Snowbound Herpetologist

We are so proud of our sassy snarkball :) The big day consisted of a trip to our local museum (and a turn as a fireman), opening of the loot, more cupcakes (she's a pro at blowing out candles), and some exhaustion with the kitty kitty at the end of it all :) Also, for her birthday, I got her a trampoline.  In a not-so-uncommon reversal of gender roles in my marriage, husband reacted like I bought her a Molotov cocktail kit or something due to perceived potential for injury :)  I think she loves it, and it will help get a bunch of the wiggles out over another long winter! Now if only our basement were finally finished (they're getting close...) so she had a real space to use it!

This morning, we had our 2 year well child checkup - all looks good!  Maya's stats are: Weight: 27 lbs, 7 oz (with her diaper on) Length: 35 inches Head circumference: 19.25 in I don't have time to update further as I have one of my grad students showing up for a meeting in exactly 5 minutes, but all is well here.  She's excited about Christmas and her birthday, she hauls stuffed animals around everywhere, and is otherwise a joy to be around.  An opinionated joy, but a joy nonetheless! Here's my favorite photo of the year: my fierce baby :)

"I have rooibos tea, you have Ceylon tea. That's right! Rooibos tea. Rooibos tea is yucky." Sluuuuuurp. "Yeeeeeeeeeuck." Click click. "I want another washcloth. With the bath toys. I want a bottle. Put it in the laundry. Just like mothball. Beep beep boop boop. That's beep beep like Nolan. Mama, I made your pajamas wet. Mountain lion! Watermelon mountain lion! I need some shaving cream." Scratches butt. "I need to go pee pee in the potty." Rush out to potty. "Uh oh, no pee pee!"

...of recent life :) In brief: It's fall, we went to a special event at our local hands-on museum where they had a MOUNTAIN LION (although the warthog was her fav) and gave her a salamander tattoo, we drink a lot of wine (I'm *totally obsessed* with Argentinian malbecs) and practice Danish hygge. Good stuff! :)

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...

We're back!  Jetlagged (again), but back.  No time to post anything long yet, but I did want to finish off the trip blog posts with a photo and video of the final lizard captured on the trip, our third (!!) species of Tiliqua , this one caught in our final pass through the Goldfields on our way back to Perth (which is why we're all in jackets - it was cold!).  I *adore* these skinks. So happy to be home! Maya thought the antipredator tongue display was pretty neat :)

It's official - we have successfully completed our field season!  We caught a ton of awesome squamates, had no major issues (besides one slightly bogged vehicle and one horrifying baby faceplant - ironically occurring after the return to civilization, which is way more dangerous with its ill-placed coffee tables than the great outdoors!), and are slowly working our way back home towards the daunting mountain of rust-stained laundry I have to try to salvage that’s been completely permeated by red Australian dirt.  Tomorrow we leave Kalgoorlie, which has been serving as our inland staging ground, and head back to Perth.  We’re spending a few days catching up with friends there, and then we’re off on the epic set of plane flights back to the North Country.  If I can get them to load, here are a few low res photos from some of the time we spent on the second leg of our collecting trip at Shark Bay (a UNESCO World Heritage site!).  Although it was indeed gorgeous, ...

Until I can post the video, this just about sums up Maya's thorny devil ( Moloch horridus ) experience:

Things continue to go well!  Unfortunately, we got an entire group of new people out here at the field station, so our internet bandwidth got VERY overcrowded, so I won’t be able to include as many of our absolutely adorable new photos in this post as I’d like (and what I do include will again be low res)!  We also have some totally hilarious footage of Maya’s reaction to some of our lizard catches - she loves (loves!!) 99% of the lizards out here, but is deathly afraid of thorny devils. We got a gigantic rainstorm here a couple days ago, and several of our sites completely flooded out.  We have some epic photos and video of both the flooded roads and of us bailing 20 liters of water out of every pitfall trap.  We had to close some sites down (i.e., put the lids on the buckets and then secure them so that nothing can get in until the next time someone is out here to run the trap lines), and it changed our plans for next week to go out with some of the traditional...