Thanksgiving

A house full of people and lots of eating!!

Thanksgiving shows at the kid's schools

A lot of special moments spent with grandparents and good friends

Making and launching water rockets

Digging in the sand and looking for algae and barnacles

Black Friday spent at the Bronx Zoo


Last week was a much needed chance to slow down and enjoy the people we love

these days

These days there is a lot of sibling love around here. Jove occasionally offers Miranda his lap during dinner. Now that the night comes earlier, a lot more time is spent playing indoors, making up games. They have spent the last couple of days cooking playdoh in the toy kitchen: making playdoh cookies, pancakes, etc. It melts my heart when they look to each other for comfort and invite each other to play along.

These days Jupiter and I are both really enjoying Radio Lab on NPR. These highly, entertaining radio broadcasts talk about science and society. I assign them to my students as extra credit. And they like them, too. My favorite so far is the one on parasites.

These days I finally feel a sense of balance between my outside the house life and my inside the house life. My goal is to stay as emotionally present as possible when I am with my family and not worry about undone job related work and, likewise, to focus on work at work and not drift into guilt about not being home. I am grateful that I truly love both responsibilities and I have a lot of help.

Fall Fun

Everyone in the house is asleep right now as I blog. We are all tired from all of the Halloween festivities. Both Jove and Miranda were very excited about trick-or-treating and we had to stop a couple of times en route to eat candy.


All of us had Halloween events at our schools: the kids had parades and class parties, Jup did a bunch of cool dry ice demos and was part of a science department thematic costume as gruesome chefs and I dressed as a tree and showed my classic Halloween video "Bloody Suckers" about blood sucking parasites. We did a lot of dry ice experiments at home and had a few failed attempts at trying to blow up a rotten pumpkin in the backyard.

I took the kids to the Botanical Garden for their festivities last week: a parade, cider pressing, pumpkin decorating and other plant crafts. It was a beautiful, warm fall day. The leaf color is peaking right now and we are trying to enjoy it as much as possible.

I have been doing a lot of outdoor labs with my students lately, which is fun for them and for me. I always take my environmental science students many times a year for different labs, but this was my first time taking my earth science students. We hiked to a rock formation which shows features of metamorphic rocks.