The end of the Bar!!

Scout helping Daddy study

The past two months have probably been the most difficult of my life. Mario took the Texas bar at the end of February, which means he's been using every minute he could spare for studying since mid-December. Most sane law school graduates stop working to study for the bar because it's honestly a full-time job just to prepare for it, but not my baby! For at least 10 weeks a typical day for Mario would begin at 6:30 when he would get up to get ready for work. He would try to get to work really early so he could use a few hours at the office for bar studying and not have to take time from his job. At 5 he would come home and study for an hour while I made dinner and then hold Mia for 15 minutes while we both ate. Then he would study for another 2 hours until it was almost time for the kiddo to go to bed, at which point he would take about half an hour to play with him and help me get him ready for bed. Then he would study for another 3-4 hours until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore and hit the hay for a few hours. I tell you, it was hard on all of us. I'm so proud of him for his stamina in sticking to a schedule like that, and completely impressed at his huge sacrifices to continue to be a great dad and husband even during the craziness that was his life for three months. 

During a rare study break

 At the conclusion of this mad schedule, he spent a week in Texas taking the bar, the culmination of which was 8 hours of essay questions on his 30^th birthday. While he was gone, I was miserably sick with the flu while trying to take care of the two little munchkins. Then Josh got sick, and now Mia's sick. It has been a very rough few months! But Mario's home now, and actually able to spend time with us when he is home. We're really enjoying having him back. We won't know if he passed until May, unfortunately, but we are thrilled that he possibly just took the last test of his life!

We celebrated both his 30^th birthday and the end of the bar when he got home with some chiles rellenos. I stuffed one with chorizo, onions, and cheddar and the other was stuffed with carnitas, mozzarella, lime and cilantro. They're topped with a sweet and spicy roasted red pepper cream sauce and cotija cheese. Yum!! His birthday cake was carrot with cream cheese frosting and caramelized walnut filling.

Mario took part of a very chilly (-25 or so) Saturday off to go with us to the start of the Yukon Quest, an annual dogsled competition that starts here in Fairbanks.  The starting line is actually on the frozen Chena River that runs through downtown Fairbanks.

The sun at noon in December

We have an unofficial tradition of making pizza most weekends. We stopped using my homemade marinara  pizza sauce precisely when I started making my own ricotta cheese about three years ago. Since then, we usually would make a pesto-spiked ricotta sauce topped with mozzarella, mushrooms, chicken, red peppers, pepperoni, and whatever else we happened to have. Then we had the great fortune of ordering a steak and potato pizza from City Slicker Café in Boston and discovered the miracle of putting potatoes and gorgonzola cheese on pizza. We thought we had it all figured out. Then came the epiphany: eggplant! This pizza is absolutely divine. We ditched sauce altogether in favor of garlic-infused olive oil and traded my usual pizza dough for naan dough. Then we topped the garlic oil with lightly pan-fried eggplant rounds, caramelized onions, fresh mozzarella (regular just doesn’t work, I’ve tried), bacon, and fresh basil. We added the garlic chips after it came out of the oven. Seriously. The eggplant is soft and rich to complement the fresh mozzarella, which meld perfectly with salty bacon, sweet onions, and the ending punch of garlic and basil. The search for perfection is over. I may never make a different pizza ever again. The end.  

Two months

Fun with the snow built up on our deck

Two months

This boy sure loves his dad!

Christmas and New Year's

Christmas

One month old

She got pretty skinny for a while

December was a crazy month for us. We took Mia home from the hospital after a day. We struggled with nursing for weeks. She lost a whole pound and we worked hard for almost three weeks to gain it back. She’s a gorgeous little chunk now, though, with beautiful squishy cheeks and fat rolls on her legs.

Making a gingerbread train. Notice Scout in the bjorn.

For the most part, she’s been a pretty agreeable little peach from the beginning, aside from the nursing issues. For the first month, all she wanted to do was eat and sleep. Seriously. When she wasn’t sleeping, she wanted to eat. All the time. When I say “all the time,” I mean like 10 hours a day. I’ve discovered there aren't very many things I can’t do while nursing. Thankfully she was skilled enough (or desperate enough) to nurse in the Baby Bjorn while I did pretty much everything.

I’ve also discovered that having two kids doesn’t double the work. It at least squares the work. Especially when one of those kids is Josh. I love that boy with all my heart, but he sure is a unique little creature and it takes no small amount of work to keep his life moving along smoothly.

Jed and Crystal have been a great help and have taken Josh a few times when I needed a hand.  We went with them to the ice slides they make every year in North Pole while YaYa was still here.

We celebrated our 7th anniversary pretty quietly with Pizza Hut. Although not the best pizza available, Pizza Hut holds a special place in our hearts as one of the only American foods we could obtain in China. It brought back some pretty awesome memories.

Mario is actually asleep here.

Christmas came and went almost as quietly as our anniversary. We kept our tradition of having Chinese food on Christmas Eve and enjoyed some fantastic wonton soup and one of our favorite Chinese staples, eggs and tomatoes. 

Wonton soup

 We also had our second annual Christmas Camping (sleeping under the Christmas tree). We actually got to do the Santa thing and set up Josh’s presents the night before. Mario constructed an awesome marble run from Grandma Leslie and Papa that Josh really enjoyed on Christmas morning. 

We spent a fun evening with Jed, Crystal & Co. for Christmas dinner. They put me in charge of desserts. We had crème brulee, homemade chocolate cream pie, homemade truffles, and a citrus custard tart. You could tell it was a Foutz affair because there was at least as much dessert as there was dinner.

The only reason we knew the New Year was being celebrated somewhere was because of the fireworks outside our windows. I think we passed out from sheer exhaustion long before midnight.

Happy holidays to us, I guess!



The dress in the pictures below and to the right (and other photos scattered through the blog) is one of a few that my great-grandmother Josephina made for me when I was born.  My mom was thoughtful enough to keep those beautiful dresses for when I had my own daughter, as well as some lovely handmade quilts from the same great-grandmother (Scout is sitting on one in this very picture).  They're in great shape and I hope I can keep them safe to give to Mia when she has her own daughter.  Thanks, Mom!

Scout's big entrance!

We sent off the end of Josh’s era as an only child with a Nanooks hockey game. I thought he might be scared by the noise and craziness, but he actually loved it. He totally got into the crowd mentality and did everything the people around us were doing.

My mom arrived the next day. Since she only had 10 days to spend with us, we decided to schedule an elective induction for Sunday, December 4th. I wanted Josh to be able to have as much adjustment time with YaYa as possible after the baby arrived, and that baby didn’t seem to be in any rush to vacate her home. We called that morning, as instructed, and were told that a few women had gone into labor overnight and there wasn’t any room for us. We were to call back in two hours, at which time they fully expected we would be able to come in. Two hours later, more women had come and we were to call back two hours later. This went on all day, every two hours being told to call back, until about 7 pm when they said we could come in. We dropped Josh off at Jed and Crystal’s and went to the hospital. After taking about an hour to get me checked in, changed, and hooked up to monitors, they said they just didn’t have room due to new arrivals during the time it took us to get there, and I needed to go home. They scheduled us again for the next day, Monday, and sent us away.

Monday morning came and we called the now-familiar front desk at the maternity ward to see if they had room. And they didn’t. I tell you, by this time I was depressed and angry and so uncomfortable I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And I wasn’t even excited about having a baby because of all the dashed hopes of weeks of never-ending contractions capped off by being sent home from the hospital once again. But I dutifully called every few hours all day until, miracle of miracles, at 4pm they told us to come on over because they had room for us! We left Josh with Jed and Crystal and headed off to have a baby.

They hooked me up to all the various monitors and started Pitocin around 6pm. Soon I was having fairly mild, regular contractions. Around 9pm my doctor came in and said since not much was happening she recommended I take an Ambien and sleep while I could and that she would come back in the morning and get things started again. We sent YaYa home to get some sleep. Apparently said Ambien didn’t agree much with our little baby, because as soon as I took it my contractions started getting serious. I really wanted to walk around and try using the hot tub this time, but the fetal monitors (which were supposed to allow me to roam the entire hospital floor and still record what they needed) stopped working every time I tried to get up and walk around. My water broke around 11pm and then ensued a couple hours of pain. By 1am I asked for an epidural and we called YaYa to come back since things were moving right along. By the time she arrived, I was settling in to the heavenly bliss of a well-done epidural. Around 3am something started to feel different and they called the doctor in. After a pretty short 5 minutes of pushing, our little girl finally arrived! She was 8 lbs 1oz and 20.5 inches long.

She was pretty calm from the beginning, and nameless for a whole day. We finally settled on Amelia, Mia for short. Amelia actually wasn't on any of our original name lists, but a few weeks before she was born, I was relaxing during Josh's nap one day and thought, “Hmm, Amelia is a good name. I'll mention it to Mario when he gets home.” Our other name contenders were Reese, Annabelle, Reagan, and Jenna, but Mia won out in the end.

My sweet little munchkins

Sleeping with YaYa

My great grandmother made this dress for me when I was born

Thankful for Northern Lights!

Fun with long exposures and glow sticks at the cabin

We've had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend and had the chance to take some pictures that really must be posted.  

The extent of our Thanksgiving "activities"

We had plans to have some friends over for dinner on Thanksgiving, but since I've been having lots of contractions, which are exacerbated when I stand up for a while, we decided to cancel and just have a quiet holiday by ourselves.  This picture pretty much sums up our day.

 

We also decided to take advantage of our last weekend sans newborn to get out.  We found a nice little cabin available not too far from home at Quartz Lake.  It's the first time we've been “camping” since Josh's leg has recovered and he really enjoyed poking into all the corners of the cabin and running around like crazy.  He wasn't thrilled about the -20 temperatures during our walk on the frozen lake, but we busted out the glow sticks when we got back and had ourselves a party!  It was a delightful evening and I'm glad we went even though I was close to throwing up a fair amount of the time and was having contractions semi-regularly.  May I also mention that it seriously SUCKS to be a girl while camping in -20 temps?  Especially since this girl is 39 weeks pregnant and had to pee more times than she'd care to remember in the middle of the night!  Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Looks like a crazy neon reindeer or something, but it's actually just Josh + glow sticks + 15 second exposure.

The up side of being awake and venturing outside frequently in the middle of the night in Alaska on a clear night is I was able to catch a decent showing of the northern lights, and with enough time to actually set up the camera and get some fun pictures!  It was quite a memorable experience to watch the green waves dance across the sky by myself at 4am.  It was, as previously mentioned, -20 something and I was in my pajamas, so the parking lot in the foreground is unfortunate, but I was unwilling to carry my camera out onto the lake at that particular point in time.  Maybe next time I'll make the effort to heat the car and drive out to a better vista.  I was also worried the lights would disappear before I could get out there and get set up since last time we saw them they went away too quickly to photograph.  That was probably the right decision this time as they only lasted about 20 minutes.  I waited another hour for them to come back, but that was all I got.  

Driving on the lake

The next morning we explored the frozen lake from the comfort of our heated car instead of on foot.  

Mario also got to try out Jed's new cross country skis for a little while.

On our way home, we noticed some strange rainbows on the horizon and got some fun pictures.  I'm no expert (and if you know what these are, I'd love to know!), but it seemed like they were part of a halo around the sun that was visible as a rainbow when it hit the mist near the ground.  By the way, these pictures were taken at 12:30pm, so the sun is at its peak here.  It wasn't actually this dark, though - that's due to the camera settings I was using to bring out the rainbows more.

A close-up of the "rainbow"