rivka

Anything is possible in dreams - any location, real or imagined; any activities, plausible or implausible.

So I feel totally cheated that this morning I had a good long dream in which I was picking up tiny plastic toys, the kind that kids are given as prizes or whatever and don't care about or play with. And cheap candy. And bits of paper. For the entire length of the dream, all I did was try to clean up this junk.

Dude. That's not what dreams are for.

I was reading to Alex at bedtime tonight. Colin kept trying to grab the book, and I kept moving it out of his reach. Then he clambered carefully off the bed and left the room. I thought he might be headed across the hall to the study, where a bunch of his toys are.

I kept reading. It was quiet outside Alex's room - too quiet. So after a couple of minutes I went to check on Colin. When I called his name, I heard him on the stairs. I went to the top and looked down.

He had gone all the way down to the living room and gotten his current favorite book. Now he was carefully making his way back upstairs: lifting the book up a step, crawling up a step himself, lifting the book up another step. He beamed up at me. Because SURELY I was going to put away Ozma of Oz and read Peekaboo Morning now. Right? Right?! Now that he'd found it for me?

I am reminded that cuteness in babies and toddlers is a survival mechanism. He's been godawful with his sleep lately, and it's killing me, but ZOMG he is the sweetest sweetie imaginable.

First rough chop of grant application to meet draconian new page limits: 25 pages to 18. I still have to get it down to 12.

Also, I haven't added all the "more detail" sections I promise the reviewers in my response to their critiques. "We have revised Section X.X to include more information about scenarios in which CBT techniques may be incorporated in PATCH, as well as additional examples of an MI approach to conspiracy beliefs." "We expanded the discussion of subject availability and recruitment strategies in Section X.X." "Please see Section X.X for more details about how potential participants will be approached once they have been identified." Yeah, none of that will be a problem when the PAGE LIMITS HAVE BEEN CUT IN HALF.

I haven't read the chopped version yet to see if it even makes sense. *weeps tears of blood*

Great party. I didn't get a whole bunch of pictures this year, because this year we didn't hire anyone to help with the party and most of the parents didn't stay. So I was pretty busy.

As you can see, the kids looked fabulous. The one boy invited decided at the last minute not to wear his costume, but unsurprisingly all the girls were way into it. They spent a lot of time just running around being princesses.

The games were a mixed bag, with some of the kids not wanting to play and getting upset and others having a great time. I didn't expect as many game refusals, but at least one kid didn't want to play each game. There was no dissent about decorating royal goblets - everyone loved it. They spent a lot of time on their goblets, sticking on jewels until every single jewel - and I bought a lot of jewels - was used up.

The cake went fast.

It's funny: many of her friends have had parties including the whole class. I limited Alex to sending out 8 invitations, and when some of her friends couldn't come I worried a lot that I had restricted her too much and that the party wouldn't be much fun. But wow, five friends was plenty big enough. None of them seemed to think the party was too small. And I'm really glad afterward that she doesn't have 15 new toys.

We usually have our groceries delivered. The delivery charge ($7-12, depending on how much we buy and when we order) is more than worth the savings in time and hassle. Usually. (Lately they've been giving us some trouble.)

Last night our delivery was more than an hour late. I was pretty annoyed, because we had scheduled our delivery window to fall in between when Michael came home from work and when he had to leave for a meeting at church. Instead the groceries wound up arriving when I was alone with both kids. It took the driver forever to bring them into the house, and when I went into the pantry after he left, it was so full that I could hardly open the refrigerator door. Huh.

I started to shift things around. Right away I came upon a giant supersaver 5lb package of boneless chicken breasts. We didn't order that. Then I noticed a head of lettuce. We didn't order that either. I started to sort the bags. Sure enough, the driver had delivered our order and half a dozen bags of someone else's order. Specifically, their perishables.

As soon as I realized we had some of the wrong groceries I called Safeway's 800 number to tell them to turn the driver around. He'd only been gone about five minutes. She came back to tell me that the driver said he didn't have time to come back, so oh well.

"Well, I've got about fifty dollars worth of someone else's meat, here," I said.

"Really?" Her voice faltered.

I started adding up. "Fifteen-dollar package of chicken breasts, here's a ten-dollar package of ground beef, two pounds of bologna, some pork sausage, bacon, link sausages..."

"Um," she said. "Do you think you could store the groceries and we'll pick it up tomorrow?"

I explained that on grocery day my fridge is pretty much full. She wound up saying that she'd see if the operations manager could order the driver back to pick it up, and otherwise they'd just have to take the loss and I could donate the food to someone.

I managed, with difficulty, to wedge the most perishable stuff into the fridge, and went to put the kids to bed. When I came down, there was a phone message from Safeway. They had been unable to reach the driver. Could I please call them back to schedule a time when they could send a driver in the morning.

What would you do?

They schedule their drivers with a two-hour window. Two hours that I'd be waiting around for their driver to fix their mistake - if the driver wasn't running late like last night's driver. Plus, I think it's totally disgusting from a food-hygiene-and-safety perspective that they would consider taking back and selling to someone else food that had been out of their possession and stored in a customer's home under unknown conditions. Seriously, as their customer? The idea that they would put this food back on the shelf so as not to lose $50 makes me not want to eat their food anymore.

I did not call them back. Instead I called My Sister's Place, a homeless women's and children's day center across the street from my church. Yes, they take fresh food donations. Yes, they would be delighted to accept anything I can give them. I'll pack the stranger's groceries up with some leftover baby food Colin isn't going to eat, and drop it off this afternoon. And I will feel guiltless about it.

Edited to add: Safeway called back this morning to schedule a pickup, and when I brought up the food safety issue they said that they can't sell food once it's been out of their store at all. So they would've picked it up only to throw it out. Whew.

Alex is fond of a weird little book right now: a children's version of what is apparently a mathematical concept called Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. It's called The Cat in Numberland.


The book is about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, each occupied by one of the Numbers. Number One lives in Room 1, Number Two lives in Room 2, and so on. When Zero shows up at the door looking for a place to sleep one night, the hotelkeeper (Mr. Hilbert, of course) tells him the hotel is full up - no empty rooms. Then Zero suggests that everyone could move up one. Number One moves into Room 2, Number Two moves into Room 3, and so on, and Room 1 has become vacant for Zero. Where did the extra room come from?

Chapter after chapter, new ways of playing with the concept of infinity unfold. Half the numbers (the Odd ones) leave to pay a visit to their friends the letters. The hotel is then half-empty. But the Even numbers don't like having an empty room on each side of them, so they all move down. The hotel is full again, even though no one new has moved in. And so on. The exciting culmination of the story is the arrival of the Fractions, all of them, in an infinite array of infinite rows. How will they fit?

It's a neat little book. (See a mathematician's review here.) I'm not sure how much exactly Alex is getting out of it - although she's definitely engaging with the text; tonight it led to an interesting discussion about whether infinity is even or odd, and she also objected to the phrase "the Numbers and the Fractions" with "Mom, Fractions are Numbers." All I know is that I've read it aloud five times already.

I am crazy exhausted and overwrought.

Something is up with Colin. He hasn't been eating much and has been sleeping like an amphetamine addict on payday. Last night he went to sleep promptly at bedtime, and then was up mostly screaming from 10:30-11:30. I still haven't the faintest idea what was wrong. He was just miserable.

He is still going strong with the night waking. I am going to have to come up with some sort of plan for nightweaning and/or sleep reprogramming, because This Is Not Working for me.

Also, he figured out how to take the childproof cap off a pill bottle. Fortunately we were all right there in the same room and he didn't get any of it in his mouth before we noticed that there was Claritin all over the floor. But WTF, if he's going to be this awful couldn't he at least be dumb so I have a chance to stay ahead of him?

He was up at 6:30 this morning. I'm supposed to get to sleep in on Sundays, but it was Easter and Alex woke right up excited about egg hunting so I had to get up or miss Easter.

Colin has been clearly exhausted all day. He went down for a nap at 9:45 and I said I would just miss church and stay home with him but then at 10:15 Alex decided to play the fool and run away from Michael, who was trying to get her dressed, and then she jumped out and yelled "Peekaboo!" at top volume right at the foot of the stairs leading to the baby's crib. And he woke up, and I couldn't get him back to sleep.

This is of a piece with Alex's general heedlessness and disobedience, lately. Friday night I said "anyone who isn't working needs to get out of the kitchen now." Alex: "But I'm working!" She kept on with what she was doing, which turned out to be trying to pick up a jar of baby food with my long-handled kitchen tongs. A glass jar. Guess what happened.

I know she's only (almost) five, but for God's sake why can't she just do what she's told for once without looking for goddamned loopholes?

Anyway, back to today: I missed most of church anyway because Colin was on the move, and too noisy for the sanctuary.

I tried twice this afternoon to get him down for a second nap. He is so, so tired. He almost drifts off, and then pick two of three: screams/bites/laughs, and he's up again.

I have no patience for either one of them, or for anything else in my life right now.

I keep thinking that surely more sugar will make me feel better. Surprise surprise, it isn't working. But I keep trying anyway because I am not very bright.

Michael took them out after the second failed afternoon nap attempt. They've been gone for an hour and a half. It's absolutely silent in the house. I am enjoying being quiet and not touched and responsible for no one too much to go to sleep. I am starting to regain some sanity.

ETA: Michael just came back. Colin fell asleep on their way home from the playground, just a few minutes ago. The parents here will know just how fucked a 5:30pm nap is going to make us. But he's basically unrousable.

I don't know. At least they're cute?

On Monday night we went to a Seder hosted by our friends unodelman and lynsaurus. I really enjoyed the evening, and I was surprised at how well the kids held up. (Alex did miss school the next day because of excessive sleepiness, but I consider that a small price to pay.)

We were thrilled to be invited. Two years ago our church held a Seder, and Michael and I have both been disappointed that there hasn't been one at the church since. At the same time, I had some ambivalent feelings about whether we, uh, deserved to be invited. I hasten to say that those feelings have absolutely nothing to do with lynsaurus and unodelman and their family members who were present; everyone was incredibly warm and welcoming.

Here's the thing:

I was raised in a mainline Protestant, liberal Christian tradition. I was baptized when I was a toddler. I went to church every week. But I also, when I was a kid, felt a strong sense of connection and affinity for Judaism. At that time in my life, I thought of myself as ethnically "half Jewish." My father was raised in a nonreligious household, but his father was Jewish, the son of immigrant garment workers who lived on the Lower East Side in New York. My father identified as ethnically Jewish. And in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s, other people also identified my father as Jewish.

So I grew up with an interest in Jewish things. I sometimes went to temple with kcobweb on Friday nights, if I was sleeping over. She tried to teach me a little Hebrew; I can still write my name, but that's about all I ever learned. I read extensively in the children's/YA genre of "heroic Jewish children hide from Nazis." At that time, in the late 70s and early 80s, mainline Protestant churches like mine took a very respectful and interested attitude toward Judaism - not in the skeevy "Jews for Jesus" sense, but in a belief that we had a strong shared heritage and that their history was our history. We sometimes held a Seder at church out of just that sense of shared heritage.

As I grew older, I started to see things in a more complicated light. I realized that by Jewish law, not only was I not "half Jewish," but I wasn't Jewish at all - and neither was my father. Judaism passes through the maternal line. I realized that even if my Jewish ethnic heritage came from my mother's side, my baptism and churchgoing would have made me really not-Jewish. And eventually I came to understand that the idea that Christians and Jews share a substantial common heritage and history, and have significant religious commonalities, is a belief that is much more common and more strongly held among Christians than among Jews. I started to consider my childhood, um, Jewphilia, in the light of cultural appropriation. And I felt awkward.

I'm not a Christian now, but (of course) a Unitarian-Universalist. And UUs have a long tradition of glomming happily onto other people's beliefs and practices and rituals. (Sometimes this is approached thoughtfully and respectfully. Other times, not.) When we found out that there wasn't going to be a Seder at church this year, Michael and I briefly discussed whether it would be okay to have a Seder in our home, for just our family.

We decided that it wouldn't. The thing is, I really like Passover. I love the story and the rituals. I think every religion should have a major holiday focused on oppression and liberation (and wine). But Judaism is not an evangelical, O-hai-let's-share-the-good-news-with-everyone-and-get-them-to-be-like-us religion. Passover is for Jews, not for everyone who thinks Passover is cool. So it was awesome that our friends invited us to share their Seder. It was deeply meaningful to us. But I think that makes us "lucky people who got to share in their tradition," not "people who also have a right to this tradition."

They posted my grant score this afternoon.

I got a priority score of 27. Under the new system, a priority of 20 is "Outstanding. Extremely strong with negligible weaknesses." 30 is "Excellent. Very strong with only some minor weaknesses." I'm somewhere in the middle there. (The lower middle.) That's pretty good for a first submission.

My percentile score is 20. (NIH does this weird thing where lower percentile = better.) The percentile score is the best indicator of whether a grant is likely to be funded. And mine tells me... not much.

Some NIH institutes have a "payline," a percentile above which virtually everything is funded and below which virtually nothing is funded. NIMH doesn't. That would be too easy. Here's what they say about their payline:

In general, NIMH assumes that research applications that fall below the 20th percentile are scientifically meritorious and that sufficient funds are available to support up to 80 percent of these new and competing research applications. Council and program staff may selectively recommend payment of grants that fall in this range, as well as beyond, based on: 1) Institute and division priorities; 2) balance in the existing research portfolio; 3) early stage new investigator status (see below); and 4) availability of funds. [...]

Early Stage Investigators: NIMH is committed to supporting new investigators and facilitating the independence of emerging scientists. The Institute considers early stage new investigator status--new Investigators who are within 10 years of completing their terminal research degree or within 10 years of completing their medical residency at the time they apply for R01 grants—as a priority in funding decisions. This means that a research grant from a newand/or early stage investigator may be funded out of order and at percentile scores the same or higher than grants not selected for payment from established investigators.

So I'm juuuust on the edge of the potentially fundable range. I do have Early Stage Investigator status, which should help, but my guess is: probably not quite enough. It could be funded this time around, but I am not in the hold-your-breath range.

A score this high does bode well for my chances of a successful resubmission. But here's the sad thing: NIH radically changed their applications just after I submitted my grant. So I won't be able to just polish what was already a very good application, working in carefully-crafted responses to the reviewers' criticisms. I'll have to rewrite the whole damn thing. AND SHORTEN IT FROM 25 PAGES TO 12. *cries*

I actually feel pretty good about my score. It's a frustrating score, almost more so than something in the definitely-not-gonna-get-in range would have been. But it's a good score for a first submission. Most grants don't get funded the first time around. It would've been nice to defy the odds and get a fantabulous, immediately-fundable score. But the score I got says "really good grant, just needs a tiny bit of work." I'll take that.