About being someone's mom

Today I came across this beautifully written blog post about how becoming a mother changes you and makes you miss or even say goodbye to the person you used to be. The person who could do whatever at any time she wanted. Go and read it, because renegademama writes it WAY better than I ever could. It seriously made me cry when I read it.

I recently came to the weird realization that have a baby doesn’t mean having a little piece or version of yourself. It is actually another person who just came to live in your house too. Even though he may have grown in your belly (or not, it doesn’t even matter). In the beginning he’s just laying there, sleeping and feeding, but now he’s growing into an actual person, who does all the things that other people do. He says “No” if he doesn’t want things, and can all of a sudden say “Sushi” and eat 5 pieces of California roll for dinner. It’s awesome. And a little weird if I think about it too long.

To a conference in baby-detach mode

At last year’s SfN BlueEyes was still very little and portable, so I stuck him in a wrap and brought him with me on Saturday and Sunday. This year’s SfN is going to be the first time that I’ll be away from him for 5 (FIVE!!) nights. I don’t think I’ve ever had more ambivalent feelings about anything. On one hand I’m super excited to go to SfN, travel by myself without having to watch and entertain BlueEyes, see friends and science and be able to hang out, but on the other hand the idea of missing him is almost physically painful. And then there’s my worry whether Dr. BrownEyes is going to be okay taking care of BlueEyes by himself for five nights. At least the freezer is full of milk so I’m pretty sure they will be fine.

So, I’m very excited to go to SfN, mainly because it is in New Orleans this year. The last time that happened was just before I started as a graduate student, and the whole time in grad school I kept hearing all these awesome stories about SfN in NOLA, as the city is lovingly called. Back in grad school, going to SfN was a very big deal, first because it was so far away for us, and thus much more expensive to go, but also because my advisor only allowed us to go if we could present data from a paper that was already submitted somewhere, because he was always afraid we would get scooped at SfN.

So what else do you need to know? Doc Becca and Scicurious have excellent posts with tips for surviving SfN so I’m only going to add to that that what I usually do at SfN when I don’t know where to go is to stroll around the posters in the hopes of meeting people I know or unexpectedly seeing posters I’m interested in.

Also, RXNM has four posts about where to eat in NOLA, go check it out!

And my fellow blogger and electrophysiologist TheCellularScale is one of SfN’s neurobloggers, so go read there to hear all about the latest neuroscience.

And last but not least, this year is going to be my first time going to SfNBANTER!

Food I normally miss

One of the exciting things about going back to the home country to visit is that we can eat all of the foods that are unavailable or hard to find here in the US. Here's a list of things we ate in the past ten days (pictures are not my own because I was either too lazy to take a picture or too lazy to take them off the camera yet):

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 Raw herring, eaten with raw onion.

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Bitterballen and kroketten: they're both ragout with a fried crust around them. Kroketten are best eaten with fries served with mayonaise.

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Lots of awesome Indonesian food, all of it homemade by Dr. BrownEyes' family.

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And last but not least: bread with cheese. And with this I mean tasty wheat bread with good old cheese!

With our suitcases filled with cheese, stroopwafels and liquorice we came back home yesterday evening. I'll write more later about the fruitful and less fruitful scientific meetings I had!