January, February, and March!

He loves to steal my head bands

Flowers!

And that brings us to March! Josh's vocabulary is exploding daily, and his fascinations change just as fast. We went to Barnes & Noble the other day where they were having a children's activity. Josh was given some flowers which he then carried around for the rest of the day. 

In his bath full of sharks

 He still loves sharks and has rediscovered a love of trains. He sometimes wears his sunglasses all day, naps being the only exception. He loves to go outside even when it's -10 (or lower) as long as he's snugly tucked into multiple blankets in his stroller. Josh's current favorite food is chocolate, followed closely by toast and goldfish. 

Stealing chocolate chips

 He LOVES to paint. He's still quite timid both with new people and with new physical activities but is getting a little better. Sometime in the past two weeks we have wandered into the eye of the terrible twos. Perhaps Josh realized that Mia is here to stay and is venting his frustration, or maybe we've just dodged the bullet until now. He's a very loving, sweet little man a good deal of the time, and I'm learning to be more grateful for those moments!

Mia is just like Josh in so many ways. She rarely cries except when she needs something. We've successfully moved her into her own bed at night and I'm thoroughly enjoying having more than 8 inches of bed to use. She's settled into a somewhat regular daytime routine, but every night is still completely unpredictable. Some nights she sleeps 10 hours without a peep and some nights she wants to eat every hour. 

 Unlike Josh, she is a champion eater and has lovely, perfect fat rolls to prove it! We’re working on teaching her to fall asleep without eating as a step towards being able to fall asleep by herself, and it’s going pretty well. It would be a lot easier if Josh didn’t have a sixth sense about when she has finally calmed down and has just closed her eyes, because that is precisely the moment he decides he’s done waiting for me and comes busting into the room yelling MAMA!! 

 She is quickly mastering the fine art of “grab whatever you can and stuff it in your mouth,” although she often misses her mouth and whacks herself in the forehead with things. She loves Josh to pieces and tries to grab him at every opportunity. Josh is less than thrilled about that, although he will touch her now which is a great improvement. And now that she looks at him and smiles, he will often smile back before he remembers he doesn’t like her.

March is a delightful time to live in Alaska. It regularly gets above zero during the day and the sun returns with passion. There is also usually some decent showings of the northern lights. 

 Having a baby who won’t reliably take a bottle and wakes up unpredictably at night has made it quite a challenge to be able to take pictures of the aurora borealis since we can’t see them from our house and need to drive about 20 minutes to a good photo location. It’s also unfortunate that the best show usually happens between midnight and 4am, but even with the challenges I was able to get a few decent shots a few weeks ago.

The light on the right is from the moon rising

The end of the bar brought us a newfound freedom to do things as a family that we are wholeheartedly taking advantage of. Fairbanks hosts an ice-carving festival every March, very similar to the one we went to in Haerbin, China. This one is quite a bit smaller, but interestingly many of the competitors were from Haerbin. 

The winner of this year's competition

One thing that is better than the Chinese competition is that much of the ice park is built for kids. They have slides of all shapes and sizes as well as a skating rink. Although Josh went on some ice slides with Jed and Crystal in North Pole right after Mia was born, he won’t go down any of these. Instead he prefers that Mario go down them or just his sled. The last time I took him he carried around a big chunk of ice that he put down all the slides.

Making Mario go down the slide

Mario's boss, Justice Dan Winfree, invited us to visit his cabin on the lake a few weeks ago.  We got to take his snow machines out on the frozen lake.  Fun stuff!

Mario and Josh ready to go

Three months

This is Angie at about the same age playing on the very same quilt.

Two months

Scout is about two weeks old and Josh hates when we wash his hair so I just cut it all off!

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