Haere mai. Welcome. Thanks for coming to play. My name is Miriam and I am, indeed, a geek. Specialist geeky subject? Babies. Since 2009 this has been a destination for family enthusiasts, dorky teachers, geeky parents. We share ideas and info about children, science, families, and life. Come in. Enjoy. Stay a while.
This old website has been a shelter, a liferaft, and a circus. It’s been a teacher, a burden, and a delight. It’s due for an almighty overhaul, which has made me hesitate to update … but what the actual HECK, that has become like failing to clean a kitchen that is about to be renovated.
In fact, inspired by a friend from Japan, I cleaned my defunkt oven on the day it was removed from my house. Thank you for your service, oh Oven. Thanks for the birthday cakes, the crispy potatoes, the tofu scrambles.
So I thought I’d do a lovely link-share, but something is kaput and I cannot seem to highlight text in order to insert a link, rendering this whole process a bit hopeless. I hope we will find each other when the website moves. I hope we can keep the 15+ years’ of thoughts, links, ideas.
Change! It’s constant. That might be why we like the moon so very much 😉
so … um … yesterday at about 2pm I submitted my PhD thesis. I have decided this is like winning a quarterfinal – worthy of a little celebration, a wonderful milestone, but TEAM we ain’t done. Still needing to be examined and defended … but we are getting there.
You’d have thought it was a fab time for champagne popping, but a) I didn’t want to drink a whole bottle, b) I didn’t want to waste any, and c) I had an appointment for jabs in the afternoon, which made day-drinking pretty unappealing. So I’m as-yet-unchampagned!
I promised myself I’d have June off for resting and knitting, but sheesh it’s gonna be a process, getting used to not chipping away at the huge PhD goal.
Can I tell you a bit about what a long road? I am the first in family to graduate from a tertiary institution – got my Diploma of Teaching in Early Childhood straight outta high school in the early 90’s.
My lil’ Dip T and I punched above our weight for years, enjoying the BEST JOB EVER at the Tennessee Early Childhood Training Alliance housed at Tennessee Tech University at the turn of the century (go Golden Eagles!), and when I was a new mum in the early aughts I slowly clawed my way to the BTchLn upgrade, one distance paper at a time, finishing in 2006.
I guess it was a couple of years later I started trying to convert that into some postgraduate quals, and my path to the PGDip was interrupted by the collapse of the city, the need to provide care to my dear mum, followed by my next (precious) pregnancy.
Eventually I finished the PGDipHSci in 2018, by which time my sweet mother had died, so she never knew about my successful completion of a Master’s degree by research in 2020, or this gargantuan mountain I’ve been climbing since.
A PhD is not for the faint hearted, and I am just beyond grateful for the support of my exceptional supervision team, my beautiful family, and the Child Wellbeing Research Institute at the University of Canterbury. We are on track to finish ‘er up midyear.
So here comes enforced rest! Weird. I started yesterday with cleaning out slime from the nooks and crannies of my washing machine. Unbeknownst to me, there is a world of cleaning videos out there, and I am so jazzed by the notion of having some time to indulge in a bit of oikology! All the jobs I’ve been walking past and ignoring for YEARS … here we come …
Temperatures make a gal say BRRRRR, but the power of love oughta keep her warm. Full disclosure: I am typing this with a heater blowing on my toes and a scarf wrapped around my head and neck.
Those of us in NZ are having another wee lockdown. I’m using the time to work on an essay (qualitative research methods, baby) and embrace a bit of puzzle time.
Shout out to my mate Deidre, whose research is written up HERE. She was my colleague when I worked at the other TTU (in Tennessee!) and she’s the person who first taught me about “clean data”.
Oh, and we have a trip booked to fly from rural South Island idyll to shaky capital city on other island … TOMORROW. We are supposed to be visiting my 94 year old grandmother. What to do? Unsure when we will get to go, if we decide to postpone.
I’m waiting to hear what Dr. Ash will say at his 4pm briefing – that oughta tell me if the country is likely to stay at current alert levels, or whether they will change, trapping us in Wellington. What I would really like to know is whether the quakes are done for now. I’m not sure anyone can say.
So I worry. Which is as effective as trying to solve an algebra problem by chewing bubblegum, as the lyric goes.
Kia Ora New Year newbies and lovely friends. Sitting down at last to share some bits and pieces on the dear ol’ blog.
Like … here I am drinking tea (you can’t tell, but trust me) and enjoying the latest OHbaby! magazine. Yup, happy to have an article in there .. it’s about routines v. go with the flow … what Dan Siegel would call “the river of integration”, but kinda from the baby’s point of view. Anyway, shout out to the visionary new editor Kristina for a great issue, and mad love to outgoing marvel Marianne as she works on nesting with her next baby x xx
Meanwhile: what else? I have been inching an academic article over the finish line for a v. flash journal – I will report back once complete. Like most, we have had a busy time of Christmas and New Year’s malarkey, lots of delicious feasting and loving gifting and a fair bit of grateful hanging out with our friendlies. Have I mentioned lately how grateful I am for New Zealand’s privileged position during this global pandemic? “Go hard, go early” said Jacinda. And so far the borders are holding steady.
We do not take these freedoms for granted – our bi-cultural family hosted a Thanksgiving meal, we had a lovely afternoon of celebrating the groovy mark I got for my Master’s thesis ( as the late Julia Child would say “a party without cake is just a meeting”) and there have been a couple of house parties in there, to boot. Busy, happy, joyful, messy, busy, exhausting, wonderful life.
Here is a family friendly collection of episodes from the legends at Radiolab, and while we are in a podcast state of mind, behold the latest episode of Your Undivided Attention, which is dazzling. And it references the legendary Fred Rogers. And yes, it is solution focused, with Eli Pariser making such smart analogies between the design of public spaces and online fora. I said fora. Having done a bit of playground design (and having learned at the feet of legendary teachers) I feel like I can dig this metaphor. Oh, and I own this book. Am I a town planner, or just kidding?
More from me later … lots of thinking going on in between trashy novels and domesticity.
Arohanui x x x
PS! Important announcement! In response to my daughter’s scrawling penmanship, I read her “2020” as ‘zozo’, and it occurs to me that this year must be zozi, next year will be zozz, and then I think it’s zoze, and 2024 could be zoza. At a stretch, we could follow that with zozs, zozg, (which, admittedly are a bit lame) but then you round out the decade with zozy, zate (best I could do) and perhaps zozg to finish.
Kia Ora koutou, hello everybody!It has been a challenge to get to the computer, but I did it … even if just for a moment! To the left is a quote I’m rather proud of – I have an article in the most recent issue of OHbaby! mag, about mother’s bodies and the need to care for ourselves.
My usual annual ban on wintery Christmas songs (White Christmas, Sleigh Ride, etc) is temporarily abated – it almost feels like winter, because the conditions in my kiwi summertime are so spazzy (hail, rain, chilly temperatures). So what the heck, right? I could try being, as my Big Girl would say, “all chill”. Not my natural state!
Quick link dump for my friends, then I’m off to help Little Girl clean her bedroom – how could a person add gifts to chaos in good conscience?
May your festive season be full of family and love and mess and tasty treats. May you play board games, go for slow waddles around the block, and have the opportunity for a nap … but please exercise caution if your nap strategy involves plying children with screens. It is probably oK just that once, but unconscious screen use is a poor long-term solution, especially if the kidlets are super young. And don’t trust the buggers telling you it’s all chill! Even schools have been seduced. Exercise caution, friends. Use critical thinking. Even some cynicism might be useful here.
Speaking of awesome advocates and wise folk no longer with us, I await the film about the late, great Celia Lashlie with bated breath and I send extra greetings to her whānau at this poignant time of the year.
Springtime is lovely in this garden. These past couple of weeks I have spent many blissful minutes under various blossoming trees, eyes closed, breathing deep, smelling sweet smells and hearing the productive meditation that is the buzzing of bees.
Another blessing of spring is the excuse to hang out in my glasshouse. I’ve gotten some seeds started for the year (bit slow, actually, compared to my neighbours!) but nonetheless I relish the opportunity to go watering in there. It gets so parched in my glasshouse that when I water I can sometimes fake the most beautiful smell in the world, aka petrichor. Here is legendary Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly performing his song of that name.
And I know you don’t mean to do that, and you kinda get a pass because you’re bearing the brunt of being the cocoon to this precious infant in strange places with uncanny time zones and YOU GO, you’re doing great. But honey, remind me when I see you, we need to talk about infant regulation.
My grandad was given whiskey when he was an infant, he survived. Neve will survive this too! I’m not giving you a hard time, Clarke. I’m telling you cos I love yiz. Just come over and stay and we can talk all about it. But wait till my dining room repaint is finished, K? xx
This picture is one I just snapped from the Letters to the Editor page of the latest Tots to Teens magazine. I am delighted to report that the article those readers found useful was one that I created. You can read it here. It’s a phenomenon I thought others would recognise, and LO! IT is SO!
We are more alike than we know. The ways we are the same are so many more than the ways we differ. Important to consider this week, as we slide toward election day in NZ. It is no secret that I am a left-leaning, progressive liberal and this is the way I will vote. No matter your politics, I just hope everyone who can vote, does. Especially the women!
The weekend has almost evaporated. I’m trying hard to get a bit of rest in, after a huge day of cooking a thanksgiving feast for our half-American family. The trees and pollen of late springtime are having their way with my respiratory system, and I could use a lie down! Later, I promise.
Better go, as I am trying to model healthy screen habits. That’s step one, peeps. A great book on this topic is “The Big Disconnect”, that’s your homework!
