This photo is for my mom - she was wondering how Maya and I get into campus with all of our gear, and I told her that I'm basically a pack mule with saddle bags in front and back instead of on the sides. Yup.
Fantastic news all around - we had an excellent and productive trip to the Amazon, I got the promotion to tenure track (still in the negotiation phase, but the offer is official - YAAAAAAY!), and my masters student successfully defended. It took a couple weeks, but Maya has completely forgiven us for our long absence (she was pretty mad about it), and I've headstarted two whole flats of seeds for my garden this year, including a bunch of aji amarillo peppers so that I can make the Peruvian delicacy huancaina upon harvest :) Life in our household is happy and vibrant! However, there are two things that weigh on my mind: 1) the insane increase in productivity/efficiency that I'll need to shoot for if I'm to get tenure here, and 2) the decision about whether or not to have another child. Make no mistake, the first child didn't seem like a choice (in a good way). If I couldn't both be a professor and have one child, then I didn't want to be a professor. ...
In response to my good friend Lesley’s very valid comment question about how on earth I get any work done with the baby in tow, I’ve decided to do the post that I’ve wanted to write for a while. I am, in fact, attempting the impossible for the next four months: working as close to full-time as possible while not putting the baby in day care. (Edit: I wrote this really long, flowery, idealistic post below, but the short answer is that I work - poorly - while the baby sleeps. So I also do everything in my power to help her sleep in long chunks, which is perhaps instilling bad sleep habits, which I will also probably pay for later. And that's about it :)) Over the course of my world travels, I have always been inspired by the women in less industrialized societies than ours. They truly bring their babies everywhere with them as they go about their daily business. They simply strap the babies to their bodies in some kind of carrier and go, nursing whenever...
Since I expected the whole “getting pregnant” thing to take much longer than it did, I never imagined that I’d have a new baby in the dead of winter. As I have also never lived in a place with real winters before last year, I have spent a good portion of this pregnancy pondering how one possibly dresses a newborn for a North Country winter. Through a long and convoluted path, I ended up seeing this BBC article today titled “Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes” (ww.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415). The basic gist is that all Finnish mothers get a little box full of baby goodies from the government after they give birth, including the World’s Cutest Baby Snowsuits : Through this webpage, I ended up reading the official Finnish guide to motherhood, which includes this incredibly helpful graphic that tells me, in no uncertain terms, exactly how I should dress my baby for the winter - and the box gives you everything you need to do it! Now all I have to...
So are you back at work? How are you managing to get anything done with Maya there???
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