When I found out I was pregnant with our twins, I had great intentions of enrolling my new babies in the NYU Baby Sleep Study. But I hadn’t prepared before their birth and, parenting two newborns is exhausting (have I mentioned that?). Sleep simply wasn’t happening very often for my husband, myself or our babies […]
Learning the Value of Water with Citizen Science
I grew up in a town with a river flowing through it. A beautiful river, that served voyageurs, communities, and industry for years. A river in which we couldn’t swim because it was so polluted with PCB’s (polychlorinated biphenols) it wasn’t safe. A river you could fish, but not eat from because the fish were […]
How Watching a Solar Eclipse with Toddlers Actually Went Down
On Aug 21, 2017 we experienced a solar eclipse. Parts of the United States even experienced a total solar eclipse. You may recall that the day before the eclipse, I was still trying to figure out the best way for our toddlers to experience the eclipse, participate in some eclipse related citizen science, and not […]
Watching a Solar Eclipse with Toddlers
It’s nearly here. The Total Solar Eclipse happens tomorrow, Aug 21, 2017. Like many parents, I’ve been meaning to come up with a cool way for our toddlers to participate in the fun. But, I’ve been struggling with what to do and have procrastinated far too long. Ideally, we’d go out in the backyard, put […]
Date Night: Citizen Science
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I found ourselves in a unique (to us) situation. It was a Friday night. We’d made it through another long week. The kids were in bed and it was Date Night. But what to do? There weren’t any shows or movies on our “must see” list. We […]
Cultivating Observational Skills in Kids
When I was a kid, we spent a lot of our weekends going “up north”, first to my grandparents lake cabin and later to our own cabin in the woods. Whenever he got a chance, my dad would take us out on the boat or into the woods for a drive. My dad’s always been […]
What does it mean to incorporate citizen science into your life?
When I began drafting this post, I was thinking loftily about this question, what does it mean to incorporate citizen science into your life? It’s a big question. Could there be an overarching meaning to it? A path to a citizen science life? What would it look like if there was? It’s an interesting question […]
Citizen Science with Newborns
Even before the boys were born, I was already thinking about how much fun it would be to introduce them to citizen science. I kept seeing announcements and blogs about all these cool baby-related studies we could do with them (See: NYU Baby Sleep Study). “This is going to be great!” I thought enthusiastically to […]