Is Brain Awareness Week!  To commemorate the occasion, I plan on actually using my brain for once.  My job interview is next Friday, and I am going to need all of the brain power, good vibes, and jazz hands that people can muster!

Holden has been doing a great job with his various babysitters.  Today he was away from me all day and he did GREAT.  I missed him so much and thought about him often throughout the day, but I was fine.  I was so excited to be able to go pick him up at the end of the day.  He had a great time playing with his new friend Mallory and getting to explore all of her toys.  Their nanny is very sweet and is super awesome with the babies.  If we end up staying in Burlington, I will want to keep him in this nanny share .  Their house is literally a 1-minute walk from our house.  I just cut through our neighbors’ backyard and voila—I am at their front door.  

I guess I got a lot done today, but the time flew by faster than I would have liked.  I worked on transitions with my talk, re-arranged and re-organized certain parts of the talk, and double-checked a lot of my facts.  My living room is a mess of uncategorized journal articles and notebooks half-filled with half-baked ideas.  This blog post is an exercise in procrastination, as I really should be cleaning up the stacks so I can get a fresh start tomorrow morning.  It was a pretty productive day, although I felt so sick for part of it.  I really haven’t felt better even after my bout of antibiotics last month.  I was on the mend for about a week and now I have the same illness that comes and goes intermittently.  My sinuses are so congested that I have intense headaches in the middle of the day, every day.  I am also bruising everywhere on my body, large black marks that seem to emerge for no apparent reason.  I do need to go back to the doctor, as I am pretty sure that the breastfeeding is wiping me out.  I probably just need to make some adjustments to my diet, maybe take some supplemental vitamins.  Nevertheless, I can’t go back to the doctor until this job stuff is out of the way and I have time again to run little errands of that sort.  For my talk, I plan on taking a bunch of medicine in the morning so that I won’t have to contend with debilitating headaches while talking about this:

As this is enough to give you a headache on its own.

One of the great things about my current situation is that no matter what happens, I will have a job to go to at the end of it all.  Even if the academic job in Maine does not work out, I will still have a postdoc here in Vermont.  And regardless of what happens, there are many things to look forward to in the coming months.  I will enumerate them here, as a way to psych myself up and get through these last weeks of snow and bitter cold.

1.  Holden will be turning one in June.  I haven’t written our plans in stone yet because I am not sure where we will be in June, but the current plan is to rent out a picnic shelter at Oakledge Park in Burlington and have a potluck cookout for the little guy.  This park is lovely; it’s right on Lake Champlain, it borders the bike path, and sports the world’s first handicapped accessible treehouse.  What could be more fun than playing in a treehouse?  As soon as I know more about where we’re going to be in the next few months, I will be able to make the reservations and send out invites.

2.  First family vacation.  Rob and I have made it a priority to get away every year, even if it’s only for a long weekend.  We want to be able to take our first family vacation, just the three of us.  We are still undecided on the details.  We have contemplated going to North Carolina (we had a wonderful time there 2 years ago), or staying at a beachside cottage in Maine (although that option is less appealing if we actually end up living there).  Or we may opt for something completely new and different.  There are a billion places I would like to go without Holden (including many destinations in Europe), but we’re not ready to leave him for a week yet.  Maybe in a few more years.  For now, we’re just trying to find a simple, relaxing spot where the three of us can chill for a week.  Any suggestions?

3.  Dishwasher!  Whether we move or not, I am getting a dishwasher.  If we end up staying in our condo another couple years, I have decided that I can’t live without one.  I do way too much cooking and end up spending an hour of my day doing dishes (no lie).  Our kitchen is small and it will require some creative maneuvering to fit another appliance in here, but I am confident I can find someone handy enough (e.g. not one of us) to do the dirty work for us.

4.  Television!  The fact that Rob and I do not own a television makes us feel smug and superior on a daily basis.  We pride ourselves on being bookworms and reading the local newspaper instead.  We are avid fans of Netflix and watch many a movie on our desktop computer in the living room.  Alas, I am now 30 years old, and I can’t quite see the screen like I used to.  I am finding myself squinting as we watch movies most of the time.  We toyed around with the idea of getting a projector to save space, but now that flat screen TVs have really come down in price, it seems a good time to take the leap and snatch up a screen that we can actually see.  Our most recent obsession has been watching Cosmos (the famous PBS series hosted by Carl Sagan)—can you imagine how some of those shots of the Milky Way would look on a huge screen?  We’ve decided the TV will be reserved for watching movies and that we will forego cable.  After all, who wants to pay for being advertised to?

5.  Kayaking & Hiking!  In 2 more months, the mud will be gone and we will be able to hike.  Hauling Holden up a mountain might present a bit of a challenge, but we’ll figure it out.  We are excited for kayaking too—we just need to find a baby life preserver and we’ll be set!

What are you excited for as we spring forward into the warmer months?

Holden gives his audience a round of applause.  Yesterday while I was getting dinner ready, he sat in his booster seat and started clapping for Rob.  We encouraged his clapping by clapping along with him, which of course intensified his efforts.  He still has to master the high-five, but we are getting there.

Earlier in the day, Holden and I ran errands on our own because it was Rob’s turn to be very sick with the flu.  I like to turn routine errands into entertainment, so a trip to the pet store to pick up hay for the rabbit turned into an opportunity for Holden to see some animals he has never seen before.  His favorites by far were the mice and the fish.  When I took him to the mouse cage, he started giggling every time a mouse would dart around the corner of the enclosure and start digging frantically in the bedding.  Clearly, the mice were hysterical to Holden because they were so tiny and unpredictable.  The puppies, rats, and birds were moderately interesting, but when we got to the aquatic section of the store, Holden’s interest was piqued once again.  He loved watching the fish dart about in their organized shoals.  One day when he is old enough to take care of it, we might get him a small aquarium.

On the job front, I am still waiting for the interview to be scheduled.  It’s definitely nerve-wracking to know that it’s probably going to happen next week but not know exactly which day it is.  I have been preparing for the talk with the help of some very generous friends who have stepped up and offered to watch Holden.  Thank you to Amanda for being a good pal and spending time with Holden last Friday.  Holden spent the longest time he has ever been away from me (3.5 hours!) with Amanda while I worked on my talk.  Holden just loved playing with the puppy dogs over at Amanda’s!  Tomorrow he will spend 3 hours with my friend Adam, and on Wednesday and Thursday he will participate in a nanny share with one of our neighbors.  Wednesday will be the long, 8.5 hour day away from me, which will be difficult but necessary.  So far, Holden seems to handle being away from me just fine, although I imagine that this will vary from day to day and depend on his mood to a large degree.  

Hopefully I will know more about the job soon so I can update everyone.

I’ve been amused all day today as I watched friends and acquaintances who live in MD upload “Snow Day” pictures onto their Facebook accounts.  All of these pictures feature a thin layer of snow punctuated by giddy schoolchildren eager to wear their overpriced snowsuits for the first (and likely last) time in 2009.  

I cannot pretend that I am impervious to the cold (as most native Vermonters would have you believe of themselves), because I spent my entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in the mid-Atlantic.  When I moved to Vermont 7 years ago, I did not know what a frost heave was, and I was horrified to find out that owning two sets of car tires (one for winter and one for summer) was commonplace.  Since moving here, I too have become one of those crazy people who has walked to work in a pair of snowshoes.  Generally speaking, I don’t mind the cold nor do I mind the snow.  The darkness that descends on us in November, December, and January can be trying, but by February it is no longer pitch black at 4PM.  That said, this is the first year where I really NEED the sun to shine longer and the temperature to be just 10-15 degrees higher.  Holden goes through periods of boredom during the day where diversion is welcome.  Today it was 12 degrees out—too cold for a walk.  It’s not worth it to put him into the car and go to the mall.  One of the great things about Vermont is that it does not have malls quite like the mid-Atlantic.  In Vermont, you can walk the entire length of a mall in 5 minutes.  This is a great thing—but when it’s 12 degrees out I wouldn’t mind having something like Towson Town Center around so I could kill a few hours effortlessly.

Thus, our day was spent solely indoors.  I tried to read H a story first thing this morning, but he insisted on turning the pages at his own pace and then insisted on holding the book himself, and finally insisted on chewing on it.  Somehow in the process, he managed to shut his finger between two of the mighty cardboard pages, which elicited panic and crying.  The rest of the day was frought with noncommital whining.  Holden doesn’t like to be on his belly, so he rolls onto his back.  But then he can’t get up.  So he whines.  If I put him in a sitting position, he promptly gets onto his belly, realizes (again) that being in this position affords him nothing but misery, rolls over, whines, repeat ad nauseum for hours.  I tried picking him up, cuddling with him, walking him around the house, going from window to window and describing the view from each:  “From this vantage point, you can clearly see the heaps of snow demarcating the westerly-facing portion of this parcel of land, our home.  From the other vantage point in your bedroom, the Budweiser can that props our neighbor’s window open is being obscured by falling snow.”  This is the dialogue to which Holden is exposed, hour after hour, until I finally sigh and look at him with desperation:  “What do you want?!”  

I finally resorted to just leaving him on the floor for a moment.  I let him fuss for a minute, and then he promptly busied himself with rolling around, drooling on my yoga mat, and to my horror, discovering both my knitting needles and a lighter in quick succession.  

Somehow through all of this, I have managed to re-submit a manuscript and actually work on my job talk.  With the acrid aftertaste of coffee in my mouth, yesterday’s pajamas, and the throbbing pain of another sinus headache, I am managing to get through my work, a little bit at a time.  I feel energized just by thinking about running experiments and teaching again.  I also feel that if I can make progress, piecemeal—in between feedings and pumping, playing and bathing—that I can really do this right if I have an office with a real desk, chair, and paycheck.  Our little condo is shrinking by the day.  I have literally thousands of articles in banker’s boxes in our basement—I keep a rotating stack of articles in our living room, along with my laptop balanced precariously on the ottoman.  My stacks of papers and notes are nomadic, inhabiting different, increasingly remote regions of our living room as Holden becomes more and more mobile.  Our living room is office, playroom, library, exercise room, movie-watching and music-listening room, and kitty litterbox room all rolled into one.  In order to do any one activity, things must be moved and put into another, temporary place.  It drives me crazy, the amount of time I spend moving things, only to move them again soon thereafter.

In another few weeks, it will be spring.  Mud Season will be upon us.  I can take Holden out for walks in the 40 degree weather.  We just need to make sure we don’t track in too much dirt while we’re out.