The Late Show with Hollie Anderson

I'm surprised with my recent spells of insomnia that I haven't posted a new blog sooner. The reason for both the lack of sleep and lack of blogs is probably because this weekend was simply nuts. I worked Friday through Monday and had little time to do things like homework, spend time with Tony, and sleep. Luckily, that is all over and now for the rest of the week I only have 8 hours of work to look forward to. Even though this weekend was packed, I still managed to sneak in some fun here and there.

Friday was half work/half play..but mostly work. I woke up early (for me) and went to the infant development lab where I now volunteer. To me, that is play. It's actually quite interesting what we do. It begins by cold-calling mothers (we have birth records) with babys a certain age. This is an age-held-constant study so we only study babies all around the same age at a time. The mothers volunteer to bring in their little ones, and we hook 'em up to some awesome machinery. This is a net full of electrodes that we strap on to these little guys and gals. This isn't an acutal picture from our lab (this girl is way older than the babies we're testing now).

After we're done strapping them in and calming them down (c'mon, you know you'd be freaked out if a bunch of people strapped that thing to your head!) we go into our observation booth and show them a series of big dot, little dot, low pitch, high pitch. We start with the big dot and the low pitch, and the small dot with the high pitch...then, we switch it up on them to see if their brain detects a change in the material. It's complete nonsense to those who don't know what we're studying. We often get a lot of puzzled mothers after having watched the little "show" ask us what we are doing. No brainwashing --don't worry! It's fascinating research and I'm glad I can be a part of it!

On Saturday, Tony and I both woke up, relaxed for a bit, then headed out to the mall. I had recently recieved a gift card and I wanted to use some of it! We each got several things from the mall, and we had a pretty good time together. Tony started feeling sick, so that wasn't fun, but other than that it was really nice to get to go shopping.

We are both still pushing through school trying to finish in one piece. I've been having some hard nights lately that keep me up into the wee hours of the night, but overall we're doing great.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed!