Meltdown Monday (with a positive twist!)

There’s nothing like starting the new week with your daughter vomiting her brains out without prior notice while bringing her to bed on Sunday evening. What followed was a rough night with a small number of further vomit intermezzos, alternated with my son trying to roll over me or crawl under me all night, and all of that topped off with a nice and somewhat loud wake-up caused by our cat that had some kind of bowel night spasm – judging from the turds that I found spread throughout the living room.

With a night like this, you just know it will be a good week. It can only get better, right?

At least the week at work should be fun. This morning me and my colleague Sarah started a new series of planned measurements in which we will hopefully figure out how tansy chemodiversity affects, among others, levels of predation on dummy clay caterpillars. I’ve done such assays before when I still worked in the Netherlands, and it was fun. There are some more insect assays planned for this field experiment this week, and slowly we are trying to understand and measure everything that we think could explain insect diversity in this experiment.

For the rest of the day, I will take it slow to prevent matters getting worse. I don’t feel too fit myself either. As I also worked in the field on Saturday, this afternoon our sick daughter will be a perfect excuse to compensate time a little. We’re now at the pediatrician (well, I’m in the car waiting), where we need to get something that stops the vomiting. With the current outside temperatures – or without them to be fair – the last thing we want is a dehydrated baby. My guess is that the next stop will be pharmacy, followed by the supermarket to stock up on groceries and sick kid food. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re all sick tomorrow…