My apologies for the lapse in blog updates. I have no excuse. But I certainly will try to make up for it with a flurry of wonderful blogs!
Most importantly and most recently, Mario has received a bona fide offer from a really great Intellectual Property firm in Austin, TX. He also interviewed last week in Houston at a really great litigation firm that also does some IP work. We are thrilled at the prospect of finally knowing what the heck we’re doing for the next few months and years. While he has not accepted the Austin offer yet, we are hoping to make a decision this week. Thank you all for your prayers and well-wishes! We’ll let you know where we’ll be this summer as soon as we find out!
So, back to catching up on the last three months. We celebrated the arrival of the new year with a tribute to our upcoming year in Fairbanks, Alaska. We made beer-battered fish, pub fries, and sourdough bread. The fish batter was from a mix we got at our favorite pub in Anchorage during our trip, and the sourdough starter was from Denali. It was delightful! We discovered the trick to real pub fries – you fry the potatoes twice! You can see the difference in the picture. Other than great food, our New Year’s Eve was quite uneventful.
Let’s move a little more quickly.
The best crème brulee EVER. And a $5 blowtorch (a real one, not one of those little kitchen ones) to brulee it with.
Julia Child’s coq au vin and ratatouille for Valentine’s Day dinner. Complete success!
Had to cut Josh’s hair again.
It went a lot better this time once we strapped him into his highchair and turned on the Backyardigans.
We’ve had some epic snowstorms and had to break out the candles due to extensive power outages. Some cool shots Mario got, huh? The snow was especially deep this year. The piles between cars on our street were higher than my head until just a few weeks ago.
Mario took a morning off to go to the Boston Children’s Museum with me and Josh. What a fun place! Josh had a blast.
Mario also turned 29 in March. We went out to a good (but not worth the price) dinner at Boston's most famous fish house - Legal Seafoods.
Josh and I usually have 3 play groups a week. One is a Toddler Time group that we take turns hosting. Josh and I hosted for Chinese New Year in February and had a great time with all his friends!
Mario and I also kept our tradition of celebrating Chinese New Year with a feast of dishes learned during our year in Qingzhou, Shandong Province, China.
La zi ji shown here – chicken braised in caramelized sugar and soy sauce with star anise, leek, peppers and mushrooms.
And here’s some pictures from the weekend when we learned to make that very dish at Lindy’s family home in a very small rural village.
We ate the very rooster that woke us up that morning at 4 a.m.
And boy was he delicious!
We also made it to the Aquarium with a few friends.
Josh didn’t like it very much – I think it was too dark for him.
We tried with Mario a second time with the same results, unfortunately.
It’s a really cool aquarium, though.
There’s a 4-storey, circular tank that runs up the middle of the building with a walkway winding around the outside all the way to the top.
It is filled with sharks, turtles, tuna, and a whole lot of other very large fish, which I think also scared the little guy.
Josh did enjoy the penguins, though.
We checked out the Museum of Science. While it wasn't very kid-friendly, Josh did really enjoy this Archimedian motion machine. Here he is showing Daddy how it works.
Mario’s been pretty darn busy lately. He’s taken on a fairly ambitious class load as well as working part-time at a Cambridge-based robotics engineering firm called Vecna. He’s working with their in-house lawyer doing patent prosecution. It has been a great experience, but we sure have missed him!
We discovered a restaurant in Chinatown that not only has AMAZING, authentic food, but it has AMAZING, authentic food from our province in China! What a wonderful evening that was! Can’t wait to go back!!
In other food news, we made some epic pad thai and a really wonderful coconut shrimp soup with apricot and cilantro basmati rice.
Yummm!
I’m happy to share the recipes if anyone’s interested.
Josh and I are headed to Moab, UT and Las Vegas to spend some time with my family.
Hopefully we’ll have some fun pics to share in a few weeks!
Poor Mario will be here all by his lonesome for almost 2 weeks.
First, we have some breakfast. Sometimes that requires the use of utensils slightly more interesting than plain old spoons.
Then, most mornings we have a playgroup of some kind. Sometimes we have our playgroup friends come over to our house, or we meet them somewhere fun, like the Aquarium.
Josh usually gets to play outside at some point in the morning. He especially loves to find birds and chase the cat that lives in our apartment complex. When it’s raining, we suit up and see what kind of puddles we can find.
When we don’t have playgroup, we make some kind of outing in the morning. We often go to the library, and sometimes we get special free library passes to visit one of the museums or the aquarium in the area. 
After that, most evenings we play with Mario for a while and then take a bath.
