Christmas and Stuff!

Jake's Baby Claire Rose

What a wonderful Christmas we’ve had!  It was the very best of both worlds – Josh and I got to visit family in Oregon during Mario’s finals, and the three of us got to spend a quiet Christmas together. 

I packed the refrigerator full of food for my studying sweetheart and Josh and I took off for Oregon.  The little man did great and we got there with no problems.  We spent a wonderful 9 days visiting family.  Josh absolutely loved the time with grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.  We got to meet Jake and Heather’s new little darling, Claire Rose, and catch up with lots of loved ones.  We missed Suzie and little Max and Scotita, though!  Josh had a riot of a time chasing around his cousins as well as all the dogs and cats he met at the grandparents’ houses!  When we got to Oregon, he was fascinated and terrified of dogs.  By the time we left Oregon, his favorite thing to do was to chase down the nearest furry creature, stick his hand in its mouth, and squeal in delight.  In fact, this comfort with dogs has held up after coming home – just the other day he was sitting on a lap that was also occupied by our friends’ little poodle, Gigi.  He proceeded to grip Gigi on both sides of her cute little head, pull her in close, and the two shared a kiss.  With tongue. 

Anyway, Oregon was great!  Josh had his first real experience with Christmas presents.  He got some great gifts, although he doesn’t seem to enjoy opening presents very much.  He made the same disgusted face every time he ripped the paper, including Christmas morning here in Boston.  He sure does like the presents, though! 

Our flight home was not terribly pleasant.  On the second leg, Josh fell asleep (miraculously) as we took off.  About an hour into the 3 hour flight, one of the flight attendants told me I needed to move him since his head was resting on the arm rest and hung out about an inch into the aisle.  So I tried very carefully to move him.  He woke up and cried so hard he made himself vomit.  After that he was okay, though!  Fun stuff!

Mario was studying for and taking finals while we were gone.  He thought he had finals Monday and Thursday.  He found out on Sunday that his Thursday final had been moved to Tuesday morning.  Although that was pretty unpleasant, he thinks he did okay and is glad the term is over. 

The day after I got home was our 6^th anniversary.  Mario got me a beautiful, huge, hardwood cutting board and a delightful box of Belgian truffles.  What a dear!  We went out to dinner at a little restaurant (little as in it only had seating for about 20 people) in East Boston called Rino’s Place.  It was absolutely amazing.  Mario had chicken saltimbocca and I got the lobster ravioli.  That’s right, I said lobster ravioli.  And it was every bit as lovely as it sounds.  It was a wonderful anniversary and it’s been an even more wonderful 6 years! 

Josh and I have been relishing all the time we’ve been able to spend with Mario this past week.  Usually all his time off is spent traveling to visit family and trying to make sure we spend time with everyone.  This holiday, though, we’ve been taking walks, going shopping, reading, and spending lots and lots of time playing with Josh.  It’s been so relaxing and fulfilling and, although we do miss parts of being with our families at Christmas, this has been a most excellent vacation!  We had the chance to do a bunch of things we haven’t been able to the last few Christmases, like put up a Christmas tree!  We also decorated sugar cookies, which the monkey really enjoyed.  

Yum!

We spent Christmas Eve with some friends who host an annual Christmas Eve dinner for those few families in our church group who don’t go “home” for Christmas.  This is the first year we’ve attended and it was a really fun evening.  The Gentrys had a delicious Italian dinner prepared.  It just so happened that their guest list included vegans, vegetarians, and celiacs (allergic to gluten).  Lots of credit to Laci and Christian for putting together a feast for such a challenging group of eaters!  Mario and I turned out to be the only omnivore couple in attendance.  After dinner we had a rousing game of Christmas Pictionary (the boys won by 4 points), we sang Christmas carols, and finished by decorating sugar cookies for Santa.

Disgusted present-opening face

Christmas Camping

One aspect of being by ourselves at Christmas has been the opportunity to establish some of our own family traditions.  Mario thought a fun tradition would be to sleep under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, so we did!  I think we’ll call it Christmas Camping.  We decided after a particularly rough night with Josh (the day before Christmas Eve he woke up at midnight and didn’t go back to sleep until 3am.  What am I going to do when I eventually have a

Breaking in the new truck

newborn again?!  One sleepless night and I was thrown all out of whack!) that only kids who are capable of falling asleep and staying asleep outside of their cribs are allowed to participate in Christmas Camping, so it was just the two of us.  When Josh woke up, he opened his presents (Mario and I both got our presents early – Photoshop Elements for me and a nice overcoat for him . . . and sushi, but that’s later!), which included a train, a dump truck, and a Leapfrog book.  Anyway, after exploring those options for a while, he found his snow boots and brought them to us, indicating he would like to play in the snow for a while and freeze his little paws off.  He had a great time filling up his new dump truck with snow using one of my kitchen spoons. 

Maki rolls

Tuna sashimi

Mario and I spent the rest of the day (and parts of the previous days) working on Christmas dinner.  Our friends, Sophie and Jose, bought a beautiful prime rib roast for dinner which we prepared, and Mario loves sushi, so we had prime rib and sushi for Christmas dinner.  It was epic.  I dried the rib, uncovered in the refrigerator, for two days.  Then I dry rubbed it and roasted it.  The sushi was lots of fun – a throwback from my days as a ski bum working at the Seafood Buffet at Deer Valley Ski Resort in Park City, Utah.  I made bluefin tuna, salmon, and shrimp nigiri as well as crispy shrimp and spicy tuna maki rolls.  We even had flying fish roe (those are the shiny little orange balls on top – fish eggs!) for garnish.  They were beautiful and delicious.

But the prime rib defied description.  Hands down the best piece of meat I’ve ever eaten, although Dave and Aurica’s steak and tri-tip sure could give it a run for its money!  It had a beautiful dark, salty, crispy crust but the inside was a perfectly seasoned and tender masterpiece.  It was like eating delicious little bites of prime-rib-flavored butter.  It was unbelievable.  I can’t wait for our next big occasion so I can make another one!  For dessert, we had homemade dark chocolate truffles, triple chocolate coconut cookies, and pumpkin spice cake.  As one who often measures a celebration by its food, this Christmas was out of this world!  And it was definitely better because it was shared with our good friends Josh & Whitney (and their little Gigi, with whom our Josh shared a passionate kiss on Christmas night as discussed above) and Jose & Sophie and their little Mirabel.   

From left - Jose, Mirabel, Sophie, Whitney, Gigi, and Josh

In all, it was a lovely Christmas that was spent quietly with our little family and with wonderful friends.  We missed our families, but this was exactly what we needed!

You may have heard about the big snow storm currently blowing through the East Coast.  Snow storms are lovely when you don’t need to leave the house unless you want to, and this one has been fun!  Josh has finally learned that if he lets me put his mittens on right (i.e. lets me get his thumbs in their place), he can play and put his hands in the snow and they won’t even get cold!  He and Mario have been having fun playing in snow drifts when the wind isn’t going like mad. 

Today we braved the elements and the un-shoveled sidewalks to go to the library for a little while.  Our library is seriously the best library ever.  The entire top floor is just for kids, and it’s separated from the rest of the library so the little tykes don’t have to be quiet or anything.  It’s huge and awesome and we spend a lot of time there.  

The Cambridge Public Library

Eating bubbles

When we got home, Josh found the bubbles and politely asked us to blow some for him.  He was content for a while just to watch and pop them, and then he got this idea! 

 Some great shots Mario took, huh?

Josh is a great little guy still, and learning a lot.  Just this week he learned how to spin in circles (while watching the Backyardigans, his most favorite show EVER) and spit mouthfuls of water in the bathtub, both of which he is very impressed with.  He also thinks he can jump, but he really just bends down and then stands up really fast, which is hilarious and adorable.  He still hasn’t used any new words besides his three (hi, daddy, eye), but you can see him figuring out stuff.  He’s a whole lot of fun these days!

You can see more photos on my Facebook account.  If you're not on Facebook and would like to see them, let me know and I'll send you a link!

The Game and Thanksgiving!

November has been a fun month.  The weather has been mild until the last week or so and we’ve really been enjoying the company of great friends and a mostly-happy baby!

Josh is a big fan of cooking.  When I’m busy in the kitchen, I always have to clear a spot on the countertop so he can hang out and give me a hand.  He needs to have his own utensil to poke and stir things with and full access to whatever happens to be in the bowls I’m using.  Here he is helping me finish up a pizza, one of his current favorite foods.

 

Two weeks ago we went with some friends to The Game.  For those of you not familiar with this term, The Game is the annual, thunderous clash of the Ivy League football titans: Harvard vs. Yale.  It’s the longest-running rivalry in college football and is actually broadcast every year.  In reality, The Game is not really about football at all.  It’s really just an excuse for Ivy League namby-pambies, such as ourselves, to shamelessly flaunt our Harvard affiliation.  We got all yuppied up in our school sweatshirts and virtually pranced through Harvard Square on our way to the football field.  I don’t think many people actually noticed when the game began as they were busy networking with their fellow namby-pambies.  It wasn’t like any football game I’ve been to.  Sure, people wanted their team to beat the other guys, but I don’t think many of them actually knew how that was to occur, nor did they care.  It was like a high school game but without the heart.  I really like watching football, and I wasn’t even following the game very closely.  And with all those white-sweatshirt-around-the-neck yacht club-goers around (does it get any more yuppie than Harvard vs. Yale?), it was really difficult not to make remarks like “That’s a great marching band.  I wonder if they’re actually the football team too and are going to rip off their band uniforms and start playing football.  Or maybe they’re just going to play band music at each other violently and see who wins.”  We wondered whether being members of the marching band at Harvard was actually a status symbol (no offense to anyone reading this who was in their high school marching band).  Anyway, we had a great time with our friends and headed home at half-time to let Josh have a nap and enjoy the rest of the game in the warmth of our own home.  Strangely, the game looked much more exciting on ESPN than it did in person, which has definitely not been my experience with college sporting events.  Every time I watch the Beavers play (Josh is a big sports-watcher, as you can see here - OSU v. Cal a few weeks ago), I remember how awesome it was to sit in that stadium and enjoy the rush of excitement or disappointment along with tens of thousands of avid fans.  In person, the Harvard game was somewhat sparsely populated by people who really didn’t care.  On TV, the announcers kept saying how exciting the game was and how electrifying the atmosphere was.  Those announcers obviously have never been to a “real” college rivalry football game if that was an electrifying atmosphere.  Anyway, we had a great time with the wonderful friends we’ve made here over the past two years.  Here’s Josh and his little buddy Katelyn, only two months and one block apart.  And here’s Josh with his two favorite people (and that’s including us), Josh and Whitney.

We have been blessed with friends who were willing to let us into their lives here while we are far from family.  The past two years we have been invited to share Thanksgiving with good friends, so we decided it was our turn to spread the friendship.  We ended up hosting 20 adults and 5 children (including ourselves) in our 800-sq foot apartment.  I was a little worried about fitting that many people in our little place, but it turned out great.  We wish we could have invited more people, but we were truly at capacity as you can see!  We were quite cozy, and once everybody sat down there was really no getting up again, but everyone had a great time.  We had fabulous food and great company and it was wonderful!  Tiring (even little Nikhil was worn out and he didn’t even cook anything! :) ), but wonderful! 

 

Here’s a flourless chocolate cake I made for Thanksgiving dessert.  My friend Paige, an outstanding baker, inspired the stenciled leaves and acorn detailed in powdered sugar and cocoa.  Mario spent about an hour cutting out the pattern for me.  Turned out great, and it was wonderfully delicious! 

We bought one of our Christmas presents early this year – a portable DVD player.  Josh and I are flying to Oregon for a short visit while Mario studies for finals, and we’ll be driving across the country at least twice in the next 18 months, so we figured it would be an excellent purchase for everyone’s benefit.  Here’s Josh giving it a go.  Hope he’s this interested in it during our flight home!

Halloween and Cinnamon Rolls!

My mom came out for a visit late in October and we had an excellent time!  Josh was very sick with roseola for the first half of her visit, but once he recovered from his fever of 104 for 4 days while on both Ibuprofen and Tylenol, we visited some new places.

We had heard that during October, the little town of Salem (famous for the Salem Witch Trials in 1692) gets all crazy for Halloween.  We were sadly disappointed, but we heard later that it actually gets all crazy only after sundown.  During the day, however, it was full of local kids on field trips and not very crazy.  Since none of us are really into witches and the various means of torture and death imposed on them by religious fanatics, we didn’t pay the rather high entrance fees to visit the witches’ dungeon or the museums, but we did spend an enjoyable morning wandering around Salem.  

As you may have read in my previous blog about food, we love food.  Thankfully, my mom shares this passion and we always spend a good deal of our time together eating or planning what to eat.  We saw a special on Food Network about a famous donut shop only 20 minutes from our house and decided we had to go there.  Kane’s Donuts proclaims that they’ve been “Making the world’s best donuts since 1955.”  While I disagree about the donuts – they were good, but not really any better than fresh donuts from The Jelly Donut in Grants Pass – they are also famous for their so-called Coffee Rolls.  I have no idea why they’re called “coffee” rolls.  They’re really just big cinnamon rolls.  Let me restate that – they’re just REALLY BIG cinnamon rolls.  Really big as in a solid 18 inches across.  Really big as in Josh had trouble lifting it up to take a bite and it was about twice the size of his head.  Usually when a restaurant makes something that huge, it’s the size that’s meant to impress more than the taste.  Not so with Kane’s Coffee Rolls!  It was an absolutely divine, cinnamon-filled, crispy on the outside and super tender on the inside, doused in frosting and dusted with cinnamon sugar delight!  All of us, including Josh, really enjoyed it.

 

 

My mom was also here during Halloween and she was game enough to bring her costume with her!  She was a tiger and Josh was on a safari.  He had khakis, binoculars, a stuffed lion, and a safari hat and was mighty cute!  He and YaYa and us went out for his first-ever trick-or-treating.  It took him a while to figure out that we actually wanted him to just take stuff from people, especially since the first few houses we went to had people with kind of scary face paint and he spent most of his time trying to get away from them.  Once we opened up a pack of candy and gave him what was inside, he decided he really would like to take that stuff from those people even if they were scary!  We only stayed out a little while, but he got a pretty good haul.  His favorites were the Rollos, peanut butter cups, and Almond Joys.  We had to be careful where we stored them because he learned how to open all the packages by himself after a few days.  We’d come around the corner or find him huddled behind the couch stuffing a whole peanut butter cup in his face. 

Josh is now a whopping 25 pounds and is growing out of all his clothes.  He’s had balance good enough to walk for a few months now, but was never interested in taking his first step.  He would stand in the middle of a room playing with a toy and not holding on to anything for minutes at a time, but absolutely refused to take even one tiny step no matter how we tried to entice or trick him.  Finally, while mom was here, he was still a little drowsy from just getting up from a nap and sleepily took his first steps from me to her!  He promptly became scared of walking again and wouldn’t do it for a while, but he really picked it up quickly.  After less than a week he could walk all the way a cross the living room, and now he’s just running all over the place!  He still doesn’t say very many real words – only Daddy and hi, although he has sort of tried to say other stuff.  He knows about 5 sign language words and loves to use them.  He even likes to tell me when he’s tired and wants to take a nap!  He has an awesome throwing arm and is great at playing catch.  He’s also crazy about balloons and bubbles right now.  He usually has a deflated balloon in his mouth most of the day these days.  Strangely, though, his absolute favorite thing to do is read books.  He likes to sit by himself and read out loud, or he’ll drag a book all the way across the room and sit in our laps and have us read to him. 

Our Final Fall

We kicked off our last New England autumn with a visit to Vermont to see Mario’s family there.  We took a little detour to the original Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream plant in Waterbury.  We got to tour the plant and taste one of their new flavors, Milk & Cookies.  It’s a fun place and includes a Flavor Graveyard where they commemorate ice cream flavors they’ve discontinued.  Why did they ever think putting popcorn in ice cream was a good idea?

After that, we had a visit from Mario’s cousin (sort of – it’s a long story) and her lovely little family.  Alicia, Tucker and baby Weston were out visiting Alicia’s sister in Vermont and came to Beantown to go to a cranberry festival with us down on Cape Cod.  It was SO COOL!  Visiting a working cranberry bog being harvested has been on my Bucket List for a long time.  Ripe cranberries have small pockets of air which cause them to float in water.  At harvest time, they flood the cranberry fields, called bogs, and then use big lawnmower-type machines to beat the berries free of the bushes.  Once the cranberries float to the top, harvesters put a very long, bendable piece of floating plastic around the bog and then draw it in tight, gathering all the berries in one area.  When they have an entire bog corralled, the berries can be 8 inches deep.  Then they suck the berries up with a big vacuum and load them on trucks to be shipped off for processing.  Very fun and satisfying day.  On our way out of the festival, we got some fried dough (as they call it on the east coast) with cranberries.  Lovely stuff!

We used one of our free Wednesdays (our travel day since Mario doesn’t have class) to visit a little coastal village just north of Boston called Marblehead.  It’s famous for its affluence, quaintness (is that a word?), and history.  It was one of the first villages established by the first settlers to America, and most of the cute little houses that make up its downtown were built in the 1700s and have little plaques hanging on them that say things like “Jacob Clay’s Shoe Factory 1674.”  It’s also the birthplace of the U.S. Navy.  We spent a beautiful morning wandering around taking pictures. 

Experiencing fall in New England is like spending Chinese New Year in China (which, ironically, we didn’t actually spend in China – on purpose, I might add).  New England was made for autumn, plain and simple.  It’s so effortlessly perfect.  First you get the weather – gentle breezes, clean and crisp air, and lots of sunshine.  Then you get the apples – a dozen kinds of delicious, dripping with fresh, crisp, tart, liquid sugar.  With the apples you get fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider that tastes like you just bit an apple, and tender and crumbly cider donuts tossed with cinnamon sugar.  And then you get the leaves.  Oh my goodness, the leaves!

We wanted our last fall in New England (Mario graduates this spring) to be a good one.  The last two years we haven’t really gone crazy trying to find good places to see leaves since we still had time left and Mario was really busy with class.  Since this is the last one, though, we were on a mission!  We decided to go to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  As you can see in a few of the pictures, this area was a little past “peak” (you can see a lot of the trees have lost their leaves completely), but it was still AMAZING.  We’ve seen pretty great fall colors the past two years, but it was nothing compared to this place!  It was kind of a rough trip for Josh – it seems he has grown out of his easy traveling age – so we didn’t see as much as we would have liked, but it was still the perfect last “leaf peeping” adventure! 

 

I also dragged Mario out to the orchard to pick apples for our last time.  A trip to an apple orchard is an obligatory part of a New England autumn.  He wasn’t terribly excited about it, but he did warm up to it a bit as soon as he got some apples and cider donuts in him!  And he enjoyed a very refreshing apple juice bath from Josh gnawing on an apple while sitting on his shoulders. 

I Love Food!

I love food!  We love food!  I’ve posted a few meals we’ve made in the past, and we’ve been busy again!  I had a bunch of extra milk a few weeks ago and decided to make it into ricotta cheese.  It was surprisingly easy.  Milk plus vinegar in a stockpot basically equals ricotta.  It smelled divine as it drained (it’s hard to describe, it just smelled so very rich).  I kept the whey to make some whey bread at some point, and I used the ricotta for two very different things.  Half went to make a ricotta-parmesan filling for a roasted-vegetable lasagna with crisped prosciutto, which was delicious but didn’t get photographed. 

The other half had a much more divine destiny.  I folded it gently into sweetened whip cream along with fresh lemon juice and zest and a pinch of salt.  I wanted to fill cannoli shells with my lovely stuff, but we couldn’t find them on short notice, so I made some magic with puff pastry.  I rolled foil into little tubes, sprayed them with nonstick spray, and formed the puff pastry around my home-made cannoli molds and baked them.  Then I made a little tasty strawberry-lemon sauce to drizzle over them once they were filled.  Wow.

Some of our best friends here are Boise State fans, so we had them over to watch the Boise State vs. Oregon State football game two weeks ago.  Mario found this awesome recipe from Tyler Florence for oven-roasted Curry-Lime Glazed Chicken Wings.  They were so awesome!  And to put it right over the top, he whipped up a delicious home-made blue cheese dressing to dip them in.

We’ve decided to try to make General Conference (the semi-annual worldwide broadcasted conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, of which we are members) a special experience for our family, and making a special breakfast for it is part of our plan.  Mario chose crepes, so we did crepes with strawberries and whipped cream in the morning.  We had a bunch of crepes left over and I whipped up some ingredients reminiscent of the crepes we had on our honeymoon in Paris almost 6 years ago, with a few new additions.  These fantastic little beauties had a touch of homemade pesto, shredded parmesan, lemony chicken, and caramelized onions and mushrooms.  TO DIE FOR!