Cereal...and what the heck am I supposed to eat for breakfast now?????

My husband asked me, "What's the deal with LIFE?"

"You are going to have to be a bit more specific", I replied.

"The cereal. I always thought it would be disgusting because of the name. But then I tried it today and it was AWESOME. Totally full of sugar."

"And your point?", I asked.

"Stupid marketing. The cereal just doesn't match up with the name"

Oh----kay! And there is your random media moment from my day! Though just in case you were wondering, Life is actually low in sugar (6 grams a serving) compared to most other cereals (e.g., Lucky charms has 10 grams, Fruit Loops has 12). I was checking this on a website and to my HORROR I found that one of the very worst cereals you can have is Raisin Bran - a whopping 19 grams of sugar per serving!!! I have this like 4 times a week and always thought it super healthy for you!

Stupid marketing, indeed.

Time to find a new, delicious, healthy cereal....suggestions?

How I bonded with my 9 year old using SPSS

Okay, this isn't strictly media related, but given that we use SPSS in class, I'm counting it!

I was preparing for my other class and getting a big dataset ready in SPSS. My son, Nathan, came in the room, stalling, not wanting to go to bed.

"Watcha doin'?" he asks

So I tell him all about statistics and correlations and so on thinking he will get bored and go to bed. Instead he asks a ton of questions and we start to run some stats together. We find some evidence that playing violent video games is bad for kids. We find that having a really mean best friend isn't good for anything. We find that when parents are authoritative to their kids then good things happen. We look at a ton of gender differences. Boys are better at self regulation, girls are more depressed, boys are more violent, girls are more anxious and so on and so on. We look at mean differences and significance levels. He kept asking me to run more..... so interested in the gender differences and taking it personally for boys everywhere when girls were significantly higher on a given trait! We ended with a good discussion on gender showing that both boys and girls are good at lots of things, so hopefully he doesn't read TOO much into the stats.

We seriously did this for an hour. He asked how he could do this for his job. Just keep doing well in Math, I told him. Now as I'm reflecting on this, he totally just manipulated me into staying up an hour past his bedtime. So he wins. But I win too.......SUCH a nerdy mother/son bonding activity but I'm loving it!!!!

Me and my little guy