Jump To:
Researching Pregnancy
Pregnancy Lifestyle
Where to Deliver
Labor and Delivery
Our Parenting Choices
What We’ve Learned
Further Reading
Stages of Fetal Development
Credit: NHS Pregnancy Desktop
One of the first things Vicky and I established when we first became romantically involved is that we both wanted to have children. We share a deep love of science and the natural world and wanted to share our sense of wonder with children of our own. At the same time, in our sharing we were hoping to experience the world vicariously through fresh eyes, reliving the thrill of learning and discovery.
When the pregnancy test finally came up positive, we were launched into a whole new realm of learning: reading up on diet, lifestyle, and fetal development. We were also put into an unanticipated tour of various types and standards of prenatal care. This post covers what we learned and what we are continuing to learn about pregnancy and childcare.
[Continue Reading...]
Book Festival Poster
“I cannot live without books.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
I had the great joy of attending this year’s National Book Festival on the Washington DC Mall. With over 100 authors in attendance, CSPAN’s BookTv.org covering the event, PBS Kids, Scholastic, and the greatest library on Earth providing educational materials, this was a fun activity for kids and adults, all celebrating the most important cultural invention in human history: the written word.
[Continue Reading...]
“Circling the Earth in my orbital spaceship I marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty — not destroy it!” ~ Yuri Gagarin
Yuri’s Night 2011
50 years ago, on April 12th, 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin piloted the Vostok 1 into space, entering the history books as the first human to achieve space flight. It follows the 50th anniversary of the first artificial satellite in orbit, Sputnik, the first living passenger to make it into space, Laika, and America throwing our hat into the space race. It will be eight long years until we can celebrate the next big semicentennial event, the Apollo Moon landing.
[Continue Reading...]
27 Scraps of Paper
Credit: Arthur Ganson 2002
“Invention breeds invention.” – Edison
Check out the complete flickr set here.
Carbon Emission Counter
City living is good for the environment. When populations are concentrated, they are pooling resources. They use less electricity because their apartments are close together, less oil because of mass transportation and less water because they don’t have big lawns to feed. And cities like New York are constantly working to become greener, from the Science Barge, an experiment in bringing local produce to the city, to green roofs, collective grocery stores and hybrid-electric taxi cabs, things are becoming more environmentally friendly in the city all the time.
High Line Park
High Line Park is one-such improvement, suggested by nature, to green the city. The High Line was an old set of railway tracks on stilts, running through the city. It was supposed to be torn down, but local residents had come to love the trees, flowers and shrubs that had overgrown the tracks. So the tracks were converted into a park, running a beautiful river of natural beauty through the city for all to enjoy.
Check out the complete flickr set here.
Evolution Store in Soho
|
When my sister came across the Evolution Store in Soho, New York City, she knew I absolutely had to see it. This store has everything you need to make some high-quality additions to your home Cabinet of Curiosities. From insects, fossils, minerals, taxidermy animals, seashells and corals, skulls and skeletons, this store covers all bases for the Naturalist collector.
What struck me most about the displays, was the way they were presented as fine art. We usually only see these things presented in museums, where they are obviously art, but not always thought of as something we would like to have hanging on the bedroom wall. A skeleton is a beautiful thing, and a fossilized one embedded in stone is one of nature’s paintings perfectly framed. A trilobite or ammonite uncovered from the stone is a natural sculpture, and the minerals like stibnite and obsidian are natural patterns more intricate than any work of modern art, because it’s intricacy goes all the way down to the atomic level.
After some fretting over which dinosaur bone replica was within my price range and was cool enough looking, I went with an Allosaurus finger claw. The store has a very large collection of curiosities for sale on the website, and I could see that the collection was ever-changing as new items rotated in to replace those sold out.
Window Display at the Evolution Store in Soho
I would highly-recommend putting this store on your “must see” list of attractions to check out on your next trip to the Big Apple, after, of course, the American Museum of Natural History.
Check out the complete flickr set here.
Futurama at the New York World’s Fair
Walking through this exhibit, we find a love/hate relationship between Americans and science. We love the modern conveniences of plastic, birth control, and cheap energy, but hate the chemical poisons contaminating our environment, radioactivity, cancer, and innovations in warfare that come with them. Displays that are hopeful for the future through science are contrasted with displays of human suffering during the depression… and that’s not even getting into the conflicts of tradition versus progress as we see in the Evolution debates.
Check out the complete flickr set here.
Mountain Laurel
This set is a work in progress, as one must visit botanical gardens at many points in the year to see all the various flowers in bloom.
Check out the incomplete flickr set here.
Vicky with Azaleas
The azalea is unique among species of rhododendron in that, rather than blooming in clusters or “stripers” as they are known, every terminal branch on the azalea bush produces a flower, resulting in the spectacular displays they bring each April.
Check out the complete flickr set here.
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December. ~ J. M. Barrie
Norfolk Botanical Gardens Rose Garden
Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;” however, psychologists have found this is not true, that words impact the way we percieve the world. Understanding the science of roses, how they are made of carbon pulled from the air, that they are often grafted onto the roots of hardier species to survive the outdoors, and how they pull energy directly from the sun, makes them all the more lovely to admire.
It reminds me of this Feynman quote:
The World looks so different after learning science.
For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree. [A]nd in the ash is the small remnant part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.
These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.
Check out the complete flickr set here.
