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Professor mommy

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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. ...
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Attempting the impossible

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...
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Punnett squares

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One of the awesome things about being a pregnant geneticist is that I’m super excited about pulling out some high school bio skills and calculating a few probabilities on morphological traits the baby might have.  OK, it helps that I went genetics-crazy last fall and got husband and myself genotyped at a million SNPs through 23andme  (do it!  It's awesome!!  Only $99!!).  It also makes it more fun that I’m a heterozygote for a lot of things :) Traits of current interest: ABO blood type - ok, we’ve established that the baby will be Rh negative.  Here’s the breakdown for ABO: Husband: AB (actually A101, B101) Me: AO (A101, O109) Baby: 50% A (AA or AO), 25% B, 25% AB (my hope: AB, my prediction: A) Eye color: brown/blue Husband: bb (blue) Me: Bb (sort of hazel) Baby: 50% blue, 50% brown/hazel (my hope: blue, of course!  Husband - and rest of   husband's family - all have fantastic eyes.) (FYI: 23andme calculates baby’s probabi...
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