Snowbound Herpetologist

First, before anyone gets excited - NO, I'M NOT GETTING PREGNANT.  The "two week wait" is a common phrase for people trying to conceive to describe the stressful, intense waiting time in between ovulation and the earliest pee-on-a-stick test that you can take to figure out if you're pregnant or not.  As I have only experienced this once, and mostly I didn't expect to actually get pregnant, I had a pretty mild experience with it. However, I've also never felt anything quite like it - great excitement, mixed with great fear, mixed with a very sincere sense of impatience.  And yet!  I've found another experience that feels *exactly* the same! So my paper got editorially rejected from Science - although it was quite a kind and positive rejection - and so now we are waiting at Nature.  I wake up every single morning fervently both hoping for and dreading the decision, and feeling distinctly impatient that I can't just know now  (and praying that someone...

Maya insists on taking little bites out of every single tomato in our garden. It's actually even more annoying than the squirrels. If you get pasta sauce at our house this fall, just know that it didn't come from pristine tomatoes....

Cute or what? :)

We're alive!  The conference was fantastic!  We've weaned (and it was sooooo easy!)!  We're speaking in sentences and singing songs!  Life is good! I apologize for the long absence, and I'm not sure it's going to get better soon.  I'm in 100% paper-writing mode, and I will be until the end of the year so that I can get a permanent job.  I've been preparing a MS for Science (!!!), which is now finished except for the cover letter, and I even feel guilty taking time to write this blog post now because I should be working on that.  Also, husband is in Brazil for the next 3 weeks (he left last weekend), so I'm also solo parenting.  Day care hours are like rare gems, and I have to use them wisely because I'm on 100% parenting duty outside of them. That said, Maya and I are having a blast with our "girls only" time.  I ordered a bunch of art supplies for some weekend fun, we've got some zoo and museum trips planned, and we're eating a...

Just one cute photo to brighten your morning :) Time for gymnastics classes …?

We are settling back in nicely!  The biggest news of the month is two-fold: 1) Maya is getting a bunch more teeth, so I've updated her tooth chart (and will keep updating - there are at least two more on the horizon).  Of particular interest, her lower lateral incisors, which were supposed to appear ages ago, are just now coming in at 17 months :) Also, 2) we decided to ride the wave of a bunch of adjustments in the return to Michigan (and daycare) and night wean/sleep train Maya.  I had been avoiding "sleep training" with every fiber of my being, insisting on waiting until I thought Maya was old enough that she could both understand that she's "supposed" to be sleeping through the night (and we could have discussions about it) and also that she really didn't *need* to nurse.  The idea of leaving a tiny baby who's legitimately hungry or thirsty to scream for hours alone in a crib seems awful to me, and I simply refused to do it no matter how tired I...