Awaiting the spring peepers

A vet that I work with, and admitted amphibian nut, reported yesterday in a company-wide email that he has heard the first spring peepers of the year. This man lives about 50 miles south of me, so it may be a week or so before we hear them in our neck of the state. But each year I not-so-patiently await them, it's a bigger sign of spring for me than seeing the first robin.

The spring peeper is a tiny tiny frog. The only time I've ever been able to find one in the wild (although I haven't really trekked out in the middle of the night to find one lately) is way back in college and it was no bigger than my thumb nail. They hibernate all winter and come out to breed when the air temperature starts to hit a steady 50 degrees.
And then they gather in enormous numbers in vernal pools, "wicked big" puddles, as we call them here in Massachusetts, that form from rainwater and snow melt that exist only in the spring and evaporate before the end of summer. Starting around dusk in mid-March you might hear one, then two, then hundreds of singular "PEEPS!!". And those are the spring peepers. Their voice a billion times louder than their little bodies. When I hear that noise I throw open my windows, toss an extra blanket on the bed and sleep very deeply knowing spring is here.

After the cacophony of sound they breed, lay their gelatinous egg masses and hop away into the night. Because vernal pools are isolated and not connected to streams or rivers they are free of fish. Without this protection the tadpoles would never survive. Vernal pools are fun places to check out, if you've never been to one all you have to do is fine a huge puddle, often very close to a road, and peer into the middle. If you see an odd object that looks like this you've found a vernal pool!







If you're very very lucky you'll even see one of my favorite, although less vocal animals (in fact I've handled hundred of these animals and I've only ever heard a very soft growl): the spotted salamander. These are beautiful creatures who share the vernal pool's breeding water with the peepers .

They have the most adorable faces, how could you not love this guy?

Unfortunately, as with all amphibians, their future is uncertain for all the usual suspects of habitat loss and global warming. And more specific problems of being run over by cars on their spring-time migration (some towns build tunnels in busy crossing areas!) and even salted roads that change the salinity of their nearby breeding pools. But at least this spring I know the peepers are back somewhere in the state, and I will eagerly await their deafening call of "we're here!" And the first really rainy night when the air is at least 50 degrees I just might grab my rain coat and head in to the woods to see all the action. The "Big Night", as we amphibian-nuts like to call it, is serious fun. I'm not kidding! So go grab your rain coat and flashlight, watch where you're walking, and be ready to see some frogs and salamanders.

Even though amphibians are generally declining around the world we have a wonderful local environmental education organization called Kestrel that's teaching kids from all over Massachusetts' North Shore to love vernal pools and all their creatures. For an adventurous field trip check out what the Kestrel team is up to!

My beautiful piece of the world

During a recent flip through my iphoto library I realized (not for the first time) how unbelievably beautiful my little town is. Enjoy:




Southern tip of
Plum Island














Hood's Pond











Low tide at
Pavilion Beach
















Cows at
Appleton Farms













footbridge over the
Ipswich River in
Bradley-Palmer state park













Lobster boats at the
Town Landing













Sunset over the farms
on Rt. 133















Marshes near
Great Neck









Beach grass at Crane Beach

Yay! for the proposed Mass. gas tax increase!

A lot of people I know would like to tar and feather me right now in the spirit of good ol' Colonial New England. But I actually WANT to pay higher taxes. Our young and ambitious governor, Deval Patrick, has proposed an increase of 19 cents on every gallon of gas. This would bring the Massachusetts gas tax from one of the lowest in the country to the highest at a new cost to the driver of 42 cents per gallon.

I did a little math (mind you, I have a fear of math) and this would only cost me about $2.20 a week since I fill my tank once a week, if that. A normal year might see me paying a mere $130 more in taxes. I did a little more math and realized that with the current gas price of $1.88 a gallon (which is RIDICULOUSLY cheap!) if I drove the 30 miles into Boston for my job I would pay about $4 round trip for the commute. I usually take the commuter rail which costs me a whopping $13.50 round trip. You can see just there that if I didn't have to pay $15 to park at the garage nearest my place of business I'd obviously opt for the drive.

So every time the gas tax creeps up, the price of fuel creeps up, or anything of the sort I cheer, my husband cheers and most of my acquaintances cheer. We should be paying MORE for the luxury of breezing into the city in our little cocoons of comfort and LESS for the not-so-luxurious chance to cram one's self onto a train and most likely get stuck near an annoying 25-year-old woman talking on her cell phone the whole way whilst ending all her sentences in questions (my ipod battery always dies in this situation).

We are so unbelievably spoiled in this country that is supposed to be an example for the world. On a vacation in the UK in late 2007 my husband and I rented a diesel Volvo wagon, loaded it up with camping gear and drove from Heathrow as far north as we could go, jumped on a ferry to Scotland's Isle of Lewis and drove some more. We paid on average 99 pence a liter, this translates to a whopping $9 a gallon with the exchange rate for that time. We probably spent about $900 in gas in 18 days and never once complained about it. The Brits are used to taking trains, buses and even walking as their cities are set up more like villages and they CAN actually walk places and ditch their cars.

We've screwed things up in this country pretty bad by thinking sprawl is a good thing. I like not having to use my car, we live in a little sea coast village and if I had to I could walk to everything I needed in our village in about ten minutes. And we're two blocks from the (overpriced) train that runs into downtown Boston. People always ask me now that we have a child "aren't you going to by a bigger house with some land?" No. I'd rather the rest of the state pay the gas tax so I can enjoy better public transportation, fewer cars on the road when I do drive, cleaner air and hopefully a cooler planet. And when I do fill up my car it will be so nice to know that those extra pennies will be improving our subway and train system, filling in those nasty potholes and maybe even keeping a few people off the road so we all can go the speed limit and get better gas mileage.

So go ahead Deval, raise the tax higher!! No, higher still! Let's get gas back up to $4 a gallon so we see some change.

To cloth or not to cloth: defending cloth diapers in a plastic age

I feel like just about every friend of our family is either trying to have a baby, expecting a baby, or already has a baby. I figure in just our close circle of friends alone we know about 21 babies currently in diapers. Taking an average from newborns to three-year-old these babies collectively go through about 160 diapers a day. And that's just the babies we know!!

Now, only a mere SIX of these babies (including ours) are in cloth diapers. I don't want people to think I'm being preachy and righteous (because I'm not, I swear), mothers and fathers are free to choose whatever diaper works best for their family. In our case we chose cloth for a few reasons: it's cheaper, we don't live in an area of restricted water use, we felt bad making more trash.

I'm blogging about this issue because I'm sick of people taking bets on how long we'll last with our daughter in cloth. It's like the world would end if they had to put their kid in cloth. News flash: for the past thousands of years babies have crawled around in cloth diapers! Five months and counting and I've been happy with every minute. And I'm even more sick of people (who thankfully are not in our inner circle of friends) who criticize us for using cloth saying that they read somewhere that it's more polluting than disposables. I would like a chance to dispel this myth.

YES: cloth diapers can use a lot of water in the washing process. You have to wash them once in cold then once in hot to get them clean. And I wash them about every five days. Like I said, we don't live in an area of water use issues. Coastal New England generally makes it through the summer just fine. Plus our family uses very little water in other areas of our life.
-We don't water our lawn (we have 0.06 acres most of it taken up by our house) and I have two 100 gallon rain barrels that I use to water my vegetable garden.
-In the summer my husband rarely takes more than two or three showers a week. He claims if he went surfing then he showered. Fine with me. Salt water has cleansing properties.
-I don't think we've washed either of our cars more than three times in their collective 15 years of existence.
-We have a low-flow toilet as well as dishwasher.

YES: there are detergents used in the washing process. But, cloth diapers can't be washed in just any old detergent. It screws up their absorbency. Most diaper-friendly detergents are better for the environment, phosphate-free and work better with the rest of your laundry than regular detergents. Even when my kid is out of diapers I'll still use the detergent I've switched to.

YES: you have to dry them which uses electricity. But I line dry mine and only fluff them for 20 minutes in the dryer to make them soft. And you don't have to do that step.

YES: they are manufactured and shipped via truck to my front door (since I mail ordered them). But they are shipped ONCE. I don't have to drive to the store every week and stock up on plastic diapers wrapped in more plastic (which are also manufactured and shipped). And the ones Lizzie wore when she was a newborn are organic cotton made in Pakistan. Which I know is very far away (i.e. lots of fossil fuels to get them here) but I'd like to think I did a minor part in helping a Pakistani family stay chemical free. Plus I bet most disposables are made in China anyway.

YES: the diapers themselves are expensive. The ones I chose are $12 each and I have 30. That's $360 that luckily friends and family shelled out for them and gave to us as gifts. But it sure beats the $500-$700 a year if I was using disposables!

What I'm NOT getting with my cloth diapers are the nasty chemicals that plastic disposables have in them. The polluting bleach that factories use to bleach the disposables. The landfill space. The gas used to truck all those boxes to the store. The gas I use to go get them from the store. The billions of gallons of water used in the manufacturing process to make the disposables. The ridiculous chunk of my budget that would have to go to buying disposables (I read once that cloth can save about $1000 per kid!) And best of all: the diaper rash. As long as Lizzie is in cloth her butt is happy :)

OK. So after that rant I have to admit here that I do use disposables at night. I like my sleep. Cloth just doesn't keep sensitive baby butts as dry. But I use a chlorine-free diaper that has, from what I can tell, no plastic. And they're made in Vermont so they don't go very far to get to my local organic food store. And I mean local. I can walk there to buy them. Which I do about once a month. So I might use 30-40 diapers a month. Line me up and execute me, I'm just not THAT obsessed with cloth. But I figure I'm doing my best.

So hopefully that is a good rebuttal to all my acquaintances who claim cloth is worse for the environment. You're not making me switch. And I'm not asking you to switch either. Cloth works for us. And we love it.

PLEASE don't make me do a sing-along!!!

Is it bad that I can't stand a singalong?

OK, I feel like I terrible mother. I brought my 5 month-old daughter to a new play group this week and ten minutes into the session the child care professional running the group brings out his guitar. I need to explain that my husband plays the guitar for our child all the time. But he makes up lyrics that tend to go like this:

Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie-Lou. You're the one that makes the poo.....

....and so on and so forth. (This is an improvement from lyrics he used to make up before Lizzie was born that usually found himself trying to find words that rhymed with bobbies, vagina and butt.) No matter what he comes up with it's always hysterical and I end up crying with laughter. I look forward to his jam sessions, you never know what he'll come up with next. "Hey Katie! What rhymes with smelly diaper?" would not be an unusual request.

Anyway, I'm getting away from myself. The childcare professional grabs his guitar and I get excited thinking he's going to sing some fun made-up song for the kids. And then it happened. As soon as he sang the opening word of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" every mom starts to sing along. I broke out in a cold sweat. I HATE sing-alongs. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME SING ALONG WITH THESE WOMEN!

I can't explain it. Being forced to sing in public with strangers just makes me feel icky all over. Does this make me bad person? I feel that there's just something wrong with twelve women clapping along to "The wheels on the bus" while their barely sitting-up children sit there looking completely overstimulated. I know there's a million developmental benefits of singing along with your child. And I do sing to my kid. Between her father and me she gets sung to most of the day. But they're songs that don't make sense even if they do rhyme. And at least it's just Lizzie hearing me, I can sing whatever I want.

Road Rage and Raising Rugrats: How to doom your children

A few months before I became pregnant with my first child I experienced a true horror. There's a nice, quiet, country road leading out of the seaside town that I live in. It's not uncommon to be tailgated from one end of this seven mile road to the other. Even when one is driving ten miles an hour over the speed limit. My husband and I usually just pull over and let the annoyed driver, who has often been one car length off our rear bumper for a mile or so, go by and therefore lowering our blood pressure back down to a normal rate.

Over the last two years I've begun to notice that more than half of the tailgaters are actually women, and most of them on their cell phones. My husband told me once that he actually has a female friend who claims to be uncomfortable unless she's right on someone's bumper. I have no idea why this is, but I can see it must be true by the number of clueless people who seem to kiss my bumper on a daily basis.

My horror occurred last winter, and it recently popped to the front of my brain when I was tailgated by yet another minivan with kids in the back and a mom on her cell phone. I was quietly driving 50 miles an hour in a 45 past a farm with horses huddled against a barn for warmth when I noticed an SUV literally one car length off my rear bumper. I cocked the rear view mirror to get a better look and it was a woman, on her cell phone, looking very annoyed that I wasn't going faster. Because it was winter there wasn't a cleared spot to pull over as the snow banks were right up to the edge of the road. Unless she pulled into a side street I was stuck with this woman for at least another four miles.

I could have sped up, but this stretch of road is often patrolled by bored country policemen with nothing else to do but hide behind a barn to nab you so I stuck to 50 in a 45. Still speeding. Well, I swear this women actually inched CLOSER to my bumper and I could clearly see her waving her arms around getting more annoyed with me and yelling something thankfully I could not hear. I stuck to 50 and slowed to 40 when the speed limit dropped to 35. Until I got to the red light at the end of the road. This is where I became completely horrified.

I was turing right. The SUV was going straight and pulled up next to me. I took a deep breath and turned to look the driver in the eye. She flipped me off. FLIPPED ME OFF. And then I saw it. Two kids in the back. Awake. Looking at me with a look of contempt. Those poor kids. They're gonna grow up just like their mom.

I want to think that they were rushing to the hospital to see an ailing grandparent. Or one of the kids was sick and they were going to the doctor. But I doubt it. The mom was just run-down, annoyed, grumpy, whatever. She probably needed a break from her bratty kids. And why were her kids so bratty?Well, look at her driving. Look at the way she flipped me off in front of them.

When I did become pregnant a few months later and had my first child that fall I made a vow to myself to never, ever, be that obnoxious to another human being in front of my daughter. Because if we want respectful children we must be respectful ourselves. Otherwise we'll have a whole generations of tailgaters flipping everybody off. So parents: BACK OFF. Teach your kids respect. Whether it be not tailgating, letting someone cross the street, not yelling at another driver who's following the law. Good behavior starts early and starts in places where you don't think it matters. Sure, my four-month-old won't be driving for another sixteen years but she sees everything I do. And I'd better make sure that I'm the best example I can be.

musings of a soon-to-be-working mom

I know I have more Holdfast Seeker to work on, but a very demanding four-month-old often prevents me from writing. Although, my husband and I just had an interesting conversation over breakfast that prompted me to write this short musing on the evolutionary roles of moms and dads and what that means in the modern world. Enjoy:

Four months after the birth of my daughter I am truly beginning to understand human evolution. Mind you, I hold a degree in biology with evolution as one of my concentrations. But until I actually had the chance to witness my own part in the human cycle it never occurred to me why men and women often struggle in their modern parenting roles. It started when we were leaving the hospital and came across a couple and their baby who were just wheeled down from delivery to the post-partum ward. The husband asked if there was anything he could do for his wife, she screamed something that sounded like “go find food!”. He quickly left the room muttering “hunt and gather, hunt and gather, hunt and gather.” 'Cause that's all a man can do in that situation right? Provide for his family.

I could get stoned by women's lib groups worldwide for saying this but it's true: women are programmed to stay home with their kids and men are programmed to hunt and gather. I'm currently battling with the issue of returning to work and never ever thought that I would want to leave my dream career of working at a public aquarium (I mean, come on, how cool is it that I get to swim with sharks, pet jellyfish and play worm-catch with common terns and get PAID for it?). But there's this little computer chip in my brain that's telling me “No! You are the mom, you stay home and nurture your child and build a home for your family.” Do I listen to it or ignore it?

Likewise my husband had an unexpected reaction to fatherhood. He had planned on staying home for at least a week but his little dad-computer chip switched on and he felt an urge to go to his office. It wasn't that he wanted to get away from the newborn, he practically cried every morning when he went out the door. But evolution was telling him, just like the new dad at the hospital, to go hunt and gather. Or in the modern sense: go make money. Because providing for a family is literally the only thing a man can do in this situation. He can't lactate, right? Sure, he can change a few diapers and maybe if the baby is bottle feeding do a few overnight feeds to give the mom a break. But until the modern age after the birth of a child hominid males generally went out, hunted down a wildebeest, and dragged it home for the women to prepare. And you know what? I'm kinda fine with that. I hate grocery shopping.

So stone me. Tell me I just put women's liberation back 40 years. But for all you moms out there, you have to admit that you know there's a little chip in the back of your brain, a little link in your DNA, that told you to stay home, curl up around your baby, and kick the dad out of the house to drag home a wildbeest. Now if only a grandmother would come along and cook it up that would be perfect. But an essay on the benefits of raising a child in a village versus the typical American nuclear family will have to wait for another time.