2012 Holiday Letter

A few days ago on New Years Eve, I wanted to reflect on 2012 and realized that I remembered very little of it.  It was a haze of physics, travel and drool.  So, so much drool.  The drool has to stop sometime, doesn’t it?  So, with the help of my photo folder and Facebook, here is a little of the fun that happened to my little family this year.

It all started pretty quietly.  Eli couldn’t walk yet, it was really cold, and we got lots of colds.  Here is a photo from one memorable day when I was trying to work from home while he was home sick.  In desperation, I stuck him in a chair and piled a bunch of toys on top of him:

At some point, we watched the Superbowl, which featured another guy called Eli, and my Eli’s first introduction to popcorn, now one of his favorite foods:

(Do you see those curls?  Already he is a big boy with straight hair and I miss those curls!) Actually, by “favorite foods”, I mean the short list of foods that Eli is actually willing to consume.  He is really picky.  But when we celebrated passover, he found Matzo to his liking:

And then, all of a sudden, it was spring, and we got to go outside again!

Following in the footsteps of many kids in my family, Eli refused to walk until he was good and ready.  But when the warm weather arrived, he really wanted to play outside, and that was when he decided he really wanted to walk. There were a few months when he always wanted to hold our hands.  I miss those days too:

This year, Eli also became obsessed with all things that involve plugs and wires.  The more plugs the better.  When I am working at my laptop, he searches the house for cords that will fit into *every single* hole in my MacBook Pro.

When summer arrived, we started a garden.  It was sadly ravaged by critters this year, but we did get a bunch of delicious tomatoes, basil and cucumber.  So, so many cucumbers.  It was the year of the cucumber.

During the summer, we also started traveling and pretty much didn’t stop.  Our first trip was to Arkansas to see family:

(That one was taken by my lovely cousin, Jessica Johnson).  Then we were off to upstate NY to see more family:

And a really fun trip to Ithaca, where Eli and I got to play while Howard worked:

After that, we got a little bit more relaxation at home, with more outdoor fun:

In the Autumn, I started a heavy-duty series of trips, starting with PIC 2012 in Slovakia.  While I was there, I started feeling a unique kind of nausea that I’ve only experienced once before, which is how I knew Eli’s little brother was on the way:

He’s due in May, and we think he might be called Leo.  That morning sickness kept on going for the rest of 2012 and so did I, with a conference in beautiful Rio De Janeiro:

and then more trips to Buffalo, an LBNE collaboration meeting in Houston, and a conference in Pittsburgh.  Since Howard’s sister lives in Houston, he and Eli accompanied me on that trip, and had lots of fun.  Eli particularly enjoyed riding on the airplane.  His parents enjoyed it a bit less, spending most of the ride trying to explain to him the meaning of the seat-belt sign.  Somewhere in there, Eli turned two, and my pal Leah took some family pics to commemorate the occasion:

We finished off the year with a trip to Little Rock for Christmas.  We got out of town just as a blizzard was hitting the Chicago area. Although we thought we were in the clear, an ice storm hit Little Rock on Christmas day, stranding us in my mom’s (teeny tiny) house for three days.

Also, just in case things weren’t crazy enough, we decided to buy a house!  We started looking  a few weeks ago, had a signed contract just before Christmas, and are planning to close at the end of the month.  This is a little crazy, since we are planning to leave Batavia in the not-to-distant future, but this baby has got to go somewhere, and I’m kinda really tired of having a kitchen in the basement.

So, 2012 was busy but happy for my family.  We are looking forward to lots of new fun in 2013 and wish all of your reading this the same!

 

Summer Blogging Extravaganza

It has been so long since I’ve written here!  Eli went from being this baby:

To being this other baby who likes to play with EVERYTHING!

A lot of other things have happened too.  We took Eli on his first roadtrip, back to Ithaca, NY, where he got to see his first waterfalls:

I also took my first airplane ride since having Eli, to go to a MINERvA collaboration meeting in Austin, TX.  It was hard to be away from Eli, but Austin was fun (although really, really, overwhelmingly hot!), and we got to Skype:

There was also Father’s Day, involving matching Bill’s Jerseys:

(Did you know: when I purchased these jerseys, it was not possible to get a jersey for anyone who is on the Bills current roster of players.  Anybody good enough to merit a jersey leaves the team, apparently.)  Eli’s Grandma B. also came to see us:

And last week, for the 4th of July, Eli took his first trip to Arkansas, where he was spoiled rotten by his many relatives there.  He also got to go swimming for the first time — he wasn’t sure what to think of the concept at first, but he warmed up to it and had fun:

And finally, we started a garden:

Eli finds gardening very tiring:

Happy Summer, Everyone!

 

Marriage, Schmarriage

It is coming up on the anniversary of something I haven’t explicitly announced here: Howard and I got married.

Personally, I was really excited about contributing to the downfall of Mike Huckabee’s America by being an ‘unwed’ mother.  I wanted no part of the historical definition of marriage — I am nobody’s property, and the modern definition has been so contorted that it is basically meaningless.  But I am a practical person, pregnancy is expensive (even with insurance), and Howard had a HSA account beefed up from years of being a healthy single guy, so off to the court house we went.

It was an annoying courthouse.  The judge asked Howard if he really wanted to go through with it, but didn’t ask me anything.  When I complained about this, he said he knew I wanted to go through with it since Howard is a handsome guy.  Which implies all sorts of bad things about me.  But we managed to get over that hump and he married us.  I’m still not sure exactly what I agreed to — the judge slurred his words a lot.  But luckily there is no record, in case I did in fact promise to wash Howard’s socks for the rest of my life.

I figured it was a good time to get married.  We could say “we’re having a baby… and by the way we are married.”  And people would be too excited about the first half of that sentence to make much of a big deal about the second.  After all, we’d lived together for many years, moved across the country together and were having a child together.  Surely people don’t need a piece of paper to view us as a committed couple, right?  Wrong.  A lot people were so caught up on the “marriage” part, they kind of glossed over the “baby” part.

It’s sweet that people were happy for us.  It is sweet that his family has welcomed me in spite of my shiksa-ness.  But it just feels really weird that a signature from a drunk misogynist should give our relationship any sort of significance or legitimacy.

But anyway.  One year on, our marriage is still a happy one.  One of the best things about Eli is that I got to give Howard a gift he has always wanted.  And Eli couldn’t  have asked for a better dad.

 

Four Months

Okay, since I’ve been talking about physics so much, here’s a completely Eli-centric post for all you baby junkies.  He had his four-month well-baby checkup this week with a new pediatrician — “Dr. Tony”.  I always liked the idea of having a family doctor that all of us can go to, but I eventually realized that our family doctor wasn’t doing anything other than referring us to specialists.   So now Eli is going to a pediatrician.  Anywho, he is in excellent health and is developing in all the right ways.  One of his latest new skills is screaming (not as in crying but as in hey look, I have vocal cords!).  Fun for mommy and daddy!

Last weekend, my friend and coworker Leah came over and took some more pictures of Eli, including the one above.  There are more at http://leahc.smugmug.com/Children/Eli/ .  We also got to meet Leah’s husband Jason and their really adorable daughter Lucy.  Lucy is 15 months so it was like getting a preview of what Eli will be like once he is walking and talking.  Lucy also knows a bit of sign language.  When I was pregnant, I thought the concept of teaching babies sign language was a little nutty, but I can now see that it would be quite useful for Eli to be able to tell me if he’s full or hungry or what have you.

Let’s see … other Eli news of late?  The nice ladies at the daycare are convinced that his skin problems are because he’s allergic to milk.  I’m dubious, but they are very nice ladies, and I’m willing to try anything that might make Eli less itchy, so we are doing a soy formula this week.  We also have the go ahead from the doctor to try solid foods, but I’m going to wait until after the soy experiment to start that.  Any advice on first baby foods?  I think I’m going to start with the standard rice cereal, but then try some strained fruits.

That is pretty much all my physics-addled (or really, meeting-addled) brain can come up with this Friday evening.  Did I mention that he is about as cute as it’s possible to be?  I dunno how Howard and I ended up with such a cute and sweet kid, but we did!

 

Hey Look — More Physics!

Today is computing division maintenance day for my experiment.  This makes work a little more interesting — the tools I use to do my job have been slowly disappearing all morning, and are now to the point that I can’t do much of anything.  So instead I’m going to take a few minutes to share with you some of the work that has been keeping me so busy:

The details of this plot are beyond the scope of this blog, so I’ll just tell you that the pink part of the graph above is what I’m trying to measure, and this plot is really exciting for a lot of reasons.  It is the first plot like this we’ve presented publicly and is an indication that MINERvA is going to make some really, really nice measurements of neutrino interactions. Also, on a much sillier note, I picked out the color scheme and am really happy with it.  The last time we presented stuff publicly, we used a very masculine red-and-black color theme.  I’m glad I got to feminize our work a little bit.  The experiment is named after a greek goddess after all!

And okay, okay, most people are not here for the physics.  So here’s your baby picture fix:

Also, Lucy has been registering her dissatisfaction that Eli has supplanted her on this blog:

This week, I’m a single mom while Howard is away in Ithaca.  It is fun to have Eli all to myself, but I’m really glad I don’t have to be a single parent all the time — it’s a lot of hard work!

 

Hey Look — Physics!

It has been a busy week at casa Sanders-Fields.  In a push to get some results shown at a conference next week, I have been working way, way more than the mom of a three-month old should.   But the plots are approved and now on their way to India, so Eli and I are relaxing together for a few days.

I’ve somehow managed not to mention the details of my work much at all here.  I never told you about my work as a postdoc on CMS (one of the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland), and I’ve never told you about MINERvA, the experiment I work on now.  But this week I wrote a blog post for Fermilab’s blog on Quantum Diaries, which you can read here.  It was altered slightly from my original text by the Fermilab communications office, but you can read about MINERvA there if you are interested.

But I suspect most of the readers of this blog are not interested in physics.  They are looking for this:

This was Eli yesterday — he’s about 3.5 months old and growing so fast!

 

Now He Just Smells Like Aveeno

Before Eli was born, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from motherhood, but I was pretty sure it was going to be bad — there would be the horrible childbirth and there would be this little goo-filled thing screaming all the time that would totally ruin my career.  But really, it has been great.  I was totally numb during childbirth, Eli laughs way, way more than he screams, and my career is just fine.  There is a lot of goo though.

What I did not expect was how much having a baby would force me to deal with the medical establishment.  Until the day I had a C-Section, absolutely nothing went wrong with my pregnancy, but various doctors still found reason to drag me in for inspection at least twenty-five times.  So then Eli was born and I was all “Yes! No more doctors.”  Ha.  Eli has already had five doctor’s appointments in his young life.  Most recently, our regular doctor decided his baby acne/eczema is beyond her skill level and sent us to a dermatologist.  But the dermatology practice she sent us to:  A COSMETIC SURGERY CLINIC.  While we were waiting, Eli got to learn about a procedure where he could stick his head in a box, get flashed with bright lights, and voila, increase his collagen level.  That particular doctor wants him to come back in a week.  I think not.  My super mommy senses tell me Eli is just fine.  And that it’s probably best to minimize his exposure to cosmetic surgery propaganda.

Anywho, on a totally unrelated note, the photo above was taken by my super-awesome photographer friend Leah.  You can see the rest of them at: http://leahc.smugmug.com/Children/Eli/.