Voles
Work
This week we had a special treat: Ms. Tierra visited us for dinner one night during her visit to Salt Lake City for a convention. She was Everett’s teacher at Wauwatosa Montessori for two years in Children’s House. Everett loves Ms. Tierra and we do as well – in many ways she had a huge positive impact on him. She visited us with Ms. Tracy, another Wauwatosa Montessori teacher who teaches Upper Elementary. One thing that we learned as Montessori parents is how children are intrinsically motivated to do work, and even young children will concentrate for long periods of time given the right task and setting. On a related subject, our dinner with Tierra and Tracy was surprisingly relaxing because Teddy and Gwen found engaging work. This first happened for Gwen a couple months ago when we were at the beach – she was playing with sand and told Melissa “Momma, I’m so busy. I’m so busy Momma.” Tonight during dinner the children were playing with colored macaroni. Teddy told Chris “I’m working so hard.” Also in the midst of this Gwen told Melissa “Sit down with me and don’t hold your phone.” Later, Teddy said “This is nice, Momma.” This may be the most relaxing family dinner we have had for a couple years. Both of them love playing with the macaroni, so much so that it has become a distraction from eating.
Everett is now in Lower Elementary (second grade) and he is getting used to a different approach when it comes to work and time management. When he was in Children’s House the students were almost completely self-directed and did not have deadlines. That is changing now – he is given more specific tasks for his lessons, and he is given a deadline to finish them. He can be very focused. On Tuesday this week he was sick and home from school. One of his self-directed activities was to create an entire book of watercolor paintings for the family.
All of the children now have chores. Everett sets the table and takes out the trash on Sunday nights. Teddy & Gwen are expected to help with cleanup of toys. Gwen has taken it upon herself to make sure everyone has a napkin at dinner. Chris has a reputation for being a messy eater; Gwen seems to have picked up on this and decided to give Dad a couple extra napkins.
This afternoon Everett helped Chris with another kind of work: dealing with the voles in our yard. This has been an issue since we moved in but we didn’t really care because our yard has been abandoned since the house was built about 20 years ago. However, we are nearing completion on a huge landscaping project and now that we have a nice patch of grass outside the back door we do not like to see it destroyed by vole mounds and tunnels. We have researched several ways to get rid of them. None seem particularly effective – these rodents are so fertile and prolific that the best we can probably do is keep them in check.
We are averse to traps and poison because of the age of the children. Instead we are focusing our energy on repelling them, perhaps into the neighbors yards. So Chris and Everett mixed up a batch of vole repellent out of castor oil and dishwashing soap. Then we carefully scraped away all the vole mounds and sprayed the solution into each hole, as well as all over the surviving grass. Within an hour there was a vole poking his head through the grass and making a new mound. And in the afternoon there was another new mound. It seems clear that this is just the beginning of a process in which we may not prevail.
As for Mom & Dad, our work is never done. It feels like there are not enough hours in the day to keep up. Somehow we have to reconcile that feeling with the fact that these are likely the best years of our lives. Even when everyone is happy and healthy it’s not always easy to keep this in mind.
The Molly Show
Molly had some time off this summer and we feel fortunate that she decided to visit on her way to meet her family in Denver. She has been with us for about the past week. Since we moved to Utah she has been caring for some of our former neighbors in Wauwatosa who have an older child and younger twins. And she decided to take a vacation from this by visiting us :-).
It was great for everyone to see her again. The twins remembered her and called her by name right way. She and Everett had some special time together. She explained social media to Chris, and she and Melissa spent several evenings together. On Friday night she hosted the Molly Show: she watched all three children while Chris and Melissa went away for a night to Midway, Utah (also know as the Switzerland of the Rockies). That night the children asked for Molly water (a la Dada water), a sure sign of trust and affection.
Safe travels Molly! We hope to see you again soon. Perhaps next time you can visit for a year or two?
Not Ideal
Over the last few months a remarkable thing has happened: there has been a confluence of physics and football that has been reported by many popular newspapers in the wake of Deflategate (a.k.a. the unusual drop in air pressure in footballs used by the New England Patriots in the AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts).
One New York Times article tried to explain how this could have happened using goofy and contrived photos of someone in a lab coat writing equations on a white board. This was meant to show how the ideal gas law could provide quasi-scientific evidence that the pressure drop in New England Patriot’s footballs could have occurred naturally, and could have happened without any deliberate deflation, even though the footballs from the opposing team remained at normal pressure. This situation reminds Chris of the time he compared the incredible mess on the desk of a fellow grad student to the entropy of an ideal gas. The associate director of our research institute was walking by at the time and said “Oh there’s nothing ideal about it!†The same can be said about the events related to Deflategate and in the news reporting on the subject. Perhaps the best possible outcome from this is to take advantage of a teaching moment.
There are two broad possibilities with regard to the pressure drop in the Patriot footballs: the pressure dropped because of natural conditions such as a change in temperature; the balls were deliberately deflated (most news stories have created confusion by using the term deflation to describe both of these possible mechanisms, when in fact the former is a pressure drop without deflation). To put this in perspective, the ideal gas law is not some exotic equation that is used exclusively by physicists with advanced degrees. It’s a fundamental equation that is taught in high school chemistry (PV=nRT), and it doesn’t take any advanced education to perform your own analysis of the ball pressure. In fact, the hardest part about using this equation is making sure the units are correct. A quick glance at Wikipedia lists the gas constant R using 27 different combinations of units. Note that the analysis shown in the New York Times article above uses Rankine for temperature, a unit of measure that is so obscure that modern spell checkers don’t even recognize it. As we have pointed out many times before in this blog, it would be much more sensible to use metric units, but it is likely that the NFL would perceive this as being un-American. It probably doesn’t help that the most widely used system of measurement in the world has a French name (Le Système International d’Unités, more commonly known as SI Units).
Of course this is all pure hooey. If a football can drop 2 psi when moved from a 70 degree locker room to a 50 degree playing field, then why is the run up to Super Bowl XLIX the first time we are observing it? And why doesn’t it happen often in places like Green Bay or Minneapolis where the temperature differences between inside and outside are much greater? This is reminiscent of the scene in My Cousin Vinnie when Vinnie Gambini (Joe Pesche) is questioning a self-respecting southerner who claims to have cooked non-instant grits in about 5 minutes. He exclaims “Perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove?!?” Indeed we might be left with a similar conclusion with regard to the Patriots. Probably the best possible outcome from all of this is that children who watch professional sports will take a greater interest in science. Stories like this also create the incorrect perception that you need an advanced degree in physics from Columbia to perform basic scientific analysis. In fact, you do not need an advanced degree in anything from anywhere. What you do need is common sense, a basic degree of confidence with algebra and the ability to be a keen observer. Using these criteria almost anyone who has taken high school chemistry should be able to perform an analysis using the ideal gas law. And anyone with a football, a pump and a pressure gauge should be able to reproduce what happened during the Patriots-Colts game. In other words, this phenomenon should be reproducible by any football player who is old enough to read. In the United States this should be tens of millions of people as a conservative estimate.
We have been waiting until the news stories about Deflategate die down before we post this blog entry, but it appears that this may never happen. At this point several people have confessed to deflating the balls including Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Tyler and many others. The NFL has decided that the balls were deliberately deflated and that Tom Brady knew about it. As a result he was suspended for several games, but this suspension was erased. There is almost certainly more to come.
Lastly, as DAVID WALDSTEIN at the New York Times recently pointed out, it is surprising that the NFL has decided to pay such close attention to ball pressure, while virtually ignoring issues like domestic violence, drug use and brain injury.
Not Babies
Today Melissa and Everett were standing in the kitchen when Teddy opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. Everett remarked that we needed to go through the house and babyproof it again, to which Teddy replied “I am not a baby!†Wow, indeed. And neither is Gwen, though it still comes naturally to us to refer to them as “the babiesâ€. Clearly it’s time to think of another way to collectively describe them. None of us like “the twins†and we have heard anecdotally from grown twins that they don’t like it either. Melissa sometimes calls them “the kiddos†and Chris calls them “the monkeysâ€, but neither of these sound like they will be in use for very long.
After Everett was born, Chris often called him “the kid†when talking to people outside our immediate family, as in “I took the kid to school on the bike today.†After the twins were born he added “the girl†and “the boyâ€, all descriptive and unique. Coworkers especially found these terms incredible amusing, though this was unintentional.
The need for these kinds of names and collective labels seems to be purely motivated by efficiency: time is one of our most precious commodities at this point in our lives, and we don’t want to drag out our sentences by saying things like “Everett Maxwell Butson, Gwendolen Rose Butson and Theodore Ansel Butson: please come to the table for dinner.†Also, we are often so frazzled that it takes two or three tries to call each child by their correct name.
We are curious to hear how other families handle this.