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ciroccojGot a forward from a friend the other day:
Here's a truly heart warming story about the bond formed between a little 5 year old girl and some construction workers. Makes you believe that we CAN make a difference when we give a child the gift of our time...
A young family moved into a house, next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot. The young family's 5-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers. Eventually the construction crew, all of them gems-in-the-rough, more or less adopted her as a project mascot. They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee, lunch breaks, and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important. At the end of the first week they even presented her with a pay envelope containing a couple of dollars. The little girl proudly took this home to her mother who said all the appropriate words of admiration and suggested that they take the two dollar "pay" she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.
When they got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay cheque at such a young age.
The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with the crew building the house next door to us."
"My goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"
The little girl replied, "I will if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the f**king dry wall..."
***
Probably our last day skating yesterday. The season's ending and boy, was it short. But we went several times, had a great time every time, and Justin improved exponentially - started as an almost-skater, able to go about a minutes at a time without falling, and ended as a real skater, falling maybe four times in the whole hour and a half we were on the ice yesterday.
***
Had dinner out and then stayed till the place closed Friday night with five of my high school friends/acquaintances. I can't quite believe it, but we were there six hours. Topics were all over the place - gossip about other members of our class and what they're doing, family histories, current jobs & families, reminiscences, religion, politics, 9/11, old misunderstandings, birth stories, England, spouses, debate over whether people change their basic personalities over time or not, day care, weddings, health... myeah. It was really, really cool. The food was excellent, too :)
***
Justin asked what St. Patrick's Day was all about, and got a crash course in Irish history and the Irish Diaspora. At one point I pointed out that we're part of that diaspora too, even though I'm Chilean, through my maternal great-grandfather William O'Neale and my paternal great-great, Philip Lee. Also talked a bit about how the Irish were often discriminated against wherever they went, because they were poor and dirty and spoke funny and drank a lot and were the wrong kind of Christian-
"You mean we're part Christian too?" he asked in astonishment. "I didn't know that!"
Heh. Religion as an inherited trait.
***
Speaking of inherited traits, Chris was able to do some neato genetics teaching using our family the other day. Talked about inheriting characteristics, dominant and recessive genes, etc and when he got to the part about heterozygous and homozygous, we had a little demo right there in our home.
This isn't quite the order he did it in, and I'm aware it's grossly simplified, but here's the general gist of what he was talking about.
Let's say you can have two genes for eye colour: dark (brown) and light (blue). You get one gene from each parent. Brown is dominant, so if you've got one brown gene, that's the colour of your eyes, whether your other eye gene is brown or blue. The only way you get blue eyes is if you got two blue eye colour genes, one from each parent.
Same goes for hair (dark = brown, light = blond).
What this means is that if you've got a blue-eyed, blonde person, you know they have to have two blue-eyed and two blond genes, but a brown-eyed, brown-haired person could be homozygous (two genes the same colour) or heterozygous (one of each) and unless you know more about them, you can't tell which they are.
Here's a truly heart warming story about the bond formed between a little 5 year old girl and some construction workers. Makes you believe that we CAN make a difference when we give a child the gift of our time...
A young family moved into a house, next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot. The young family's 5-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and spent much of each day observing the workers. Eventually the construction crew, all of them gems-in-the-rough, more or less adopted her as a project mascot. They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee, lunch breaks, and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important. At the end of the first week they even presented her with a pay envelope containing a couple of dollars. The little girl proudly took this home to her mother who said all the appropriate words of admiration and suggested that they take the two dollar "pay" she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.
When they got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay cheque at such a young age.
The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with the crew building the house next door to us."
"My goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"
The little girl replied, "I will if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the f**king dry wall..."
Probably our last day skating yesterday. The season's ending and boy, was it short. But we went several times, had a great time every time, and Justin improved exponentially - started as an almost-skater, able to go about a minutes at a time without falling, and ended as a real skater, falling maybe four times in the whole hour and a half we were on the ice yesterday.
Had dinner out and then stayed till the place closed Friday night with five of my high school friends/acquaintances. I can't quite believe it, but we were there six hours. Topics were all over the place - gossip about other members of our class and what they're doing, family histories, current jobs & families, reminiscences, religion, politics, 9/11, old misunderstandings, birth stories, England, spouses, debate over whether people change their basic personalities over time or not, day care, weddings, health... myeah. It was really, really cool. The food was excellent, too :)
Justin asked what St. Patrick's Day was all about, and got a crash course in Irish history and the Irish Diaspora. At one point I pointed out that we're part of that diaspora too, even though I'm Chilean, through my maternal great-grandfather William O'Neale and my paternal great-great, Philip Lee. Also talked a bit about how the Irish were often discriminated against wherever they went, because they were poor and dirty and spoke funny and drank a lot and were the wrong kind of Christian-
"You mean we're part Christian too?" he asked in astonishment. "I didn't know that!"
Heh. Religion as an inherited trait.
Speaking of inherited traits, Chris was able to do some neato genetics teaching using our family the other day. Talked about inheriting characteristics, dominant and recessive genes, etc and when he got to the part about heterozygous and homozygous, we had a little demo right there in our home.
This isn't quite the order he did it in, and I'm aware it's grossly simplified, but here's the general gist of what he was talking about.
Let's say you can have two genes for eye colour: dark (brown) and light (blue). You get one gene from each parent. Brown is dominant, so if you've got one brown gene, that's the colour of your eyes, whether your other eye gene is brown or blue. The only way you get blue eyes is if you got two blue eye colour genes, one from each parent.
Same goes for hair (dark = brown, light = blond).
What this means is that if you've got a blue-eyed, blonde person, you know they have to have two blue-eyed and two blond genes, but a brown-eyed, brown-haired person could be homozygous (two genes the same colour) or heterozygous (one of each) and unless you know more about them, you can't tell which they are.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-11 06:47 pm (UTC)Love the genetics lesson. We did a similar thing for our kids, using the gene for red hair which one of the great grandmas has, and three of the cousins got as well. Simplified, yes, but also age appropriate for the elementary years. THe kids have gotten used to me starting every science lesson with "This is the simplified version; later, we'll cover this in more detail, and we'll see where the exceptions happen, But here's the gist of the matter:"
no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 08:45 pm (UTC)Yeah that was me too when I read it :D :D
We did a similar thing for our kids, using the gene for red hair which one of the great grandmas has, and three of the cousins got as well.
Ooh, red hair's neat. If I went into more detail re. genes that work in conjunction with other genes, I would use red hair and green eyes to illustrate. It would keep my interest going a lot longer than the Wyandotte hens my grade 11 biology teacher used :P
THe kids have gotten used to me starting every science lesson with "This is the simplified version; later, we'll cover this in more detail, and we'll see where the exceptions happen, But here's the gist of the matter:"
Yeah, our kids hear that a lot too ;)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-11 07:39 pm (UTC)Your hair and eye chart is really cute, too. My husband and I both have blue eyes, but we have a couple family members who always repeatedly ask, "Do you think his/her eyes will stay blue??" with every one of our babies. We keep explaining that our babies' eye color just isn't going to be that much of a mystery, but they always forget. You'd think they'd have remembered by the time we got to our third baby.
I wish I knew more about how hair color worked, though. My girls, for example, were both born with very dark hair that was rubbed off and grew back blond. The older girl's hair is now darkening up again (it's still blond-ish, but I think it will be definitively brown within a couple more years), and I assume our youngest will do the same. Our boy followed the same pattern, although his hair wasn't as shockingly dark at birth.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-13 08:52 pm (UTC)Arg for multiple useless explanations. Although you could just start making shit up. "Oh, the doctor says they're going to turn yellow at six months. You know, because of the prenatal fish hormones I've been on. I just hope the other kids don't tease them too much. Although I guess if they're going to be teased about anything, it'll be the prehensile tail that's supposed to grow in at puberty."
I wish I knew more about how hair color worked, though. My girls, for example, were both born with very dark hair that was rubbed off and grew back blond.
Yeah I've heard of that before! Bizarre. I've also heard some black babies are born pretty much white-skinned, and darken within the first year to the same dark brown as their parents.
Genetics is fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-14 03:19 am (UTC)I was actually talking with R.'s pediatric endocrinologist today about eye color, and she said that blue-eyed parents having brown-eyed children isn't as uncommon as you might think. I've never met anyone that's happened to (as far as I know), but I did tutor someone who had one brown eye and one blue. They were both beautiful colors! But I always wondered how that came about.