Long time no see

A lot has happened since. Students S#3 and S#4 graduated, and they got postdocs for this year and next year. Also, S#6 who's graduating in 2008 already has an offer (and more to come - he has done a great job). S#6 had a brilliant idea, with a great statement and a bogus proof. I hope that soon she'll get the proof right. S#7 is also doing pretty well. So altogether I have now three students, since S#6 will probably never graduate, but become a brilliant teacher instead.

I got some administrative responsibility, which I'm making a mess of, but not worse than the previous holder.

On the family front, C#1 likes gymnastics much better than she did basketball. She has a new maths teacher and her problems with the subject seem to vanish; nevertheless, she seems to have inherited my reading style and not my math love.
To give you an idea, she got one 350-page book as Christmas present. She finished it yesterday morning, and at lunch time she was on page 250 of the second reading. She doesn't look like me at all, but she's definitely my daughter :-).

C#2 speaks german fluently, if rarely. He still can't write his own name, and complained that Santa brought a game with letters but none with numbers. C#3 is trying to write more and more, and we're confident that a breakthough on the diaper-in-the-night front is also near in time.

We had a lovely Christmas + Boxing Day, just the 5 of us plus nine-year old neighbor J as a bonus elder sister. We played bingo and Monopoly and two different versions of Labyrinth (ours and hers) and baked cookies and ate them. C#2 expressed as further wishes to Santa that C#3 stop crying so much, and that mama would tickle him (C#2, that is) more often. The second wish has been granted :-).

Mostly, I'm wondering whether to move to a scientific blog in my actual name. I feel that there are not enough women scientists blogging in their own name, and there are not enough mathematicians of any gender. Speaking of which, I'l include two great examples of math blogging: the latest John Baez, with a commented list of free math books online, and John Armstrong with a lovely "Yes, Virginia" Christmas post. Of course if I could write like either of them (both in style and depth) I would definitely blog under my own name.

In related news, C#1 figured out that it's not Santa that brings the presents. She looked very proud of herself, and not shocked at all.

Students update

It seems to get slowly better. I have now read four of five pages of S#7 and it is all pretty reasonable. She is a bit creative with conventions for my taste, but I have to admit that the meaning is at all points totally clear. That's really good.
Unfortunately, tomorrow I will have only half a day for mathematics, since the afternoon I'll be busy with the birthday party, and the rest of the week I will attend a conference with the aim of improving my cv, not my mathematical culture. At least I should meet an old college friend, who chose a different side of mathematics and whom, as a consequence, I see rarely indeed.
I am also optimistic that S#3 and S#4 will finish their dissertations and get a postdoc; in the moment S#3 has a postod and S#4 a dissertation, but improvement is in the air. S#2 got a new postdoc, and a long well-paid one. Since S#1 chose to be a teacher, and S#5 has chosen to leave mathematics, I don't feel as bad as I did. And in a few weeks the number of students that I am responsible for will go down to four, two of them shared... I feel so excited, if I'm not careful I might as well accept another one!

Season change, or lack thereof

I have finally finished selecting, washing, drying, folding and sorting the children's old stuff. Since I haven't done this basically since the birth of the twins, it was not only a herculean job but emotionally draining as well. As I dug deeper into the layer, smaller and smaller outfits came to the light, many of them still looking pretty new. I kept wondering where my lovely babies had gone, and who the big boys infesting my flat could possibly be.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to arrange immediate dispatching, so many boxes and bags are now lying around all over my bedroom and livingroom. A few of them contain also clothes of mine, including the elegant (and, you guess it, good-as-new) outfit I wore for my graduation - in my country we just wear nice clothes, nothing specifically academic. Hopefully all the boxes etc will be gone by tuesday: I can't help being a bit envious of Twice and every other mother of twins enjoying being part of such a group.
After all the work, the children started insisting that we go to the beach. Normally it's way too cold so late in the year, but the sun was shining, and I was exhausted... I decided, why not? The children bathed in very low, very warm water due to extremely low tide. I went with them, water until my knees, clean as it never is during summer, and basically all for us. We spotted crabs and fishes of various dimensions, and a large selection of shells. We stayed until the sun started setting.
On the way home, the twins fell asleep; after a quick dinner, all three are now peacefully sleeping.
It was a wonderful way to say goodbye to the summer, enjoying the calm sea and perfect limpidity of water and air, with dozens of sailing boats and behind them, in a bluish haze, the hills (and the factories, but maybe one needn't be too precise).

Intense week

I didn't do any research this week. I spent several hours doing support to the students. I should be happy that they are getting productive, but this means a growing pile of mostly badly written and occasionally wrong theorems accumulating on my desk.
I wasted an outrageous amount of time doing university politics. I may or may not have an official administrative duty in the future (I hope not), but I will have to invest a lot of time doing brown-nosing, which is the officially certified method to get poitions in one's own field in my university. It is very sad, but I'd rather submit to the indegnity that have my student suffer from me being overworked; plus, one deserving young person will get a good job, if I play my cards right. Still, part of me hopes to move eventually to a better and more honest place, if one exists.
I dedicated some time to maternal activities: I went to a meeting with the schoolteachers, planned a birthday party, and (drumroll) finished sorting and packing the enormous backlog of no longer needed clothes in our flat. Plus, I managed a trip to Ikea and bought a large amount of no frills storage funiture; when it will be delivered (by Ikea) and mounted (by WS, with some paid assistance) I expect a much neater household. I already reorganized C#1's clothes cupboard, and the twins' is due tomorrow. Mine will have to wait for a new, unbroken cupboard. I am still overdue in organizing the children's extracurricular activities: C#1 wants to try a new sport, for which she needs a medical certificate, C#3 will do violin, or swimming, or both, and C#2 will most likely sit on a chair and suck his index finger.
Next week I'm off to a conference, and after that courses start. I am wondering when I'll start to do research again, and hoping that it won't be too long.

Parents undressed

Slate has an article with the fascinating title "Are children harmed by seeing their parents naked?". The article itself is even more fascinating, since it completely avoids the question in the title. It starts by declaring that no studies exist, so in a sense the answer is "we don't know".
It then proceeds to say that younger children may not notice and in any case will not remember, so they should be no problem.
Mercifully, it also mentions that breastfeeding doesn't cause trouble, at least at age 12 months. I can't say anything about later ages since my kids decided to stop breastfeeding not much later than that.
It then goes on to discuss possible problem mentioned by adolescent psychiatrists. However, no evidence is given for such problems. It finishes by explaining at what age children want to stop using the other sex's bathroom, and what age girls don't want to be bathed by father any longer.
There are a few points I would like to raise. First of all, it should be very easy to study children of nudists, and see whether they have any specific sexual trouble. After all, there are plenty of people who go vacationing in nudist beaches with children.
Then, it should be possible to compare americans with northern europeans, who are used to seeing grownup nudity (e.g., when people change bathing suits on the beach they don't cover up).
Finally, a few remarks about my own kids. We are raising them as I was raised: going to the bathrrom for solid reasons demands a closed door, since concentration is required; any other activity does not prevent the use of the bathroom by the rest of the family. If you think this is crazy, try to grow up in a household with only one bathroom and see where this leads you.
My children know how they differ from each other, and from us. We have explained that grown ups have hair under their armpits and between their legs, that men have a larger didi then boys, and that girls and women have a didi so small that it's hard to see. We also explained that women need a diaper on a regular babies, since they loose blood; this is the blood which forms a nest for a baby inside the mother, and when it has been there too long and no baby needs it, it gets thrown out before it goes rotten.
My kids are squeamish about using the "wrong" public toilet, and they insist that their clothing and haircut corresponds to societal standard for their gender. They also prefer to pee privately, I suspect (but have only circumstantial evidence) so as not to use toilet paper.
I always saw my parents naked, and I grew up more or less normal. Or maybe I didn't, and haven't noticed yet.
However, one question about this article is really, really important to me now: is there a way to make sure boys do not want to be bathed by mommy anymore? I certainly wouldn't mind sharing the bathing duties along gender lines: C#1 showers on her own, needing only a look to check that all the shampoo has been rinsed from the head, while the twins resist and C#2 has still a strong opposition to having his hair washed. Had I known for sure that less nudity in the household would have led to me avoiding bathing duties for the twins, I would bought a burqa years ago.

Growing old and liking it

As their hair slowly turns grey, or red as the case may be, most women encounter a series of physical changes. However, many of them, my own mother among them, maintain a fully feminine body despite the advancing years; others, like my children's nanny, surpass their own already considerable achievements in matters of softness of the chest area.
It is pleasant to know that I am not alone in belonging to neither of these categories.

Good mothers

With my usual delay I noticed a very good post at Tertia's So Close with an awesome list of comments.
Many mothers (fathers are mysteriously, or maybe not so mysteriously, absent) argue repeatedly the same point: that as a mother you do your best, and have to work with the child/children you have. No a priori method works in all cases, and different children have different time schedules for reaching benchmarks like sleeping through the night or stopping diapers/pacifiers/bottles.
Mothers of twins have an even clearer understanding of that, since they often behave in totally different ways: even same sex twins do that, and I understand even identical ones.
I think the post above should be mandatory reading for every first-time pregnant woman, and for any of the many people who are always ready to criticize other people's educative methods.