The not so sunny Italian part of Switzerland

Never mind that, though. It was different. A getaway. A chance to sleep and eat somewhere other than Zurich, which meant I didn't constantly see things that still needed to be finished in the apartment, or laundry, or dishes, or mail. We had another spectacular meal at Il Tartufo, with N and L (and A) who came with us to Locarno. In essence, it was a meal catered by a private chef for us. In a cozy little restaurant with a fireplace and space for the girls to play on the floor. We were the only ones there. It was very very nice.

And the babies had a great time chasing each other in the great apartment we found at a B&B on the hill near the monastery. We went on a boat ride to the other side of the lake where pretty much nothing was open and it was also chilly and damp. Baby A went back to crawling part time in order to chase the other Baby A around the kitchen table and down the hallways. They even learned to actually play together on something a few times. Not just near each other or stealing each others' toys.

Finally, there is a huge round loaf of Ticino bread in our kitchen waiting for us for breakfast, from the bakery near the train station. And a new app for buying train tickets, sitting on my phone. The conductor scanned the barcode on my phone screen. Crazy technology. And some moments of sunlight on the train trip home through the snowy alps.

Or maybe the dog shouldn't come with...

Poor pupper. She gets a lot of flack from us at mealtimes. She has started cruising not only the dining room table but also the kitchen counters. We used to never give her food that we ate, apart from a piece of bread here and there. And once in a while, she would get her claws into a loaf (or, on miraculous days, the butter next to the bread). But she very rarely went for the high surfaces.

But not anymore. She is a fully, two-legged creature when it comes to relieving our tables and counter tops of their edible offerings. It drives me up the wall. I yell and clap at her. I don't like baby A seeing that behavior from me, but she is part instigator - it is her food that the dog has started to get access to. By accidental drop on the floor followed by our lack of energy to clean it up before the dog gets it. Also on purpose, when the roaming eater that is our child meets the roaming eater that is our dog.

This has also led to our dog gaining some kilos.

Tonight the dog was away during dinner and bedtime, and it was so much calmer. Now I just have to figure out a way to translate that to when the dog is home. She already has to "go to bed" (i.e. her crate) when the food is on the table. But afterward is it one long inhale, as her nose travels the floor. Food goes in, fluff goes in, who knows what else makes it in there.

There are times I wish we had a yard. Very few, given the amount of work it takes to maintain even a simple one, but this is one of them.

On being human

When I told friends that M got baby A to laugh for the first time, one of them emailed me to say that in Navajo culture, the advent of the first laugh is considered a special moment when the child truly becomes human. And the person who gets the first laugh from a baby is supposed to throw a party to celebrate. Well, the party has yet to be thrown, in line behind so many others we have yet to throw - to meet our neighbors in the building, to have M's students and postdocs over, etc.

Last night was another tough one for baby A, and us, by extension. She seemed to have a lot of painful gas and would cry for 10 seconds, whimper, scream, then fall asleep again on the bed next to me, or on my chest. This went on for a while, and at times I was frantically looking for her binky in the dark, because I was sure that this time she might finally fall off to sleep for longer, taking me with her. Well, usually we have 2 glow-in-the-dark binkies in her room - one in her possession and one for when that first one gets chucked into some far corner of the room, under or behind something and we can't see it glowing. Last night, however, at bedtime, we couldn't find anything more than 2 non-glowing binkies.

Seriously? Two?! And neither glow?! This is cause for great alarm in our still sleep deprived household. Nothing is open at that hour, and we'd better be ready to find a stealth binky with our hands and knees in a dark room full of hiding places if things get unsettled.

Luckily, the unsettling of last night didn't have to do with plain-old, sub-glorious binkies. M wound up feeding baby A a bottle and rocking her upright until she fell asleep and the rest of the night went pretty well.

This morning, after a heartier than recent breakfast, baby A was playing in the dining room as we were getting her ready to leave for daycare. She started playing with a cardboard box by the window, and as M went to go help her open it, they both gasped. And he started laughing. "Guess what's in here."

I had no idea.

Baby A stuck her hand in, and came out with 4 glow-in-the-dark binkies.


We both started laughing. She's been creatively stashing all sorts of things lately, in her onesie (toy cars from school), in her diaper (not just things coming out of her back end), in her pajama feet. And the girl is most serene and grounded when she has one binky in her mouth and another one in her hand. Having 4 of them to stash in the cardboard box must have felt like a mindfulness meditation workshop to this baby.

I remarked to M that she's getting to the age where she makes him laugh. A very important quality to him. Especially these days, when things can still get overwhelming, and it still feels like a trudge to bedtime some nights.

And he said, "Yeah, she makes us human again."

The pupper needs an iPhone

Angry Birds is a very addictive game for the iPhone. It probably comes with a version for any smartphone and beyond. Uses real physics principles for catapulting variously talented (they split into 3, they drop egg bombs, they explode) birds at creatively protected pigs. In the game, the meanie pigs have stolen the birds' eggs, so they have it coming. And when you don't blow them all up using all the birds you've been allotted, they smile smugly at you. At this point, your heart rate goes up, you vow to show those pigs a lesson, and as soon as the screen asks you "try again?" your finger slams the "ok" (or as I experience it "hell yes!") key.

One of the most anxious moments in Angry Birds comes when you've knocked a wooden or stone beam out of place and it is just barely hanging in place, just above a soon-to-be-mocking-you pig. You tilt the phone in hopes the beam will fall. Maybe you blow at the screen. And about half the time, after a few seconds of wobbling, it falls! Score!

Anyway, even though our dog doesn't play Angry Birds and has never had a physics class, even she gets the point about precariously balanced objects. We gave this one a wide clearance.

Don't tell your kids they are smart

When we were back in the US for Christmas break, I picked up a book co-written by an author I like, Nurture Shock . Po Bronson had written a book about changing careers, "What Should I Do With My Life?", full of stories about people who had made huge career changes. It came at just the right time for me, as I was getting up the nerve to quit astronomy. I remember only a few things about the book (as I do with most of what I read), that I liked it, and that almost all the people in the book were forced to change careers. No one calmly sat down and wrote a list of pros and cons of being a day trader and decided it was healthier to follow their dreams of running a diner. Everyone went through a crisis - a divorce, a death in the family, a stroke or heart attack, a paralyzing depression - and this pretty much catapulted them in a new career. They could no longer do what they had been doing before. It made me realize I didn't have to be ashamed that it "took me so long to quit." Unfortunately, my will was strong enough to get me through 5 unproductive, unhappy graduate school years before a major depression hit and I couldn't continue. But that book showed me that this is the natural order of how big career changes happen to a lot of people.

Anyway, apart from recommending that book, I wanted to talk about the more recent book, Nurture Shock. It is a collection of chapters on child development, and the first chapter lands right in the middle of some of the literature I was reading for my dissertation. On praise and intelligence. The first chapter talks mostly about Carol Dweck's research on the perils of praising kids (and I extended that to adults) for their success as an outcome of being smart. Saying "good job! you're so smart" actually seems to set kids up for trouble. They start to worry that they won't be smart enough for the next task they approach and being to avoid challenges. I think of it as hearing "Each person is some fixed amount of smart. If you were smarter than this math test, the next math test could be smarter than you, and people will know you were not smart enough to pass it. You should hide how smart you are and avoid challenges because it is good to be smarter than others and bad to be less smart."

I'm not even going to get into the concept of intelligence today, but the results of Dweck's research suggest we should praise achievement by attributing it to effort - "Good job! You must have tried hard on that test." This encouraged the children in her studies to see challenges (and trying hard) as a good, fun thing. They enjoyed harder tests, even when they didn't do that well on them. In contrast, the kids who had been praised for smarts tended to try hiding any effort they had to expend.

We say "good job!" a lot around the house these days. And whenever I can, I add in something about effort. I think there is a lot to be learned from this research that applies to the culture of academia, but I'll leave that for another day.

"The American Way of Life"

On the homestretch to writing my thesis, E was my writing partner. We'd meet online, with chat windows open, fill each other in on what we were about to work on, set our Zen-bell alarm clocks and work for 45 minutes.

Ding!

We would take a 5-10 minute break, either go get some coffee in our respective kitchens, or do a debriefing on how our work had gone and anything that had been problematic.

Then the alarm programs would be reset and Ding! another 45 minutes.

Sometimes we did just one or two sessions, but other days, when there was a looming deadline, it would be 5 or 6 sessions. It was the only way I got so much done in such a contracted period of time.

And I think it worked so well because of a quote that E brought to one of our sessions..."Writing leads to motivation, not the other way around." It was that first 5 minutes of the first 45 minute session which were the hardest.

So here I am, trying to put this into practice again. I'm still ramping up to get back to work after a month of debilitating back problems, but I really want to get back to producing something from my dissertation that is accessible (and palatable) to more than just my committee members. I'll try to write about my work a few days a week, but just sitting down to write every day is the best way for me to start again.

Since Mondays need to be slowly settled into whenever possible, I'm aiming for fun photos and light topics. Like the maple syrup bottle at our table at brunch yesterday. M and I had a lunch date, courtesy of our babysitter, and we opted for comfort food, at Bohemia, instead of the anxiety producing exercise of roaming Zurich's old town in search of a menu and ambiance we liked. Pancakes and eggs benedict won.

And on our table was a brand I'd seen already on peanut butter here in the stores. "Nick: the easy rider." That's a brand? Complete with red, white and blue fonts and stars. What we couldn't decide was if it was really ignorance of Americana, or a deliberate aim at kitsching it WAAAAAY up. Or something in between. Did the company know that the branding was weird and at best American-derivative?

Who knows. The pancakes, although outrageously expensive, were pretty good. And on a cold rainy sunday, in a Cuban-ish restaurant/bar, American enough.