Rational Moms

As much fun as it is to take the whole family on an astronomy outing, it’s easy to find fun astronomy tools at home, too — for free on the Internet! Today my kids would like to recommend to you some of their favorites. To give credit where credit is due, my husband found all of these free software programs and videos, but I helped the kids watch, discuss, and play with them.

First up: Celestia: a 3-D space exploration simulator that you can download free.

Nico took all the screenshots himself — as we saw in love of learning and LSG’s adventures, kids learn by example and often take an interest in activities their parents enjoy! In my case — through my hobby of writing illustrated articles — I’ve inadvertently taught them to enjoy taking screenshots to post. Read the rest of this entry »

I often wonder how what I am interested in, and am therefore sharing with my kids, will affect their interests when they are adults.

I’m interested in science, so I talk about it frequently. My husband is good at math, and often talks about that. The kids are little sponges, listening to all this talk. We make frequent visits to science museums and zoos. We have lots of books about science. We even sit at the dinner table and do math problems in our heads while we eat (I know, I know, nerd alert). For example, five-year-old Little Skeptic Boy spends a lot of time asking questions such as, “What’s 32 plus 32?” Handsome Skeptic Husband always has the right answer, and fast! That impresses and thrills our boy.

My interest in astronomy has resulted in seven-year-old Little Skeptic Girl submitting moon-themed science fair projects for the past two years. The first one, when she was in Kindergarten, consisted of her drawings accompanied by facts she had learned about the moon. One of the drawings was of a little alien who says “Meep!”. When I asked her what description I should type for that drawing, she said, Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d briefly share some thoughts after our five-month-old son’s first visit to the emergency room. He had an attack of croup Friday night. Well, really, it was early Saturday morning, and we had to drive over to the ER at 2:30 a.m. Read the rest of this entry »

When my daughter caught her first cold in the daycare at the YMCA, people told me that it was, in the long run, a good thing. Getting sick now, they said, would build her immune system and make her stronger. If it didn’t happen in daycare, then it’d happen in preschool. No matter how much I wanted to protect her, she would eventually have to go through a period of illness. Getting sick was a right of passage into the world of immunity. Was this an old wives’ tale, I wondered, or was there any truth to it?

Read the rest of this entry »

lead elder: Harmless? It is this kind of backsliding that has brought the scarcity upon us!
a foreign penguin: Excuse me smiley, could you speak plain penguin please?
Mumble: He thinks the food shortage has something to do with me.
lead elder: Do you not understand that we can only survive here when we are in harmony? And when you and your foreign friends lead us into your easy ways you offend the Great Guin — you invite Him to withhold His bounty!
an elder: He rules the seasons.
an elder: He giveth and He can taketh away.
Mumble: Wait a minute — happy feet can’t cause a famine.
an elder: If that kind of pagan display didn’t cause it, then what did?
Mumble: I think it comes from outside — from way beyond the ice. There are things out there we don’t understand.
foreign penguins: Mysteries! Mind-boggling mysteries! Mystic beings!
Mumble: Yeah, aliens. I’ve heard they’re smart.
an elder: He’s insane!
Mumble: No, they might be smarter than all of us — who knows?

an elder: He drove the fish away, and now he’s ranting this rubbish. Read the rest of this entry »

My kids are really into the solar system these days. As I mentioned in Love of Learning, they’ve been drawing and coloring pictures of the solar system, and lately they’ve taken to playing with toy planets and inventing their own imaginary planetary system (called “the imaginary solar system” — it includes two “Giant Earths,” “Zurg’s Planet,” and “The Planet of the Pitcher Poo-Poots,” among other imaginary planets). I’m not sure precisely why they’ve taken such an interest in the solar system, but I’m not complaining. In fact, a couple weeks ago my husband remembered that there’s a scale model of the solar system starting at Uetliberg hill, right in the outskirts of Zürich!

So we took the kids on a pleasant Sunday-afternoon hike through the solar system. Here’s the sun, at a scale of one meter equals a million kilometers:

And here’s Mercury:

It was great fun for us to get a feel for how the sizes and distances really compare! Here I am with my two kids standing beside Venus: Read the rest of this entry »

I must admit I’ve had a lot of trouble approaching this post. So maybe it’s best to just come right to the point: I’m a diehard breast feeder myself, but I dislike the way formula is demonized.

I love nursing, and I’ve really enjoyed that aspect of being a mom. I have not had any trouble with pain, latch, or supply, and I’ve been able to maintain nursing after returning to work by pumping in the supply closet at my job. It’s not the most cozy location, but it allows for privacy. My son was born big, and he’s now grown to a whopping 20 pounds at only five months. I’m proud that I’ve been able to put this weight on him with almost 100% exclusive breast feeding. There were only four times in his life he had formula. Once, in the hospital, he lost almost 10% of his body weight on day three of his life, and our pediatrician insisted in supplementation before my milk came in. And the other times were the result of logistical errors—frozen milk at daycare, Daddy at home, Mommy at work—but now we’ve got our system down and the boy only gets breast milk. I experienced a strange guilt when we had to give formula, and I think this is a negative aspect of the current breast feeding culture.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been away from this blog for a while as my daughter recuperated from surgery. Over the course of her hospital stay, we encountered some weirdness, and I’m curious as to whether I am merely sleep-deprived and stressed, or whether this was really irrational. This is the group to ask.

My daughter’s surgery was predicted to result in significant pain for at least a week, and in fact the plan was to keep her in the hospital until her pain was well-managed. The surgeon explained her options before surgery, and assured her that she should speak up if she were in pain so that she could get relief.

As she came from the recovery room and started to wake, she didn’t immediately ask for additional medication, or accept it when offered. However, about 3 hours after the surgery, she said her pain was increasing and she wanted some relief. Here’s where the weirdness started. The nurse we called first tried to talk her out of it, and then tried to insist she take the weakest of available options because “you’re not going to be able to go home the IV, so you might as well start with the oral meds now.” This was at least 24 hours before we were scheduled to leave. And as long as this nurse in charge of care, every time my daugher asked for pain relief, he came in with a lecture. For instance, he told my daughter (in direct contradiction of her doctor’s orders) that she should try not to take her prescribed narcotics once she got home, and instead just take Advil. Twice he told us he was only giving her half the prescribed dose because he felt she shouldn’t have the full dose unless she “reallY’ needed it.

I would have thought it was just him, but then I went to the pharmacy to fill her prescription, and the pharmacist similarly argued with me that she did not need the volume of medicine prescribed. (She was supposed to take 15 ml every 4 hours for 4-5 days, and the pharmacist told me that the prescribed 400 ml was way too much so he would only give me 300 ml. Try the math.)

So what the heck is this about? The belief in the nobility of suffering–that she would have been more virtuous to “tough it out”? The belief that a 14-year-old would become drug dependent in 5 days with parent-supervised medication? Either way, it seems completely crazy to me, but as I said, I haven’t slept a lot lately. If you’ve got a way to make it make sense to me, please let me know.

(By the way, my daughter is doing pretty well now, though it will be a few weeks before she’s back to normal.)

As an adult who never really outgrew childhood, Halloween is my favorite holiday. Cool weather, candy, costumes, and no religion (for the most part)… what could be better?

Some parents, however, get anxious around All Hallows’ Eve. Kids running amok, candy from strangers, concealed identities, dark nights, horror movies–along with media hype–can snowball into a bit of Halloween hysteria.

But, what, really are the risks of trick-or-treating?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m almost 34 weeks pregnant right now. At the beginning of my pregnancy, I was talking with a friend who believes she’s had out-of-body experiences (OBEs), that an afterlife exists, and that this is her final incarnation on this planet, in this form. As skeptical as I am, I always ended up listening to her stories with great interest, simply out of curiosity and a dose of romanticism.

So when I informed her of my pregnancy, she was delighted to explain to me how souls and other pregnancy-related phenomena work in or are affected by the “spiritual realm.” She told me she witnessed first-hand the process of choosing a soul for an ever-growing embryo/fetus, or, I should say, for the soul choosing the embryo/fetus.

Apparently, it goes something like this:

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