Sense of time

 

Keeping up with time

Many of us struggle with keeping up with time. Scheduling events is not easy, but thanks to Google calendar which has made it a little easier.  Anyways, here I will report two independent events where we were totally out of sense of time.

When is the party exactly?!

When we arrived at a birthday party, the host/birthday boy was roaming in his pajama trying to figure out what to order for dinner. There were two possibilities, one that the time of the party was changed or we arrived on a wrong day. But no, we were right on time. 6 pm sharp as requested in the invite. The other guests arrived 1.5 hours late. It didn’t make any sense! My question to everyone was should I call the night before for the reporting time instead of the invitation time 🙂

Sorry we are late to the party..

We got up at an acceptable time (7am when you have a baby) on one fine Saturday. I checked my calendar and saw two appointments, first not-so-fun at Toyota service center for a regular check-up of my car and and second fun one for a birthday party at a park. Both the appointment were placed at a comfortable interval and we could make it to the 11:30am party after my trip to the car service center. Everything was going great. We finished at the service center at 11:10 am and decided to go to the party directly. But the baby had her own plans. She didn’t wanna sit in the car. There was a huge drama to put her in the car. When she did, we started driving. We had just pulled out of the service center when the meltdown began. We stopped the car in one of the side streets to pacify her. We paced around her till 1pm (yup 2 hours!) to convince her to go back to the car. Finally, we drive to the birthday party and it was 1:30pm when they had already started packing up. We tried explaining the whole incident to the hosts and they were so understanding 🙂 What is most important in a birthday party is cake which we luckily got to eat!

 

 

 

Things you can learn from a toddler to be a great scientist

I have a toddler (almost three years old) and she is one Curious George! I love her and I have realized that toddlers have three most critical qualities to be a successful  scientist:

1. Be persistent: When a toddler wants to eat an ice-cream, there is no force in the world that can stop them! No matter how much you try to convince or trick them, their persistence will defeat you. So be persistent in your research, do not give up and keep testing your hypothesis. You will get that data (or ice-cream in toddler world) in the end.

2. Be inquisitive: My toddler just started asking “why” for everything that happens in the world and it is sometimes challenging to answer some of those whys. For example, why do we have blood in our body? How do you explain this to a two and a half year old child?! As a researcher, you have to be inquisitive and ask why for every hypothesis you have or every result you get or every experiment that failed. The cascade of whys will lead you to your answer. 

3. Be creative: My toddler is so creative that surprises me at many times. She uses her toys/stuff around the house in unique ways, for example this morning she used her spoon as a boat, filled it with milk, and put a piece of bread as a fish to eat it. We never taught her that. It was her creativity and awareness. As a researcher, you have to be creative as well. If an experiment doesn’t work in a certain way, try a new method. If your results are totally unexpected, try thinking creatively for alternative hypothesis. Creative scientists make the biggest discoveries and inventions.