up: Green beans.

Big Dogs - Big Bones

2009-05-31T14:47:00.000-07:00

Katy and Yuki both got a special treat this morning — a super sized chew stick bone. Yuki went to work on it straight away while Katy hung back and slept next to it before getting up to "kitty cat" it. That's what we call it when she bats stuff around like a dingbat. She had to check on Yuki's progress a couple of times.... all part of her delaying strategy to lord it over Yuki when Yuki finishes first. Katy always waits until Yuki is finished chewing on something big before she starts in. That way she can torture the younger pup who always comes to watch Katy. One of these days Yuki is going to get wise to Katy's antics and swipe Katy's waited for treat right out from under her nose. One of these days...

.. but not today.

My Foray into Felt Food

2009-05-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days I've been making a sandwich out of felt — using no patterns, just winging it.

The sandwich has:

* 2 slices of bread, with crust
* swiss cheese slice
* 3 slices of thin cut deli turkey meat
* 2 pickles
* 2 tomatoes
* slice of ham/bologna
* an egg with yolk
* cheddar cheese slice
* 10 leaves of lettuce

After making it, I came to realize that people who sell felt food on etsy severely underprice their creations. I've seen sandwiches, albeit not as complete as this one, for sale for as little as $11! That's crazy. It took me at least an hour alone to sew just the bread and cheese. And, it's not like I'm a novice hand-stitcher either — I've been sewing since my grandmother taught me when I was 11. And I have gotten plenty of practice making all those stinking OrnaMonkeys! There is definitely an upper limit on how fast you can stich by hand, so to see people so severely underprice their work it makes me wonder.

Of course, some of you may be wondering why the heck you'd make felt food, let alone buy it in the first place. Well... if you've got kids or are expecting them, they do make super cool toys. Kids can assemble their own sandwich, picking and choosing what they want to put on it to pretend to eat (or to pretend to make their dolls eat). This let's them practice at making their own food long before it's safe to. And, there's no mess. Depending on the type of felt play food they have to play with, they may even be more adventurous with eating the real deal. Play with fake asparagus enough times, or sushi, or pita sandwiches, and maybe just maybe she'll ask to eat that instead of a whole litany of other things that wouldn't be as healthy.

Baby Field Notes will have a well stocked felt food pantry by the time she's old enough to make believe. I can't wait! I've already bought some super awesome felt food from GoBuggy on etsy. Her creations are amazing — so much so that I now know it's not worth it to even try. I did try to make a lobster like her crawfish. It has joined the domain of Projects I Started And Never Finished. What was I thinking?! You can see her talent on display here in this crawfish dinner.

Birth Classes: To Take or Not To Take?

2009-05-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

Usually when confronted with a decision where some research would help, I consult sources to help me make the tough choice. For the decision about whether to take birth classes, also called 'antenatal classes,' it didn't take much to convince to pass on them. Before you gasp and say, how could you? Let me just say that: a) they aren't free, b) the latest research report says they don't decrease the use of an epidural or create a more positive 'birth experience,' -or- reduce the rate of a C-section, and c) are considered by many women to be a waste of time — especially if you are the type to educate yourself.

Now, cost is not really a big concern, but the cost of dragging myself and Mr. FN to a class every Thursday night for 2 hours from 7-9pm is a significant cost. I start heading toward snoozeville at 7pm and both of us are ready to be out like lights by 9pm. Put me in a room where I have to listen to someone tell me crap I already googled or read on my own and make feel dippy by having me practice breathing (something I already know how to do from meditation practice) and I am bound to drop out.

Add in the latest research, reported by the BBC and based on the study of 1,000 women who participated in classes, and I am not inclined to go. The research found that taking classes to learn and practice breathing and massage techniques to reduce pain did not lower the rate of epidurals, C-section or use of instruments like vacuum and forceps, nor did it affect the perceived quality of the birth experience.

I can't say I am surprised by it, since I doubt there is anything that can prepare a person to cope with intense pain, besides perhaps, having already experienced it. Practicing breathing and massage in the absence of pain and expecting that juju magic to work when there is real pain is just plain naive if you ask me. I know it's going to hurt like hell, I can imagine it's a hell of a lot worse than the pain I got from endometriosis and cysts rupturing — the kind of pain where you are reduced to lying on the floor crying out for a god you don't even believe exists to make it stop. I remember that vividly, and I imagine what I am in for is at least that bad.

But, unlike then, now I know why the pain is happening, that it is for a good reason, and that it will not last forever. I think that can make quite a bit of difference, but we'll see. I do aim for a natural childbirth, free from drugs. Having an epidural strikes me as a good way to prolong labor and increase the likelihood of having surgery, something I definitely want to avoid. And, really, it will come as no surprise whatsoever given my academic background, that the knowledge that women have been doing this for eons is comforting.

This is one case where I can't wait to experience the pain. It means waiting will be over and the real fun can begin.

We canceled cable TV.

2009-05-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

Although a recent AP story I read on the effect of TV networks offering their primetime shows for free online said that that few households were canceling cable because of it, we did.

For the past few months, well, really, ever since I started suffering the effects of pregnancy, we stopped watching primetime TV. I just couldn't stay up until 9pm to watch shows like Lost, Grey's Anatomy, 24, Chuck. So we started watching them online either the next night at an earlier time or whenever fit into our schedule. I don't mind at all watching the shows on my laptop while curled up in bed. It is far, far more convenient.

Not sure yet whether this was a brilliant way to save a couple of hundred bucks a year on a service we rarely use, or a decision I'll end up regretting, but we canceled our cable TV subscription yesterday.

The straw that broke the camel's back was getting selected to be a Nielsen family — you know the research organization that tracks TV viewership. Well, we got our TV watching log book for the week to begin filling out last Thursday and by Saturday we had not even turned the TV on. We only turned it on for a few hours Saturday when we were dog tired from gardening in the near 90-degree heat and had need for mindless entertainment. We channel surfed.

When we hadn't turned the TV on after that come Monday night, I suggested we just cancel the cable service. Why not? We're not even using it. The TV shows we watch we watch online, and they're ending for the season anyway.

If we change our mind, we will have to pay the $50-100 to have the cable guy come back out to hook it up, but if not, we'll have an extra bit of money in the bank each month — to put into a faster internet service for one. And if we can live without it for 6 months and decide that's long enough, the cable company will offer a discount rate to entice us back — right in time for shows like Lost, 24 and Chuck to begin.

I think we made a smart move. But time will tell. In any case, internet has killed the TV in our house.

Competitive Bird Watching: Separates the sparrows from the hawks.

2009-05-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Bobolink! Yellow-billed cuckoo! Catbird! American woodcock!

Just some of the rare-to-us birds Mr. Field Notes and I were excited to see within spitting distance of the place we lived during my grad school days. I never got to see the cuckoo, and allegedly there was a black-billed one spotted too, but bygones. I am *not* competitive when it comes to birdwatching. However, some folks are and take to an extreme level.

Each year in Texas competitive bird watchers gather in Texas for the Great Texas Birding Classic, a 5 day long event in which teams traverse woods and waterways all over the state to collect the most species sightings as they can in 5 days. The prize? Bragging rights, a humongous bronze trophy shaped like an egret and $10,000 to donate to a conservation project.

I really thoroughly enjoy bird spotting and have for a long time — ever since my 7th grade biology teacher had us do a version of the Great Texas Birding Classic for a class project. I racked up quite a few species, including an American Goldfinch, which for a kid used to seeing only robins and ducks, was really, really neat. I don't think I did much authentic birdwatching after that, until I met Mr. Field Notes, who from what it sounds like, grew up going birdwatching with his dad. I say 'going birdwatching' because there's a difference between being a bird watcher and someone who goes bird watching. The former are content to see who comes to patronize their backyard feeds. The latter travel on purpose specifically to spot 'life birds' — new birds seen for the first time in your life.

Mr. Field Notes and I definitely fall into the latter crowd. Proof? We chose to go to southern Arizona in August on purpose for our honeymoon - so we could go birdwatching. Southern Arizona, specifically the area around Sierra Vista, is a birdwatcher's mecca, being the best jumping off place to see tropical species in the US. Later we went to Belize — to go birdwatching. We also snorkeled, and saw ancient Mayan ruins, and monkeys, but mostly we went there to see birds. And birds we did. We kept a list of everything we saw.

Some people who rack up birds on their lists give themselves credit for stuff they hear but not see. I think that's wrong. My personal standard is that I have to get a good enough look at the bird to make my own identification. I never check a bird onto my life list if I see it fly away after Mr. Field Notes does the ID work. I have to do that myself too, for it to count.

Another thing birdwatchers go crazy over, besides life lists and writing down heard-but-not-seens is equipment, specifically binoculars. Now, there are also spotting scopes, which come in very handy for identifying shorebirds, but, it's the binos that come in the most handy. And, as long as you are patient, and quiet, and observant, you don't need expensive ones with image stabilizing features, powerful lenses, and ultra-light weight. I get by just fine on my comparatively dirt cheep ones.

Needless to say, I am truly looking forward to teaching Baby Field Notes about birds and going out with her and Mr. Field Notes to see the birds in our area and then into the great beyond.

A trip down memory lane: Senior Year of High School

2009-05-14T13:31:00.001-07:00

It's a meme. It's an easy blog post. I have 2 hours of the LOST season finale to catch up on, not to mention work! So here's a snippet of my former life, and please by all means, do one on your blog too so I can get to know you better too, dear readers!

1. Did you date someone from your school? --- sort of

2. Did you marry someone from your high school? --- No way. But I did from my college.

3. Did you carpool to school? --- No, I walked there in the blistering cold on days when my dad wouldn't let me drive or my neighbor didn't take pity on me and give me a ride. The walk was uphill both ways, through 2 feet of snow and 50 mile per hour winds.

4. What kind of car did you have? --- I didn't get my own car until I went to grad school, but in high school I enjoyed the occasional use of a then brand spanking new Ford pickup truck.

5. What kind of car do you have now? --- Honda CR-V but I still miss my red Audi 90 quattro very, very much. It's just not practical when you have huge dogs! And the CR-V is never in the shop for repairs that cost an arm and a leg... actually more like two arms and a leg!

6. Its Friday night ... where are you? (then) --- at a football game in the fall, dances in the spring

7. It is Friday night ... where are you? (now) --- at home with Mr. Field Notes and the two newfies

8. What kind of job did you have in high school? --- senior year? I don't think I had time for a job, but maybe I worked at the shoe store for a while then. I did work at Dairy Queen early in high school until I was fired for insubordination or some such thing. Come to think of it, that's how my other high school job at a video rental place ended abruptly. Apparently if you question management practices, you lose your job — a lesson I still have not quite 'learned.'

9. What kind of job do you do now? --- One that pays well enough for the time I put into it but is generally a pride-swallowing bore of a job that I'd rather not have to do for much longer.

10. Were you a party animal? --- No.

11. Were you considered a flirt? --- Heh. No. I knew boys were nothing but trouble.

12. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? --- No.

13. Were you a nerd? --- I still am!

14. Did you get suspended or expelled? --- I think I came awfully close one time as editor of my yearbook over a photo I thought we should not have to air brush. I was and still am an ardent advocate of free speech.

15. Can you sing the fight song? --- Not anymore, but I remember its tune is Anchor's Away.

16. Who was your favorite teacher? --- My biology teachers for sure.

17. Where did you sit during lunch? --- In the yearbook office. Even then I took lunch at my desk and worked.

18. What was your school mascot? --- Bison.

19. If you could go back and do it again, would you? --- Not a chance.

20. Did you have fun at prom? --- I hated it.

21. Do you still talk to the person you went to Prom with? --- Every once in a while on Facebook.

22. Are you planning to go to your next reunion? If I live within driving distance at the time.

23. Were you a good student? Yes.

24. What did you like most about high school? I guess, being done with it.

25. Do you still talk to people from school? --- All the time on Facebook.

Katy scores another football! And we got our car back!!!

2009-05-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

If this keeps going the way it's going, we're going to have to get her a jersey! Katy just adores football. Yuki does too, which is ultimately why Katy got another football today.

We drove a long way away to get it too, but got to do so in our own car. We finally got it back from the body shop after driving around a rental for 3 weeks. Keep reading for why we had a rental for so long...

... back to the football ...

Mr. Field Notes thought Katy deserved to have her own football after Yuki usurped it from her on our last football adventure to the dog park. This is the brand new football she just got a week ago and was bought specifically for Katy after she went bananas over the one she found at the park and wanted to bring home. Well, at the dog park to break it in, Yuki just would not let Katy fetch the ball, or alternately, Katy just wouldn't assert herself to snag it out from under Yuki. So, Mr. Field Notes had to get Katy another football today so they could both have one. Now, really, we did not make a special trip to the store (an hours drive away) just to get Katy a ball, but rather were already in the vicinity on account of needing to go retrieve some custom framing that was finally ready. Target just happened to be conveniently located and we thought we might be able to find a broiler pan for Mr. Field Notes to use in his new oven. The footballs were an impulse buy, so to speak.

Katy certainly appreciated it and posed for a second or two with her new ball. I had to snatch the camera and quickly take a pic to capture the fleeting moment so the photo has a funny exposure and is out of focus, but you can imagine how majestic and proud she looked in real life as she posed.

... and so the car ...

A guy slammed into us in rear end collision while we were stopped at a red light back in February. It seriously screwed up our Honda CR-V (incidentally just a few weeks after I finished paying it off! Murphy's Law, isn't it?) He hadn't even hit his brakes, so it was a pretty good size jolt we got. No one was hurt in the slightest but our car sustained enough damage to warrant 3 weeks in the body shop. The other driver's insurance covered the repairs and the rental. The only pain in the butt was that we had to wait almost 2 months before our car actually got into the body shop.

We got a brand new Toyota Highlander to rent. It was nice. Huge. HUGE. Compared to our CR-V. There's no way we can transport 2 newfies, a baby in a car seat and any stuff in our CR-V, but we could if we had a Highlander. It rode much more smoothly than the CR-V too. More like a car than a truck. Ours rides like a truck. But, the Highlander got horrible gas mileage so we weren't tempted in the slightest to go out and trade our wrecked car for a Highlander.

I am glad to have our own car back. No more worries about whether the dogs would mess up the rental too much. They only road in it once, to go to the dog park, the day before we got the call our car was ready — Murphy's Law again. So we (ha ha ha!) I mean Mr. Field Notes, had to clean up the Highlander, when if we had known, could have waited a day on then not been bothered with the clean up. Oh well.

Pur CR-V looks a little strange with a brand new back end and darned if it doesn't look much, much nicer with a washing! I swear they returned it to us cleaner than it has ever been since we took possession of it 3 years ago. We both remarked we're going to have to actually wash it every once in a while because it looks a lot, lot less ratty when clean.

My other brilliant (I think?) idea with the car is to install the baby's car seat now and put a stuffed animal in it to get the newfs accustomed to having to sit in their places and not jump or crawl over the back seat. I think that will allow us to see whether they might ever be able to ride in the car with the baby. Otherwise, it will be just the dad guy taking them to the dog park for years while I stay home with the baby. Or vice versa. Humpf on that. That's no fun.

Copyright Infringement vs. Fair Use

2009-05-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Recently one of our YouTube videos, of the newfies of all things, was flagged for copyright infringement. I wasn't going to write about this because I didn't think I'd be able to keep it clean, but I figure as long as I make a good argument and use some good vocabulary words, I can use a few swear words in the process.

The flagged video can still be watched in the US, but not in some other countries. The video in question is called "Sleeping Dogs: Smells like 2 dogs napping." Katy and Yuki rest on the back couch barely awake despite the Nirvana song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" blaring in the background. It lasts all of 69 seconds. The Nirvana song is not played in full. In fact, there's 40 seconds of one part of the song and another 29 seconds of the tail end of the song. In other words, what I would think would constitute fair use.

I revisited the issue today when I uploaded a video of the girls playing football at the dog park. All the YouTube site says upfront is:
Important: Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself.

Okay. I didn't do that. Still not satisfied, I read the "Copyright Tips page" where I got some really cheesy advice: "The way to ensure that your video doesn't infringe someone else's copyright is to use your skills and imagination to create something completely original." Feeling like a 5th grader, I clicked on the "What about fair use" link to 'learn more' and there I went straight to "http://chillingeffects.org/fairuse/" where I finally learned something from the George Washington University School of Law after reading their answers to some of the FAQs.

In the event that the owner of the copyright to the Nirvana song (would that be Courtney Love?) takes us to court for copyright infringement, the court would weigh 4 factors. Now, nevermind that I doubt she'd bother taking the time to take us to court over 69 seconds of Newfies sleeping to Smells Like Teen Spirit, but if she or whoever actually owns the copyright did, the court would consider:

1) THE PURPOSE AND CHARACTER OF THE USE
Basically how new, novel or creative is the creation in question? The more it is something novel, the more likely there's no infringement.

2) THE NATURE OF THE COPYRIGHTED WORK
Basically, if it's a work of art as opposed to a piece of fact, the more protection the copyright holder has. I think in this case, Smells Like Teen Spirit is a true work of art. I'd be busted if this were all that mattered. But it's not, which brings us to factor 3.

3) THE AMOUNT AND SUBSTANTIALITY OF THE PORTION DEFENDANT USED
The less used, the more it falls under fair use. This is like the difference between a fleeting expletive and a whole freaking song littered with F-bombs, which I happen to not find offensive, but that's another blog post subject entirely. "If, however, the defendant copied nearly all of, or the heart of, the copyrighted work, his or her use is less likely to be considered fair." Here I think that since I used only 23% of the song (69 our of 300 seconds) and that it was not the heart of the song, I would have a leg to stand on, especially in light of factor 4.

4) THE EFFECT OF DEFENDANT'S USE ON THE POTENTIAL MARKET OF THE COPYRIGHTED WORK
This one basically says that it isn't fair use if my use doesn't circumvent the copyright owner's ability to exploit his or her original work. Basically, since no one in their right mind, or even their severely deranged mind, is going to download the newfie sleeping video just so they can listen to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and avoid having to buy the song themself, then it's fair use. My use is not a direct market substitute for the original work.

Furthermore I might point out that when visitors to this blog watch the newfies sleeping video, or find it on YouTube and watch it there, they are actually encouraged to buy the Nirvana song where they can do so with a mouse click. In essence, the copyright holder is getting free advertising and anyone who doesn't own the song and is reminded of how much they like it when they see the video, may be compelled to buy it. Meanwhile, I earn nothing from the video whatsoever.

Thus, my use of 69 seconds of Smells Like Teen Spirit as background noise in the Sleeping Dogs video constitutes "Fair Use."

I rest my case.

And, here's the football video, for anyone who is ready for some lighter entertainment. If you look closely you'll see a tiny Yorkshire terrier who wanted to play with the big girls. I think he was smaller than a football.

Football at the Park

The Week in Review

2009-05-07T17:22:00.001-07:00

Don't worry grandma! I haven't fallen off the face of the earth! You're probably the only one who still reads this blog now that I post so infrequently — for that I blame pregnancy and the horrible, horrible heartburn I still get. I wake up with it; I go to sleep with it; I pretty much feel like throwing up most of the day because of the acid reflux that goes with it. And now, I am huge enough that I walk funny and have to think about how I am going to get back up if I squat (there is no such thing as bending down anymore) to pick something up off the floor. Needless to say, I sort of wish I had more orangutan-like toes. I would put them to good use.

This week, I managed through 3 days of solo dog duty because Mr. Field Notes was away at a conference. They were sweethearts, mostly, and did remember to wake me up for work in the morning so that was good and all I really expected of them.

Mr. FN's nearly 100 year old grandpa died. He was a Lt. Colonel in the Army so he had a military service, complete with gun fire out at the army fort. We couldn't be there because I'm too far along for air travel. I'm glad I at least got to meet him when I did.

My belly button is starting to pop out, but still no stretch marks for now! Did I mention I feel like barfing? Ugh. I really wish that would stop.

Yuki has to go to bed now with her "Shreddy Bear" nearby. It's her ball made of rope. She has to have something to chew on every night before bed and the pieces of it come apart and scatter all over the floor. It makes a colossal mess, but she loves it and it helps her get to sleep, sort of like a teddy bear.

Two movies I watched were sursprisingly bad: The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I didn't have high hopes for the former one, given it's a Keanu Reaves movie and he never makes good movies. But it had Jennifer Connely in it and is a sci-fi doomsday flick so I couldn't not see it, but jeeeeeez - who the heck wrote the script? Aliens want to wipe out humans because we are killing the earth's other life forms due to our selfishness, but the alien meets a kindly (female) scientist who takes him to meet an evolutionary biologist who is working on "biological altruism." This is supposed to show him that not all humans are selfish and that we can evolve altruism. The alien still has to help him hammer out the exact formula for it though. And then later the alien has a change of heart about destroying humankind when the scientist's kid demonstrates grief. Good grief, I say! Just because one kid is capable of grieving the death of his father does not mean humans are capable of being altruistic to other life forms. Ugh. And, whatever. At least the special effects were decent and I didn't fall asleep. The Brad Pitt Button film was a royal snoozer. I fell asleep numerous times and had to watch it in two parts on different days. It was at least a good story. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. Who knew?

So that's pretty much it. Oh yeah, and I am finally reading a book for fun. Granted, it's an academic one (the only kind I really ever read) but it's a snoozer too. I don't think I'll finish it.

Good stuff happening? Ummmmm, lemme think. The flowering trees are stunning and I've already got snapdragons in bloom. The weather has been warmer and I'm eating ice cream like no one else! It cures heartburn, wouldn't ya know! And, if you put bananas and peanutes in it, you can *almost* call it dinner. Least, that's my reasoning tonight!

One bright bird brain: MAGPIES!

2009-05-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Add them to the growing list of animals that can recognize themselves when they look in a mirror: magpies. If you don't live in the West, you probably aren't familiar with them, but they are really neat birds that I happen to be rather fond of. They are showy, the West's version of a tropical-looking bird. I know some people don't like them because they're scavangers, but whatever. I think they're cool and they just got a whole lot more cool!

According to research published in the Public Library of Science - Biology, magpies passed the famous mirror test that psychologists have been using since the 1950s to determine when babies (and animals like apes, monkeys, dolphins and elephants) have a self-concept. Presumably, if they show evidence they know the image in the mirror isn't somebody else and show signs they recognize themselves in the mirror, then they have a sense of self.

The mirror test involves placing a mark on the individual while they are unconscious. Controls get touched, but no mark is left. When they wake up in front of a mirror if the marked ones touch the mark after looking in the mirror, they 'pass' the test. They also have to not touch the mark if they're not in front of the mirror.

Self-recognition is linked to highly developed understanding of social relationships, empathy and perspective taking.

According to the researchers, magpies were chosen because they compete with conspecifics for food that they hide and have a memory for where food is hoarded, making them good candidates for complex social understanding. They were also chosen because they're smarter than monkeys, i.e., magpies achieve the highest level of Piagetian object permanence (ability to recognize an object still exists even when it is out of sight, i.e. why peek-a-boo is so amusing with babies) whereas monkeys don't. Magpies are curious and "prone to approach new situations, making them ideally suited for an experiment that requires spontaneous interaction with a new and puzzling context," the researchers said.

Flu during pregnancy raises risk of schizophrenia

2009-04-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

With all the talk of swine flu, or whatever they're calling it these days, I couldn't help but recall some research I came across years ago. It found that pregnant women who contract the flu have an increased risk their child will develop schizophrenia later in life.

Schizophrenia is a serious psychosis — a mental illness characterized by disordered thinking — that can include visual and auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions. In colloquial language, it means you're insane. Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the U.S. population and can be seriously debilitating, requiring institutionalization in severe forms. You may recall the movie A Beautiful Mind in which actor Russell Crowe portrayed a man with schizophrenia. The symptoms don't usually appear until a person is around 20 years old.

The link between maternal flu infection and schizophrenia was published by Dr. Alan Brown, a Columbia University psychiatrist, in 2004 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. His research team looked for antibodies to influenza in archived blood samples from 64 women whose children developed schizophrenia as adults and a control group of 125 women whose children did not. Women who had higher levels of influenza antibodies in their first or second trimester of pregnancy had offspring who were 3 to 7 times more likely to develop schizophrenia.

Brown calculated that if the women had not had the flu during pregnancy, 14 percent of the schizophrenia cases could have been prevented, an effect he calls potentially enormous.

Although researchers do not know the mechanism of action, many think a certain protein released by the mother’s immune system in the wake of a flu infection goes on to harm the infant's developing brain. A flu infection stimulates the release of an immune system protein called interleukin-6, which in normal amounts helps the immune system do its job. However, the release of abnormal amounts of IL-6 is associated with autoimmune disorders such as allergies and asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and more. In the wake of a flu infection, the immune system can go haywire. The normal result of fever, inflammation and secretion of glucocorticoids like cortisol, aka the 'stress hormone,' can go bananas and cause the immune system to destroy good cells — possibly in this case of schizophrenia, brain cells in specific regions of the brain of the developing fetus.

Given the known genetic links to schizophrenia, it is also possible that an inherited predisposition to an abnormal immune system reaction in the wake of flu is another risk factor. After all, the vast majority of women who get the flu during pregnancy do not have children that grow up to have schizophrenia. According to Brown's research, the overall risk of schizophrenia from flu is small — 97% of children born to women who got the flu while pregnant will not develop schizophrenia. But what if you have inherited a predisposition to over-react to the flu? Perhaps your risk of having a child with schizophrenia goes up — way up.

This is certainly something they arouses my concern given I have a family history of autoimmune disorders in my immediate family. My mom is a walking advertisement for screwed up immune system and my little sister developed an autoimmune response to the flu when she was 6 — a rare condition called ITP that put her in the hospital for a week. Then there's a more distant relative who actually had schizophrenia. Needless to say, I have already started taking precautions at work and will happily become a hypochondriac washing, antisocial freak just to be safe.

Regardless, it is interesting that schizophrenia may yet turn out to be a partially communicable disease.

By the way, if you are sick, please cough into a tissue or your sleeve and not your hands!!
If you put those germs on your hands you spread em!

Synopsis of a Week: AKA Finally some time to myself!

2009-04-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

What a long week! In lieu of an academic post, I'm going to wrap up the week in RBoC style. That's random blogging on couch — so appropriate given I haven't been feeling well and finally managed to move from the bed to the couch. What an upgrade! And perfect timing too, given that I've caught up on all the online TV that I no longer have the staying power to stay up for to watch 'live.' I do have an academic post planned that I hope turns out to be at least timely if not really fascinating. It's on the psychological ramifications of swine flue.

The Week in Review

* Two sets of parents visit.
One thing can be said for certain — when parents visit, they really want to make sure you eat! I have never eaten so much before in my life, or out so many times in a week. I love that it ran the gammut from fast food (Quizos sandwiches) to upscale sit down places. It's really, really nice when parents pick up the bill, too! Yay! THANK YOU!!! They also brought presents for the baby. I really don't think we will ever have to buy baby clothes — ever. We now have so many onesies and sun dresses I honestly don't know where we're going to store them all. Even the newfies got pressies (pancake breakfast) from 'grandpa.' Video at the end!

* Most of baby stuff purchased.
What a relief this is to have researched major items that need to be bought and the reviews they've gotten and to have finally pulled the trigger on purchases. In a nutshell, the most important things we have checked off the list:

Crib: a dark (walnut stain) hardwood crib made by Atlantic Furniture.
Stroller: Baby Jogger City Mini stroller in brown/tan found on Albee baby for $20 less than Amazon. I decided on this one since it had the best overall reviews for the price.
Car seat: Evenflo triumph advance LX convertible seat. It accomodates newborns of 5 pounds to kids up to 50 pounds, going from rear facing infant seat to a forward facing booster seat. See it here.
Oven: Yeah, I know, how is this a baby item? Our oven has it's controls on the front within kid reach instead of up on top, and with a local appliance store having a big going out of business sale, I decided these were two great reasons to finally buy Mr. Field Notes a new oven. He's the house chef, and we are both thankful for that! The oven has a smooth top, so no more ugly, dirty coils.
Ceiling fan: He. he. he. The ceiling fan in the living room suddenly looked really, really ugly once we (ha ha ha, I mean Mr. Field Notes) put in the wood floor. So I got us a new one. Since it will circulate air in to the baby room, it's really a purchase for the baby.
Boppy: The pillow that makes nursing easier. It's basically an open donut. I got a super cute cover for it too.
Things still needed: A baby bath tub, ear thermometer, crib sheets, burp cloths, diapers and a baby carrier/sling. I know there's probably other stuff, but shouldn't be anything major left.

* Got my hair cut!
I chickened out of the freebie-teaching hair cut I had volunteered for at a new local salon (that looked sketchy) and got one at a swanky spa-salon while my mom and sisters were in town. I ended up having about 4 inches taken off the bottom and layers put in. It was amusing — and exhausting — having my mom and two sisters along for the ride. Even my new gay hairstylist said my 'mom's a bit much!' How about that? Well, it's true. I told him there's a reason I went into psychology! He was fun and did a great job with my hair. It weighs a lot less now and I can do more with it on account of him thinning it out in the back and adding layers. I even wore it curly for the day which is a huge change.

While we were there we met a local celebrity - Tonya from MTV's the Real World. We didn't recognize her until my stylist whispered it was her. She chatted with my sisters for a while. It was amusing. They thought she was pretty trashy-looking and her boyfriend was mega preppy. It was all mildly amusing. Apparently she told my sisters that I'm 'one of the cute pregnant ladies.' And, thanks to mom and sister #2, I now have 2 curling irons to experiment with when.... I have time or want to raise the eyebrows of everyone at work. They've only even seen me with straight or completely pulled back hair. Curls. Ha!

* DOGS
They got new toys. My sister's little boy thought their favorite old toy — Big Green Monster — was pretty cool. And why not? It has squakers, rattles and makes a weird farting noise when squeezed. He also liked the rings they chew on and play tug of war with. I think he wanted to play with them, but due to so many people in the house the dogs were too freaked out. They did much better with my dad when he visited by himself. He seems to be the only visitor they allow in their inner circle. He does have a way with animals. It's pretty cool. When he was here we took them all to the dog park and had a grand time.

And, Katy finally got her football. She's still recovering from a busted toe, which had caused her to limp for several days, so we haven't let her play football yet, but now that the swelling has gone down and she's walking well, I think it's time — once it stops raining! We're not sure what happened to her tow, but it did swell up badly. Our best guess is that she stepped on a bee and got stung. She's fine now, but for a while, we had been calling her Tripod. Poor kiddo. She was so frustrated during the whole time out period but was mentally upbeat and kept asking to go out, to go for rides, etc. even though she was gimping around.

* Custom paper orders.
Oof da! I was so busy I had to make paper while my dad was here. Poor guy had to watch as about 30 sheets were made. I think he made it all the way to the end, without getting bored. Or, maybe he was bored and just didn't show it.

One of the orders was a huge one - 250 butterflies made from lavender and printed with wedding guest names. I think they turned out beautifully, so I'm going to add them to the selection of products I offer. They took longer than I anticipated, so the price will go up from what I originally charged. I think the market can accomodate it though given that I'm the only one that offers butterflies that are printed for use as wedding table place cards. We'll see how it goes, not that I'm in a hurry to sell a bunch more given how busy I have been, and will be.

* Baby kickins' and pregnancy complaints galore. Ugh.
I'm sure it all be 'worth it.' But in the meantime why do I have to experience every pregnancy symptom in the book? The heartburn is awful. Sometimes it makes me so queasy I don't even want to eat. It's like I have a resurgence of first trimester pregnancy sickness: nausea and food aversions all over again. Just about the only thing I am always excited to eat is ice cream and that's because it rarely gives me heartburn!

I've also been getting the practice contactions known as Braxton-Hicks contractions. I've been getting them several times a day every day for months now but they've recently become much stronger. So have the baby kicks which means she's getting bigger. Sometimes she kicks so hard and rolls around so much it makes me sick to my stomach. And then there's the feeling I have a snake slithering around in the matress right next to my skin when I'm on my side. It's her, but man it feels like a snake. Unsettling! It all makes sleeping darned near improbable for longer than, well, honestly, however long it takes for one hip to get sore! I will be so relieved when I can sleep on my back and stomach again. The only place I am totally comfortable is while taking a bath.

Summary

I am exhausted! For the next month I have just one goal — take it easy and not get swine flu!

Could lice prevent asthma?

2009-04-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Ew.

But yes, according to new research published in the journal BMC Biology. Mice with the most lice had calmer immune systems than uninfested mice, adding to evidence that hyper-clean living contributes to asthma and allergies.

The idea is that if the immune system is not properly primed with germs, bugs, and pathogens during childhood, the immune system can go haywire, basically inventing problems to solve when it has nothing to do. Asthma and allergies belong to a broad class of conditions known as auto-immune disorders. In these conditions, the immune system launches a hyperactive response to harmless triggers such as pollen, pet dander, and even the individual's own body cells.

This is sort of pet subject for me, given that my mom and sisters have all had allergies, asthma or other auto-immune conditions. It's also a sore subject for me because no one ever listens to me about keeping the house too clean — except for my dad — he gets it. Perhaps because it's a convenient excuse to not clean the house, something I am sure he doesn't really like to do. My mom on the other hand is a complete neat freak/germaphobe. She takes it to downright scary levels. I think it's insane, personally. And she is coming to visit tomorrow, which means I do need to give my house a top to bottom cleaning so she doesn't freak out.

But while I give the house just enough dusting to make sure the dark wood furniture doesn't look gray, just enough vacuuming to eliminate most of the newfies' under-furniture-and-corner hair balls, and just enough scrubbing to make the kitchen and bathroom appear to be clean, I will keep in the back of my mind the funny yet sage advice from a scientist whose immune system talk I attended at a conference: Be sure to have at least some dog poop in your sheets!

Although I can no longer remember the details of Marlene Zuk's talk, I do recall the take home message is that you need some germs in your environment to have a healthy immune system. Without stuff to fight off, the immune system launches assaults on stuff it shouldn't, causing you to actually be less healthy. Zuk's talk echoes what I had learned in the psychoneuroimmunology course I took during grad school. All of this makes me wish I had the time to read Zuk's book, Riddled With Life. She was an engaging and hilarious speaker, so I am
sure her book is great.

How could you not enjoy reading the work of a scientist who advocates for having a little dog poo in your home? I know we have trace fecal matter throughout the Field Notes' house. Hopefully, Baby Field Notes will have a terrific immune system.

We'll have to trade the lice for poo though. I draw the line at lice.