I know I SUPER suck at blogging, but I'm really hoping to get better soon!
Mario's keeping himself busy doing research and studying to take the patent bar this August.
I'm still working - sort of - and our little boy is due to arrive Sunday, July 26th, although it seems pretty unlikely that will happen.
We moved last week from a one-bedroom apartment into a two-bedroom townhouse in the same apartment complex, which is AWESOME!!! Mario had a very rough couple days since I'm pretty worthless, but we're finally unpacked and at least physically ready for out son to come.
I have absolutely nothing to report labor-wise - he hasn't even dropped yet as far as I can tell. But we'll keep you all informed!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
We actually have something to write about this time!
Mario finished his last final two weeks ago and my mom flew in for a visit the next day. Mario picked her up at the airport and brought her in to have lunch with me, so the first time she saw me was in the food court in the mall next to my office. She had to touch my belly before she could even give me a hug - the last time anyone in our family saw me I was only about 8 weeks pregnant. It's funny how pregnant bellies are so captivating - even people at work who see me every day can't stop looking at it. It took Mom a few days to get used to it, which is understandable considering I'm still not totally used to it!The first day was pretty quiet - Mario showed her around Harvard Yard and Harvard Square.
We got an airbed for her to sleep on and it took up our ENTIRE living room. We actually had to move the couches so it would fit. And it was only a queen!
Saturday morning we spent exploring a big, open-air market in downtown Boston with everything from fresh raspberries to oysters on the half-shell to freshly-baked bagels. That afternoon we walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, which is a walking tour of historic sites in Boston. We saw Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church where the lanterns were hung to begin the Revolutionary War, the graveyards where the revolutionary leaders are buried, and the meetinghouses where the Revolution got its beginnings.
We ended our tour in Boston's North End, aka Little Italy, so named because that's where the Italian immigrants started out. Now it's a beautiful part of town full of one- or two-storey red brick buildings that house endless Italian restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores. We found some ridiculously excellent cannolis and rested our aching feet as we ate dinner at La Famiglia Giorgio, a little place with a single dining room that only seats about 30 people at a time and serves home-made pasta noodles. Our waitress was a portly older woman everyone called Auntie and the food was awesome.
The next day was my birthday. Mario got up early and made me cinnamon Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. For dinner he made huge hamburgers and sweet potato fries. If you can't tell, holidays for me are all about the food!
The next morning we headed out for New York City. It took us four hours to arrive at our hotel in Queens where we dropped off our bags and hopped on the subway to Times Square. We spent the afternoon walking around mid-Manhattan. We went to the top of the Rockefeller Center where we could see the entire island of Manhattan, Grand Central Station, the Theater District, the Public Library (I know it doesn't sound very exciting, but it was a very cool building with big stone lions in front and a gorgeous park in the back), and the Chrysler Building as well as a whole lot of stuff in between. I ate a hot dog from a vending cart on the street that wasn't very good and Mario got hooked on big, soft vending cart pretzels. We found a little pizza place for dinner with deep-dish pies. It was expensive and not very good, but we had to have pizza in New York City!
The next morning we started at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was really quite impressive. The Green Lady was very beautiful and a really impressive piece of art apart from being one of the symbols of our freedom. Ellis Island was very humbling. They did an excellent job with all the displays. They had the medical and mental exam rooms for incoming immigrants set up still where they explained what they were testing for. One of the mental exams was to draw a diamond (just a square on an angle, not like a drawing of a diamond). They had to stop giving that exam because a lot of the immigrants coming through had never held a pencil before and weren't capable of drawing four straight lines even though they were perfectly mentally competent. There was an awards ceremony of some kind going on to honor the children of immigrant families. Candace Bergen was giving presentations about "Broadway" Joe Namuth and Jerry Seinfeld, both of whom were in the audience not more than 20 yards from us as we walked through the room they were in. They also had rooms with pictures, passports, ticket stubs, and stories. It was amazing. It made me thankful for my own ancestors who were brave enough to leave their lives and families to come to America and for my grandparents who have shared their stories with me, but it made me unspeakably thankful for my father-in-law. For those who don't know, Mario's dad grew up in communist Romania where his family was persecuted for their Christian beliefs in addition to other horrors that come with communism that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say he had it rough. He and his family suffered a great deal. He decided at a young age that he wanted something better than communism for his future family, and when he was 19 he risked his life to escape. I'm talking about evading guards with machine guns and dogs kind of risking his life, like something you'd see in a movie. Because of his courage, I'm married to the man of my dreams and we're starting our own family. I am proud that my children can share in that heritage, and we will be sure they know what their grandpa did for them. Ellis Island really brought home to me the kind of heart it must have taken for him to do what he did, although I know I will never truly understand the sacrifice he made so his family could have a better life than he had.
The rest of the afternoon we spent making our way back up to Times Square. We went past the stock exchange, the site of the Twin Towers, the Empire State building, Chinatown and New York's Little Italy. Chinatown was AWESOME. That's the closest we've been to China since we were in China. It even smelled like China! It was a lot of fun to walk around and remember the Motherland. Everything we saw, from the bakeries to the meat vendors (complete with pig heads and feet hanging in the windows) to the fruit stands, looked like it had been directly transplanted from a Chinese town. I even had a China experience right there in Chinatown. There was a blue post office box on a street corner - you know the kind with a little handle you pull down which opens the door so you can put in your mail. There was a Chinese guy with a letter he wanted to put in, but he couldn't figure out how the box opened. He tried sticking the letter in all the places were the metal was welded together and that (obviously) wasn't really working out so well for him. He must have walked around that thing three times trying every crease to see if that was where he could jam his letter inside. So I walked over, grabbed the handle and opened the slot for him. He gave me a very big smile of relief and put his letter inside. Poor guy. I don't know how long he would have been going around and around the box if someone hadn't helped him. I was very impressed with myself that I held back my giggles until he was far enough away not to hear. I'm sure many Chinese people had similar experiences with me when I was in their country. Chinatown and Little Italy are right next to each other - they're actually only separated by a banner hanging in the middle of a block - everything to one side is in Chinese and everything to the other is in Italian. It wasn't quite as cool of a Little Italy as we have here in Boston, and we bought more cannolis because we'd been so impressed the first time, but unfortunately they were ridiculously expensive instead of ridiculously delicious. After walking until we couldn't walk anymore once again, we found a little pub for dinner and called it a day.
Our last day in NYC we spent exploring Central Park, which was great, and a few of Manhattan's other city parks. It's really impressive to see that even when real estate there is at such a premium, they have still kept so many parks.
None of the three of us are much for cities - I don't think I had ever planned a vacation just to see a city in my life - but Manhattan wasn't like anything else I've ever seen and we all enjoyed it a great deal more than we thought we would. I would never, ever want to live there (I think I would last about a week before inescapable claustrophobia set in, no matter how many city parks there are), but it was an amazing place to see and surprisingly clean, beautiful, and interesting. It made me wish I knew a lot more about architecture so I could appreciate all the cool buildings. It was also fun to see things I've only seen in movies or on television. It was a great trip and we're hoping to go back at least once before we leave the east coast, which I certainly didn't think would be the case when we were planning our trip. We were pretty much doing it because it was one of those things we had to do while in this part of the country since we'll most likely never have the chance again, but it turned out to be really enjoyable and interesting, even for people who don't like cities.
We headed back home for a night and left the next morning on a new and completely different adventure - a road trip up the northeastern coastline. (It's too bad they don't give you stamps for going into different states like they do for countries because in the week Mom was here, we took her through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine.) We drove north along the coast of New Hampshire and Maine all the way to Canada. It was a lot of fun. We stopped in a bunch of the little seaside villages and wandered around, and we found the most amazing beach in a little town called Ogunquit. It happened to be in the 90s that day, which was really unusual for that time of year, so we got out to walk around a little. It was three miles of perfectly white sand and light blue water. It was absolutely gorgeous. The water was unbelievably, achingly cold. I'd guess it was a solid 5 degrees colder than the water off the Oregon coast, and that's pretty darn cold! On our way back to the car, we struck up a conversation with two little old ladies enjoying the day who happened to have grown up in the area, and I asked them where we should go to get the best lobster around for my dear mother visiting from the other side of the world. They said we absolutely must try the "lobstah" pie at the Maine Diner ten miles up the road, so up the road we went. We weren't disappointed! Lobster pie, aka lazy man's lobster, is a local dish of freshly cooked and shelled lobster meat that is soaked in butter and baked with a savory crumb butter topping. Mom was in heaven! We originally planned to spend the first day of our road trip on the coast and the second in inland Maine, but we were having so much fun we decided to just keep going on the coast the whole time. We made it all the way to the Quoddy Head Lighthouse, which sits on the easternmost point of the United States. We stopped on the way home at a place called Jasper Beach, which is composed entirely of red jasper stones instead of sand and is one of two such beaches in the world (the other is in Japan), which was interesting. We had dinner at a place called The Seafood Shack where Mom had more lobster. It was a great time and quite the opposite of New York - "downeast Maine," as northeastern Maine is called, is sparsely populated and has a lot of wide-open spaces, as opposed to humanity-laden Manhattan.
We spent our last day with Mom in Boston finishing the Freedom Trail. We walked A LOT while she was here, so we decided to go to the movies Saturday afternoon to give our sore feet a break. It was a somewhat ill-fated trip, although we enjoyed the movie. We went to a little supermarket to get snacks to take in with us. While we were standing in front of the cooler, a worker on a step ladder at the end of the aisle dropped a 2-liter bottle of soda. The impact caused it to fizz so much it exploded through the cap and shot like a jet-propelled rocket down the aisle where it then collided quite forcefully with my shins. The four of us just looked at each other for a second and then the worker rushed over to apologize profusely for my rapidly-bruising ankle, but we all ended up laughing. Who expects to be attacked by rogue Diet Coke in the grocery store? Then, there wasn't a parking lot at the theater, so we had to use parking meters, which wouldn't last as long as we needed. Mario gallantly volunteered to go feed the meter during the movie so we wouldn't get a ticket, and he ran the whole way so he wouldn't miss anything. The theater we went to is kind of weird - exceptionally dark and a little strange with weird statues and odd hallways. That combination, plus it being pitch-black, so disoriented Mario that in his rush to get back to his seat, he ran face-first into a wall. He came back to his seat rubbing his head and panting, which was odd, but we didn't find out until the movie was over what had happened to him.
We sent Mom on her way early Sunday morning. It was SO great to have her out to visit and we're grateful she took the time to come see us way out here!
So now we're back to our normal routine again. Mario, unfortunately, has a schedule pretty similar to (if not slightly more demanding than) his normal school schedule at the moment. He's doing research for two professors and studying to take the Patent Bar before the baby comes. Hopefully he'll be able to make it through this summer and the next school year without getting too burnt out, and without ruining his eyes completely from reading for 12 hours a day for two solid years! I'm still working (as a receptionist in a biofuels company called Verenium) and I plan to keep working until the week before Zachary/Ian is due, which means I have 7 weeks left! Hope you're all doing great!
Love,
Angie and Mario
P.S. Almost all of the pictures are Mario's and there will be more posted shortly on Angie's Facebook.
Mario finished his last final two weeks ago and my mom flew in for a visit the next day. Mario picked her up at the airport and brought her in to have lunch with me, so the first time she saw me was in the food court in the mall next to my office. She had to touch my belly before she could even give me a hug - the last time anyone in our family saw me I was only about 8 weeks pregnant. It's funny how pregnant bellies are so captivating - even people at work who see me every day can't stop looking at it. It took Mom a few days to get used to it, which is understandable considering I'm still not totally used to it!The first day was pretty quiet - Mario showed her around Harvard Yard and Harvard Square.
We got an airbed for her to sleep on and it took up our ENTIRE living room. We actually had to move the couches so it would fit. And it was only a queen!
Saturday morning we spent exploring a big, open-air market in downtown Boston with everything from fresh raspberries to oysters on the half-shell to freshly-baked bagels. That afternoon we walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, which is a walking tour of historic sites in Boston. We saw Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church where the lanterns were hung to begin the Revolutionary War, the graveyards where the revolutionary leaders are buried, and the meetinghouses where the Revolution got its beginnings.
We ended our tour in Boston's North End, aka Little Italy, so named because that's where the Italian immigrants started out. Now it's a beautiful part of town full of one- or two-storey red brick buildings that house endless Italian restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores. We found some ridiculously excellent cannolis and rested our aching feet as we ate dinner at La Famiglia Giorgio, a little place with a single dining room that only seats about 30 people at a time and serves home-made pasta noodles. Our waitress was a portly older woman everyone called Auntie and the food was awesome.
The next day was my birthday. Mario got up early and made me cinnamon Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. For dinner he made huge hamburgers and sweet potato fries. If you can't tell, holidays for me are all about the food!
The next morning we headed out for New York City. It took us four hours to arrive at our hotel in Queens where we dropped off our bags and hopped on the subway to Times Square. We spent the afternoon walking around mid-Manhattan. We went to the top of the Rockefeller Center where we could see the entire island of Manhattan, Grand Central Station, the Theater District, the Public Library (I know it doesn't sound very exciting, but it was a very cool building with big stone lions in front and a gorgeous park in the back), and the Chrysler Building as well as a whole lot of stuff in between. I ate a hot dog from a vending cart on the street that wasn't very good and Mario got hooked on big, soft vending cart pretzels. We found a little pizza place for dinner with deep-dish pies. It was expensive and not very good, but we had to have pizza in New York City!
The next morning we started at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was really quite impressive. The Green Lady was very beautiful and a really impressive piece of art apart from being one of the symbols of our freedom. Ellis Island was very humbling. They did an excellent job with all the displays. They had the medical and mental exam rooms for incoming immigrants set up still where they explained what they were testing for. One of the mental exams was to draw a diamond (just a square on an angle, not like a drawing of a diamond). They had to stop giving that exam because a lot of the immigrants coming through had never held a pencil before and weren't capable of drawing four straight lines even though they were perfectly mentally competent. There was an awards ceremony of some kind going on to honor the children of immigrant families. Candace Bergen was giving presentations about "Broadway" Joe Namuth and Jerry Seinfeld, both of whom were in the audience not more than 20 yards from us as we walked through the room they were in. They also had rooms with pictures, passports, ticket stubs, and stories. It was amazing. It made me thankful for my own ancestors who were brave enough to leave their lives and families to come to America and for my grandparents who have shared their stories with me, but it made me unspeakably thankful for my father-in-law. For those who don't know, Mario's dad grew up in communist Romania where his family was persecuted for their Christian beliefs in addition to other horrors that come with communism that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say he had it rough. He and his family suffered a great deal. He decided at a young age that he wanted something better than communism for his future family, and when he was 19 he risked his life to escape. I'm talking about evading guards with machine guns and dogs kind of risking his life, like something you'd see in a movie. Because of his courage, I'm married to the man of my dreams and we're starting our own family. I am proud that my children can share in that heritage, and we will be sure they know what their grandpa did for them. Ellis Island really brought home to me the kind of heart it must have taken for him to do what he did, although I know I will never truly understand the sacrifice he made so his family could have a better life than he had.
The rest of the afternoon we spent making our way back up to Times Square. We went past the stock exchange, the site of the Twin Towers, the Empire State building, Chinatown and New York's Little Italy. Chinatown was AWESOME. That's the closest we've been to China since we were in China. It even smelled like China! It was a lot of fun to walk around and remember the Motherland. Everything we saw, from the bakeries to the meat vendors (complete with pig heads and feet hanging in the windows) to the fruit stands, looked like it had been directly transplanted from a Chinese town. I even had a China experience right there in Chinatown. There was a blue post office box on a street corner - you know the kind with a little handle you pull down which opens the door so you can put in your mail. There was a Chinese guy with a letter he wanted to put in, but he couldn't figure out how the box opened. He tried sticking the letter in all the places were the metal was welded together and that (obviously) wasn't really working out so well for him. He must have walked around that thing three times trying every crease to see if that was where he could jam his letter inside. So I walked over, grabbed the handle and opened the slot for him. He gave me a very big smile of relief and put his letter inside. Poor guy. I don't know how long he would have been going around and around the box if someone hadn't helped him. I was very impressed with myself that I held back my giggles until he was far enough away not to hear. I'm sure many Chinese people had similar experiences with me when I was in their country. Chinatown and Little Italy are right next to each other - they're actually only separated by a banner hanging in the middle of a block - everything to one side is in Chinese and everything to the other is in Italian. It wasn't quite as cool of a Little Italy as we have here in Boston, and we bought more cannolis because we'd been so impressed the first time, but unfortunately they were ridiculously expensive instead of ridiculously delicious. After walking until we couldn't walk anymore once again, we found a little pub for dinner and called it a day.
Our last day in NYC we spent exploring Central Park, which was great, and a few of Manhattan's other city parks. It's really impressive to see that even when real estate there is at such a premium, they have still kept so many parks.
None of the three of us are much for cities - I don't think I had ever planned a vacation just to see a city in my life - but Manhattan wasn't like anything else I've ever seen and we all enjoyed it a great deal more than we thought we would. I would never, ever want to live there (I think I would last about a week before inescapable claustrophobia set in, no matter how many city parks there are), but it was an amazing place to see and surprisingly clean, beautiful, and interesting. It made me wish I knew a lot more about architecture so I could appreciate all the cool buildings. It was also fun to see things I've only seen in movies or on television. It was a great trip and we're hoping to go back at least once before we leave the east coast, which I certainly didn't think would be the case when we were planning our trip. We were pretty much doing it because it was one of those things we had to do while in this part of the country since we'll most likely never have the chance again, but it turned out to be really enjoyable and interesting, even for people who don't like cities.
We headed back home for a night and left the next morning on a new and completely different adventure - a road trip up the northeastern coastline. (It's too bad they don't give you stamps for going into different states like they do for countries because in the week Mom was here, we took her through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Maine.) We drove north along the coast of New Hampshire and Maine all the way to Canada. It was a lot of fun. We stopped in a bunch of the little seaside villages and wandered around, and we found the most amazing beach in a little town called Ogunquit. It happened to be in the 90s that day, which was really unusual for that time of year, so we got out to walk around a little. It was three miles of perfectly white sand and light blue water. It was absolutely gorgeous. The water was unbelievably, achingly cold. I'd guess it was a solid 5 degrees colder than the water off the Oregon coast, and that's pretty darn cold! On our way back to the car, we struck up a conversation with two little old ladies enjoying the day who happened to have grown up in the area, and I asked them where we should go to get the best lobster around for my dear mother visiting from the other side of the world. They said we absolutely must try the "lobstah" pie at the Maine Diner ten miles up the road, so up the road we went. We weren't disappointed! Lobster pie, aka lazy man's lobster, is a local dish of freshly cooked and shelled lobster meat that is soaked in butter and baked with a savory crumb butter topping. Mom was in heaven! We originally planned to spend the first day of our road trip on the coast and the second in inland Maine, but we were having so much fun we decided to just keep going on the coast the whole time. We made it all the way to the Quoddy Head Lighthouse, which sits on the easternmost point of the United States. We stopped on the way home at a place called Jasper Beach, which is composed entirely of red jasper stones instead of sand and is one of two such beaches in the world (the other is in Japan), which was interesting. We had dinner at a place called The Seafood Shack where Mom had more lobster. It was a great time and quite the opposite of New York - "downeast Maine," as northeastern Maine is called, is sparsely populated and has a lot of wide-open spaces, as opposed to humanity-laden Manhattan.
We spent our last day with Mom in Boston finishing the Freedom Trail. We walked A LOT while she was here, so we decided to go to the movies Saturday afternoon to give our sore feet a break. It was a somewhat ill-fated trip, although we enjoyed the movie. We went to a little supermarket to get snacks to take in with us. While we were standing in front of the cooler, a worker on a step ladder at the end of the aisle dropped a 2-liter bottle of soda. The impact caused it to fizz so much it exploded through the cap and shot like a jet-propelled rocket down the aisle where it then collided quite forcefully with my shins. The four of us just looked at each other for a second and then the worker rushed over to apologize profusely for my rapidly-bruising ankle, but we all ended up laughing. Who expects to be attacked by rogue Diet Coke in the grocery store? Then, there wasn't a parking lot at the theater, so we had to use parking meters, which wouldn't last as long as we needed. Mario gallantly volunteered to go feed the meter during the movie so we wouldn't get a ticket, and he ran the whole way so he wouldn't miss anything. The theater we went to is kind of weird - exceptionally dark and a little strange with weird statues and odd hallways. That combination, plus it being pitch-black, so disoriented Mario that in his rush to get back to his seat, he ran face-first into a wall. He came back to his seat rubbing his head and panting, which was odd, but we didn't find out until the movie was over what had happened to him.
We sent Mom on her way early Sunday morning. It was SO great to have her out to visit and we're grateful she took the time to come see us way out here!
So now we're back to our normal routine again. Mario, unfortunately, has a schedule pretty similar to (if not slightly more demanding than) his normal school schedule at the moment. He's doing research for two professors and studying to take the Patent Bar before the baby comes. Hopefully he'll be able to make it through this summer and the next school year without getting too burnt out, and without ruining his eyes completely from reading for 12 hours a day for two solid years! I'm still working (as a receptionist in a biofuels company called Verenium) and I plan to keep working until the week before Zachary/Ian is due, which means I have 7 weeks left! Hope you're all doing great!
Love,
Angie and Mario
P.S. Almost all of the pictures are Mario's and there will be more posted shortly on Angie's Facebook.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Our baby
We've received some worrying news about our baby and wanted to let everyone know what's going on.
First, we don't know anything for sure. There is a very good chance our little boy is just fine and will be perfectly healthy. However, we think you should know what we've learned just in case.
At our ultrasound last week, the technician saw two worrying things - bleeding in the placenta and some spots on the brain called Choroid Plexus Cysts. After a very long week of waiting, we had another ultrasound today with a maternal fetal specialist. They determined the bleeding in the placenta is normal leakage from the veins and is not something to worry about anymore, which is really wonderful because otherwise it would have meant I could have had a miscarriage at any time.
The second thing - the Choroid Plexus Cysts (or CPCs) - is still a problem. We have attached a very helpful article that explains exactly what it is and what it could mean, but here is a brief summary:
CPCs are not harmful in any way to the baby. They are spots of fluid on the brain and by themselves do not harm the baby at all. The reason they are bad is they indicate a higher risk for something called Trisomy 18, or Edward's Syndrome. Please do not look it up if you do not REALLY need to know exactly what it is, because it is very, very scary and we don't want to make anyone unnecessarily worried. In short, if our baby has this it would be severely retarded and of those who make it to birth, 50% of babies with it do not live longer than a week. Most of the rest don't live past a year. On the brighter side, MANY MANY babies have CPCs who do NOT have Trisomy 18. Usually babies with Trisomy 18 have other problems that can be seen on an ultrasound, none of which our doctor has seen yet. MOST babies who have CPCs and no other indicators (like our baby as of right now) are born healthy and normal.
CPCs without any other indicators means our baby has about a 1 in 500 chance of having Trisomy 18. I am having a blood test that will tell us if our baby's risk is higher than that, both for Trisomy 18 and for Down's Syndrome. We will get the results of that test in a week. We also have another ultrasound in two weeks where they will check everything again to look for other indicators.Obviously we are worried about the worst-case scenario but we are doing okay. We appreciate everyone's well wishes and prayers and will keep you informed as we find out more. If you have questions please feel free to call us (541.441.4249 Mario and 541.441.4140 Angie) or write. Again as we said there is only a very very small chance that our boy has Edward's Syndrome, so please don't worry too much - we just thought it would be good for you to know.
Love,
Angie and Mario
the article we found with more information:
http://www.babyzone.com/
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
I SUPER suck at blogging, and we don't really take many photos anymore, but Suzie said I had to so here goes!
I'm 17 weeks along and getting quite fat. I can't button my pants anymore so yesterday on my day off I told Mario I wanted to go shopping for maternity clothes. He took time off from studying and we looked up some places on the internet and finally made it downtown. After finding a parking spot and making our way through the mall, we found the store we were looking for. I took one look at the infamous prego pants and decided I wasn't ready to wear stretchy pants yet. So after all the work to get there, we just bought a belly band and went on our way, something we could have done at the Target two minutes from our house. Mario wasn't too happy to have wasted his afternoon for nothing, but I couldn't help it! I just couldn't buy stretchy prego pants! And in reality, he's probably lucky I didn't start crying in the store (I cry for absolutely no reason these days, and buying stretchy pants is not no reason!). He should be grateful all I did was chicken out of buying spandex!
I'm 17 weeks along and getting quite fat. I can't button my pants anymore so yesterday on my day off I told Mario I wanted to go shopping for maternity clothes. He took time off from studying and we looked up some places on the internet and finally made it downtown. After finding a parking spot and making our way through the mall, we found the store we were looking for. I took one look at the infamous prego pants and decided I wasn't ready to wear stretchy pants yet. So after all the work to get there, we just bought a belly band and went on our way, something we could have done at the Target two minutes from our house. Mario wasn't too happy to have wasted his afternoon for nothing, but I couldn't help it! I just couldn't buy stretchy prego pants! And in reality, he's probably lucky I didn't start crying in the store (I cry for absolutely no reason these days, and buying stretchy pants is not no reason!). He should be grateful all I did was chicken out of buying spandex!
Monday, December 22, 2008
I know many of you have been wondering what's taken us so long, but a few weeks before our 4th anniversary we found out we're having a baby! Baby Mangio (as Angie's family likes to refer to the two of us) is due July 26th.
It's been a fun few months in Boston since we last wrote. Mario has been studying away and I've been keeping myself busy as best I can. It's been a very pleasant winter so far - lots of blue sky and sunshine. It's a far cry from our usual winters in the great Pacific Northwest where it isn't uncommon to go weeks on end without even seeing the sun. In fact, we've been here in Oregon for five days now and have been graced with a single appearance that lasted all of 20 minutes.
We spent Thanksgiving in Cambridge with some other law students. Even though we were having a potluck dinner with them, I couldn't stand the thought of going Thanksgiving weekend without leftovers, so I cooked an entire Thanksgiving meal myself. Unfortunately, that was my first weekend of morning sickness and to this day the thought of stuffing and turkey is pretty nauseating. I hope this little seahorse in my belly hasn't ruined Thanksgiving for me for ever!
We're really enjoying Boston, though. Mario bought us tickets to a Blazers - Celtics game the first week of December. He came to my work and we walked across the Charles River to the North End, otherwise known as Little Italy. It's a very old part of Boston that still has some cobblestone sidewalks and everything is made of red brick. It's full of tiny little Italian restaurants. We went to a little one-dining-room place called La Famiglia and had the best eggplant and chicken parmesan I've ever encountered, as well as a dynamite calzone. The plate of parm must have had an entire pound of spagetti on it. It was ridiculously good and ridiculously huge. After dinner, we walked to the BankNorth Garden to watch KG and Greg Oden duke it out. We walked into the arena and started up the 10 or so flights of stairs to our section. When we got to our section, we started up the stairs looking for our row. We walked and walked and walked and finally came to our seats, which actually came with headrests. That's because we were sitting against the back wall. In other words, it would have been impossible to get further away from the court. We still had a great time even though our Blazers played a game that was, in the immortal words of Charles Barkeley, "just turruble." (That means "just terrible") We rode the subway home. All in all, it was about as Bostonian a thing to do as I can think of and it was great!
Because Mario's finals are the first week of January, pretty much his entire Christmas break will be spent studying in his mom's dining room. We brought one suitcase home just for his books. In addition to studying during his break, he's also working on finding a summer job. He had three interviews at Portland firms last week when we got here and will fly back out in January for a few more, which is pretty great considering most firms don't even look at first-year law students on top of the fact not many firms are hiring for summer positions at all because of the economy. So we feel pretty lucky for the interest he's received. He's hoping to work either in Portland or Seattle and we'll find out in a month or two about that. The fact that he'll be on the west coast this summer means I'll get to quit work a few months early because we don't want him to miss the last two months of the pregnancy, not to mention risking him not being present for the birth of his first child because I'm in Boston and he's in Portland. So I'll quit my job when he's ready to come out west so I can spend the summer with him. Another bonus is now my mother won't maim me for having my first baby on the other side of the continent where she can't come see it as easily.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We hope to hear from you all soon and hope you have wonderful holidays!
Love,
Angie and Mario
It's been a fun few months in Boston since we last wrote. Mario has been studying away and I've been keeping myself busy as best I can. It's been a very pleasant winter so far - lots of blue sky and sunshine. It's a far cry from our usual winters in the great Pacific Northwest where it isn't uncommon to go weeks on end without even seeing the sun. In fact, we've been here in Oregon for five days now and have been graced with a single appearance that lasted all of 20 minutes.
We spent Thanksgiving in Cambridge with some other law students. Even though we were having a potluck dinner with them, I couldn't stand the thought of going Thanksgiving weekend without leftovers, so I cooked an entire Thanksgiving meal myself. Unfortunately, that was my first weekend of morning sickness and to this day the thought of stuffing and turkey is pretty nauseating. I hope this little seahorse in my belly hasn't ruined Thanksgiving for me for ever!
We're really enjoying Boston, though. Mario bought us tickets to a Blazers - Celtics game the first week of December. He came to my work and we walked across the Charles River to the North End, otherwise known as Little Italy. It's a very old part of Boston that still has some cobblestone sidewalks and everything is made of red brick. It's full of tiny little Italian restaurants. We went to a little one-dining-room place called La Famiglia and had the best eggplant and chicken parmesan I've ever encountered, as well as a dynamite calzone. The plate of parm must have had an entire pound of spagetti on it. It was ridiculously good and ridiculously huge. After dinner, we walked to the BankNorth Garden to watch KG and Greg Oden duke it out. We walked into the arena and started up the 10 or so flights of stairs to our section. When we got to our section, we started up the stairs looking for our row. We walked and walked and walked and finally came to our seats, which actually came with headrests. That's because we were sitting against the back wall. In other words, it would have been impossible to get further away from the court. We still had a great time even though our Blazers played a game that was, in the immortal words of Charles Barkeley, "just turruble." (That means "just terrible") We rode the subway home. All in all, it was about as Bostonian a thing to do as I can think of and it was great!
Because Mario's finals are the first week of January, pretty much his entire Christmas break will be spent studying in his mom's dining room. We brought one suitcase home just for his books. In addition to studying during his break, he's also working on finding a summer job. He had three interviews at Portland firms last week when we got here and will fly back out in January for a few more, which is pretty great considering most firms don't even look at first-year law students on top of the fact not many firms are hiring for summer positions at all because of the economy. So we feel pretty lucky for the interest he's received. He's hoping to work either in Portland or Seattle and we'll find out in a month or two about that. The fact that he'll be on the west coast this summer means I'll get to quit work a few months early because we don't want him to miss the last two months of the pregnancy, not to mention risking him not being present for the birth of his first child because I'm in Boston and he's in Portland. So I'll quit my job when he's ready to come out west so I can spend the summer with him. Another bonus is now my mother won't maim me for having my first baby on the other side of the continent where she can't come see it as easily.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We hope to hear from you all soon and hope you have wonderful holidays!
Love,
Angie and Mario
Thursday, October 30, 2008
I'm not sure how many of you are already on Facebook, but it's so much easier and faster to upload photo albums that I think I'll put most of our photos there and paste the link here for people to view them. When I'm done, I'll post the link here.
Here's a preview of the next travelogue I'll send out . . . as soon as I write it . . . I don't know, I guess I just need to learn how to be fascinated by life in a some
what-sane country because I just don't have the desire to write at the moment. I'll try to work on that. But I still do love to take pictures!
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Boston
Hey everyone! I am under no illusion that this will be even half as entertaining as the random insanity we reported from China, but we thought we'd keep up our updates anyway. It's just going to be a much bigger challenge to my writing skills to make it at least interesting enough for you all to read at least some of it. So here it is!
September 3, 2008
Hey, everybody. I'll tell you right now this isn't going to be as interesting or entertaining as our travelogues from China. I mean, I haven't seen anyone
urinating in public. Well, Mario relieving himself in the literal middle of nowhere between Lakeview and Winnemucca doesn't really count, does it? I haven't seen any strange food. Wait, I take that back. The eclectic little "supermarket" on the corner by our complex has 50 kinds of cheese and an interesting collection of meat. No dog, sadly, or rat, but it does have bear meat, lion meat, and python meat. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. We arrived in the U.S. in June. The first thing we ate was a delicious take-n-bake pizza. My mom graciously made a run to the store just to get us some ranch dressing to put on it. Man, I love America. Man, I love ranch dressing. And pizza. And carpet! We had a fantastic time with family and friends for two months at home. We also had a not-so-fantastic time cleaning all the rat feces off our belongings we stored while we were gone. Dad did a great job looking after our stuff and we're very grateful for the space. That rat made a mess, though. It decided to make its nest under a dresser and constructed it almost exclusively out of the straps from our bike rack and Mario's golf bag. Man, I hate rats. The rat was long-gone by the time we got home, but a remarkably wet spring meant all of our stuff was also covered with a nice green mold. That was fun too. We ended up tossing a lot of stuff, but we were really surprised how much survived the rat and the spring. We had to take everything out of the boxes, clean it, and repack it. We discovered when we tried to move the dresser that the rat was gone, but a family of bees had moved into the vacated premises. The fun just didn't stop!We packed up our stuff between camping trips and wedding receptions in a trailer very generously and wonderfully provided by Rich, Mario's step-brother. We were a little skeptical when we picked it up, honestly. In my brother Jed's words, "At least you won't have to worry about anyone stealing anything out of it – it looks so bad no one will want anything you've got in there!" It worked great, though, and Jed was right—no one stole anything!
I don't mean to skip the time we spent with family, but all of you know how much we enjoyed the time we got to spend with you. We had some good times. Like my 2-year-old nieces putting each other in time-out. And playing Sing Star with my brothers, their wives, and Mario. I would have lost a lot
of money on that bet. After having to repack the trailer twice (thanks, Jed!), we took off. Our poor little Subaru was almost sitting right on its tires, but it pulled like a champ. The trailer lights worked when we left my dad's house the first time, then they didn't. So we borrowed a set of magnetic universal trailer lights from him, which worked when we left his house the second time. Then they stopped too. When we got to Tyler and Susan's house in Salt Lake, we were talking to Tyler about the problem, and he found a new set of universal trailer lights, which worked. Unfortunately, our little problem meant he had to then spend the whole evening we were supposed to be just hanging out with them trying to find a soldering iron for us to fix the wires. When we left the next morning at 4, the lights worked. Then they stopped too. We gave up and just drove the rest of the 2,500 miles with broken lights.
We stopped in Colorado for a visit with my dad's family, which was awesome. We loved spending time with Gram, Gramp, Jane and kids, Kate, and Walt. Mario was very impressed with Colorado, the scenery and the family.
We headed out the next morning for the rest of the 2,000 miles. We slept at rest areas, went a top speed of 70, and discovered that Nebraska has awful radio stations. Half were gospel rock, a quarter were straight-up butt rock (for those of you not familiar with butt rock, Motley Crue and The Scorpions are two illustrative examples), and the rest were talk shows. Pretty sweet.
New York was beautiful. We decided to stop at Niagara Falls our last day on the road. Because we had a trailer, though, parking was going to cost $25. We thought we'd outsmart the system and just pay a meter since we were only planning on being there for an hour or so. We drove around and found two meters together that we could use, only to discover that one of them was for a maximum of 30 minutes. There was nothing else we could do and we had wasted so much time already that we just decided to go with it. So we sprinted down to the falls, too
k about 7 pictures, and sprinted back to the car just in time to get out of the spot before the photosensors on the meters gave us a ticket (we couldn't even bank on the po-po not coming by right when it expired because they're freaking automated! How unfair is that?! Shouldn't they have to catch you?). All five minutes we spent looking at the falls were breathtaking. It was impressive and very beautiful and we hope to go back again soon, preferably when we have more than exactly 30 minutes to enjoy it. So that was an adventure.We got to Mario's "cousin's" house in Vermont and were blown away by how beautiful it is here. It is unbelievable, and the fall colors haven't even started yet! We were very well taken care of by Mario's family there and are now staying with a 2nd-year law student in the complex we will be living in here in Cambridge until our apartment is finished being renovated on Monday. We're really looking forward to getting settled in after so much time in transition.Mario's had two whole days of classes now, and he seems to be doing just fine. He had to go back to the library to study the evening after his first day of class, which the 2nd-year student said was both admirable and scary. I'm still unemployed, which sucks, but hopefully that will change soon. September 28, 2008
I (Mario) just finished my fourth week of classes. I still enjoy the classes and the material, but don't really enjoy the time it all sucks away. I spend as much time as I can possibly stomach (at least 14 hours a day during the week and half of Saturday) to do my reading assignments for class and I still feel like I'm not doing enough. I'm not even sure how much I should be doing, if I'm doing it right, or if it will even be helpful. Obviously, it helps me not look like an idiot when one of my professors decides to call on me, but other than that I have no clue how I'm doing. But I guess that probably all of my classmates feel the same way. I am enjoying the school. Being Harvard, it draws some exciting and unique guest speakers. This past week I listened to former presidential nominee Michael Dukakis and former FCC chairman Dr. Minow discuss the history and importance of presidential debates. As a side note, when we were buying our TV from BestBuy, John Kerry walked past me as I was checking out. That's two former presidential nominees in less than a month. Next month, Al Gore will be here to talk about the dangers of man-bear-pig! (for those who don't watch South Park, it is a reference to global warming) I don't have any other law school experience to compare it to, but my classmates seem to be fairly normal and varied. It doesn't seem like there's going to be much of a problem with maliciousness among students to try to undercut each other's performance, which is nice. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it all. Except for the man-bear-pig part, of course.
We have been in our very own apartment for three weeks now. There's good news, bad news, and no news. The good news is it's not as small as we had feared. The actual living space is adequate. It's not large by any stretch of the word, but it will do for the next year. The bad news is there is absolutely no storage space. We have exactly two closets that are each about two feet square. That's it. In our lease it says we were supposed to get a storage space in the basement of our building, so we brought our grill, golf clubs, camping chairs, tool boxes, suitcases, all kinds of things. When we got here, we were told that the "storage space was lost in the remodel." I'm not sure what that means, but I was sure we were going to have to take some stuff out to Chelle's (Mario's cousin) house in Vermont to store. I was shocked to discover that it all fits under our bed! It's going to be a bugger to get out again because I packed it all under there perfectly when we didn't have mattresses so I could see everything, but at least we still have it here with us. Actually, I take that back – we didn't fit everything under the bed: we still have our cooler out, which has turned out to be incredibly useful as a table when we want to eat while we watch TV. And that brings us to no news, which is that we don't have couches and don't know when we will have couches. We ordered couches from a furniture warehouse, along with a mattress set. He had the mattresses there but needed to have the couches shipped in and said it would take about 5 days. We still had our living room full of boxes anyway, so that was fine with us. Five days later, we still didn't have any couches. The guy said our couches were being shipped from Texas and hadn't left the warehouse yet but they woul
d be coming soon. Immediately after that, there was this little problem in the warehouse. I guess little problems are to be expected when warehouses get caught in hurricanes. It didn't have power or access to communication for about a week. And we still don't have our bleeping couches. We did finally get our mattress, so at least we're not sleeping on the floor anymore. It was a pretty good system we had for a while, though. When we'd get up in the morning, I'd fold our "bed" in the living room in half and it would then serve as our couch for the day. Now we're just using our camping pads and a blanket. So basically, what with our blue Coleman cooler and our two camping pads in use every day, we're essentially camping out in our living room. Pretty ghetto, but it's all part of the adventure! I (Angie) have now been working for a week and I'm enjoying it. I'm a receptionist at a biofuel company called Verenium. I take the bus to and from my job and actually have to dress like an adult to go to work, as opposed to most of my other jobs where I could wear pretty much anything I wanted. I still feel like I'm playing dress-up walking around in my suit jacket and slacks. Who am I kidding?! The job description actually said they wanted someone "polished." Who of you thinks I'm polished? Boy did I fool them!
Anyway, so life is good. Well, apart from our car getting broken into our second week here. They smashed the window and stole the GPS unit Michelle and Brig loaned us to help navigate Boston. When they offered to let us use it for our first few weeks, we declined. I mean, how hard could it be to just follow our MapQuest directions? They insisted that we really should take it, and we found out why immediately on entering the city: it's like a blind, mentally-handicapped guy who doesn't know how to drive laid down the street grid for this place. It's is absolutely ridiculous, and that's coming from someone who just lived in China for a year. The streets are insane – some intersections have 5 or 6 streets! And none of them have signs posted! Drivers here are really aggressive but forgiving. I think it's because they know exactly how messed-up their streets are and they cut people a break.
We still haven't been able to see much of Boston because it's got this nasty little habit of calling in torrential rain storms every Friday that conveniently (that's sarcasm, in case you didn't catch it) last until Sunday afternoon. So we've been making very good use of our new TV. We decided a while ago that we didn't want to live like penniless bums anymore. We wanted to find a middle ground between utter deprivation (remember the heating scandal two winters ago in Corvallis?) and moderate frugality. In other words, we were ready to cross the line between starving students and the adult world. So we bought a flat-screen TV. And we have cable. Mission accomplished—we are officially adults now!
We really love it out here. We miss you all and we miss Oregon (Go BEAVS! Hope you saw the USC game!), but it is beautiful and new and exciting here and we're really enjoying it. Like always, we'd love to hear from you all when you have time.
Love,Angie and Mario
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