Home Sweet Austin!

Hanging out at home with the cars.

The day after graduation, we packed up, said goodbye to Mario's family, and my mom joined us in our drive from Cambridge to Austin, TX. It was (thankfully) a pretty uneventful trip, apart from some really wonderful food (with many thanks to the food gods for smart phones, which helped us find some excellent places to eat that we never would have known about!) and a random flat tire somewhere in eastern Texas.

Playing at the Children's Museum

We lived a spartan life for a week before our belongings, sent a week before we left via a moving/storage service, arrived in Austin.  We're settled in now and really enjoying our new home. We live in a rather large, higher-end apartment complex with a big pool and a couple of common-use grills.  We're less than a mile from Mario's work downtown and about a quarter mile from Austin's trendy SoCo (that's South Congress, of course) neighborhood, complete with antique shops, a few drive-in burger joints, and a whole abandoned parking lot full of permanent food trucks, one of which sells only cupcakes.  It's DANG hot, but Josh and I are getting by pretty well with lots of help from our swimming pool and multiple splash parks.


Here come the pregnancy details.  Feel free to skip if you're not interested.  We found out we're having a girl, I'm 20 weeks, and I've had a much, much rougher time than with Josh.  With Josh, as long as I ate every 90 minutes or so, I was fine, end of story.  I didn't throw up because of morning sickness even once.  With this one, eating is not the magic bullet I was hoping it would be.  Even when I eat regularly, I've felt pretty continuously crappy for about 60%, maybe 70%, of the past three months.  I've thrown up multiple times, the last of which was our second week here in Austin while Josh and I were on an outing with some new friends to go pick peaches.  I'm pretty sure me heaving my breakfast up on the side of an old country road really made a great impression.  In the immortal words from Tommy Boy, "That [family] might not call us."  Anyway, I've been getting a lot better in the past few weeks.  I've also been able to control my weight a whole lot better this time.  With Josh, I had probably gained 25 pounds by 15 weeks.  I'm only up 10lbs so far this time.  One big difference is probably that with J, I wanted red meat and LOTS of carbs, like toast with lots of butter and french fries.  This time, veggies and fruit are really what sound good and are most of what I eat.

Mario is really loving his work.  The firm is great and he loves what he's doing.  After only two weeks, they invited him to help with a deposition in California.  He loves that he's been thrown right into the pool and is really enjoying the stimulating work and the great people.

In all, Austin is wonderful.  It's everything we hoped it would be.  And if we're having this much fun with triple-digit heat every day (the weather forecast usually looks like binary code - it's all ones and zeroes!), I can only imagine how awesome it will be in the winter months when the weather is a little more kind!

There's a fun train at nearby Zilker Park that Josh had a kick riding on a few Saturdays ago.








This past Saturday, we drove to San Antonio to take the little man to Sea World.  It was awesome!  He had a great time watching the Elmo show, he was blown away by the killer whale show, he loved the water park, and he really loved the huge aquariums. 

Watching the Elmo show.  Josh kind of likes Elmo.  Can you tell?

Watching Shamu

Commencement and Farewell to Cambridge!

Clever boy got out a bowl so he could reach the chocolate whipped cream :)

Here's our last playgroup with some of the wonderful moms and kids Josh and I have spent so much time with here.  We miss you!

Mario finished classes and we got to spend a few weeks with him before graduation, part of which we spent in Oregon visiting mostly his parents as he hadn't seen them in a year.

Love visiting YaYa's store!

You can just barely see Mario waving to the right of the big tree.

Justice Ginsberg and her retinue

Harvard's Commencement was at the end of May and was really wonderful.  Mario's dad, my mom, and Mario's step-brother Rich, his wife Paula, and their daughter Chelle came out to celebrate Mario's amazing accomplishment with us.  It was really an experience.  The all-Harvard ceremony was enormous.  It's a miracle we found Mario at all in the tens of thousands of people there.  Here are the Law School graduates standing for the conferral of their degrees.  After the all-Harvard ceremony was the Law School ceremony.  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a former Harvard attendee, dropped in during the awarding of the degrees to say hi. I think there's kind of an unspoken rule that if someone shows up with their own Secret Service detail and mentions they'd like to interrupt what you're doing to say a few words, you let them. Mario is the first person in his family to go to college (step-family excluded for this particular stat, although they do get quite a lot of credit for helping Mario get where he is now). And now he has three degrees, including one from Harvard Law School.  That's pretty incredible. He worked his tail off to get there and worked a whole lot more for the three years he spent there.  He's amazing and so is what he's done!

Now you can see what a miracle it was that we actually saw Mario at all!  You can vaguely see all the law students standing for the conferral of their degrees.

 

New Apreotesi on the Way!

At the sugar shack

At the Boston Museum of Science

Hello, all!  Very sorry for the lapse.  Life has certainly gotten away with me.  We had a great last few months in lovely Cambridge. We went out to our favorite maple sugar shack one last time in the spring.

Mario's prime rib

We had a great Easter with some great friends.  Mario made prime rib again, and it was delightful.  Josh got to enjoy not one but three different Easter egg hunts.  Once we opened an egg and showed him there was chocolate inside, he was much more willing to wander around and pick up eggs!

Easter egg hunt with friends after dinner

 I spent almost two weeks in Moab and Las Vegas with my family in March, during which time I found out I'm pregnant!  Since Mario wasn't with me on the trip and I didn't want to tell him over the phone, I couldn't tell anyone in the family while I was with them.  I'm pretty proud I was actually able to keep a secret like that for almost a week, actually, but I sincerely apologize for my moodiness and my inability to explain exactly why I was crying at the drop of a hat!
 

We started in Moab with Dad and all the siblings except Scott and Anita.  It was a little on the chilly side.  It actually snowed one day.  Josh took it like a champ, though, and played outside a lot even in the freezing weather.  He got his first taste of an old Foutz favorite, camp donuts, and had a BLAST on the little electric four-wheeler Grandpa Riggs brought for the grandkids to play with.  Josh was willing to sit in it for 20-30 minutes waiting for an older cousin to come along who was willing to give him a ride since he was too short to reach the pedals.  I also got to ride a quad for the first time in forever when we took an expedition out to the Gemini Bridges. 






 































After Moab, we went to Las Vegas to meet Grandma YaYa, Wendy and her family, and Scott and Anita.  We spent a few wonderful days with everyone playing on the Strip and at Wendy's house.  Josh really enjoyed spending time with his wonderful cousins, although he and Collin didn't quite agree on how to share YaYa. 

Battling for YaYa's lap

Tuckered out!

Josh and I had a wonderful trip, and the little man came home from our trip wearing this to tell Daddy the great news!