All posts by TZT

Mom. She-hack. Armchair astronomer. Buddhist.

Team WhyMommy Virtual Science Fair

April 7, 2010 TZT 3 Comments

Known to the blogging world as WhyMommy, Susan Niebur is an astrophysicist, a mother to two young boys, an advocate for cancer education and research, and a survivor. Since 2007, she’s graciously, frankly and bravely let us into her life through her blog, Toddler Planet. She’s let her readers walk with her as she’s battled Inflammatory Breast Cancer and dealt with its physical and emotional fallout, all the while advocating for women in planetary science.

She’s had a recurrence, and is slated to have surgery today. So, to let her know that we’re all thinking about her – thinking of the whole of who she is, not just this tenacious disease she keeps kicking — Stimeyland is holding a virtual science fair. People have been making an effort to do something science related (with kids or on their own) and posting about it today in Susan’s honor.

If you read Tiny Mantras at all regularly, you might guess that I don’t go through a day without doing something science-related. And you’d be right.

So far this week, I’ve overseen the assembly of an anatomy floor puzzle and helped my son navigate CERNland — a kids’ site designed to explain particle physics and illuminate what the Large Hadron Collider is doing. We’ve snapped together models of the Ares Launch Vehicles that NASA is developing to take people back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. We’ve read Millions to Measure.

I thought I would compile a list of a few of my favorite posts about raising a science-inclined child and the things we’ve done to keep up with him, focusing particularly on Susan’s passion (also Declan’s) — space:

I gave birth to the whole universe — This is the way we tell a bedtime story.

Beginnings of a solar system magnum opus – This is the way we write a song.

Sometimes, science makes us anxious. It makes us dream. We sleep in the rings of Saturn.

Every placemat, book and ball in our house has been part of the solar system at one point or another.

Space changed the way I look at art.

Halloween costumes — My son has actually been getting smaller every year. First he was space, then the solar system and last year he was Jupiter.

I once had to convince my son he was on Triton (Neptune’s moon) to get him to take a bath.

There is really nothing cuter than a 2-year-old talking about space or going through Hubble Space Telescope images or interpreting the world through space or warning you about impending doom.

Spaced out at NASA’s Plum Brook Station — This is a huge NASA site in Ohio that’s rarely open to the public, but they had an open house in 2008 and we went. We also like hanging out in Space Shuttle tires in Wapakoneta.

Here are some kids’ space books we love. Here is one Carnival of Space. And another.

Be well, Susan. Kick this cancer to the Kuiper Belt.

Motherhood

This rubber band

March 29, 2010 TZT Leave a comment

Ten-ish years ago, one of my best childhood friends and her husband split up. Being engaged, rounding 30 and kidless, I can’t say I at all understood how difficult her decision to venture forward on her own with two young daughters really was. But I did what I knew to do as a long-time friend — I simply spent a lot of time with her. We regaled her daughters with stories about the things we did when we were girls: the songs we liked to sing until 2 am, the way we seemed to be perpetually rearranging each other’s bedrooms, our gullibility in thinking that we could be “discovered” by a Hollywood agent on the way to buy milk for her mom in suburban Ohio.

And we laughed like crazy. We laughed with her girls the way we did when we were girls together. I accompanied them on mundane trips to the drug store. They liked to brush and braid my hair when we talked. Like their mom, I began to count the girls among my best friends.

“You should have a baby, Tracy,” her older daughter – six or seven-ish at the time –told me while thumbing through stickers at a craft store. “So we can be friends with her and play with her.”

Soon enough, I told her, reminding her that a baby is a long way from a kid. That a baby could also be a boy. A baby would be okay, she told me. Maybe not a boy, but… well, she could babysit him. Maybe.

Her younger daughter was four or five-ish in that time. I liked to read Shel Silverstein poems to her at bedtime. A born comedian, she was already delivering jokes punctuated with “I’ll be here all week” and cracking me up with nonsequitur statements like “I’m weak without light” when I had a mouthful of food. I told her mom that she needed to investigate whether there was any such thing as a kids’ comedy camp in the Catskill Mountains.

I realized in that time what perfection childhood can be. How deserving every kid is of an appreciative audience now and then, how happy and privileged I felt to be in the front row of their lives, how fun it is to make sense of the world through play. They taught me that there’s something about the way of seeing things when you’re around five that’s utterly spectacular well before I had my own almost five-year-old.

Their mom was in the hospital with us when my son was born, and the girls both held him in the first days of his life. They are teenagers now. And as their social lives grow, I don’t always see them when I see their mom, but when I do, I see that they both have the patience for and joy in play with Declan that their mother had with them.

We spent the whole day together about a week ago, doing the same kinds of simple, everyday things we did a decade ago. Declan was talking about the sizes of different breeds of puppies at lunchtime, so we all went and looked at some. We did household errands, made infinitely more interesting because we were all doing them together. The girls asked my son for hugs and tickled him and their mom bought him a $3 ball.

Before we left, we sat on the floor of their house, playing “Hot Potato,” but no one was really ever out. Declan held onto the ball every round, hitting my still deadpan comedy-inclined teenage friend with it at the last minute while laughing hysterically.

Lately, I’ve been testing the elasticity of many of the friendships I’ve collected in this life and finding that they can snap back into shape more easily than I realized. A week ago I had a day that, on paper, may look pretty unspectacular. But it was a great day.

Future Folklore, Motherhood

Human worlds and Hello Kitties

March 10, 2010 TZT 5 Comments

One of Declan’s best friends at preschool is an extremely sweet little girl (I’ll call her Nora). The intensity of her smiles and happy bounces make it seem like she’s about to explode into a big, shimmering firework of pure joy when she tells me how much she likes my son.

She made him a gigantic valentine, replete with a big blue glass gemstone and a poem that she dictated to her mom about him. According to him, she wants to sit next to him every day at lunch. And he likes that. On the playground, they pretend they are Jack and Annie from the Magic Treehouse and go on adventures together.

The other day, her mom told me that Nora has been worried because when they grow up, Declan will no longer “live on the human world.” Declan’s affinity for space is known by pretty much anybody who knows him. She’s going to miss him a lot when he’s off on his galactic adventures, but she and another boy from their class will plan elaborate “welcome back to Earth” parties whenever he comes home for a visit.

Earlier this year, Dec started asking for Hello Kitty things. First he asked for band-aids, then stuffed Hello Kitties. He has one dressed in a lamb costume and another in a panda costume. They go most places with us, especially to his school. He feeds them at mealtimes. He puts them in the cupholders of his car booster to keep them safe. He tells me what they are thinking. He sleeps with them.

It’s been hard for me to figure what makes him so attached to them. Until I asked him one day in the car.

“I told you, it’s because all of the girls in my class love Hello Kitty so much,” he told me.

He loves the ladies, my boy. He wants to stay in their good graces. He’s a four-year-old that’s begun to unravel the mysteries of social currency with so little self-consciousness.

Motherhood, Under the Whale

This little wish

March 1, 2010 TZT Leave a comment

He’s been considering wishes for a few months now, toying with fairy dust and never missing a fountain.

Since this year began, he’s had a new one. And he repeats it every time there is an opportunity for a wish to be made:

“I wish that everything that we need to have happen would happen for us.”

Godspeed, my boy. And I wish for all of your wishes to come true.

Motherhood

The perfect heart

February 16, 2010 TZT 4 Comments

The other night, Declan decided he wanted to make one big special valentine for his father. I pulled out a sheet of paper, folded it and drew half of a heart for him. It was art paper, so cutting it was tough. He switched scissors a couple of times. He got frustrated. Then he took a couple of deep breaths and finished it. He spread it open on the table and looked at it proudly.

He wrote his dad’s full name on the big heart. He filled the space around it with rocket stickers and gems and glitter. Then he tried to draw a heart. It was sweet and soft and curvy, like dough that swells beyond the edges your cookie cutter promised when it bakes.

He hated it. He hit it with his fist.

I loved it. I thought it was so precious and perfectly four, perfectly him.

He covered it with a dog sticker and tried again. He didn’t like the new heart either, so he covered it with another dog sticker, ran into the living room and threw himself into the couch cushions.

I tried to reason with him that I knew his daddy would love it, that I could see it was a heart and that there were lots of kinds of hearts. He was frustrated. He told me no. It needed to be perfect. It needed to look “right.”

At his school, they often ask him about his feelings and put them in a note. I started writing one to him. He watched my hand and circled me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m writing you a note to tell you how I feel,” I told him.

“What does it say?”

“Dear Declan,

Every time you write, it does not need to be perfect. Whatever you write is something I love because it is perfectly Declan. I love you. I want you to be kind to yourself.

Love,
Mommy”

He looked at me calmly, unmoved.

“Let me have that for a minute,” he said.

I handed him the notebook and he carried it into another room, grabbing a marker on his way. I heard it flop onto the floor. I heard the sound of the pen on the paper. He came right back and handed me the notebook, a big pink X over my entire note.

“I didn’t like it so I put an X on it,” he explained. “Because I want everything to look right.”

I fought back feeling hurt by his x-mark and wrote what he said down on the note. I told him that I understand that feeling. I do.

I understand that feeling so well.

Then he went and got another piece of paper and asked me to make a heart that he could look at while he drew another. I made a small one and handed him the marker, reminding him of the advice his teacher gave us about trying to hold a pencil steady: “Pinch it.”

He took the notebook behind our piano and brought a new heart back to me. It was puffy too. Puffy and curvy and beautiful and, to my eye, not terribly different than the ones he had rejected.

“This one looks right,” he said. “See?”

Under the Whale

Tyger, tyger, burning bright

February 5, 2010 TZT 1 Comment

My blogging has been lighter than usual because a couple of weeks ago, I saw my doctor and she told me that my right shoulder is so much lower than my left, she would have thought that I had a severe curvature of the spine. My typing has been slow, my sleep has been poor and and my breaks have been many. Unless today’s snow dump somehow derails it, I’m going in for an evaluation with a physical therapist early this afternoon.

The last couple of months have been a revolving door of reminders about mortality and health. We’ve been second-hand witnesses to the passings of three people, one far too young, the other two simply too young to die. I’ve interviewed young people who know too much about things like homicide and psychological abuse (for projects I am working on). I felt helpless as I stared at images of the fields of bodies in Haiti, keeping the television mostly silent because my boy already spends too many bedtime hours resisting sleep, trying to solve the puzzle of death.

In a little over a week, the Year of the Tiger begins, and it feels far more like a ritual time of reflection and reassessment than January 1st this year. I’m making lists, trying to finish projects and clearing away clutter. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to bring my physical, personal and professional carriage back into alignment. I want to be on the tiger’s side.

And I would be oh so grateful to see her clear our collective house of fire, thieves and ghosts.

Keen Insights Into the Obvious, Oh My Ohio, Zeitgeist

I hate art scavenger hunts

January 25, 2010 TZT 6 Comments

We had an hour or two to visit an art museum in another city the other day. No sooner had we hung up our coats than one of the volunteers asked my son, “would you like to do a scavenger hunt in the museum today? If you finish it, you get a prize!”

Being four and generally highly motivated by reward systems, he looked at me eagerly for permission to say yes. I gave it to him. If I deprived him of that kind of offer, I might as well have kissed my chances at a fun museum visit goodbye. (This scavenger hunt basically asked you to find particular pieces of art in the different galleries, then answer a question about each one.)

For the first several rooms, I tried to balance the tasks of the scavenger hunt with more meaningful conversations about the art and history we were looking at. Every now and then, I could get him to stop and ponder something like how a particular piece of art was made, how it might be used, the story it might be telling or what it even was. But as we pushed on, the tasks of the scavenger hunt became more and more pressing, pulling us away from other things we might have been able to talk about.

We saw another dad looking completely beleaguered as his 9-year-old son ignored his requests to talk about any of the 18th-century European paintings he wanted to share with him. The kid was just too far into the throes of his primal push to finish his scavenger hunt and earn his prize.

As far as I’m concerned, scavenger hunts are the equivalent of worksheet learning in the classroom. They don’t invite any real depth of understanding, and do not create a particularly meaningful relationship with their subject. They are more cheap marketing gimmick, something that seems to be designed for children to pass time while parents are supposed to either help, or meditate on paintings in solitude or something. In this case, they actually seemed to be depriving more than one family of an organic museum experience.

On Sunday, a friend of mine and I took our kids to the local museum, which is under construction, so all that is open is an illuminated Dale Chihuly exhibit and a couple of rooms with highlights from its permanent collection. We led our four-year-olds through and asked them what they thought the abstract glass forms were.

“That looks like an upside-down turkey!” my son said about a glumpy shape slumped over in a forest of spears.

“That’s like a shoe, all opened up,” said his friend about a floppy, shell-like piece.

We ventured past the people watching a movie smack in the middle of the gallery, which seemed like an unnecessary obstacle with this inherent message: “shut up and don’t talk about the art.” We squirmed out of that room. My friend’s daughter peeked around the corner, and then ran back to grab my son’s hand and pull him in, howling – “come look! It’s SPACE!”

Their imaginations and curiosity ruled the rest of the visit. A chandelier was an erupting volcano from another planet. A sphere was a “giant Jupiter that’s all dead.” In the permanent collection galleries, my friend, who grew up in Holland, had her daughter jumping up and down with excitement over her obvious connection to Dutch paintings. We all sat on the floor in front of a George Segal sculpture and talked about what plaster is and how you might go about making a person out of one.

Of course, there was a room with the dreaded reward-based scavenger hunts, which just seem to be everywhere kids may show up now, but thankfully, no one bypassed us and offered them to ours. When my friend’s daughter asked what all the kids with clipboards were doing and if she could do it, her mother dismissed it with a smooth “you have to be able to read to do that.” We sidestepped the issue and took in the grandeur and mystery of a ride back downstairs in the giant elevator instead.

Granted, I’m the daughter of an art educator, so I was raised with a particular love and appreciation for art. But I didn’t find that love via lectures or gimmicky games. I was simply given the room to respond to and be inquisitive about it – to use my brain to make of it what I may before getting down to the facts of who made it and what they thought it meant or why it might be historically or culturally relevant.

If you want a child to love art, don’t make him or her whisper about it in a gallery or do some glorified word search to earn some 3-cent superball or a sticker. I also had a total blast on Sunday… and it was the interpretations and questions of our two four-year-olds that made it so much fun for all of us, pure and simple.

At a time when there are endless books out there espousing the value of “creative” people to the richness of our lives – even our economy – why are museums, of all places, bent on such ordinary engagement with kids, who are by nature some of the most innately creative people in the world?

Armchair Astrophysics, Motherhood, Under the Whale

Passings

January 15, 2010 TZT 2 Comments

As we drove home from school today, Declan told me that he knew nanodiamonds could keep our dog Arrow from dying. Now, Arrow is barely six years old and pretty robust, so I’m not sure why this was on his mind (other than the fact that a National Geographic special about spatial relationships in the universe schooled him on the nanodiamonds stuff), but he was insistent.

I told him that nothing could keep Arrow, or anyone, from dying sooner or later, but that Arrow seemed very healthy and happy to me right now. He was angry with me and pretended to sleep for a while. I let it be until the next question comes.

I’ve only watched the news after Declan is asleep or when he is elsewhere this week. It takes my breath away to watch the devastation, the human suffering, the chaos happening in Haiti. At this death-sensitive age, I can’t imagine him being able to process much about this, so I haven’t figured out what to tell him. Meanwhile, I feel helpless and grateful for every little thing I have here – fresh air, clean water, a roof, a car, family, schools for my son, food, music, books, love, jokes.

This afternoon, the father of one of his schoolmates passed away after a short battle with cancer. The boy Declan shared a class with last year was the older of two and their third child is due in less than a month. The preschool’s community and friends of the family have rallied to do everything from laundry to childcare to grocery shopping to help them during this tragic time, but this is just heartbreaking news. I wish him peace.

This is a loving and kind family. The mother is a young and passionate wife and parent. I can’t fathom the stress of being self-employed, almost nine months pregnant, parenting two young children and losing your spouse. So if you’re listening, and you’re feeling generous, you could help them out a little bit financially to help ease some of their material stress as they begin to grieve and await this new birth.

Take care. Breathe. Hug your loved ones tight.

Armchair Astrophysics, Motherhood

Interview at Mama Joules’ place

January 5, 2010 TZT 1 Comment

If you are looking for ideas about how to engage children with science, Mama Joules has got resources and fresh ideas about everything from physics to geology to gardening. I plan to make her site a regular destination.

She and I exchanged emails through the crazy holiday time, and she’s published an interview with me about keeping up with a child whose scientific interests are greater than those of his/her parents. It was a lovely opportunity for me to reflect on the parts of motherhood I expected the least – those that have required me to become an amateur astronomer.

I also think it’s super cool to be among the ranks of her interview subjects, which also include the President of the National Tarantula Society and a beekeper.

Check out Meet Jupiter’s Mother. That’s the first part, here is the second.

I’ll update this post and Twitter (@TinyMantras) when part two is published.

Om Mani Padme Hum, Under the Whale

New

January 4, 2010 TZT Leave a comment

I wish I could say that I came into this year, this decade, with rosy optimism and a warm blanket. I tried. I did yoga. I took a hot shower and sang along with Irma Thomas to expand my cold-ravaged lungs. I took a cinematic ride through the universe with my boy and remembered our teeny-tininess, but when midnight came I was just agitated, unsettled, unreasonably angry.

But it’s the first Monday of the year, and even though my son and I argued on the way to school in the car today, even though my chest is still sore, I don’t feel rested and the cold outside is far too bitter, I feel strangely unburdened and optimistic. I want to clean up and put things in order. I want to make appointments and to-do lists. I want to roast vegetables and cut fruit and find a place to run inside. I want to listen to depressing music until I feel light again.

I hope your first Monday is pleasantly complicated, that your sinuses are clear and that ushering in this new decade feels like watching the sun rise.

Happy new year.

http://www.profileplaylist.net/mc/mp3player_new.swf

Tiny Mantras

All posts by TZT

Team WhyMommy Virtual Science Fair

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