The things i don't do.

I am a busy person.
I hang out with my 3 kids under 6 years old.  I am flat out with 14 loads of laundry a week, plus endless cooking, cleaning, picking up small plastic objects, fixing cuts and brusies, bathing kids, arbitrating, comforting, and inventing games. We pull off great feats of daring together: new garden beds, Ikea furniture, cakes, elaborate cubbyhouses, guests and parties, and we are bravely learning to ride bikes (mee tooo!), as well as growing & harvesting a nice edible garden and picking wild foods down the creek. Expeditions too. We don't flinch to take the kids overseas when the opportunity arises - since DS1 was born, we've gone with kids to North America three times, Hong Kong, Europe via Bangkok, plus dozens of domestic trips.Three kids to Europe was gutsy but extremely fun.

I also work, and love my work. It's only 20 hours a week at the moment (haha! only!), but when I had 2 kids and was pregnant with the third, I was working a 4/5 equivalent load in 3 days. A month before #3 was born, I was project engineering stuff. Including the commute, a 12 hour day in the office becomes a 15 hour day away from the kids. And then I often find myself finishing a technical document at home at 11PM and on the weekend.

And I love to knit, weave, spin, dye, sew, quilt. I need to make the kids new quilts this winter. I aim to knit 10km a year, spin 3kg - and for the last 3 years I've busted those goals by October. My kids are always dressed in handmade clothes, and my friends' new babies usually get handknit gifts.

People whinge to me: "It's not fair. How do you do so much? I never have time and I only have (3-n) kids." 

So here is a list of things I don't do, in order to get the above things done.

1) I don't go to the supermarket. Ever, if I can help it. My husband bakes. We get vegies delivered, meat comes in bulk and gets frozen, and as for the rest, I pick it up whatever I can wherever I am (eg. toilet paper was selling for a good price at the Korean grocer last week. So as I walked past from the station, I picked up 36 rolls of white gold, and a 25kg bag of rice, and loaded them into the pram and made the 1 yr old walk the last 500m back to the car.)

2) I don't keep track of fashion. I don't know what colour is hot this season, whether tiger print leggings are still cool, or how high my heels should be. I stick to classic cuts of clothes and make a feature of being a little bit retro, and I wear the colours and shoes that I like. Always neat and elegant, though. I don't usually shop for clothes either - I have a collection of female relatives (mum, MIL, grandmother, aunt, SIL) who have great taste in clothes and I love wearing their cast-offs.

3) I don't preen much. My nails are short and never painted. (Nails would get in the way!)  I wear little makeup (except at work) and typically only put lippie on in the carpark when I've arrived right before I hop out. I get a haircut every 6 to 8 months, and I choose a cut that will look just fine straight out of the shower. I have hairy legs for 6 months of the year and just wear long pants or dark stockings. My husband loves me anyway.

4) I don't go hungry and I don't eat crap food. If I want to change my shape, I do it with exercise not starvation. As for donuts or chips: a sugar flat or indigestion can ruin the rest of an afternoon's activities, they're just not worth it. I don't have much processed food in the house (cos I never go to the supermarket) and I don't choose it when I eat out. We fly with a couple of bags of raw carrots (the first time they were confiscated at San Francisco Airport quarantine I was highly indignant!) and before a long trip I pack a snack box of something like leftover pasta, cucumber salad, cheese slices, a couple of sandwiches and a banana.

5) I don't consider housework to be my job. I have a cleaner once a fortnight - a privilege of a professional career. If the house gets really feral, I set up miniature cleaning competitions to share the load: we race to see if Dad can vacuum the lounge room faster than the boys can put all their clothes away in drawers or Mum can pick up all the puzzle pieces. We clean up for guests, but mostly we keep a habit of putting 5 things away every time we go past somewhere (even the 3 year old!) and this manages the clutter. Broken objects get fixed or chucked out. I am hard-nosed about not keeping things "just in case": that's what op shops are for!And because I avoid shopping, we don't have the usual trail of small plastic toy bits associated with three kids under 6.

6) I don't watch TV. Or if I do, it's no more than one episode a night, and I knit or work at the same time, and DH marks papers and we're not really watching. I don't bother downloading - I never get to it. I have no idea where any sitcom is up to, and I don't get a twinge if i miss out on the latest sci-fi masterpiece at the cinema. It will be on sale at JB Hi-Fi sometime next year and I can buy it and watch it in instalments.We have an analog TV and are considering not upgrading.

7) I don't waste an opportunity. If I hear about a book I really want to read, I reserve the talking-book from the library and listen to it up and back to work instead of music or talkback. If we can organise leave and flight bookings, we all travel with my husband on a work trip. If it's raining and we want to go walking and won't have a chance for weeks, we put raincoats on and go anyway.

8) I don't have coffee with friends very much. My kids don't do babycinos - they can't sit still for very long - so I don't try. We invite friends on a train ride, or to join us at the beach, or to come over for an afternoon of painting and playdoh. I would love to go for coffee but our lives are too full and too fun.

9) I don't kid myself about what is needed to be good at something. Ten thousand hours. If I am serious about it, I find a way to throw time at it (like knitting). If I can't give it time anymore, I don't expect to be that good (like rockclimbing). Same with the kids. Either they do regular guitar practice, or they can skip the lessons.

10) I don't punish myself. If things don't work out, I don't get caught feeling like a failure. I re-frame my thoughts - what worked well, or what was I really in my heart of hearts trying to do, or how can I learn from this and do better next time? Most things will have another opportunity coming around again. When things do work out, i let myself be totally stoked.

How big is a human organism?

So we just got through another Autumn family virus. And it got me thinking (something always gets me thinking!)

I reckon a single human entity is not actually a single human being. If you can get your mind around that idea and honour it, you might be a step closer to living happily and prospering.

Firstly I will rather enjoy arguing that a single conscious entity is bigger than a human, and a human single genetic entity is not a useful idea. Then I will talk about the human entities of which I am currently part.

I leave open the question of how big a human entity is - but there is a video of the brain worm at the end if you wade through my long words and references.
Post a comment and let me know what you think. (About time somebody posted a comment about something.)

One consciousness? That depends. I'm not going to start on the extent to which an individual might be in control of their consciousness (thinkin of Mother Courage here, although The Matrix also counts)
and assuming that a person is more or less conscious, I propose that a single human is not a single unit of consciousness anymore - not since widespread literacy and certainly not in this age of the net. Psych research is gradually starting to catch up with folk knowledge & mysticism, selected references below.
Our personalities are very context-driven. (Start with Thinking Fast and Slow, and then cherrypick his reference list.) Mirror-neurons pick up the vibe from others and adjust your mood to match, your body and posture will mimic people you like, and cause some involuntary actions (ever wanted to yawn when others are yawning? Even blind people yawn when someone yawns in front of them. Go on, have a yawn, You know you want to yawn. Even reading this has made your mirror neurons decide to want to yawn.)
We go to great lengths to please selected people around us (those we love and those with power), anticipating and imagining what they might want us to do and feeling compelled to please. That's how a boss can get others to put their effort into his(!) plan instead of their own, and how Kim Jong-Un (or his dead grandfather) can organise a nation-wide hierarchy of army guys to kill any dissenters without actually giving more than a vague head-nod.
The things we choose are not normally our own choices (The Decisive Moment, among others), otherwise marketing wouldn't work. With the exception of a small proportion of early adopters, 80%-90% of our choices are habit, most of the others involve copying someone else. Watch yourself for a day and see how many of the things you do you actually choose.
As a species we have gradually been externalising memory, first through speech, then handed-down stories and songs and legends, more recently through printed word and god-knows how the internet will change our brains and memories.
Many people describe a type of profound ease and joy when conscious decision making is made in concert with someone else. When you are in love, it is especially powerful: "I feel like I know exactly what he's thinking".. "It's cool, we finish each others' sentences'... 'It was like we had one mind'... Sports coaches strive to get their teams to act as a single consciousness, because a soccer team or a sailing crew acting as one wins against another just as good but with a fractured mind. Good players are often not selected for a team if they don't fit into the mind.

One DNA string for every component cell? I don't think so
Most of your cells are 'your' DNA. But not the following:

• Bidirectional cell transfer through the placenta. A proportion of your cells are your mum's DNA. And if you are a mum, you carry cells from all of your children. Longevity of these cells is not easy for me to find in Google Scholar, ie they might all have been filtered out through your liver by the time you're 10, or you might carry tiny specks of your grandmother and great-grandmother, like a bottle of homeopathic water. 
• Gut flora. Symbiotic partners - but Google is pathetic here. Some other symbiotic pairs of organisms are regarded as a single organism - bluebottles or man-o-war, photosynthetic lake jellyfish, while other systems of organisms seem to be symbiotic together - ever thought much about hippos?
• Identical twins. 
• Cancer cells and non-reproducing spontaneously mutated cells.
• Stuff that you think of as part of you but isn't actually composed of cells: plasma, hair, toenails etc.

Plus, chromosomal DNA is 99.s.th% identical between humans, which appears to be less variation than other species. Mitochondrial (non-chromosomal) DNA also mutates very slowly (Mitochondrial Eve is much older than Mitochondrial Adam).Our perception is that we are much more different than we actually are.

Plus, we accept that creatures which are genetically identical can be separate entities, like bacteria or Wollemi Pine trees or starfish and anemones
- so what's the big thing about DNA defining the edge of an organism?

One autonomous self-sufficient unit? No.
In solitary confinement, a person has to work very hard not to go insane. Children deprived of loving contact grow up very very weird - as the Romanian orphanages of the 1980s showed us. It's common to other primates too. Just check out Harry Harlow's monkey experiments and be thankful that most universities would probably not provide ethics approval anymore..


So how might a family be a coherent human entity?

• A single immune entity. Amy gets some of my immunity from my breastmilk. Josh brings home an enterovirus from childcare and gives it to everyone in the house plus selected grandparents. We all suffer together - aches, bad moods, sleepiness - and then we get over it and carry whatever immunity we've earned for roughly the same length of time.
• Resources shared and distributed for maximum common benefit: money, food, rotating responsibilities and opportunities for sleep-ins between grownups. 
• Communal mental health - when one is struggling, the whole family is affected. Google family therapy or human systems - I'm getting tired and running out of cross-referencing enthusiasm.
• Common plans, goals and ambitions, We all carry artifacts of our parents' fears and ambitions - and we pass our own on to our children.
• Temporary separation of family members causes discomfort, reunification is a nice feeling. The death of one would cause irreperable (but not necessarily fatal) damage to the coherence of the organism.
• At various ages and life stages, when an individual has left a family group, the urge is very strong to find a way to join or form another family group.

Now since the nuclear family is one of my least favourite artificial constructs, how else might we define a single human entity?

• Neuroscience and the Amish think 10 <people<150 is about right. Less than 10 is hard. At 151, the Amish split a community into two. Also, it seems to be the maximum paleoanthropological community size, perhaps due to hygiene and waste disposal issues. Or war. I'd be happy with this as a rural or pre-industrial-revolution definition. Of course a decent hierarchical structure (eg. military chain of command, Russian Duma governance etc) might expand this.
• Some subcommunities can be coherent within a city. Cultural or ethnic minorities stick together, professional groups are often coherent (certainly everyone in rail knows everyone else!), and how about musical groups, organised crime, sports communities, goths, and gamers. 
• Consider a human entity as analogous to tubifex worms in a sewer - a seething mass of varying numbers of separate bodies appearing to move in concert. Gotta love Youtube.