We’re moving!

No, not to Northfield, although we are moving there. We’re cybermoving, from this url to our new, fancy url:

thefamilyroll.com

All is explained over there. Update your blogrolls people!

Rapprochement (dmjg)

Belly and Ellie have appeared to move from detente to rapprochement. The other day, I was sleeping on the guest bed with Belly when Emily put Ellie on my chest. Much to our surprise, Belly did not flee. Not only did she not flee, but she stayed put when Ellie shifted half of her weight to Belly’s side.

After a few minutes, Belly shifted slightly, causing a sleeping Ellie to flop over and bury her face against Belly.  Of course, the first thing Em did was reach for the camera. Amazingly, Ellie didn’t stir.

Finally, Belly got up and I spent about 30 seconds pulling dog hair out of Ellie’s face.

The whole series of pictures is here.

Intervention at 3am

Breastfeeding Ellie at night is our special time. In the beginning, I would turn the lights on just bright enough to see her face and sing to her and tell her stories. That lasted for about 10 days and then I re-discovered Hulu.

At first I stuck with pretty light-hearted fare: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and some Home and Garden Television. And then I discovered “Intervention“. Enough of this milky maternal night-time business: what I need at 3am while breastfeeding my newborn daughter is a hard-hitting documentary about addiction. “Intervention” is, obviously, addictive. I can’t get enough of seeing how people spiral into addiction and how treatment does and does not work.

So that’s how I’m spending my nights these days.

Tonight I’m anticipating a sleepless night as I’m nervous about driving Ellie to Toronto tomorrow. We have her 1-month check-up in the morning and then we’re heading out. We’ll be in Toronto for a couple of days and then we’re heading to the Cottage for a full week and then back to Toronto. I’m so excited for the trip but am uncertain how well Ellie will tolerate all the driving. Time will tell. The other nervous-making thing has been packing for the trip. It’s hard to anticipate what, exactly, we need for 2 weeks away from home. I erred on the side of bringing everything and the Subaru’s trunk looks like we’re emigrating.

We are annoying (dmjg)

We took a video of Ellie doing tummy time the other day (also known as “face plant time”) with the hopes of sharing it with you, our readers. Two things prevent us from doing so. First, wordpress doesn’t allow us to post videos without paying a substantial fee. We’ll be able to take care of this with the help of Sandy’s expertise. The second reason we can’t, or won’t, share the video with you is that Emily and I are fantastically annoying in it — the 2:30 of Ellie doing tummy time are accompanied by ceaseless, high-pitch baby talk and fawning commentary. My lord, I hope we haven’t behaved that way in front of anyone. So, once we 1) figure out how to post videos and 2) learn to keep our mouths shut while taking them, we’ll get you some footage of Eleanor.

In other news, Eleanor is definitely getting bigger. We have the official weigh-in on Wednesday, but we did an unofficial weigh-in on Greg and Claire’s digital scale (weighed myself first, then weighed myself with Ellie). She is now just a little shy of  9lbs, which means she has gained about 1.5 lbs in 3 weeks. But she is still smaller than her younger, and more substantial, compatriots: Ezra and Veronica.

Developmentally, Ellie is chugging along nicely. We’re seeing more and more smiles, which, of course, we find completely captivating. We’re hoping that she’s doing full-fledged social-smiles in time for her introduction to Abba next week. Sleepwise, things are going along swimmingly. She’s given us two nights in a row with a 5 hour sleep which was followed, last night, by a 3.5 hour sleep (Em only got up once). During the day, we’ve discovered that her hotsling (thanks Uri and Noa!) works as well as the magic boob.

Socially, we had a wonderful week spending time with Sarah & Sandy and Claire & Greg since everyone has a very very high tolerance for sitting around and talking about babies. It’s a lovely way to pass the time and we will certainly miss them when we decamp to Northfield in a month (a month!).

Finally, a small bit of Carleton news. I got an e-mail about Carleton’s new wellness benefits provider, which offers your run of the mill health and financial services. And then there’s this not so run of the mill service:

“Fear of Flying Program – Provides telephonic counseling by a commercial airline pilot, who is also a counselor, to address anxiety about flying.”

I might pretend to be afraid of flying just so I can talk to a pilot. And to top off a good week of Carleton related news, the department sent Ellie a Carleton bib and Carleton socks. Alongside her Carleton t-shirt and Pomona Sagehens (best team name ever?) onesie courtesy of Michael Green, Ellie is accruing an enviable collection of elite liberal arts college paraphernalia.

The pictures are from this album.

Self-knowledge (dmjg)

People say that you learn a lot about yourself when you become a parent. That point was driven home today when we went to pick up Ellie’s birth certificate downtown (yes, that means we’re coming to Canada! More on that later):

Look carefully now. Did you know that I was born in China? I certainly didn’t. Come to think of it, though, it makes a lot of sense. I had always attributed my love of Chinese food to being Jewish, but maybe I come to it more naturally than that. And ever since I was little I’ve simply had a passion for centralized planning. So, the truth comes out.

In other, less shocking news, we’ll be heading back to what I suppose is simply my adopted homeland, Canada, for a wonderful two week vacation. So, to all of our Toronto and Kingston readers, we’ll see you soon!

The rest in the series are, as always, here.

Ice Cream

From my inbox:

“Hello Carleton Faculty and Staff,

The Heywood Society is offering free ice cream, while supplies last, tomorrow (June 24) from 11am to 1pm in Great Space (the Snack Bar area of Sayles Hill).  Please help yourself to a cone or a dish of mint bon-bon ice cream in celebration of another successful Reunion Weekend. Enjoy!”

Am I going to a great school or what?

Father’s Day (EmJC)

It’s Daniel’s first father’s day. We heard a great interview today on NPR’s Bob Edward’s Weekend with Michael Lewis about his new book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood. Lewis described his initial parenting philosophy as “trying to do as little as possible without annoying my wife” which, he found out, was a philosophy that greatly annoyed his wife.

Daniel’s parenting has been anything but annoying. He is calm, patient, loving and ridiculously silly with Ellie. She really gets a kick out of him, as you can see from the picture. He can “Karp” her like a pro, perform a tear-free diaper change and even write a song about her.

I’m not at all surprised that Daniel is turning out to be such a good Dad but it’s still something wonderful to see or, better yet, sleep through.

We’re also delighted to see that our friends the Weiszs are also celebrating Father’s Day. Welcome Ezra Stanley! We knew you when, kid.

Dealing

One of the more aggravating aspects of being pregnant is having well-wishers and other interested parties inquire into your status as you approach, then pass, your due date.  Sandy and Sarah have come up with one way of answering the question, “Is Perquacky [their baby's fetonym] born yet?”

Dr. Dan (dmjg)

I defended my dissertation yesterday. I also put together a baby swing. Given my technical incompetence, I’m not sure which was the bigger accomplishment.

The defense not only went well, but was actually quite fun. Emily and Ellie came down and the latter was appropriately oohed & aahed at before and after the defense. My advisers asked good, challenging questions. No one was going for the jugular. And I have a good direction to go when I take up the project again (something I can’t think about right now).

The dissertation was a 3 year project, but defending really signals the end of being a graduate student (I’m already off the UofC webpage and on the Carleton webpage (now that I’ve defended, I’ll be upgraded from Instructor to Assistant Professor or, as like to call it, Ass. Prof)), so I count it as the end of a 7 year journey. The arc of graduate school is strange. The first two years are fantastic — you feel legitimized by having got into a good program; you’re surrounded by other people who are interested in the same thing as you; the dreaded job market is for those weirdo senior grad students whom you only see now and then; and you learn so much so fast. But the start of grad school also signals the beginning of the insecurities that are simply a fact of life for most academics: I haven’t read as much as so-and-so; my writing isn’t as good as it should be; everyone keeps talking about so-and-so like s/he’s the most important thing in the world and I’ve never even heard of him/her (in my case, it was Stanley Cavell). But those feelings, at least for me, took a back seat to the feeling that I had, in some sense, made it. And that felt good.

Years 3-4 is the transition period (to put it in labor-terms) and it was the most difficult time for me (just like real labor!). You’re no longer taking classes and you’re asked to do something that you have never done before and that nothing in your education to that point has really prepared you for, viz. writing a book length manuscript which contains something original. Not everyone has trouble at this time, but many do: no deadlines, no firm committee, no real idea what the hell you’re going to say. I mean, no idea. Deciding what to write on was perhaps the most stressful part of the past 7 years; it took me more than a year, and one topic change, to figure it out. There were a number of sleepless nights where my mind would not shut down, preferring to chew away on various topics I was thinking about: is there a project there? What, exactly, is the point? Is that way of construing things going to hang together? These thoughts never go away — it’s how one’s project gets sharper and more focused as you go along — but they’re exhausting and, on some days, paralyzing in the early days of writing a dissertation.

One of the more interesting aspects of this time, and a source of difficulty for me, is that your professors start to treat you more like a peer and less like a student. You had firm deadlines (well, supposedly) while taking classes and a predetermined, general topic (even if you get to decide the precise issue you’ll write about). The profs are, usually, experts on the topic and your paper (usually) is really only a tiny tiny poke at some much larger issue, so you can get a sense very quickly whether you’re on the right track. None of that is there when you start to dissertate — there are no real deadlines;  it is entirely up to you to decide what to write about; and, within a relatively short period of time, you will be as much, and in some cases more, of an expert on the topic you’re interested in than your advisers. This means that you are very much on your own. Now I actually ended up enjoying this (it made me more productive), but it took me a little while to realize that the game had changed. To the extent that I thought about chucking it all in, it was during these years. The self-doubts I described above are front and center at this point, except they’re morphed somewhat into a single tune: I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not smart enough. (And the chorus:) Who cares about this crap anyway?

If you’ve settled on a good topic, years 5-6 are, perhaps, the best: you have some momentum in developing your project; you (or at least those of us at UofC) get to teach a course of your design; you’re starting to feel like you know what the hell you’re talking about, at least with regards to your subfield; and the end is somewhat near. But this brings its own, distinctive stress, since the end game of grad school is the job market. The terrible, dreaded, vomit-inducing job market. For a taste of the misery, spend some time reading the archives from years past at this blog.

I have nothing systematic to say about my job market experience, except that I couldn’t have done it without Emily who kept me relatively calm and distracted (“Hello! Someone’s having a baby.”). I remember the very low lows — no interview at Queen’s this year; no job offer from Toronto; and, perhaps the single most gut clenching memory of the whole thing, sitting in my hotel room in San Diego after giving a not very good job talk at UCSD and simply wanting the entire thing to be over (a special shout out to two of my advisers, Dan Brudney and Jason Bridges, as well as a former prof. Michael Green, for helping to pick me back up after the UCSD trip). And I remember the very high highs — learning about getting APA interviews,  particularly at some of our “heart” schools (Carleton, U of Toronto, Fordham); learning about flyouts in early January; and, of course, learning that I had got the Carleton job (I was informed by e-mail. I ran down the street to the gym to tell Em. We jumped up and down like little girls. The trainers were not impressed).

All in all, I have had a fantastic time in graduate school. And I’ve been told that I will look back at this time and wonder why I didn’t spend more time here (limited/no teaching; fantastic peers; no administrative duties). I’m sure that’s true. But right now, I feel oh so ready to move on. And I’m done!

Oh, and I got the following, awesome message of support from Ryan Blitstein (who has a fantastic article on health disparities in America over at Miller McCune. Go read it.) before yesterday’s defense:

Indeed, I will.

Fun with Eleanor (EmJC)

We’ve been having fun with Eleanor: last night she had her second bath since her umbilical cord stump fell off (ick). We just fill up our tub and one of us bathes with her. Her eyes grow very wide when she feels the warm water and she generally seems to dig bath time. She also likes quiet alert time with either of us diligently making faces and turning our mouths into smitten new parent “O”s. I know newborns don’t smile but she gives us some sort of equivalent and nothing is finer.

Ellie also decided to re-read the “How to be a Newborn” book and has delighted us with textbook-regular naps and even a 4-hour stretch of sleep last night. Today she and I went to Trader Joe’s and the hardware store with her in the sling. I felt extraordinarily competent carrying baby and groceries. And then I saw a mom with baby, groceries, second baby and third baby. And then I remembered this statue of Garibaldi’s wife (Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro da Silva di Garibaldi) in Rome:

That’s right: she’s suckling her babe, while riding a steed into battle brandishing a pistol. But we all have to start somewhere, right?