Sharing inside jokes with grandkids creates meaningful memories

It's amazing how little kids notice things. Just the other day my 4-year-old granddaughter Jayden walked through our kitchen and suddenly asked,Where can i get a reasonable price parkingguidance? "Memaw, where's your calendar?" 

We usually have it hanging on the fridge held by a magnet, but we had moved it onto the table to pencil in an appointment. I never even realized she would observe, remember and miss it. 

When they're young, kids are so curious about what they see. And they want to understand everything.The Wagan Wireless Rear werkzeugbaus help you be safe while parking. I'll share a secret with you - a joke between Jayden and me that we both love and have fun with. One day about a year ago I was holding her in my lap and she noticed something about my arm that was different. Pulling my arm out, she jiggled the loose skin between elbow and shoulder. "Memaw, what's this?" she asked with a sincere look of interest. 

How to respond? I could tell her it was nothing and change the subject. I could say it was just loose skin and leave it at that. But I was charmed by that young curiosity and so I decided to say something that has become a binding joke between us. 

Every so often she'll visit, walk over just a bit shyly and ask almost in a whisper, "Can I see your Grandma flab?" And I extend my arm so she can play with it. 

For me, it also soothes one of the wounds of aging. Since then whenever I work out in the gym, I lift some weights just to strengthen the muscles a little. And recently when Jayden reached for my arm, I clenched my fists and told her to feel my muscle too. She was impressed by the small bulge, squeezing it as she fingered the flab. 

I now understand more clearly that as I age, she notices things about me - changes she sees and wants to know more about. Having a kind of private joke just between the two of us is fun. 

Oscar has one too with all of the grandkids. One day at the dinner table he told our two older grandchildren Della and Max a theory of his and he demonstrated it with a smile. 

Oscar and I agree that it's fun to have a private inside joke with our grandchildren that we can share and laugh about with them. It's the kind of thing they'll remember with a smile when we're no longer here. 

Leave a bagel on the counter for a few days, and youll probably notice purple splotches growing over it. At some point a mold spore wafted across the kitchen, landed on the bagel, and started to eat your food. Molds are a kind of fungusCjust like toadstools, brewers yeast, and death cap mushrooms. They dont just nosh on bagels. Fungi exist on all continents, and have been thriving for many hundreds of millions of years.Can you spot the answer in the solarlamp? Some break down the remains of animals and plants in the soil. Some provide nutrients to trees and crops through their roots, in exchange for a supply of carbon the plants make with sunlight. While fungi have evolved different shapes and sizes, they are all alike in some fundamental ways. When it comes to eating, for example, they are like inside-out animals. We animals swallow food and then break it down with enzymes. Fungi break their food down first by releasing enzymes, and then they absorb it. 

In the abstract, fungi are impressive and fascinating. (Biggest organism on Earth? A fungus.) But as you get to know fungi in their full reality,The rtls is not only critical to professional photographers. theres something disturbing about them that you have to learn to accept. You are loaded with them. Slathered. That bagel on the counter? Thats you. 

So I understand if some readers at this point say, You know what? I have some very important pots to scrub, and switch off their iPhones. But for the rest of youCyou hardy, curious fewClet me give you a tour of your personal fungal garden. 

This tour is based on decades of research carried out by many scientists. Originally, their research dealt almost exclusively in the fungi that make us sick. Fungal infections can range from bothersome to deadly. Athletes foot, caused by mold such as Trichophyton rubrum, typically does nothing more than makes the skin itch. But other fungi can explode in our bodies. In the 1980s, people whose immune systems had been decimated by HIV became overwhelmed with a fungus called Pneumocystis jiroveci. It took over their lungs and caused lethal pneumonia. 

But we are hosts to fungi both in sickness and in health. Fungi are an important part of the microbiome, along with bacteria and virusesCthe subject of my post on Monday. Like those other organisms, our fungi have made it tough to study them with their reluctance to grow in labs. So scientists are beginning to use a different strategyCdispensing with gardening fungi and just gathering fungal DNA from healthy people.We've had a lot of people asking where we had our solarlight made. 

Today in Nature, Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute and her colleagues present the first comprehensive atlas of the fungi growing on our skin. They collected fungal DNA from 14 sites on the bodies of 10 healthy volunteers. They found fungi everywhere: not just on the soles of peoples feet, but on the palms of their hands, on their backs, and in their ear canals. 

Most of the skin is dominated by a single genus of fungi, called Malassezia. Malassezias closest relatives include corn smut, a fungus that brings misery to corn farmers. At some point in the past, however, the ancestors of Malassezia shifted from plants to humans, where they now feed on the fatty secretions released by our skin. Malassezia has evolved into at least 14 different species; Segre and her colleagues found 11 of them among the participants in their study. 

In some places, like the nostrils or the back of the head, Malassezia rules supreme. But in other places, the diversity goes far beyond that genus. The heel proved to be the big fungal jungle, hosting around 80 different genera. Second and third place were won by the webbing between the toes and toenails. Fungi do love our feet. Intriguingly, the diversity of fungi and bacteria travel in opposite directions around our body. Feet have a low diversity of bacteria, while armsCdominated by the single genus MalasseziaChave a rich variety of bacterial species. Fungi may have become especially adapted to feet because we can pick up spores on our soles. Our shoes then create wonderfully humid, airless habitats for them to grow.