chasing pteronarcella: in the trenches

The main objective on the collecting trip was to sample rivers and streams and collect insects, obviously. This post will show you what that looks like when you have a toddler and a baby with you. Adventures, for sure, but I love that this is just their lives. This is what they know and it is (and will continue to be) an intertwined part of our family story now. George knows how to just dive in and collect the insects with forceps and transfer them to the alcohol without even being asked. Pearl is fascinated by these icky little creatures and enjoys picking them up with her chubby fingers for closer examination. I am not as naturally thrilled about these bugs as the other three members of my family, but I am learning to be less horrified when a three-inch long stonefly lands on my face and wants to hang out there (those pictures will come in another post). When I think about the direction of John's career path, the overwhelming emotion I have is one of gratitude. Gratitude that he has found a way to do something that he loves and feels so much passion for. Gratitude that it will mean that our family has built-in adventures almost constantly and that our children will grow up with these kinds of experiences just being part of their lives. Gratitude that my horizons and interests will have opportunities to expand as John shares it all with me. I know that it is still a long road and that there will be bumps along the way and that there will be days that I don't like that my kitchen dishes have been turned into bug-filled sorting containers, but right now I just feel really blessed and grateful.

I love these photos because they are just an accurate glimpse into what collecting bugs in rivers looks like for our family. These people are my favorites.





Most of the time our collecting routine consisted of me hanging out with the kids on the banks,


while John went out into the river to kick up some rocks and see what he could find.


Then the whole family would get involved in the sorting/examining process. Notice Pearl reaching right in to help out. I tried to keep her away from the trays as much as I could (ya know, 14 month olds and open containers of alcohol and all), but she was so interested in it all that I had to let her explore a little.

I love George's gigantic stick here and the very pleased look on his face :). This was right about when I would have to put the camera down and run snatch Pearl up before she just trotted right into the water,


I don't mind helping with the sorting of bugs as long as I have forceps. George, on the other hand, is happy to dig right in with his hands. Pearl, too. I am not there yet. Maybe give me a few more years of this and we'll see.



She likes to touch and hold them. I don't get it, but I'm happy she does.




Often times John would be in the river for quite awhile trying to find what he needed, so the kids and I entertained ourselves. Pearl was just starting to take off with walking, so she loved just being free to roam around on her little feet.


And George is happy wherever there is a body of water and rocks/sticks to throw in, so we were good to go for the most part.


At one spot in New Mexico George taught Pearl how to throw rocks into the river herself. I sat back and watched this unfold (with my camera in hand, of course), without any intervening and it was so much fun to watch George show his little sister how to do something that he loved. Pearl was seriously delighted, as you can see. (George is in underwear because he had fallen on the riverbank and gotten his shorts all wet and muddy.)



Pearl started going for the boulders once she had mastered throwing in the little rocks :).


Here's a close-up shot at what the collecting tray would look like at a particularly successful spot. And look! I was on this trip, too!


Every once in awhile I remembered to give John the camera so that we could document the mama in this family. Here we are walking up from one of the rivers. I was in charge of getting the kids back and forth and John was in charge of getting the bugs back and forth :).


And since we're on a roll of pictures with me in them, here are a couple more of us all looking like we had been camping for a few days (we had). Disheveled and dirty, but happy :).



Camping and hot springs adventures up next.

1640 miles of chasing pteronarcella

If you want to know what John is researching for his thesis please feel free to ask him, but be prepared for at least a good 7 minutes of answer time. There really is not a short way to describe what it is that he is studying, but for blogging purposes I am just going to say that he is doing a population genetics study on two types of aquatic insects (Pteronarcella badia, or more commonly, the least stonefly, and Drunella grandis, or the green drake mayfly) which involves going all throughout the western United States to collect the insects, preserving them in 100% alcohol (which we cart around in our trunk in illegal amounts), extracting their DNA to learn about their genetic structure, and then generating their mitochondrial genomes. And if that all means nothing to you then you are probably normal :).

John has gone on several collecting trips on his own or with other students, but a couple of weeks ago George, Pearl, and I decided to join him when he headed down to southwestern Colorado and then New Mexico. His research is funded through a grant at BYU so he typically takes a university-issued car and credit card on these trips to pay for the gas, but since we were all coming along we had to take our own car, which means the university will reimburse us for the gas at 50 cents/mile. Which, if you do the math, means that we spent about $350.00 in gas and get reimbursed about $800.00. It almost feels dishonest, but that's how it works, and I won't complain. I think I should get paid to go on road trips with my family more often :).

It's becoming clear to me as I get started on this that there is no possible way for me to make this just one post. I'm going to have to break it up. We'll just see how far we get right now, I guess. 

There was driving. Lots and lots of driving. We went 1640 miles in 4 days. I was (understandably) anxious about how the kids (especially Pearl) would handle all of that time strapped down in car seats, but God must've wanted to spare me a nervous breakdown because both of them were pretty great. This fact is even more remarkable when you take into account that the only amount of time where any type of electronic device was used for entertainment was when George got to play games on the iPad for about 45 minutes total spread out over those 4 days. I am not against electronic entertainment on road trips; we just don't have a portable DVD player and our iPad was having charging issues so we needed to preserve the battery since we were using it as a GPS. It might sort of sound like a nightmare, but it was actually really nice to be unplugged from anything other than each other for the whole time. Both kids read/looked at lots of books, played with lots of little toys, ate (way too many) snacks, and George learned the art of the knock-knock joke. (Which, trust me, gets pretty old after 45 completely random and made-up jokes that you have to pretend laugh at, but was highly entertaining in the beginning when John or I would tell him a joke that went something like this: J: Knock knock. G: Who's there? J: Ipe. G: Ipe who? Us in the front seat: snicker snicker, laugh laugh. G: I said, ipe who?! IPE WHO?! Us: uproarious laughter. This sequence was repeated multiple times with words like grape, wipe etc. Poor George.) John also told many, many stories. George would ask him to tell the Toy Story story or something, and John would proceed to relate the entire story with precise detail and many actual quotes, which was thoroughly entertaining for me as well as George. So anyway, there were definitely some rough moments where a little more thoughtless entertainment would've been welcome, but all in all, it was really fun to drive all that way just giving each other our attention. We had fun. Here are some of our en route pictures.

Lots of snacks, like I said. Most were not as healthy as these bananas :). (This was during one of those blessed iPad moments :). And yes, I did keep Pearl rear-facing the whole time. I debated about it because she does weigh (barely) enough to switch and she is 15 months old and I thought she might enjoy the ride more if she could see us and out the windows. In the end I just still felt like she was too small to face forward so I kept her rear-facing, knowing that if she was having a hard time or something I could always switch her around. She did pretty well, though, so it ended up working out.)

We drove through such a variety of scenery, and I was grateful for the opportunity to see places that we would never have reason to go to otherwise. There were some spots of breathtaking beauty, but I seriously have a hard time pulling out my camera just for landscapes, so there aren't many pictures. Here is one shot of a quaint little town called Ouray, Colorado. 

And another one of some place in Colorado that I am sure John could tell you the name of, but he's not here right now. I snapped this out the window on our drive home.

George is almost always really good to his sister, and it was so nice to have him back there to keep her entertained when she would get bored or restless. 

I love this one of their sweet little hands holding onto each other.

Remember that I said George is "almost always" really good to his sister? There were times on the trip where she would want something that he had (which she always does) and he wouldn't want to give it to her. Under normal circumstances, I would let him have the freedom to make that choice and then just redirect Pearl to something else, but when you are stuck in the car with limited items of entertainment and a baby is screaming for one thing in particular that her brother happens to have, sometimes the opportunity to choose is taken away and there is not another option other than to give the toy to the screaming baby. Which results in this:

He can keep the pout up for about 2 seconds, at which point he starts to cave and succumbs to my pathetic and humiliating (but effective) attempts to get him to smile.

"Must. Stay. Strong. Must. Not. Smile. Must. Cover. Face."

And then he gives up attempting to be pouty and angry and we have a happy boy again. If only adults could be pulled out of grumpiness so readily!

This was what John looked like most of the time. He just kept his waders on all day as we drove from location to location so he wouldn't have to take them on and off constantly. If you look closely you can see that he is absolutely soaking wet in this picture. We were up in a canyon in New Mexico and it started to pour. Like super pounding, huge drops of rain. Of course he still got out to sample the river there. There's not time to have a rain delay, I guess :).

When we'd get to a new river or stream John would typically get out and go do a quick sample to see if there were the right bugs in it before the rest of us got out. Here he is walking back towards us at a spot that there weren't any pteronarcella or drunella (which I was thankful for because I didn't really want to haul the kids and collecting stuff all that way down to the river).

This is a shot of him walking back to the car (in a rainstorm) letting me know that he had found one. One solitary little pteronarcella. 

And this one is from a location where some fisherman and his wife saw John out kicking up rocks in the river and collecting the debris in his net and asked him what he was doing. John showed them some of the bugs from the river and the fisherman politely asked if he could have some to fish with. Luckily they weren't the species of bugs John needed so he was happy to give them away :).

Okay, that's it for this post. More of this:

and this:

to come.