“Is it Sunny in Adelaide today or raining?” we ask Stevie Jacobs every morning on the Today show.

Adelaide Rose is our Twin 2; our little quirky baby. Consistently smaller than her sister since birth but her spark and attitude already gives us nightmares of sneaking out of the bedroom to run away with her boyfriend on a motor bike.

Adelaide was not named after the South Australian city. By coincidence there is a Moana Beach in Adelaide so South Australians presume we have named our twins after the city. This confuses me as the South Australian capital Adelaide was named in honour of Queen Adelaide. Not the other way around. It is a girls name and the meaning reads “noble kind.” The name was a popular English name in the early 1900’s and is slowly coming back in Australia. It is not that uncommon but I confess I do not personally know any other Adelaide. I did a search on the Bonds Baby 2011 and there are 17 beautiful little Adelaide’s listed.

Another familiarity with the name was my Great-Aunt Del whose middle name was Adelaide. Del a shortened variant which suited the Aunty title. The second most common question I get after “Is she named after the capital?” is “What is her nickname?”

Why do Australians have to have a nickname for everyone? No we are not shortening her name to Addy, Ada, Ado, Della. Her name is Adelaide.

And lastly our Adelaide has a peculiar little chicken dance, was the first to crawl and announce “Up” to be picked up.  So far she shows little interest in walking preferring to speed crawl across the floor especially if there is a bottle in her sight. We have entered our beautiful Adelaide int the Bond  Baby search 2011 so please visit.

Good night,

Lisa

Bonds Baby Search Adelaide

Adelaide our Bonds Baby

Moana is my first born and like all proud mums and dads, I have entered her into the BONDS Baby Search 2011 competition. So let me introduce you to my first born twin. There is some debate with twins whether to differentiate between each child a birth order but nether-the-less she was always the bigger baby and first born by a few minutes. 700g heavier but her personality could not be so different. The name Moana is a Polynesian name. N chose it from his Maori heritage and it means ocean. The name was a bit of a gamble as it is uncommon in Australia and there was a tendency to call her Moan-a. But as soon as you hear it pronounced correctly most people pick it up – even my family whom were very resistant to the name.

Moana was going to be called Isabelle. Originally we chose Adelaide and Isabelle for the twins names but we dropped Isabelle (and variations of) after hearing the name so often in our immediate circle of friends and family. Now we could not imagine her as any other name.

Although she is bigger, Moana is our little softy. She loves books and dollies and all things girly. She loves buckles and buttons.  Dora the Explorer was an easy favourite and funny enough she cries when Thomas the Tank Engine plays on TV. Moana loves to sing and she will sing along with you as often as she can.

Today I tried to take her photo for the BONDS Baby Search 2011 Competition and it did not go 100% to plan. I put her in a new BONDS branded sleepwear for a mini photo shoot in our backyard, she did not like it one bit. The grass was prickly and uncomfortable and well see for  yourself the results.

To Vote for Moana from the 28th of February click here: Bonds Baby Search 2011 MOANA

Thanks! Lisa

“We’ll just hide the sparkles, dear,” the hairdresser once said. Sparkles? WTF? It took me ages to interpret sparkles was the glamorous term to grey hair. Usually a visit to the hairdresser is not an enjoyable experience. I never know what I am supposed to ask for besides for the standard “cut&colour, thanks” and usually I walk out in horror as I part with anywhere upwards of $150 cash. Most of the time the finished cut looks nice, that is until I wash all product out.

Over the years as I visit different salons the same questions pop up and to tell you the truth I am just not cool enough to know the right answers. I know I am not hip with fashionable locks but I genuinely want to look nice, hence employing the service of a hairdresser.

Hair like Angelina thanks

• “What shampoo do you use?” umm for the life of me I can never remember. If usually depends what was on sale or what the last hairdresser up sold me as I raced out of the salon.
• “How do you blow dry your hair?” I don’t know with a blow dryer? And I use old fashioned mousse for volume (shock horror). I would have no idea how to use all the gels, masks, lotions, potions, Moroccan oils for colour, volume, straightening and heat sealing. My bathroom cabinet is overflowing with these products which I just do not use.
• “So what are we doing today?” Ten years ago the magazine clip outs of Jennifer Aniston were thrown in the waste likewise Angelina Jolie long brown hair. No matter who the super stars are I am still leaving as a poor version.
• “I see you use home dyes…” My hair is brown. Nothing flash. I have had streaks and tints and even tried to test a salon called Rockstar to dye parts of my hair pink (many, many appointments later the closer they got it was a grey purple – false advertising). So I am not embarrassed to do a home colour (its brown. Any shade of brown will do) in between saving a days salary for a salon visits to cover my sparkles.

Now days I want quick and efficient service. I really am not interested in small talk. Just a moment peace to read the trashy magazines I would never buy and drink an offered coffee. Now days I don’t mind the odd sparkle. I must be getting old.

Last Friday a friend announced on facebook the launch of the Australian version of reality TV show, The Amazing Race. Applications are open for pairs of every day Aussies to work together competing against other teams in a race around the world. For fun, I downloaded the application forms and tested N to see if he would be interested. He is not so keen as who wants to have couples arguing on National TV (a lot of people apparently). Would we be a good couple to go on it? N is a good driver. Excellent driver so that is a bonus. Me; I am not too good with directions so I might let the co-pilot down.

One of the questions in the application form reads, “What is the weirdest thing about you?” I am stumped. What is weird, unusual, and odd about me? I can’t recall any unusual food or pastime cravings or fetishes. Maybe I am just un-interesting to go on TV. I do listen to Christmas carols all year round. Is that weird? Probably. But my arguement is if you ever feel a bit down just play a bit of Frosty the Snowman or Jingle Bell Rock and I am sure you will feel better. I suppose now I should announce my love of Christmas decorations. It started ten years ago when I worked in the Christmas department at Myers. When the internal job applications were opened to work as Santa’s Elf I jumped at the chance. At that time Christmas at Myers included the decorated Christmas cave, window and yearly themes. I attended Santa school where they trained all the Santa’s for the holidays. In Brisbane they had a city Christmas parade to launch the opening of the themed windows. Unfortunately I was not svelte enough for the ballerina costume and had to be content wearing the clown outfit handing out balloons.

Let’s just say Elf and Clown are no longer listed on my resume under Chlamydia expert.

Christmas 2009. Babies less than four weeks old. I promise never to dress them like this again.

Will keep you posted on our application.

“You’re the only person in the world who has a folder on your computer hard drive titled Chlamydia,” my sister once said.

Now to get the story straight almost ten years ago I spent a year studying the molecular evidence of Chlamydia affecting our Koala population. It was my graduate science Honours degree and during the project I carried the scientific motivation and fascination for discovering something new although most of the year involved silently trying to spell Chlamydia correctly and pronouncing the species name C.trachomatis without embarrassment.

Now my results are not ground breaking (although I recently searched for my own publication and it has been cited a few times since – Whoopee for bibliometrics) but I did discover and characterise novel uncultured Chlamydiales in Free-Range Koala Populations.

Although I no longer work in the laboratory, I have never been able to capture the same feeling of accomplishment as I did from that project.

What made this project different? Was it:

• The autonomy and problem solving,
• The opportunities to experiment with an idea,
• Having access to skilled and intelligent mentors,
• Strict deadlines which meant late night and weekends in the laboratory to try new experiments, theories and repeat results. Extra hours which for some reason I did not mind doing.
• The meticulous writing up of laboratory notes. Like a Vision diary creative expression is all in your laboratory books and lastly
• The satisfaction of having your results in print.

I often wonder if I should have continued with the curiosity that drives career scientists into a PhD and research. Instead I chose the commercial world. Today I wonder if I had continued on the research trajectory would I have been driven to discover something innovative and groundbreaking or even becoming an expert in my own niche of science and would it have been a more fulfilling career.

So what parts of that project I enjoyed most can I start to replicate again today?

On a final note, not to dampen my achievement in the paper “Molecular evidence for novel chlamydial infections in the koala (Devereaux etal Syst Appl Microbiol. 2003 Jun;26(2):245-53), can you see the different interpretation my father had as he would proudly report in public that his daughter “is named after new species of Chlamydia and had a publication to boot.”?