So many updates—I will start by talking about our delightful weekend (now that we’re already halfway through the week!) It’s been in the low 50s, which is warm enough to drive with the sun roof open, and also warm enough to enjoy two consecutive days at Battery Park, just a few steps from our house.  Holden loved using the swings:

After enjoying the swings, Holden delighted in watching the older kids run around the playground from the safety of this little park bench.  I know he can’t wait to join the fun in a few short months:

What a great day!

Holden is also developing new skills in the realm of language.  He has dabbled in language throughout his life, as most babies do, preferring the repetition of ba-ba-ba or ma-ma-ma.  He knows a lot of words already, probably more than I even realize.  When I ask where the kitty is, he scans the room to find Stoli.  When I am reading him a book and ask him to turn the page, he will dutifully turn it.  Over the weekend, when we returned from our walk around town, I hoisted him from his stroller and said “Up.”  He replied “Up-Up.”  And when I repeated the word back to him, he said it again and smiled.  Today we were singing “the big fat duck” song to him (don’t ask) and he responded by saying “duck!”  When he was younger (sometime between 6 and 7 months), there were a couple of occasions where I could have sworn that he said “itty” referring to the cat.  He hasn’t said kitty since then and I’m not sure whether it was coincidence, although both times he was starring directly at the cat.  He seems to go through cycles with language, where he prefers one sound and practices it over and over again and then appears to forget all about it for months.  Holden seems to know the meaning of basic phrases like “Do you want a sip of water?” or “Do you want to nurse?”  He also knows “We’re going to visit Papa.”

Other milestones—Holden started crawling on St. Patrick’s Day.  It’s not an army crawl, it’s the real thing, on his hands and knees.  He’s not especially fast (yet) but he’s much less frustrated with himself now that he is more mobile.  Holden just got his third tooth this week—his canine on the left side.  So now he looks like a lopsided infant Dracula.  I am going to start calling him Nosferatooth.

Today I took Holden to a final visit with the nanny so I could put the finishing touches on my job talk.  I was feeling so overwhelmed this morning, realizing how much I still have to learn.  Over the weekend, I had e-mailed my contact person at the institution where I am interviewing to see if a 20-minute pumping session could be scheduled into the middle of my interview day.  I never got a reply, so today I put out another e-mail to try to firm up plans for Friday.  I was surprised when I was told that they couldn’t confirm the interview for that day because there were people (critical people, apparently), who wouldn’t be able to make it.  I was told that we would have to try to schedule it for next week instead.  So I tactfully replied that I could do that but we would have to make a decision soon so we could make arrangements on this end.  It’s no small task to coordinate everything so that Rob’s work is finished up (at least well enough for him to be out of the office), Holden has sufficient milk pumped, and our bags are packed for several days out of state.  I’m grateful for a few extra days of preparation, but I am also really anxious to have this all behind me.  I applied for this job back in November, and it will be April before I know whether or not I will be hired there.  The good thing about this process is that I have had wonderful support from lots of people to get things done—-from people pitching in to watch Holden, to a gang of friends who convened last night to listen to my talk and give feedback, to a postdoc advisor who gave up 2 hours of his day today to discuss my slides with me, I am just so lucky to have people who care enough to help me get through this.  

As for stupidity, this is something I came across on the PostSecret website.  The idea that a career in science continually makes one feel stupid is an idea that thus far, matches my experiences and resonates with me in ways that are too embarrassing to recount.  This whole process—preparing my talk, developing a research program, making decisions about what scientific questions are important to answer, then changing those questions based on what is affordable—has been humbling and continually reinforces how little I actually know.  I’ve had to prepare myself to answer questions about cardiovascular reflexes, exercise interventions used in children with ADHD, the phylogeny of the cerebellum and its role in helping different species face adaptive challenges, movement disorders, isolating genetic characteristics through successive selective inbreeding, etc.  These topics are vastly different and none are in my area of specialty per se, yet I need to be prepared to discuss any of them.  This is why I always feel stupid—and according to the article referenced above, I am not in the minority here.  Being in science is about embracing your stupidity—and eventually becoming so used to it, that you don’t even notice it anymore.