Amelia's Here!

Our little bundle of joy arrived a week early and without much warning!  We left for the hospital at about 12:30 this morning, and met Amelia at 3:15.  I'll let Beth fill in all the fun details later -- the primary purpose of this first-ever Singing Scientist guest post is to put up a few much-anticipated pictures before the eastern seaboard goes night-night.  Here they are!

 Amelia at t + 5 minutes.  She has Ally's (and Mommy's) hair!

She has feet!!  (Note: we double checked.  She has all five on the left as well as the right, prints notwithstanding)

Big sister meets little for the first time.

Don't think the Tootsie-Roll Pop is insignificant.  We're hoping this 'gift' from Amelia goes a long way toward sibling harmony.  So far so good.

 

The video version, so you can feel like you're here.

Amelia looks great in this one...

...and Ally looks great in this one.  A job for Photoshop?

Nurse leaves behind a stethoscope.  Super-cuteness ensues.

 Hopefully we'll be taking Amelia home tomorrow morning!



UPDATE:  If you were curious (I was), Ally clearly wins the hair contest.  From nearly three years ago:

Take THAT, little sis!

 ...and here's a real blast from the past, from December 1979:

Employment!

At the moment, it doesn't seem possible that there could be life after the PhD because it feels like this process is never going to end.  But in reality, there is life on the other side, and it comes in the form of employment for next school year.  I have signed a contract to stay at UNC next year and teach part time as a Lecturer in my department.  I am really excited about this opportunity, because I'll get to keep teaching Physiology and working with the undergrads and masters students in our lab, I'll get to be part of the faculty, and I will be honest, I am really looking forward to the change of pace, professionally speaking. 

But until then, so much work still to be done! 

The dissertation and the five stages of grief

I am nearing the end of my dissertation data collection and I must say, I feel like I have been running a marathon that just won't end.  Right now, I feel like I've hit the wall at mile 20; I know I just have a 10K to go, but man I really really don't want to run those last 6.2 miles!  With 5 subjects to go and 2 weeks until my due date, it has become pretty apparent that I won't be finishing my data collection before I give birth.  The exceptions might be either a) the baby comes 1 or 2 weeks late and/or b) we decide not to go all the way to 20 subjects.  In any case, I'm not holding my breath.

As I have trudged through this process, I came to realize that the dissertation process makes you feel a lot of things, including the 5 stages of grief.  I have definitely made the rounds through these 5 stages multiple times (see below).

DENIAL
I'm not sure I've spent a lot of time here, although recently my denial has been about the fact that I'm having a baby potentially any day now.  I keep thinking to myself, "Oh I have lots of time before she comes," but in reality it could be tomorrow or it could be after Mother's Day.  But as far as the dissertation goes, I think that denial could take the form of dragging your feet on getting your data collected because you think that you have all the time in the world, when in reality, you have to remember that it takes a lot of time to analyze the data, write up the results, get it to your committee, actually find a time when all 5 of your committee members can congregate for your defense, and then make the corrections to your document before getting it to the Graduate School by their deadline for graduation.

BARGAINING
I have spent a bit of time here.  It usually goes something like, "Okay, if so-and-so helps me out here, and maybe if I can get all 6 of these subjects scheduled in the next 2 weeks, and if the baby wouldn't mind staying in utero for 2 weeks past her due date, then I can finish my data collection by Mother's Day."  Although now that I think about it, that probably overlaps with denial, haha!

ANGER
Oh yes, I have definitely spend a good bit of  time here.   It is usually when I feel like the people who are supposed to be helping me out with data collection aren't stepping up, or when I put in an order for supplies and the order gets lost.  Or worse, when someone tells me they are going to help me out in any way they can, and then they end up not being true to their word, or they seem to have all kinds of time to help out another student with data collection but when it comes to me, they are all booked up.  Or sometimes I get a little angry at myself for choosing a project that is so time intensive with the data collection.  But then I also get angry when I start to think about other people who did their dissertations before me from our department, and how their advisors seemed to go really easy on them in terms of the type of projects they did and how it only took them a fraction of the time to complete their dissertations compared to mine.  And yet, they have still come away with a PhD.  This last point really makes my blood boil, so I try not to think about it too much.

DEPRESSION
Along with anger, I have spent a good bit of time here too.  It usually takes the form of, "I feel like I am never going to finish this stinking degree, and I'm not sure my committee really cares if or when I finish either."  Or also, "what I am going to do if I can't find those last 3 cancer survivor subjects?" Or also, "if I can't get this activity assay data to look right, I don't know what I'm going to do."

ACCEPTANCE
There are a few occasions when I have some waves of clarity about the whole process.  Intellectually, I do know that this chapter of my life will come to a close, and that everything will work out the way it is supposed to.  I also know there are certain things about the process that are not in my control, but as long as the ball is in my court, I just have to keep plugging away. 

Lab flood #5

No, this is not a joke.  Our lab flooded again this past weekend.  5th time since the end of last May.  Well, really, I guess this might actually be flood #4.5, because the 4th flood was more like minor water seepage rather than an actual flood.  Luckily we did not have to shut things down for renovations again like we did last summer and fall, as it seems it wasn't as bad as before during floods 1-3.  But some of the baseboards have been stripped away, and we have big fans going to dry out the walls and floors, so there is some degree of mess.  Let's just hope they get whatever is broken in our building fixed soon, because the spring and summer showers have only just begun.

Adventures in planting blueberries

I have been all talk about this for about a year, but I finally decided to take action and plant some blueberry bushes in our backyard.  Now, I must disclose that I am not a gardener.  In fact, my ability to keep houseplants alive is really not good.  But I really wanted to give this a go because I think it would be really cool to have some sort of fruit-bearing plant right there in my yard.  Plus, I think Ally would get a kick out of picking berries.  So I took the plunge and purchased a set of 3 blueberry plants from Burpee.com. 

Now, I will admit, I kind of thought that the plants we were going to get in the mail would be fairly substantial looking, like this:

I had found something online that said we were supposed to dig holes 2 ft across by 2 ft deep.  So last Saturday, Ben and I went to work digging 3 holes in our yard 2ft across by 2 ft deep.  Well, actually Ben did most of the digging as I am 7.5 months pregnant and not exactly in the best physical shape right now.  It took a pretty good chunk of time to do this, and we ended up with holes looking something like this:

But what came in the mail looked something like this:

As you can imagine, I felt a little silly having had Ben spend a greater part of our Saturday morning digging 3 ginormous holes for tiny seedlings.  Also, I came to the realization that we probably wouldn't have a blueberry crop until next summer.  So last night, we back-filled our 3 holes with dirt and peat moss and planted the little seedlings in the backyard.  Now they look something like this:

My next task is to construct some wire cages to put around the plants so that the deer and rabbits don't get to them.  I guess in about 14 months, we'll be swimming in blueberries!  I did find something at Lowe's yesterday that might give me a little more instant gratification though:  hanging potted strawberry plants.  I'm going to get one today and try it out.

A pregnancy brain moment

I think it was last week sometime, I had fixed myself a mug of ice cream for dessert after putting Ally to bed.  Now, we all know that ice cream belongs in the freezer, right?  Well, not this particular night.  The next morning when I opened the fridge to get some orange juice, there was the carton of ice cream.  Apparently, in a moment of pregnancy-induced absentmindedness, I had put the ice cream in the fridge instead of the freezer.  Of course, it was completely melted.  Ultimately no harm was done, as I put it back in the freezer and that night, I once again had a mug of frozen, albeit slightly icy, ice cream.

Third trimester already???!!!

Man, this pregnancy is going so fast!  Friday, I ushered in the last trimester of my pregnancy by going to the doctor and taking the oral glucose tolerance test.  At least I did not have to exercise afterwards!  At least the sick-to-my-stomach feeling passed pretty quickly this time; no one should ever ingest that much sugar at one time.  It is just gross.

Of course, there are still things that need to get done in these next 12 weeks, and the one that is in my mind's forefront is to finish my dissertation data collection.  I have 14 subjects left to complete, and as long as no one gets sick, decides to drop out, cancels their sessions, or gets disqualified from the study, I think I can get all my subjects through before May.  But my dissertation has thrown me curve balls in the past, and babies do come earlier than their due date, so I guess I just have to be prepared for anything at this point.

In other news, I went on an interview a couple weeks ago for a faculty position at another area institution.  It was a really good experience, and we'll just have to see what comes of it.  There is another employment opportunity in the works around here as well that seems promising, but as nothing is official yet, I need to speak in vague terms.  And I should also give a shout out to my friend Michelle who successfully defended her dissertation a couple weeks ago at Duke.  So I guess there really is a light at the end of this PhD tunnel!