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The museum work begins!

We're settling into our museum work routine pretty nicely. I always appreciate the ~5 minute walk up the hill from the apartment to get to work in the morning - as opposed to my hour long commute at home...!

Toby in the museum collections building courtyard


Which is bigger, an extinct elephant skull or Toby?


Toby was SO EXCITED to see actual dinosaur fossils, courtesy of a research group from a few different institutions around for a few days before they go off to the field.

Toby is definitely enjoying the company of Mercy, his nanny! I found her thanks to my other-archaeologists-with-kids network; Mercy is the daughter of a woman who was a nanny for archaeologist friends of mine, Sonia and Jason, when they lived in Nairobi for about a year a few years ago with their (then) toddler daughter. Mercy is currently on summer break between her second and third year of law school. The staff at the museum have been very kind and accommodating, allowing Toby and Mercy to set up on a table in a large room where some of the staff work on computers. They've been keeping busy with LEGOs, reading books, doing art projects, playing on a nearby playground I didn't even know about, and more. They are on the other side of the Paleontology lab from where I'm working, but Toby can still easily swing by when he wants to say hello, show me his most recent LEGO rocket ship or art work, or just get a hug from mommy.


Making a variety of LEGO creations on Monday

Making a LEGO race track for Toby's matchbox cars on Tuesday

Toby coloring in Mercy's drawing of cartoon characters on Tuesday

My work is going well too. I'm continuing to work on fossil collections from a prehistoric site called Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. I helped run the excavations at this site for 6 years (of the ~35 years of excavations led by my boss Rick!), before Toby was born, and for about 10 years now I've been studying the fossils from the many excavations across a single time horizon dated to just under 1 million years ago. Since the excavations have been going on for so long, I'm actually studying fossils that were excavated back to when I was 10 years old - which is pretty cool. I'll post a little more about my museum research here soon.

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