I recently saw folks talking about the advice to "bloom where you're planted" in the context of being in a less than ideal situation but making the best of it. I thought this idea could resonate well with where we are in life and would serve as a nice way to organize the million photos I accrue with A when I'm only updating the blog once or twice per month.
I thought I mentioned here that we decided to plant fun this year. More than anything, it served as a nice science experiment and introduction to gardening so I haven't had high hopes that it will be a success.
We are having fun, though!
I ordered a raised bed off of Amazon and put it together myself. It was incredibly easy to do but did take a tremendous amount of soil to fill it!
One of our favorite parts of all of this has been A developing a "fairy garden" for the backyard. We have baby tears, freesia, and a little shrub growing in the shade.
Plants we have include 3 kinds of tomatoes, 3 kinds of strawberries, peas, carrots, 4 kinds of peppers, basil, 2 types of thyme, oregano, lavender, eucalyptus, lemon grass, citronella, rosemary, and a few flowering plants (penta, dahlia, lantana, senorita rosalita). I think we went just a little overboard.
Chad and I have had mixed success with herbs in previous years. Before A was born we had a flourishing herb garden but inevitably spider mites took over the oregano. In the last few years, we just collected dirty pots on the patio, with no real desire to care for additional living things. Since we are trying again, I thought we should get some friendly pest control to keep down populations of aphids, spider mites, and the likes.
And again, science.
You may recall from the Easter post that A got 2 praying mantis egg cases. They hatched on separate days and we were inundated with little baby mantids. It was a little creepy to release them (between 50-200 hatch at a time!) but so much fun!
We also released ladybugs. A key to releasing lady bugs is that they should be done at dawn or dusk to increase the chances that they will stick around your yard.
The other half of the "bloom where you are planted" idea came to me as I have been thinking a lot about my work lately.
Last night was the graduate hooding ceremony where I hooded my first ever graduate student. Today I was back for undergraduate commencement where I had three research assistants graduate. When I interviewed here, I was told by more than one person that this job could be thought about like an extended post doc or stepping stone to the career job. Instead, I was interested in finding a home (to "bloom", if you're cheesy). I've been fortunate to be in a department where that has been easy to do. We are growing and developing a national reputation for excellent research and clinical training and it is exciting to be a part of that. So despite some very real (and sometimes incredibly hard to overlook) issues like geography, proximity to family, meteorological scares, local politics, and some limited resources, I am happy to currently be in the spot I've found.
I have really fantastic colleagues.
Getting to know the students and impact their training or professional development has been incredibly rewarding.
It's also been really tough for me to accept the temporariness of academia. Colleagues have moved on and that has been sad. And every year since I have been here, students also have moved on. They are doing precisely what we hoped for and trained them to do--leave. There are some students I will see at conferences and others who will stay in touch to keep me posted on their own development. However, there are some I have known who I may never see again. The realization that this cycle is repeated each May has been difficult for me.
I can instead move toward generativity and attempt to plant seeds for future students.
(but I still don't like change)
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