Academics and starting a family later, if at all

I was a graduate student for 5+ years.  Most of my friends are graduate students and have been for at least 3+ years.  Also, almost all of my good friends who are also currently graduate students are male.  And today, because of this, I came to an amazing revelation:

In one week, I will be going to my first baby shower.  In two and a half weeks, I will turn 29.  I made it to almost 29 without attending a single baby shower.

I may be highly educated, but I have almost NO idea what to do here. (picture from babygearworld.com)

We can back up and analyze this six ways from Sunday.  A large part of it is that I just do not have that many close friends who have had children.  And a large part of THAT is because my close friends are eternally in school and not financially ready for kids.  And going deeper into the rabbit-hole, a large part of THAT is that my friends are largely male.  Venn diagram, anyone?  Let's be safe and assume U.S. friends only.

Pardonnez pour le Open Office illustration.

My female friends are not less-educated.  I just have less of them (and that's what I'm trying to illustrate).  I would say that by and large, people who are graduate-level educated make up the majority of my friend base.  Because I am in a STEM field, and so are many of my friends, the population of males is just going to be larger.

There have been many, many science bloggers that have exhaustively discussed the prevalence of children in Ph.D.-parent relationships, the average age of Ph.D.-parents at first child, the dearth of women in tenure-track professor jobs because of the difficulties (or not?) of balancing work/life, or because of the general environment, etc.  The general trends are what you would expect: those with more education wait to have children and typically have fewer children than those who are less-educated.

But hold on.  Then there is something else.  The average age for EVERYONE (highly educated or not) having children is increasing.  So perhaps I, at almost 29, and my friends, who are typically younger than I am, just haven't hit the baby boom yet, and those blue circles will increase in size as time goes on.

And here I sit making graphs and analyzing instead of thinking of how to prepare/shop for a baby gift.  In light of the above graphs, it's not too surprising, eh?

Dredging up the French, part 2 (turbo mode!)

Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive!

I talked about how my French is coming back to me a year ago, but since then, it's been on the accelerated path.  On the one hand, I've got a province where French isn't REALLY spoken a lot, but you can definitely find it.  On the second hand, I've got the boyfriend who was in Ontario French immersion school (and his father and sister will banter back and forth with him on occasion).  And on the third hand, and likely the most prevalent in my everyday life, we've got our new Quebecois postdoc and new Iranian postdoc, who both speak French.  They speak French to each other and to anyone else who admits they know a bit of French and would be willing to speak it occasionally.  The Ontario-native grad students and I are included.  It's super cool.

That's three hands of French, people.  French is launching a triple-pronged and multi-accented attack at me.  It sounds dumb of me to say "I know it's an official language and all, but I didn't know it would be so prominent," but that's kind of how I felt moving to Ontario, land of English-speakers.

I find myself falling into the trap that I always do with all of the (bits and shreds of) foreign languages I know.  People talk to me in the foreign language.  I understand, but knee-jerk answer in English.  My comprehension is solid and immediate, but so desiring am I to convey information back quickly, that I answer in the most expedient way possible.  I have to convince the postdocs to stop letting me do this.

Has anyone else moved to Ontario and noticed an unusual influx of French into their life?