Song to the Moon

I thought it would be appropriate to share this full moon photo I took a few months ago and Dvorak’s Rusalka (opera) Song to the Moon in honor of tonight’s blue moon.

English Translation:

O moon high up in the deep, deep sky,
Your light sees far away regions,
You travel round the wide,
Wide world peering into human dwellings.

O, moon, stand still for a moment,
Tell me, ah, tell me where is my lover!
Tell him please, silvery moon in the sky,
That I am hugging him firmly,
That he should for at least a while
Remember his dreams!

Light up his far away place,
Tell him, ah, tell him who is here waiting!
If he is dreaming about me,
May this remembrance waken him!

O moon, don’t disappear, don’t disappear!

Happy New Year!!!!!!

Why *do* I write?

I’ve been inspired (as I have before) to write a post regarding the reasons behind Why do I write from Joanna at Wisdom Within, Ink.

Why does she write?

What I know is I was born to put words down on paper and I feel as if I have no choice in that matter. I could never pick up my journal again, throw out my fountain pen, burn all the paper in the house and I would survive. Yes, I’d function. But I wouldn’t be whole. Unfulfilled. I wouldn’t understand or experience life or myself as well as I might. My potential would be gasping for air, struggling to live and I would atrophy into just a human machine. The “being” part of this human would have died.

As for me…

I don’t journal on paper as much as I’d like to, because I have horrid handwriting, even though I wish I would get over that hang-up…but I do feel the need to express myself through the written word for a few very important reasons.

I write to understand the things that have happened in my life, to make sense of what seems incomprehensible and to find the silver lining in the bad events that happen to me or those I care about. I process everything important through writing.

I write to record the events I might otherwise forget in the rush of living. To slow down and savor the moments and re-read them at a later point in time, and re-live those moments when my memory might have wanted to forget.

I write to keep connected to others. I had written my friend R after I went to his school for only 4 months in 8th grade. Had we not written each other letters, we might not now be going on our 25th year of friendship. I wrote my first love for four years while he was in the Navy, and even though we didn’t end up together, we’ve been friends now for 21 years. My wonderful step-mother and dad get to keep up with what’s going on in my life and their granddaughters lives by my writing about it. I have a few good internet friends I like to keep connected to, and even though it isn’t quite the same as having shared history together, it’s still a comfort and a joy to me and I’ve learned a lot from my internet friends, many things I would never have learned otherwise. I owe a few of you a lot of gratitude.

I write to help others through my blogs (this one and my science one and my general education one – the latter two which I’ve taken a hiatus from during most of December). I am very grateful to say I still find people comment and have found comfort as they read my struggles with my highly sensitive, formerly selectively mute daughter and some ideas that have helped them. They find a little bit of hope here, I find our struggles actually have been helpful and comforting to others, even though it was extremely difficult to live through them.

I write because I meet wonderful people or things happen that inspire me to great intellectual/emotional “highs”, and the only way I can bring down the intensity is by capturing my thoughts through typing. This doesn’t happen often…but when it does, I must write in order to channel some of that constructively.

I write because it’s calming and focusing. I type and see the words and I focus better on what I’m thinking about and I know what I want and I am reminded of what’s important to me.

So, yeah, there’s quite a few important areas being served by my writing.

Why do you write?

What to do if you get laid off.

Husband has been having some weird vibes at work this past couple of days. He has a real ominous feeling about it, so I decided to post some links about that subject.

Wish us luck. Mostly hubby because he’s looking pretty concerned.

What To Do If You Get Laid Off, Time.com

10 Things You Should Do If You Get Laid Off, Tech Republic

What To Do If You Are Laid Off (from a biotech career), The Lab Rat.com

I can’t wait until tomorrow…

Tomorrow I go to the city to meet with one of my dearest friends I hardly get to see any more. My friend/mentor/father-figure D from my crime lab days. I’ve been waiting oh, about over a year now, to have a face-to-face conversation alone with him (though we’ve had phone contact). He’s been my friend and one of my best supporters for 13 years now. We would take extra long lunches sometimes and spend a few hours having lunch in a local park in Little Italy, or going to Chinatown and having a meal and browse the shops.

Once we’d taken the day off work and go to the Botanic Gardens. Another time we played hooky and caught a showing of Madonna’s version of Evita, and went to the famous German restaurant The Berghoff at Christmastime. Still yet another few times we went to DNA meetings over at the Field Museum of Natural History after museum hours for discussions and some beverages with other scientists doing PCR work. We both considered it very cool to be in the museum after hours.

So many memories, such a deep and enduring friendship.

We’ve lots to talk about tomorrow. Lots of things I’ve learned and things that happened to both of us over the past year to catch up with. I cannot wait to see my friend.

Those childhood losses have a profound effect on the adult I am now.

Some quotes from the Creating Real Relationships book:

You carry inside yourself an invisible set of parents who live inside your head. These parental images may repeatedly remind you that you are defective. Furthermore, these “old” parental figures may remain in place even if your parents ares no longer alive or have significantly changed, and no longer shame you in the same way they once did.

Some losses can never be replaced. No amount of praise or respect in adulthood can compensate for the lack of praise or respect received as a child. This is why mourning is a necessary part of healing shame. You must mourn the parts of you that seemed to die in the face of rejection.

Grieving helps you realize that shame attacks the spirit. When we face losses resulting from shame, we feel a penetrating sorrow that can fill us with pain. But this grief can relieve shame when it is experienced fully. It helps to put away the past, with it’s lost hopes, so we can find a new path in the future.

With each loss of friendship…with every loss of connection with another friend, old wounds are re-opened. Nothing is permanent, and some people don’t consider my friendship essential to them to keep it going. And so the story goes, one right friend right after another…

I’m working through some past issues, grappling with some current issues, trying to rise above it all and stop crying about feelings of abandonment from people I care about, and having hope in some friends (and family) that are being so kind to me right now.

People come and people go…and the world keeps turning anyway.

I have to learn to accept this fact (and what the hell…if people really want to leave I can’t do anything about it) and just stop fighting it and stop taking things so personally (because it’s not really about me, but it’s really about them and what they feel they must do). It would be much, much better for me if I did.

Whatever it is I need, must come from within me, not from out there (though I appreciate the support and encouragement I do find from time to time).

What I really want

I really want to make some plans and keep to them. Oh, but they aren’t New Year’s resolutions. Nope. I’m never any good at keeping those. These are just things that I really want to work on in some fashion in the coming year.

1. I really want to make another pass at simplifying things around here. I’ve taken The Simple Living Guide’s – layer by layer approach to simplifying. Rather than do a major overhaul in one overwhelming batch, I periodically purge to remove stuff we don’t need. It’s time to do it again (actually it was time about 2 months ago). We live in a tiny house, so the extra unnecessary stuff just suffocates me here. And while my family did really well not to buy a lot of toys for Christmas, but games and clothes, I can’t say the same for my in-laws, who bought plastic toys up the ying-yang and no clothes (oh, I take that back, they got 3 sweaters). You should see the toys in the family room (but I’m going to tackle that mess tomorrow).

2. I really want to start a vegetable garden this spring (making sure it’s very rabbit proof).

3. I really want to start creating again. I wrote a list of projects down today I wanted to make. I haven’t done anything major since mid-year and it wasn’t supposed to be like that. I did make a few things on Christmas Eve and I hope to get started on some new projects this week.

4. I just bought a few books for more traditional cooking and I’ve been wanting to do some sort of movement/exercise and meditate so, I ordered Nourishing Traditions, Wild Fermentation and The Fourfold Path to Healing: Working with the Laws of Nutrition, Therapeutics, Movement and Meditation in the Art of Medicine. Not that I’m sick or anything, but I’d like to keep it that way.

5. I really want to figure out what is important to me with regards to the girls’ development and my own career goals. This area needs work. I only know I know that I don’t want to sacrifice the quality of life I have with my family for personal goals that will end up hurting my daughters or making my marriage hard to nurture. That’s the reason why I got out of the rat race in the first place. And also I quit my job so I could after-school the kids so they got their education supplemented. I think I’ve done a pretty decent job of taking them to educational places and teaching them a few things outside of school. I still like to continue to do science projects with the kids, and maybe add some more (homemade?) advanced montessori materials.

I still haven’t been called back about that job I interviewed for. In a way, I’m glad…I think if I got it, I would not be thrilled about it. I think there’s some things I need to work on before I take any job right now. Of course, things might be different if my husband were to get laid off (and he got a weird vibe at work about a week ago), so who knows.

6. I really want to curb my cranky side and stop swearing. Yes, swearing is my absolute worst habit and I can’t stand that I do that. It’s a really bad way of communicating my frustration. Hopefully the meditation/movement stuff will help me weed out that nasty habit of mine. Maybe it will also help me sleep at night. Lack of sleeping doesn’t help my crankiness or energy deficit at all.

7. Take time for the small bits of self-care – like shave my legs more often than once a month (or two). Get my hair cut more often than once every 4 months. Remember to use the nice lotion I got for Christmas before my hands dry out and hurt. Buy a couple of new pairs of jeans that actually fit and don’t slip down all the time (not that I’m skinny, I just have a narrow-ish waist and more than ample hips so I can’t find a pair of pants that actually fit right).

8. Learn how to be joyful. I guess I am avoiding wrinkles by not smiling so much…but really, I probably should work on that some. I need to work on how to be joyful more often. It’s probably due to the other missing things (sleep, self-care, meditation).

I often ask my husband if it’s even possible for me to be happy for long. I don’t think it’s completely impossible, but I sure do things that predispose me to being un-happy: lack of self-care, not sleeping, forgetting to eat sometimes, letting the house get too out of control, setting too many goals that are impossible to keep in a short amount of time, procrastinating, etc.

But…among other things…I’m working on that impossibly high standard goal setting/procrastination cycle too. And on that note, I ought to stop writing, go brush my teeth, get into my jammies, slap some lotion on my dried out hands, and get some sleep.

Some seriously heavy thinking

I had been prone to suicidal ideation more than a few times in my life and also prone to withdrawing from people (Mom Gail – please don’t freak out about that.  It coexists with a very strong will to live and to keep trying to put myself out there). Mostly this is due to feeling the futility of certain aspects of my life and my own disbelief in my abilities to cope and to change and grow with the demands placed upon me (not that I mind demands, just not the kinds I have been getting) and rejection or neglect of my attempts at friendship. Some (most?) of those perceived inabilities, as I’m finding out from reading a book called Creating Real Relationships:Overcoming the Power of Difference and Shame my friend recommended to me, result from many distorted-belief phrases I’ve carried around with me for a while.

From the book,

1. Distorted-belief phrases are typically so automatic and subtle that you are unaware of them or their effect on your moods. You respond without being aware of what you told yourself.
2. Distorted-belief phrases often appear in coded form. Our short word or image contains a whole series of thoughts, memories, or associations.
3. Distorted-belief phrases are often irrational but almost always believed. For example, “what if”, thinking leads you to expect a negative outcome, one that is highly unlikely to occur. Yet, because of the impulse belief phrase is sent so rapidly, it goes unchallenged.
4. Just as you can replace unhealthy behavioral habits (such as smoking or drinking excess coffee) with more positive, health-promoting behavior, so you can replace unhealthy thinking with more positive, supportive mental habits.

My internet friend has been trying to get me to understand what real relationships are and how two people interact in healthy, mutually respectful ways. The book helps bring to light his points.

In a real relationship, it is compose of two emotionally healthy partners who seriously and mutually consider each other’s basic needs. Each partner is aware of his or her needs and is able to express these to the other freely. The couple has the skills to understand and accept these needs and to negotiate and resolve conflict of needs as they arise. Specifically, both individuals in a real relationship have the capacity to:

1. Experience a wide range of feelings deeply.
2. Expect appropriate need satisfaction.
3. Be assertive and self-activate
4. Acknowledge self-esteem
5. Soothe painful feelings
6. Make and stick to commitments
7. Express creativity
8. Experience intimacy
9. Accommodated and enjoy being alone
10. Find the unified real self that is you in the midst of all your conflicting parts

I don’t know what my real needs are.  My husband is always asking me what I want/need…and I really don’t know what exactly that is, and why I keep thinking I don’t have it.

I keep to myself a lot, especially in the winter time, oftentimes staying at home, only going out if I have to get the kids to and from school and for groceries (unless my husband gets them).    It’s not really good for my psyche.  While I am fairly content to be at home, putzing around the house, taking care of the kids I’m more often drawn to the computer simply for mental stimulation and intellectual companionship (yes, no not real, but better than nothing). Sometimes I do get intellectual companionship. Often I get requests to become someone’s correspondence partner. It’s nice, but it takes time and energy to expend on sharing my thoughts and feelings, only to end up becoming over-dependent on that internet connection because I don’t have anything else going on.  And often, when I do start, the effort becomes difficult to maintain on their end.  I’m beginning to realize that it’s difficult to maintain a friendship with me (internet or otherwise).  That’s okay.  I’m just going to stop taking requests.  It’s nothing personal.  I just can’t invest time for everyone who claims they wants a correspondence with me.

I’ve stopped trying to find intellectual stimulating people around here.  And I realize the more I seclude myself up in my house, reading, writing prolifically, striving to learn things I didn’t know before…I widen the gap between myself and most others.   This is not living, as my internet friend keeps telling me.

He’s right.  I know he’s right.  But I spent 3 years almost brain dead, after quitting my job in medical genetics for my kids and as my youngest daughter sucked my intelligence right through my breasts when she nursed for those three years.   I’ve spent the last year and a half sharpening my abilities again.  But to what end?  All dressed up and no where to go.

But I am pushing myself to keep trying to get out there, in the “real world”, interviewing for that job (still no word), taking the lab tour for another lab, teaching that lecture to the 4th grade class, visiting my grandma and a few other old people in the hospital this week (there’s a post coming on that one too).  Going back to church, if for nothing else than because I like the message at that church of trying not to be disconnected from one another, and it’s a way to meet people and get me out of my house once in a while, away from this computer.  I wonder what my friend would say if he knew I have a tendency to make myself a hermit of sorts right in the middle of suburbia.    Sometimes I just want to stay stuck and give up trying, mostly because I have a huge emotional need deficit and I’ve been trying to fill it for years. I’m beginning to think it’s time to look at that (and find out if it’s even possible to fill it).

I’m trying to figure out why I’ve called to mind the myth of Sisyphus- the character from Greek mythology who was condemned to push the same boulder up a hill over and over again, two or three times in the past two weeks. Probably because this calls to mind the ultimate in futility and that word has come up in a few different places.

I didn’t realize there was a philosophical essay about it from Camus, and I find it very interesting and perhaps appropriate to my situation. From Sparknotes
we find a summary of the essay. I haven’t quite figured out if this fits exactly my situation, but the more I read the summary I’m thinking it might. I have the book in the house somewhere (I think I recall seeing it anyway), and I think I’ll be reading it soon if we do have it around here.

The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls “the absurd.” Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos). We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find. Either we will discover that meaning through a leap of faith, by placing our hopes in a God beyond this world, or we will conclude that life is meaningless. Camus opens the essay by asking if this latter conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, we would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide, says Camus. Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose.

The absurd is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled, and any attempt to reconcile this contradiction is simply an attempt to escape from it: facing the absurd is struggling against it. Camus claims that existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers, and phenomenologists such as Husserl, all confront the contradiction of the absurd but then try to escape from it. Existentialists find no meaning or order in existence and then attempt to find some sort of transcendence or meaning in this very meaninglessness.

Living with the absurd, Camus suggests, is a matter of facing this fundamental contradiction and maintaining constant awareness of it. Facing the absurd does not entail suicide, but, on the contrary, allows us to live life to its fullest.

Camus identifies three characteristics of the absurd life: revolt (we must not accept any answer or reconciliation in our struggle), freedom (we are absolutely free to think and behave as we choose), and passion (we must pursue a life of rich and diverse experiences).

Camus gives four examples of the absurd life: the seducer, who pursues the passions of the moment; the actor, who compresses the passions of hundreds of lives into a stage career; the conqueror, or rebel, whose political struggle focuses his energies; and the artist, who creates entire worlds. Absurd art does not try to explain experience, but simply describes it. It presents a certain worldview that deals with particular matters rather than aiming for universal themes.

The book ends with a discussion of the myth of Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek myth, was punished for all eternity to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he reaches the top. Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. So long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he can find happiness in it, says Camus.

Maybe I’m too focused on the wrong things, and not allowing myself to accept a certain amount of futility/absurdity.   To allow certain freedoms from expectation, of myself and others, “without a need to pursue life’s purpose or to create meaning”.   Perhaps I’m too busy looking for everything to mean something that I miss enjoying what just “is”.

The Highly Sensitive Parent

A friend was telling me about the book, The Highly Sensitive Person In Love not too long ago, and after reading this description of the book from Elain Aron’s website, I knew I had to add it to my collection of books.  I already had the Highly Sensitive Child, and am well aware of how high sensitivity can add a complex element to one’s temperament.  I know I am a highly sensitive person, scoring a 24 out of 27 on the self-test.  I always suspected that my sensitivity has given me difficulties in many areas of my life.

I recently wrote the following to that friend of mine:

I found some validation in the HSP in love book about something related to parenting.   [I think it's very salient for me and other highly sensitive parents that might have difficulties in their parenting roles]. This passage really hit home:

Once HSW’s and HSM’s recover from the birth of their children (I’ve seen both react strongly), they usually become highly responsive parents….

At the same time, however, HSP’s can have a strong sense that they are terrible at parenting.  If you are a highly sensitive parent, you know what I mean.  You are often irritable, depressed, lack energy, want to get away, want to express your other talents, or secretly think how much better life would be without children.  Parenthood is a huge responsibility and source of stimulation.

I have thought, up until about 2 days ago, that there was something wrong with me…that I was too self-centered to have been a mother, because I had/have these feelings.  All of them.  Including the one about thinking life would be better without children. In fact, I started this blog a year and a half ago to help me record the GOOD things about being a mother, and diffuse some of the depression and helplessness I felt about being completely overwhelmed by the task of mothering, especially the overwhelming stresses of being a highly sensitive mother parenting a highly sensitive child who was selectively mute.

Even though I know that having 3 children in 3.5 years might take a toll on anyone, I always thought that I was particularly incapable of rising to the task.  I thought it was something evil in me that made me want to not be a mother.  I think now that it has less to do with something inherently evil in me, and more that my temperament is such that it makes the challenge all that much harder.  I feel responsible for EVERYTHING that goes wrong, even the fact that all three of them grind their teeth at night (must somehow be my fault, right?)

I do get overstimulated by my kids, more so when I don’t sleep well or eat well.   I definitely need more sleep.  Last night I went to bed at 9 pm and woke up at about 5 to move into one of my daughter’s beds because my two younger children climbed into bed with my husband and I in the middle of the night.  There was no more room and I was getting hot and squished.  Then I slept in until 7:30.  It was nice.

I know I need to get more sleep, eat more frequently (I have been skipping meals again), maybe even take a class to learn how to mediate or do yoga or something. My self-care skills aren’t the highest priority and they really should be.

Now that everything I had to get done this month is pretty much done (and I don’t have to shuttle the kids back and forth anywhere), I can relax and come up with some sort of self-care plan.

The most fun forensic DNA lecture I ever gave…

Happened yesterday, to a group of fourth grade students for my friend R’s class. They spent the last couple of weeks talking about forensics. My talk was going to wrap up the unit.

Now, having been a forensic DNA expert for 5 years of my life, I have had to give testimony in court (about 25 times now) for cases I worked on. I really disliked courtroom testimony since it was the defense team’s job to discredit my work (fortunately, they never succeeded).

I’ve given tours of our laboratory to visitors and explained what I knew about each area (and what I didn’t know, I deferred to those who did).

I even guest lectured for some biology students at a private university. That was really, really nerve-wracking because unlike anyone else I ever spoke to, they knew the science behind the technology and would recognize if I made a mistake.

But…all my past talks did not bring me quite as much satisfaction and utter joy that yesterday’s presentation did.

I spent the weekend preparing my transparencies (the school is in the middle of nowhere, and they are very low tech over there), some images I got from a former colleague at the crime lab I worked with, some awesome images I gleaned from the internet. I finally finished all the transparencies I wanted late Sunday night.

But it wasn’t until Monday morning at 6:30, that I decided the presentation needed something more. I decided it would be much more fun if I could bring props to help me explain some of the concepts. So, I started digging around the girls’ science kits and my cupboards and came up with some basic materials.

In the picture below, you can see some of my props.  I filled a large plastic test tube with water and red food coloring for a vial of blood, a squeeze bulb pipet, a cotton swab (for collecting cheek cells), a piece of filter paper with red ink spot on it, and our handy-dandy pasta and pipe-cleaner model of a piece of DNA.

I also went into my kids felt foods, and found a red “ketchup splotch” I made out of red felt.  Perfect for a blood stain.   I also grabbed a pair of kid scissors too.

On the drive over to the school, I started visualizing how I wanted the talk to go, and it came to me that I was going to say we leave traces of DNA whereever we go.   I decided I was going to fake a sneeze into a kleenex and hand it to the teacher (my friend R) and say, “could you hold this for me please?” and tell the kids, “that’s got my DNA all over it now”, and also I needed to chew a piece of gum for a while, and hand that over to the teacher as well and tell the kids, “that’s got my DNA all over it too”.  At some point, I was going to yank out a piece of my hair, and explain that DNA can be found at the root where it was stuck in the skin of my head.   I left early enough so I had time to stop at a gas station for a much needed pack of gum and some water.

I also came up with a “kid-friendly” crime that they could understand but not disturb them (they were, after all, only about 10 years old). I wasn’t about to talk about the violent crimes my work was used for. And it kind of evolved on the spot (which is kind of surprising because before yesterday, I wasn’t all that great at impromptu acting).   I was going to pretend that their teacher and I got into a fight, and that he gave me a nose bleed and I bled on his shirt and that I’d leave hairs on his shirt too for two types of evidence.  It was all coming together nicely.

It turned out to go exactly as I envisioned it.  And it wasn’t just me doing all the talking.  I had time for the kids to ask questions as I went through my transparencies.

As I started my talk, I had R sit close by because he was an integral part of it.   I started explaining what DNA was, where it came from, what it looked like (I had a transparency and the pasta model to pass around) how much of it was the same between people (giving us the characteristics that make us human) and how some of it was very different among people (making them look different from the friend sitting right next to them).  I asked them if they knew of any twins or triplets that looked exactly the same and explained to them that they looked exactly the same because of their DNA was exactly the same. I even passed around a picture of my three girls to show them how different they looked from each other (one red-head with blue eyes, one brunette with brown eyes , and one blond child with brown eyes) even though they came from the same parents (I’m brown haired and brown eyed, my husband is blond and blue eyed)

Here are the transparencies I used to explain where DNA came from and how it looks.

During this part of the talk, I said, “excuse me, I have to sneeze”, and I dramatically grabbed a tissue from a nearby box and sneezed, then balled it up and handed it to R.    R played along well and wrinkled his nose when I said, “that’s got my DNA all over it”.

I was chewing my gum while I said all this introductory stuff, and after the sneeze, I asked the class if they were allowed to chew gum in school.  Of course they said, “no”.   And I said, “hmm… I probably shouldn’t either”.    So I then turned to R and asked him if he was afraid of germs.  He said no, and then said, “good, can you hold this for me?” and plucked the gum out my mouth and placed it in his hand.  He gave me a very gross face and the kids all “ewwwwed” and laughed.   I said, “that’s got my DNA all over it too”.

I must say, I don’t think anything had EVER gone so smoothly and naturally and I was so relaxed and having fun with it, with the kids.  It was AMAZING.

Then we went on to the fake crime and I used the scenario that R was beat up, but that he punched the person in the nose and they bled on him and I stuck the bloodstain and a hair I yanked from my head on his light blue shirt (which was perfect because the red felt popped on that color).  Only I said he wasn’t sure he got a good look at me so he didn’t know that it was me.  I asked him if there was another girl teacher who looked a little like me (brown hair, brown eyes, similar build) and he said, “Ms.  L”.  Perfect.  So now we had 2 possible suspects and two pieces of evidence to analyze – blood and hair.

I went through the spiel of how I’d extract DNA from the stain, and had a transparency of the process.  I even went so far as to enlist the help of a student who held out her hands while I cut up a small portion of the stain, to get it ready for extraction, and how extraction was merely like cracking an egg open – opening up the cell wall to release the DNA inside.

Then I moved on to explain how they would get DNA from the suspects.  That’s where the tube of fake blood, the bloodspot on filter paper and the cotton swab came into play.  I told them that blood could be drawn into a tube, and then I’d take the squeeze bulb pipet and transfer a drop to the filter paper and extract if from the filter paper, just like the bloodstain.  But, then I told them I hated needles and I was a big chicken and that I didn’t want to give my blood, but that they could still get DNA from me, but collecting cheek swabs.    It was then that I used R to illustrate how I would do that.  I had him open his mouth, I swabbed his cheeks, then held up the swab and said, now I get DNA from his cheek cells.

It was so cool.

Then I moved on to the hair analysis.  I really didn’t have any experience explaining how trace chemistry actually does what they do with hair and fiber analysis, but I ended up finding a great pdf file online of the process, so I printed out some of the slides they made.  In particular, the kids loved the one about how to determine microscopically if a hair was human or animal (because there are very different morphologies to the interior of the hair).  The kids were oohing, and ahhing about the way the cat, dog, mouse, rabbit,  rabbit and human hair looks so very different.  Then I had a color photo of a human hair and it was so neat.  I told them that after trace chemistry did their analysis, they’d turn over the hair to me and I’d analyze it for DNA.

I had a printout of an actual DNA electropherogram, and a data table to show the DNA results of the evidence and the DNA results of me and the other teacher who were suspects.  I had the kids help me determine the match.  And the really “got it”.

Here’s the slides I used to explain DNA extraction and the electropherogram and the data table.

I think I impressed the hell out of myself, that I actually put together a really quite amazing presentation in less than a weekend and that I was able to give a presentation so informative (yet at the level 4th graders could understand).

The talk, combined with letting the kids ask their questions all throughout the presentation, lasted exactly 1 hour, with additional time for them to ask more questions.  They had some really great questions and a few silly ones.  The most interesting question came from a boy who quietly told me that a friend of his had a third nipple, and that he saw it when they went swimming last summer.   R and I were both taken aback a bit by the question, and I can’t remember what answer I gave him, but something along the lines that DNA had something to do with that, but I wasn’t sure what.

Overall, it was a smashing success.  And it’s the kind of experience that makes me really want to teach science to kids for real.

Maybe it’s time I really think about getting that teaching certificate.  Perhaps I will think seriously about it if don’t get call back about the job interview I had 2 Mondays ago.

If you are the praying type

Early this morning, my nephew’s father D was feeding him his bottle on the couch, when he fell asleep holding his son. At some point, the baby fell off his father’s lap and hit his head on the coffee table.

My sister G (yeah, the same one who screamed at me a few days ago), woke up upon hearing the noise and her husband tried to cover it up as the sound of the noise she heard as a bottle falling. She didn’t think anything of it until he put the baby to bed and she checked the video monitor from her room, looking at her husband touching the baby’s head to check if he was okay. She got up, scared and livid, saw the bumps/scrape on the baby’s head and face, and called 911.

Baby C (about 7 months) got a concussion. After a cat scan and some amount of time, they determined he was okay enough to go home.

What’s worse, is that her husband had gone out drinking earlier that night. He was trying to be a good husband by feeding the baby, and made a grave mistake. He’d been crying ever since my sister called the paramedics.

Child protective services will probably (and rightfully) will be called to investigate.

I think (and hope and pray) the baby will be fine.

I am not so sure about the relationship between my sister and her husband.

Just please say a prayer for them. No matter how badly my family mistreats me, I don’t wish harm to come to them. I don’t want their family to be torn apart by a mistake like this.

Thanks.