Rocket Scientist

My daughter Cecelia (11) has never wanted to be a pathologist. She is completely disgusted by what I do. She likes looking under the microscope, but when I showed her the Blood Bank a couple of years ago with refrigerated stocks of blood and she saw an amputated leg (shrouded by a red biohazard plastic bag) one day when we visited the gross room - "What's that Mom?" - she was mortified. She wants to be a rock star. Fine by me. I'm all up for supporting dreams coupled with education.

Jack (8), has always wanted to design video games. But he's also great at math, graduated from struggling to read Skylander captions at the beginning of this school year to hungrily devouring novel series in weeks (Percy Jackson, Hunger Games - I know, but he begged for months and had seen the movies with his dad and sis so I finally gave in), builds lego sets, and loves winding down at night making me and his class Rainbow Loom bracelets. They adorn my wrists and serve as office decorations.

But no pathologist admiration yet. Over the weekend I bought Jack an air blaster gun and he has enjoyed building the flat paper characters into 3D figures to "blast" with the air gun. One he was working on this morning while I fixed lunches had a lab coat. "Mom, you have to take this one to work with you! It's The Evil Pathologist." He wrote it painstakingly and lovingly on the back of the head.

Cecelia chimed in. "Mom, you have to put it with your rocket ship microscope cleaner." So today when I went to work I created a moon scene to show them tonight. The Evil Pathologist, my rocket scope cleaner, some "moon" sand Cecelia made for me years back, and a nice bright Emergen-C background that looks I think a little otherworldly; planet like. C said it just looked like Emergen-C packaging. Oh well.

I don't need my kids to want to do what I do. But I'm happy they finally think it's kinda cool. Confession: I wiped the dust off of the shelf before I took the pic.