Last day of Kindergarten reflections

Today is Kevin's last day of Kindergarten. It has been quite a year. Last year we prayed and pondered a lot about what to do about Kevin's school this year. His birthday is in July, so he made the cutoff for Kindergarten, but I worried a lot about whether he was ready. We considered an extra year of preschool (which we couldn't really afford) and homeschooling, but as time went on it was clear that the Spirit was telling us he should go to Kindergarten this year. Logically it didn't make any sense to me. He knew maybe half of the letter sounds and only a few of their names, the mere mention of writing and drawing would often trigger a nervous breakdown for him, and I worried that behavior was going to be a problem. Logically it made more sense to wait a year before putting him in public school. But whenever I thought about waiting it felt wrong. So we went for it.

To my amazement, Kevin picked up on handwriting and letter names and sounds very quickly. It didn't take long before he caught up. I think maybe it helped to see other kids writing and drawing, plus his teacher showed him how to draw people in a way that made sense for him. Now he can draw all sorts of things (and does so for fun quite frequently) and he writes sentences too.

Behavior was a problem for a while. He had a lot of problems on the bus and I found out that he was getting in trouble at recess and lunch too. That was when I finally looked into getting him into occupational therapy. I had been considering it ever since I first learned about sensory processing disorder when he was three, and the problems at school were a sign to me that we really needed to get help. Kevin's OT gave us a lot of suggestions to help him do better at school, and he also got an assigned seat on the bus, which was a big help to him because being uncertain about who would sit with him caused him a lot of stress. Going to therapy every week helped him to deal with his sensory problems and be more stable. We started seeing huge improvements in behavior.

At home we have seen big improvements too. There are still a lot of hard things, but he has calmed down a lot. I think having a routine at school was a huge help to him, and I couldn't have given him that kind of routine at home.

I was very upset for a while about the way they taught reading at Kevin's school. They started with a lot of sight reading and guessing based on the pictures, and I worried a lot about the bad habits that would cause him to develop. I felt that they should be starting with more phonetic reading. But listening to Kevin read some books this week, I realized that for Kevin it was a big help to learn all those sight words. While I loved the phonetic approach of the reading book we were using last summer, it was very frustrating to Kevin to have to sound out all of the words and take so long to read the stories. The nice thing about knowing so many sight words is that he can read much more quickly and confidently, and he's a lot more willing to sound out unfamiliar words because he is reading most of the words more quickly. It's not the way I would have chosen to teach him to read, but I think that for him it was a better method because he's not so frustrated.

So it's been interesting this year to see the effects of our choice to follow the promptings of the Holy Ghost. It didn't make logical sense to send Kevin to Kindergarten, but God knew what Kevin needed better than we did. I'm so amazed at all of the things he has learned and the changes we have seen in him this year, and I'm grateful that we trusted our inspiration. The impression I kept getting was that he was ready for the things he was going to learn this year, and I think if we had waited a year we would have just delayed all of the progress he was going to make.

un-learning how to read

I know a lot of people probably already saw my rant on Facebook, but I'm going to go into greater detail here on my blog.

Last week I was excited to learn that Kevin would be bringing home books that he was supposed to read to me. The first time he brought a book home, I opened the book and thought, "Wow, he can read words like these already?" Then we sat down to read the book. He read it in five seconds, and when I asked him about it, he said that no, he had never read this book before. I had him read it again, and when I watched his face I realized he wasn't even looking at the words. The pictures were so obvious that he didn't need to look at the words at all.

Okay, now let me explain my definition of "reading." To me, reading implies that you can decode the word (for most words, sound it out, or recognize the word if it's a sight word) and comprehend it. You do not need any pictures for this. Does that make sense?

Based on my definition of reading, Kevin was not reading this book. He was guessing based on the pictures.

We went back to read the title, which was not obvious based on the picture on the front cover. He moaned and said he couldn't read it because he didn't know what it said.

Here is an example from a similar book that he brought home yesterday.

When we got to the last page, he said, "The animals." I told him to look at the word and sound it out, and then he realized it said "the farm."

After he read the first book from school, I opened up this book that we had at home and asked him to read it. He looked at the first page and said, "A chicken." It took a little coaxing to get him to sound out the words instead of guessing, but he read the rest of the book and did a great job.

I'm upset because books like these create bad habits in early readers. They get in the habit of guessing what the words are based on the pictures. They also get in the habit of looking at the first couple of letters in a word and guessing what the word is (for example, on the page above that says, "the farm," Kevin would just need to look at the first letter and at the picture and realize the word was "farm"). When I was young and listening to some of my peers struggle with reading, and when I was a teenager and volunteered in the elementary school, I observed that this was a very common problem with kids who struggled with reading. My opinion is that it's unnecessary to start with books like these kindergarteners are reading, and in fact it's doing more harm than good. English may have a lot of exceptions to the rules, but it is still a phonetic language, and if kids are taught English like it's Chinese it's going to take them a long time to learn to read fluently, and they will struggle with reading new words. When I learned to read we started with sounding out words, then we moved on to learning letter combinations (like ow, ea, ar, ai, ful, etc.), learned to use the long vowel sound for most words that end in e, and in the midst of this we also picked up sight words.

I felt resentful that I'm being asked to be an accomplice in teaching my child bad reading habits (especially after all of the work I put into teaching him to read last summer), so I emailed his teacher about it. Apparently the point of these books is to help them develop confidence. Yay for confidence, except where's that confidence going to go if later on they are terrible readers?

The bright side is that at least I know what Kevin is "reading" at school, so now I can work with him on the right way to read at home. We still have quite a bit of the reading book left, and we also have some cute little books called Animal Antics (an example is the book about the hen above). I'll be hunting around to find more.

Up until now I have mostly been very happy with Kevin's school. His handwriting and drawing have improved 300% since he started school, and that by itself is huge to me. I prayed about it again and I still feel like this is where Kevin is supposed to be right now. At this point I don't think this is a deal-breaker, but it's definitely something I will keep my eye on. Everybody raves about how great this elementary school is, so we will see how things pan out. I realize that I'm not trained as an elementary school teacher, but I really don't see any benefit to teaching kids to guess with pictures.

stuff I feel like writing about

I am still slowly making progress with Couch to 5K. On Wednesday I thought I would be able to move on to the week 3 program next week, but yesterday was really hard and now I'm thinking I'll be repeating the week 2 program for the third time. If I push myself too hard my calves get too sore and then I can't do anything, let alone exercise. I wish I could get better a little faster, but at least I'm doing something.

For some reason my body thinks it's a good idea to wake up at 4:00 in the morning and spend an hour or so worrying about things--some realistic, some less so. Then I have to get up early to get Kevin ready for school.  The last couple of days have been a little better, so hopefully I can break the pattern, because I'm awfully tired.

Overall I feel happy about Kevin being in school. He is really learning a lot. It's true that kindergarten is the new first grade, at least when it comes to reading and writing. By the end of the year all of the kids are supposed to be able to sound out words and know several sight words (and spell them), and they are supposed to be able to write about a book after they have read it. Some of their methods seem a little weird, but mostly it's fine.

The school has a behavior system that is based on the acronym CHOMP (Care for others, Have respect, Offer peer support, Make good choices, and Practice safety). When the kids are caught doing these behaviors they get CHOMP tickets, and when a class has gotten enough tickets they can earn rewards like extra recess, wearing pajamas to school, etc. This is a research-based program and I think it's good for the most part. The one thing that annoys me is that the rules are a little fuzzy sometimes--basically anything that doesn't fit in any one category just gets lumped into Make Good Choices. But they are usually good about understanding that these are just little kids and they're still learning the rules. It's harder for kids like Kevin who don't really fit the cookie cutter kid mold because some of those behaviors don't come as naturally to him as they do to most of the kids. Just as an example, Kevin is a very curious person. He's always observing the things around him, and if he sees something interesting he wants to touch it and figure out how it works. That's certainly a positive characteristic, but hand-in-hand with that characteristic is a tendency to get up and wander if he sees something interesting. Sometimes it feels like they miss the positives because they're so focused on making sure he's sitting down. I understand that they need to do that because if they don't tell all the kids to sit down then things will go crazy (and sitting down at appropriate times is a skill he's going to need to figure out), but I worry that they'll see the kid who won't sit down and miss that he's also the kid who's great at seeing how things work. Make sense? I don't worry too hard about it because we do plenty at home to encourage his talents and he's a confident person, but it does still worry and frustrate me.

Speaking of how things work, we've discovered the How It's Made videos on youtube, and there are a lot of cool ones. I've been letting Kevin watch them as a treat sometimes, and the nice thing is that I don't have to feel very guilty about letting him watch videos because he really learns a lot from them. We've enjoyed the ones about sugar, noodles, erasers, and chocolates, just to name a few.

I feel like Heidi is working on finding herself. She copies a lot of the things that Kevin does or says. She is really talkative at home lately. Sometimes I just have to go in our room for a couple of minutes to get a break because she chatters so much. It's cute, but after a while it can kind of wear on you. In other places she is more shy. She's obsessed with nonsense words. A lot of the time she'll just call things a "da-nya-nya" or a "gonch" or whatever else she feels like calling it and then expect you to give it to her.

We've signed the kids up for soccer. Kevin is doing a great job participating and following directions. It's really cute. Heidi is pretty shy and has to have some time before she's willing to play. Last time it took Ryan about 25 minutes to even coax her to kick the ball, and then finally in the last 10 minutes she started standing in the vicinity of her team.

Ann Marie is getting more social and more capable of grabbing things and putting them in her mouth. There was one evening this week when she was really upset during dinner, and finally I went and got her a baby spoon to play with and she was delighted. It was like she just wanted to have an eating utensil like everyone else. She can grab things and put them in her mouth.

We had well-child checkups for Heidi and Ann Marie this week. Heidi is 29 pounds and 37 inches tall, and Ann Marie is 14 pounds and 24 inches long. As I recall, they're both around the 25th percentile for height and weight. The nice thing about having three kids is that the doctor assumes that I know what I'm doing and isn't as pushy about some things. It was a rough day for Heidi. She got a flu shot and thought it was horrible, and then on top of that we found out she has an ear infection, so she also had to start taking yucky amoxicillin twice a day, which she also thinks is horrible.

this week's accomplishments

Monday was my last final, so I am done. I checked my grades a couple of days later and I actually did quite well. A month ago I felt so intimidated by all that I had to do. I could hardly believe I would accomplish it all. But I took it one thing at a time and in the end all of it got done.

Heidi peed in the Froggy Potty three times this week and was so excited she couldn't stop giggling. This was probably the first time since before her second birthday (almost a year ago), so I am thrilled. She is very familiar with the entire process and just needs to figure out her body signals, so all I am doing is letting her wear underwear if she wants to and giving her encouragement and help if she asks for it. With the baby coming soon, I'm not planning to put any pressure on her, but if she is interested and decides to potty train herself, I won't complain. I keep saying that I've never potty trained a child because both of my kids have done it themselves when they decided they wanted to (my attempts at potty training them before then were unsuccessful).

I helped clean the temple on Thursday. I told the brother in charge that I would be fine as long as I didn't have to bend down a lot (he didn't want to put me to work), so I got to vacuum both sealing rooms, the celestial room, the baptistry, and the waiting room area. I got really tired after vacuuming the big rugs in front, so I went home after that, but I was happy to get to help.

Ryan and I went on a real date. It was like a miracle. The Young Women did a babysitting night at the church as a fundraiser for Girl's Camp, so we dropped off both of the kids and then went out for dinner. After driving around trying to find a parking space near Franklin Street, we decided to just go to Ruby Tuesdays. They took us straight to a table and our food was ready pretty quickly. The interesting thing was that the waiter kept apologizing that it was taking so long. We both got bacon cheeseburgers and fries, plus the waiter brought us an extra plate of the complimentary biscuits because our food was "taking so long." It's been way too long since we went on a date, so it was really nice to be able to get away and just sit and talk. Kevin and Heidi apparently had a blast at the church with the Young Women.

Today Kevin did an entire reading lesson (Lesson 17). This is a big accomplishment because usually he will only sit through two or three of the tasks per day. I can tell he's getting more excited about being able to read words and stories. I'm amazed at how much he has already learned to do. He had his last day of preschool this week and is really excited to go to kindergarten. He also really, really wants to take apart Ryan's old computer and use it to build a memory scanner.

I wrote an honors thesis.

This is the last slide from the presentation I gave about my honors thesis at the Anadarko symposium a week and a half ago. It's a basic summary of my findings. The numbers are 87Sr/86Sr ratios from different sources in the Croatan National Forest. None of them are as high as the peat in the pocosin of the forest, which means that none of them are the source of the high ratios. We are hypothesizing that the source may be upwelling ground water that has been in contact with the basement rocks a couple thousand feet below the forest, or it may be deposition of atmospheric dust.

The presentation went really well. I did a practice run for my advisor and a few other students the day before, which gave me a good idea of what I needed to change (including making a lot of changes to my slide show) and what I wanted to say. My advisor said that he was pleasantly surprised because I'm such a mellow person that he didn't think I would be very animated when I was talking. If I can just get past the first few introductory sentences I usually get in the zone and I forget that I'm talking to a room full of people. I got a lot of compliments from people saying I seemed very calm and not at all nervous, especially since at one point in the middle of my presentation there were technical issues with the connection from the computer to the screen (which was ironic because the day before my advisor had promised that would not happen), and it didn't really faze me.

Ryan was really great to spend the entire day with the kids so I could be there for the entire symposium. It was interesting to see people's posters and presentations and learn about what other students have been working on, and I also enjoyed talking to professors and students who I haven't talked to for a while.

Giving the presentation helped me organize my thoughts more coherently, so after I had given the presentation I was able to go back to my thesis and fix a lot of the things I had felt uneasy about with my discussion section. I submitted the final draft on Friday, so it's all done! It's interesting to think how a couple of years ago I couldn't imagine myself writing a thesis, but it all happened gradually over the last couple of years.

Tomorrow is my last final, and after that I will be completely done! It still hasn't really registered that the end is finally here.

Making Learning Fun

Occasionally when I have time I search the internet looking for ideas for learning activities to do with my kids. There seems to be a really common perception that learning should always be fun or kids will hate learning.

I have been thinking about this idea lately. Now, I'm not really opposed to coming up with fun things to do to help kids learn. But I think as they mature, kids need to develop an understanding that learning is not always fun, but it is worth it. I think it's dangerous when this perception (i.e. that learning should be fun at all costs) spills into the older ages when kids are learning more advanced concepts. Looking back on a lot of the math and science classes I've taken, they were honestly not very fun. A lot of it was drudgery. Sometimes I really hated it. Sometimes I cried over difficult homework assignments. But I'm still glad I took the classes. I have a better understanding of how the world works and I have a more refined mind as a result of challenging my mind. The worksheets and practice problems were a necessary part of learning the material. Games would never have been enough.

What really gets me is when I hear fellow college students complaining that a class is not fun or entertaining. It is not a professor's job to entertain. I feel like we're building up this perception that if we go somewhere and it wasn't fun, there must be something wrong. It may not be fun to memorize multiplication tables, or practice doing integrals, or write a ten-page research paper, but does that mean that the teacher who assigned those things is doing a bad job? No! Just because learning isn't always fun or entertaining doesn't mean it's not worth it. Have you ever noticed how satisfying it is to look back at a semester of school and realize how much more you know now than you did at the beginning? Doesn't it feel great to remember all of the hard things you worked so hard to accomplish? Personally, when I look back at the easy classes, I often feel gypped when I think about all of the things I would have understood better if the teacher had expected more of us. The best teachers are the ones who know how to present material in an organized and coherent manner and give meaningful and reasonably challenging assignments to their students. And a class can be engaging and meaningful without necessarily being fun.

Besides, this is a principle that applies to pretty much everything in life. If you don't put a lot of work into your garden, you won't get as much food out of it. If you never practice the piano (yes, that includes scales) you won't get very good. Housework is not fun, but it needs to be done, and it's satisfying to have clean dishes and a sparkling bathroom counter. And when it comes to applying for jobs, the truth is that while it's good to look for a job where you will be happy, most jobs aren't fun. If they were fun then people would do the job themselves instead of paying you to do it. At some point our children need to be helped to understand that they will have to work hard for the things that are worthwhile.

the day we drove three hours east just to get sticks to burn later

I just realized I never posted this. Last November we went out to the Croatan National Forest to get some more samples for my research. At the end of the post are some pictures. First we got some well water samples with the help of a lady from the NCDENR. She was really nice and loved the kids. She let them help her with measuring water levels and getting the water out of the wells (which basically involves attaching a bailer to a fishing pole, dropping it down into the well, and then reeling it back in). After that we drove around the forest and collected branches from trees.

After we got back I peeled the bark off of the branches with a pocket knife, then chopped the wood into small pieces, then dehydrated the wood, then ashed the wood. Once the samples had become ash, I dissolved them in acid, separated the strontium out, and loaded the samples onto filaments for the mass spectrometer. So basically we took a three hour drive just so I could get some sticks to burn. : )

The results for the vegetation samples were hard to interpret. The Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios didn't seem to have any pattern and they didn't really even match my surface water samples from before. My advisor and I suspect that it's because I sampled a variety of different trees, and the trees are getting their strontium from different depths of soil. We're going to go back this semester and get samples from all of the same kind of tree (probably pine) to see if there are any patterns found from sampling the same kind of tree in different locations.

The well water samples had high Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios, but not the highest Strontium-87/Strontium-86 ratios I have seen from my data, so that seems to indicate that groundwater is not the source of high Strontium-87, but it is mixing with that source, whatever it is.

The blue thing is the well.

These are some very strange bugs that Ryan saw on a tree.

update

Kevin has started doing basketball with the YMCA this month and is really enjoying it. He is participating with his team a lot better than he did with soccer. I think it's partly because he has developed and is better at participating in a group and also partly because basketball is a better fit for him. Sometimes his mind wanders and he loses his focus, but that happens with all the other kids too. He always has a grin on his face throughout the entire practice. He is improving with his dribbling and he does a great job with his bounce passes.

His favorite things to draw lately are electricity and a jiggly-jiggly. Don't ask me what a jiggly-jiggly is, but whatever it is it must be something absolutely hilarious. It has something to do with grabbing the unused seat belts and tying them around the car seats. He draws zig-zags for electricity (inspired by the warning pictures on the big green electrical boxes).

All of a sudden Kevin has an opinion about how his hair should be fixed. After we comb his hair down flat he will spike up just the bangs in front. It actually looks pretty cute. I suspect that he likes the bangs spiked up because then they're not touching his forehead.

Recently we checked out Castle in the Sky from the library. I had seen the commercial many years ago and always wanted to see it, and I was not disappointed. We are pretty big Hayao Miyazaki fans in this house. The kids loved it and have asked to see it several times. I'm amazed at the little details they noticed. Yesterday (1/28) Kevin asked me to roll up his long sleeves "like Pazu," and later he told me he was drawing airships. They also build airships with the duplos and run around acting like characters from the movie.

Heidi is obsessed with favorite colors. Her favorite colors are pink and purple. And if you ask her what her favorite anything is, she will still respond that it is pink or purple. Favorite food? Pink. Favorite book? Purple. Favorite movie? Purple.

Heidi loves to learn little songs and poems. Some of her recent favorites are Where is Thumbkin? and Popcorn Popping. She does a pretty good job of quoting the nursery rhyme Ladybug, Ladybug from memory and does so every time she sees a ladybug or a picture of one. I keep trying to get a video of it, but she won't do it for the camera.

Ryan enjoys the Asterix and Obelix comic books and he's been checking out 2-4 of them every time he takes the kids to the library. The kids enjoy looking at them too. However, I do not like reading comic books out loud and pretty soon I started refusing to read the books to them. (I read a lot of books to the kids, but I reserve the right to refuse to read them books that drive me nuts. Mainly this applies to dumb children's books that have an average of two words per page and should never have been published, but comic books are just awkward to read aloud.) As a result of this, I have this conversation with Heidi at least once a day:

H: Mom, you not like Ashes? (Asterix)
M: I have no objection to Asterix, but I don't like reading comic books out loud.
H: Oh. Well, I like Ashes.
M: I know.
H: Daddy like Ashes.
M: Yep.
H: Kevin like Ashes.
M: Mm-hmm.
H: You not like Ashes?

Ryan has needy students who would happily keep asking him questions until midnight.

We've all had a cold except Kevin. I was the last to get it, and I'm really bummed because I was being really diligent about handwashing and hoping it would pass me by. And just as I thought it was going away after about a week, I seem to be either getting a relapse or a different cold. I hate having a sore throat. Now I have a tickle in my throat that makes me hack and cough. In the morning I wake up with a really dry throat and I have to drink copious amounts of water to eventually get it bearably moist. I was trying to take a break from sugary things for a week so I could reset after all the Christmas treats, and now I'm having to eat lots of cough drops, although I wouldn't call cough drops a treat no matter how sweet they are. Maybe sometime I can get my sugar back into a normal balance again.

I am blessed to have fairly good pregnancies, but I'm ready to just be done, and considering that Baby will probably be two weeks late like Kevin and Heidi, it feels like there's still so much time left. I just want to meet the baby. Oh, and maybe I also want to be done with all the homework and quizzes and have my honors thesis all finished, which all has to be done before Baby comes. Since we have all the kids' clothes and infant cloth diapers stored in their closet and we have the crib and a swing, I feel like there isn't really anything to do to prepare. On Saturday we got a bigger car seat for Heidi so we can pass her convertible car seat down to the baby (and we saved 25% because of the Babies R Us Great Trade-in Event), so that's taken care of too. Mainly I am trying to get rid of stuff so that we can find a place to put the crib. And of course the apartment office has been so helpful by deciding to tell us we can't keep bikes and strollers outside our door anymore, which means I have to find a place inside the apartment for those too. I keep telling myself we can deal with apartment living for a little longer. We have been very blessed to live in clean and affordable housing close to campus, but we're looking forward to the time when we can get a place with a garage and an extra bedroom.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff, I got rid of an incomplete travel chess set after it took a dive out of the hall closet and landed on my toe. My foot was throbbing in pain and I was desperately trying to get all the pieces picked up while trying to cope with the pain, but I couldn't seem to get the box to close, and finally I just got so mad at the thing that I threw it in the trash. It felt awesome. It would have been nice if I didn't have to hurt my toe to decide it was time to get rid of the chess set, though. Something similar was the motivation for selling five dozen of my Mason jars a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to rearrange things in our closet and a box of jars fell in such a way that all of them broke all over the floor. I had to call out the door and ask Kevin to bring me the vacuum because I was stuck inside behind all the glass. When I realized that I hardly cared about the jars and was only upset because I had to clean up so much glass while the kids were terrorizing the rest of the house, I decided it was time to admit that I will not be canning for the next two years and it's not worth it to store all those empty jars and risk breaking them when we move. It has definitely made our closet less crowded, although Project Reclaim My Closet still has a lot of work left.

Oh, and apparently some cool person taught Kevin how to play Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? because while I was icing my toe he wanted to play it. He didn't seem to have a problem with the fact that the game doesn't really work with only three players, because to him and Heidi it was still just as fun to find out who had the button every time. At any rate, it makes me wonder why we have any toys when we were able to get an hour of fun with nothing but a button.

common conversations

It's amazing how often I get the same responses from people when they find out what Ryan and I are studying. Here are some typical conversations:

Friend: So what's your husband studying again?
Me: Astronomy. (Technically it's astrophysics, but Ryan has found that when people hear the word "physics" their eyes glaze over and suddenly want to get away.) He's getting a PhD.
Friend: Oh, wow. And you're in school too, right? What are you studying?
Me: Yeah, I'm going part-time. I'm getting my bachelor's degree in Geology.
At this point there can be a couple of different responses:
Response 1: Oh, wow, so you guys must have a lot to talk about/you must have a lot of really interesting conversations.
Response 2: Oh, wow, so you both must be really . . . um . . . yeah, like really, well . . . yeah.
Response 3: Wow, that's great. I'm so glad that there are people that enjoy those kind of things, because I know I could just never be interested in those things because I just don't really like them. But that's so great that you guys can do that stuff.

We find all three responses to be kind of interesting. If it's the first response . . . Um, yes, we do enjoy talking about geology and astronomy together, but guess what, we are both interested in many different topics and we talk about those too--politics, church, parenting, movies, and history, just to name a few. Is that normal, or do most people only talk about what they studied in college? If it's the second response . . . How were you planning to finish that sentence? Nerdy? Smart? Sciencey? Cool? Fond of licking rocks? If it's the third response . . . um, thanks, I think. I'm assuming you're not trying to imply that you don't want to hear me talk about what I do.

When people find out that Ryan does physics, they also sometimes say, "Wow, physics, huh? I bet you do a lot of story problems, don't you?" Not really.

I'm not offended by these comments (I figure they are meant to be friendly and therefore I take them that way), but I think it's really interesting how often Ryan and I have these exact conversations with people. I suspect that there are a lot of people who are intimidated by science and assume that whatever we say will be way over their heads because we're science people. We really can talk about a lot of different things, not just science.

But it is kind of fun to say that I'm studying Strontium isotopes using mass spectrometry. By the way, there's a lot more to geology than collecting rocks. We actually kind of like the rocks because they have a story behind them.

trespassing

For our final in my field methods class we had another orienteering-type activity, where we were given GPS coordinates and pictures, and we had to find the thing in the picture and take strike/dip or trend/plunge, then plot it on a topographic map. Ryan and the kids came with me in the evening while I tried to find the first few places.

It was all going just fine for the first place (by the pond). Then I went to move on to the second place. Something strange happened in my brain as I was walking there, and I started thinking the top number on the GPS was the northing and the bottom was easting (it's actually the opposite). I don't know how that happened, because I was thinking the right way for the first location. I was about three yards away from the second place when my brain flipped and I started thinking I needed to be going a completely different direction. We ended up at a fence, and (in my flip-flopped thought process) my GPS was saying I needed to be on the other side of the fence. We went up and down the fence and couldn't find a place where it seemed to curve around. Ryan remarked that it seemed more like a deer fence, so finally I decided to climb over this gate and find my place on the other side. I left Ryan and the kids there. Kevin and Heidi apparently tried to follow me to get me to come back. Apparently they knew this was a bad idea.

I kept wandering and trying to get the GPS numbers right, and I ended up at a road. I followed the road and came to a brick building with a parking lot to the side. Then I realized the brick building looked sort of like a house, and someone was looking at me out the window. I turned and went around the house that definitely had a bunch of fences around it. After wandering for quite a distance I finally decided my GPS was having problems and I needed to go back, but by this point I had decided that this was definitely somebody's private property, so I didn't really want to go back past the house. I ended up getting disoriented, and then I found a broken part in the fence and went over. I was pretty obviously back on the frisbee golf course now, and I asked somebody to tell me how to get back to the pond, figuring if I could get back to the pond I could find Ryan and the kids.

I got back and found them, and by that point it was time to go home. I was really frustrated because I had to give the GPS back to my TA by 2:00 the next day, and I only had one out of the ten locations done.

Here's an interesting leaf Ryan saw while I was tromping through the forest.

The next day I went back to try again. I walked quite a ways and again decided my GPS must be having problems because I would walk in a straight line north (following my compass) and the numbers on the GPS for what I thought were northing would go up and down and up and down. That was when it finally hit me that I had flipped it in my head, and that really the top number was easting and the bottom number was northing. After that I got along much better. I found the places just fine and didn't have much trouble figuring out where they were on the topo map. The only issue I had was with the fourth place. I ended up standing at that same fence with the GPS telling me the spot I was looking for was about twenty feet away on the other side of the fence. I looked around on the not-private side of the fence and couldn't find the place in the picture. This time I decided there was no way I was climbing that fence again and I was just going to miss out on the points. (It turns out that was a good choice because when I mentioned it to my TA he said it wasn't on the other side of the fence.) Oh, and the whole time it was sprinkling just slightly so that my topo map was slightly damp, which meant if I tried to erase things I just got smudges.

Later on, after finals were over and grades were posted, I decided to figure out what that building was that I had seen in the evening when I hopped over the fence. As it turns out, it was the UNC chancellor's house. No joke. It was a pretty interesting adventure. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it wasn't a test.

research project update

So here is a little update about my Strontium research project. Below you can see a map of the area I've been studying and then a table with Strontium concentrations,⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios, and elevation.

The story behind this is that a graduate student here at UNC did a Master's Thesis where she took a core of the peat (soil with a high concentration of plant matter) and studied its chemistry. One of the things she found was that the peat had a high ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio. ⁸⁷Sr is the daughter isotope of ⁸⁷Rb, which means that over time ⁸⁷Sr increases because ⁸⁷Rb is decaying. So older rocks will have high ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios, and younger rocks will have low ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios. The interesting thing is that the place where she sampled is close to the East coast, and the rocks and sediment there should be young. You would expect them to have ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios similar to modern sea water (0.70918) or else the groundwater (0.708104-0.709006). Instead she found that the peat had values of 0.71361± 0.00047. My project, which I started last fall, has been to explore why that value is so high.

Last fall I collected the first ten water samples in the table. What I found was that the water from the center (GL, CF-L, and HC) had the highest values (greater than 0.710). The samples from the east side (BC, TR-Y, and NR) had values similar to sea water. The samples from the west side (TR-P, WO-M, WO-L, and WO-H) had values similar to the local groundwater. At the time I concluded that there was something happening at the center of the Croatan National Forest that was causing the values to be high there, and I expected that there would be a radial pattern where values decreased gradually as you move out from the center of the forest towards the Neuse River, the Trent River, and the White Oak River. Since the forest is on a plateau, I also wondered if ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios would be related to elevation. So this semester I collected thirteen more samples, because I needed more data to be able to test my hypothesis. My focus was to get more samples from inside the forest, and also more samples in the area between the forest and the major rivers.

My results were not what I expected. Initially when I got the data back and compared it to my map, I was afraid I had done something wrong and contaminated my samples. But then I used Google Maps to figure out where the water was flowing, it made a lot more sense.

The place that worried me the most was the area in the north (samples CL-1, AR, NF1, and NF2). CL-1 was so close to the Neuse River that I was sure it would have a similar ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio. Since the Neuse River has a higher concentration of Sr than the other rivers in the region, even a little bit of mixing would make that creek have the same ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio as the Neuse River. Instead, CL-1 had a ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio of 0.710241, higher than the Neuse River's ratio, which is 0.709172. I know that doesn't look like much of a difference, but it's fairly significant. So CL-1 had values similar to samples closer to the center of the forest. The same was the case for AR, NF1, and NF2. Then I looked at Google Maps and realized that all of these samples are on the same creek, Brice Creek, and the creek actually meanders quite a bit before it joins the Trent River, which then joins the Neuse River. So at the location of CL-1, even though geographically it is close to the Neuse River, the water there actually doesn't reach the Neuse River until after going west and then north, and meandering a lot. If you follow Brice Creek from CL-1 to the Trent River, the ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio decreases as more mixing takes place between Brice Creek and the Trent River. So the values of those samples actually do make sense.

As I looked at all of the other samples it seemed clear that this is mainly a story of mixing. If the water is mixing pretty directly with the Neuse, Trent, or White Oak rivers, the ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios will be lower, but if there is more meandering or the location is farther from those rivers, then the ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr tends to be higher.

I also plotted all of the samples on a topographic map, and there was no correlation between elevation and ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios.

This doesn't really tell what is causing the ratios to be high in the area, but it changes how we view what's going on. The next thing I want to do is test the Strontium in rainwater in the area to see if storms from inland are bringing in ⁸⁷Sr and raising the ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratios. I also want to study the soil in the area. While I was talking to one professor here, he said that it's possible the geologic map of UNC isn't accurate and that the rock in the area is older than was thought.

Hopefully this was interesting to some people and not too hard to follow. It makes sense to me because I've spent so much time staring at the numbers, but maybe it won't make as much sense to other people who aren't so familiar with it.

Sed/Strat field trip

Here are some pictures and details about my field trip two weeks ago.

We left on Friday, March 22, around 1:30. Ryan and the kids dropped me off at Mitchell Hall. I was sad to leave them.

We drove through Virginia and then West Virginia and then Kentucky. As we got to the western border of West Virginia we started seeing signs saying that there had been a rock slide on the other side of the East River tunnel, which was along our planned route. Traffic was backed up for a mile or more behind the tunnel and the left lane was blocked. I'm sure you can imagine how excited we were to drive through a tunnel under a mountain where there had just been a rock slide. And of course the painfully slow speed was just lovely too.

Here's our view just before we entered the tunnel:

Inside the tunnel:

Obviously we didn't get crushed and we got out okay. We never saw the rockslide because they detoured traffic. To us it seemed like there was no reason for the left lane to be blocked for so much of the interstate. The detour cost us a lot of time and was the main reason why we got to our hotel in Kentucky really late that evening.

Here is a video of the rockslide:


I totally scored when it came to rooming arrangements. We were supposed to have five people to a room with one person sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I had arranged to sleep in the same room as three other girls who seemed nice. But when we got to the hotel I found out that my teacher had put me in the same room as my TA because my teacher's wife said that I should get "the full mom treatment"--i.e. a bed all to myself. So my TA and I got a room all to ourselves. That was pretty nice.

On Saturday we spent most of our time looking at outcrops. Lots of bedrock is exposed in Kentucky because they cut into the hills to make the highways, so there were a lot of cool things to see. We followed the formations from younger to older through most of the Paleozoic era.

In a lot of places you could see where water was flowing between rock layers and had dripped out of the rock to form these icicles hanging from the rocks. The dark flaky stuff in the middle is mud with a lot of coal in it.

These are some ripples:

This is a chert nodule in limestone. They are formed when the limestone is lithified--the chert forms by replacing some of the rock. Across the street from this you could see an unconformity (a gap in the geologic record where layers have been eroded away and new layers were then deposited on top). There were a lot of chert nodules in the unconformity. Speaking of limestone, I'd really like to get some hydrochloric acid of my own. It's so annoying to see an interesting rock and not be able to tell if it's sandstone or limestone because I don't have any hydrochloric acid to test it. (Limestone effervesces when hydrochloric acid is dropped on it.)

This is cross-bedding.

We stopped at this place at the side of the road that was basically a huge pile of broken up limestone. It was full of fossils. Every single rock I picked up had many fossils or fossil traces in it.

This rock shows burrows or tracks:

I thought the circular fossils at the bottom were really interesting. They have these perfect little flower shapes in the middle and seem to be shaped like tubes.

The Fifth Third Bank. I just thought that was a funny name for a bank.

Saturday night we stayed at another hotel in Kentucky. It was nicer than the first one (which had smelled like a combination of stale cigarette smoke and gross incense). In the evening everyone ended up going to sit-down restaurants, and even though I had brought food for dinner I decided to use some birthday money to get Chicago pizza with some other girls in my class. We had a nice time and the pizza was great. (I mentioned this in a previous blog post, if you remember.)

On Sunday the weather was not that great. It was pouring rain so hard that it was still dark when we left the hotel. We still ended up stopping for quite a while at some stops even though it was muddy and miserable. It did get nice for a while around 11:00. We stopped for quite a while at an outcrop that was mostly coal-ey mud. It was full of big concretions and my teacher wanted to get a good one to take home. Concretions happen when the minerals from limestone are carried in groundwater from limestone to a mud deposit, and then the minerals form around round, hard centers to make big balls of limestone. Then when the mud is lithified everything gets squished, which makes the concretions look like UFOs instead of spheres.

Here's a rock we found there with ripples:

There were a few guys in the class who worked really hard to get this concretion for our teacher. That slope they were standing on was very loose and unstable, but they were really determined to get the concretion out. They were hammering the crowbar in to get the concretion loose. They literally worked at it for at least half an hour before it finally tumbled down.

Here is the concretion in my teacher's hands. He was really excited about it. There were many concretions that were much bigger than this one.

After that we just aimed for home, just stopping for meals and bathroom/gas stops. Western Virginia (not to be confused with West Virginia) was rather depressing. Think enormous black cliffs of coal, double rows of mile-long trains full of coal, refineries, and lots of poverty. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was basically like District 12 from the Hunger Games. (Coal is great for the economy, right?) As we got further into Virginia and out of coal country it was snowing.

We got back to Mitchell Hall at around 7:45 pm and I borrowed a cell phone to ask Ryan and the kids to pick me up. I came home long enough to help get the kids dinner and mostly ready for bed, and then I hurried to the church for the last bit of choir practice. We had the Easter program the next week and I needed to be there to practice (we still needed a lot of practice), so even though I was sad to leave my family right after getting home I decided to go.

Oh, and apparently I had signed up to feed the missionaries that Saturday and then forgot about it. Fortunately they called Ryan the day before, so he made them pizza. He's awesome like that.

a peculiar people

I just returned this evening from a weekend field trip for my Sedimentology/Stratigraphy class. I will probably post details and pictures about the trip later, but I wanted to share one thing that I kept thinking about throughout the trip.

I have heard the phrase "a peculiar people" at church throughout my life. It kept echoing in my mind this weekend. I knew that I am different from most people outside of the LDS church in many ways, but until this trip I don't think I had realized to what extent I am different. Over and over again I was struck at how different I am from everybody in my class and how peculiar I must seem to them in some ways.

One of the main things was that everyone drinks alcohol. When I was in high school I generally had the impression that I should avoid becoming too close to people who drank alcohol, which was probably the right idea for teenagers since it's illegal for teenagers to drink, but then there's not usually any talk about what it's like when you're 21. The thing is that outside of the LDS church most people drink alcohol at least occasionally. If I were to never spend time with people who drink alcohol then I would be missing out on wholesome relationships and good experiences. Most people who drink are still worth knowing and befriending. Anyway, it was interesting to realize that everybody in my class who was 21 or older was getting drinks last night, and the people who weren't old enough yet were complaining that they couldn't. I got dinner with some other girls and two of them ordered a beer (the other girl wasn't 21 yet). Even though we didn't talk about it, I realized that they were probably a little confused that I wasn't doing the same. I know very little about alcohol and because of that I didn't really even know how to respond when they talked about different kinds of beer and whether they like them or not. It wasn't a temptation at all for me because I'm really not interested and I made the decision to keep the Word of Wisdom a long time ago, but it did feel sort of weird to be the different one. I'm still trying to figure out how/if to let people know that I don't drink without making them feel awkward. I mentioned it to a guy from my class the other day and I could tell I had surprised him.

It was kind of a similar case with coffee. People just make offhand comments about coffee (like how they like it or how they need it to be alert) as if I know exactly what they're talking about, and it's kind of weird because I actually don't know what they're talking about since I don't drink things with caffeine, which means I don't really know what it feels like to "need" some caffeine to get more energy or whatever. If I'm tired I just go to sleep!

I am also much more careful with my money than most people are. Before the trip I planned out my meals and made things to eat for dinner so I wouldn't have to spend a lot of money on fast food, and then once we were on the trip I realized that I was literally the only one who wasn't just planning on buying food at restaurants or gas stations. I actually did end up spending some birthday money to get Chicago Pizza when I went to dinner with those other girls, which I wasn't planning on, but I did think through how I would pay for it and how it would work in the budget, whereas others didn't really worry about it. That's not necessarily a Mormon thing, but it still throws me off when I realize how often most people go out to eat, and it felt kind of weird to be the only one pinching pennies and eating homemade food on a field trip.

Overall, it occurred to me that I am much more religious than most people. It's a very significant part of my life. Things like keeping the Sabbath day holy and reading the scriptures and words of the prophets are habits now for me and they seem normal, but if other people observed my habits a lot of them would be surprised at how much of my life I devote to my religion, even outside of church. To me it seems normal, but many people would find it peculiar.

And of course there is also my family. Apparently there are only around 30 other undergraduates at UNC who have children, so I am definitely a rarity in that respect. That alone makes me very different from the crowd. Outside of my church the average ages for marriage and children tend to be much higher.

It was just interesting to experience all this and try to analyze my feelings. It's not that I ever felt any pressure or temptation to compromise my values, but it was interesting to be around others who are good people but don't share these values and to realize how different I must seem to them. I felt a little self-conscious and uncomfortable about it. But after pondering about it I realized that is what it means to be a peculiar people. It's part of what it is like to be a follower of Christ. Many people do not follow him. Many have not found him. But I have found him, and if I am to follow him that means I am part of a peculiar people and I will always have to deal with being different from the majority. It's a little bit intimidating. I hadn't realized this concept to this extent before. It means I have to have a little bit more courage if I want to share the gospel. It also means that if I want to try to convert people to the gospel I have to realize how much of their lifestyle they are being asked to change as part of that conversion. So in that way it was an interesting trip and I came home with a lot to think about.

Next time I write about my trip I will post a lot of pictures of cool rocks.

Battle Park

A little over a week ago, for my Field Methods class we went to Battle Park. Our assignment was to use GPS to find various locations, find where we were using a topographic map, and then measure strike/dip, trend/plunge, or elevation using our Brunton compasses. Normally it's not especially helpful to do those measurements on trees and boulders because it doesn't tell you anything about the geology, but in Chapel Hill there aren't a lot of outcrops, so that's what the teachers had us measure so we could get some practice. They marked the rocks and trees with chalk. It took a while for my partner and I to figure out what we were doing, but after a while we got the hang of it. We didn't finish, so the rest was homework. I decided to check out a GPS right after class and bring Ryan and the kids with me to do it the next day. Good thing, too, because the next day was Sunday and Sunday night it rained and washed off most of the chalk marks.

It's a beautiful and peaceful park and it was a lovely walk. 

Here is Kevin playing with a big stick (his favorite type of toy) and I am  measuring the trend and plunge of that line on the tree.

Turns out there's an old septic tank in the park.

lots of stuff

This is a blog post that has just kept accumulating because it has various things that I just wanted to write down at various times in the past month, which means it's long and disorganized. But it's for posterity. Enjoy.

1/12/2013
Kevin likes to "cut scissors," as he puts it. Tonight he spent a good fifteen minutes cutting a piece of craft foam into little pieces. Meanwhile I sat across from him with my emotions swinging wildly from freaking out (in fear that he would blind himself with those scissors) and calmly enjoying the moment.

When Kevin hurts Heidi I often tell him to give her a hug and say, "I'm sorry, Heidi. Are you okay?" Well, yesterday Heidi handed me her stuffed dog and then reached out to pet it, saying, "I'm sorry, dog. Are you okay?"

Kevin knows how to say his own prayers, but sometimes he doesn't want to. So a lot of the time we end up telling him what to say, and we repeat ourselves several times to encourage him to copy what we said. One night I told him it was time to say his prayers, and he said, "Okay, Heidi, it's time to say your prayers." (She had already said her prayers.) Then he sat beside her and told her what to say, repeating himself several times if she didn't say anything. He was even scratching her back the way we do to get his attention if he's not saying his prayers. It was very sweet. I think it's funny when he sometimes tries to teach or encourage Heidi to do things that he still refuses to do himself.

I am really enjoying that Kevin occasionally draws things with a purpose now. He is even drawing people. A few days ago (1/28/13) he drew a circle with two legs, feet, and hands and said that he had drawn himself. Then he drew Heidi. He can be a perfectionist in some ways, which means that he has been really resistant to drawing and coloring for quite a while because he couldn't get on paper what he had in his mind.

Today (2/1/13) I was cleaning up a billion game pieces and Kevin decided to take lunch into his own hands. (He made a slab of graphite out of cheese and a tortilla because I wasn't watching closely enough, but that's a different story . . . ) When he opened the fridge, he pulled out a container with leftover canned green beans, which he dumped onto a plate and offered to Heidi, saying, "Oh, are you hungry, Heidi? Here, eat this treat." I had to chuckle because honestly nobody in this family wants to finish those green beans.

Kevin is very gradually making progress with learning to use the toilet. I would say that about five days out of the week he uses the toilet at least once. I've decided to leave him alone and let him do it himself because that's better than going back to square one, which is what happened last summer when I got too involved. That's just how things work with Kevin. It's hard to be the mom with the 3.5 year old who isn't potty trained. I can't think of any friends who have been judgmental, but it still kind of wears on your self-esteem even if you know it's not that important. I love Kevin, but subconsciously it starts to feel degrading at times to still be changing his diapers. I hope that makes sense. I am sort of hoping that Kevin will catch on in the next few months and then Heidi will be ready this summer. She is very interested and her communications skills are developing much earlier than with Kevin.

Heidi likes to make cute faces on purpose so that people will think how cute she is. Her favorite these days is to cock her head to one side and smile, and then say, "Hi," in a sweet little voice.

Heidi's language is developing so rapidly. It seems like Kevin didn't speak this well until he was maybe two or two and a half. She picks up on words really fast and is already saying sentences sometimes. She is very interested in names of body parts, clothes, and animals and their sounds.

We've discovered that Heidi's diaper rashes aren't as bad if we give her baths instead of completely wiping her after she has a soiled diaper. Then she usually gets to air dry for a few minutes. So now if we change her diaper and she doesn't get a bath she thinks she's been short-changed and she screams bloody murder and flails and thrashes. It's quite the feat to get a prefold and cover on her when she does that. Very frustrating, but I admit I also have to laugh at the drama. She is such a joyful little girl, but she can also throw quite the tantrum.

Heidi had her first kiss last night (1/19). My friend Annie and I decided (all in fun, of course) when her little boy, John, and Heidi were born that they are secretly betrothed. Last night at a ward party I turned to see Heidi and Johnny giving each other a hug, and then all of a sudden Heidi gave him a big kiss on the lips. I wished so badly that I had a camera right then. It was quite adorable.

My supply of pajama pants has been a little depleted lately. Some are wearing out, some are too small, and some are too big. So in December when flannel went on sale for $1.99/yd at Joann's I bought four bolts of fabric to make some pajama pants. I followed this tutorial to use an old pair of pajama pants as a pattern, and it worked great for the one pair I have made so far. It took almost three yards to make one pair for me. It was nice to have a quick and successful project. I hate it when I spend a lot of time making something and in the end I don't really like the result.

I also made myself a skirt using some fabric my Grandma sent home with me. I started off using this tutorial. Note to self, don't follow skirt tutorials made by skinny people if you are average sized. I followed her suggestion to make the circumference of the skirt 1.5 times the measurement of my waist, and it was enormous and looked awful. I felt depressed because it was my favorite of the fabric I brought home, but I cut off about 15 inches on one side and sewed a new side seam, and it actually turned out quite nicely!

I do have a couple of skirt patterns. When I bought them I forgot to check if they would work for the width of my fabric, and then later when I tried to cut out the fabric I realized all of my fabric was 45" and the patterns were for 60". But I recently found out that if you fold the fabric the other way (hamburger instead of hotdog?) it will work, so maybe now I can try that.

Oh, and I also figured out how to hem jeans using the original hem. There are a lot of tutorials online, but this is the one I used. I wasn't sure how my old machine would handle it, but it did pretty well.

I think I've probably blogged before about my issues with getting into a Lifetime Fitness (LFIT) class at UNC. When I transferred here, they were being very picky about which transferred classes they would accept to fulfill the requirement. I had taken Ballroom Dance at BYU and Weight Lifting at NC State and they wouldn't accept either one. I made an appeal for them to accept the Weight Lifting class and they responded that my appeal was denied. So I tried every semester except when I was pregnant with Heidi to get into an LFIT class so I could get it out of the way. But UNC does this weird thing where they reserve LFIT classes for certain class years. So I could never get into LFIT classes (even if there were 15 spaces open) because I am a senior and the classes were all reserved for students from other years (I'm assuming freshmen and sophomores). It was very frustrating because I just wanted to get the class out of the way. Well, this semester I finally got into a class. I registered on the waitlist and ended up getting added to the class. Fast-forward to a week before classes start. I got an email from the teacher giving us instructions for paying the fee for the class. The fee was $40 and they would only accept cashier checks and money orders for payment, or you could pay using a credit card online. I was mortified by the cost of the fee. My tuition is supposed to be paying for my classes, and this is a required class that everyone has to take. I could understand a small towel fee for a uniform, but that seemed ridiculous. Out of the blue I decided to check my Tar Heel Tracker (the place where you can check your degree progress online) just to make sure I had to take this class. Lo and behold, something changed and they decided to allow the PE classes I took at BYU and NC State to count for the LFIT requirement. This is a change that must have happened in the past month or two, because when I checked before I was still required to take an LFIT class. I checked with an advisor to make sure I didn't have to take the class, and then I dropped it. So in the end I feel like it was a tender mercy that every time I tried to add an LFIT class to my schedule in previous semesters I wasn't able to get into a class. If I had been able to sign up for the class I would have had to pay a huge fee and then I would have found out later that I didn't even have to take it. I can think of a lot of things I would rather spend $40 (plus the tuition money) on. Now I have all my general education requirements taken care of!