Ella and Francisco

Veronica has gone through so many changes in the last few months. I know it’s a well-known aspect of infants, but I am amazed at how much our little girl has changed in such a short time. She went from sleeping only 2 hours at a time to almost 6 hours now (finally!). When she sees Ella enter a room her whole face brightens like a tiny sun. When I smile at her, she smiles back and tries to hide her face. She is grabbing items and has a real interest in figuring them out. She is almost to the point of rolling over. If you tickle her she moves to her side and almost makes it all the way. Recently Ella bought a fun play mat that has arches with hanging animals, textures, a mirror, and music. It looks like a modern art installation that engages all the senses while evoking a psychedelic dream born of eating too much garlic.

Veronica seems to love day care so far. She likes to tell me about her day at day-care in a series of spittle-speckled grunts and high-pitched squeals. If I answer back like I understand her, she then continues to excitedly elaborate on her day. Day care has really helped set a routine for her; she seems to get great joy from from the company of other babies and the stimulation from her caregivers. We fear that she finds us boring when she comes back home despite the fact that we are highly entertaining people.

Ella loves to dance with Veronica cheek-to-cheek while singing all the hits from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and today. Our baby is going to great a great popular music education before she learns how to talk.

Katya is also doing well, although she has had to suffer a reduction in walks. We recently got over a horrible family cold that started with poor Veronica, then took down Ella, and finally subjugated me.  During this dark time Katya experienced a walkies moratorium and had to spend the days indoors with really sick people. She is a truly loyal and noble dog because despite all this she has remained loving and patient.

You can see some of the highlights of Veronica’s first months in the photos below.

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We passed the two week milestone and everyone is doing fine. Ella, Veronica, Katya, and I have settled into our new lifestyle which oscillates between changing diapers and everything else. Ella has been miraculously requiring little sleep as she caters to Veronica’s feeding schedule. I undertook an errand and house-fixing binge that included tending to some of the outstanding nursery-related items I did not finish when Veronica arrived early. Luckily I had a couple weeks off before returning to work.

October 29th was our wedding anniversary, which we were sure would be our last one before the baby arrived. The photos below contain a couple of the fantastic cake Ella orders every year from our wedding cake baker, Simon Lee Bakery. You’ll also see a shot of Katya mal-adjusting to her new position in the family hierarchy. She has taken to hiding in the bathtub; a location she previously avoided because of its association with bath-time. The only way we could get her into the tub was by closing all the doors in the hallway and running her like cattle through a chute into the only open door to the bathroom.

The rest of the photos are of Veronica dealing with her new out-of-the-womb existentialist state. Every now and then she strikes an expression that simply kills us. We love our sweet little lawn gnome.

Ella and I were surprised on Monday with the most amazing gift. Veronica Maribel arrived on Monday, October 26, at 11:53AM.  She weighed in at 5lbs 8 oz and 18 inches in length.  Both Mom and baby are doing great.

Ella began experiencing contractions around 2:00AM and by 4:00AM we were timing and monitoring the frequency and duration.  The frequency and duration seemed erratic so I thought it may be false labor, but Ella knew from the intensity that it was time.  We went to the hospital and upon arrival at around 6:30AM the receiving nurse examined Ella and announced “Oh, you are having a baby today,” followed by an aside to the other nurse, “She is smiling and so calm, she should be screaming and flinging obscenities.”  I credit Ella’s calm to her inner strength as well as our fitness training over the summer.

The baby arrived and promptly expressed her displeasure at her new surroundings.  After cutting the cord I accompanied our daughter for a few of her firsts:

• Her first swaddling, which she loved.
• Her first feeding which, after a few moments, she loved.
• Her first bath in the nursery, which she did not seem to love.
• Her first shot; which she definitely did not love.
• Her first long nap, which like her Dad, she definitely loved.

The pictures below showcase some of these moments.

Meeting my daughter has been one of the best moments in my life.  I am simply beside myself with pride and joy.  Bienvenida hija mía!

Veronica’s First Day

Veronica’s Second Day

Veronica Comes Home

Ella and I spent Memorial weekend in Dallas. We decided it was high time to get to know one of our adopted states larger cities. We began our weekend by visiting the JFK Memorial museum. It’s an incredibly well laid out monument to JFK’s life, the assassination, and his presidential legacy. I have to say it is very arresting to stand in the same street in which the motorcade passed. The audio tour, films, and exhibitions filled me with a  palpable sense of the national shock and mourning that followed the assassination.

We also visited the Nasher Sculpture Center. This is a modern art collection assembled by the Nashers, a couple that collected modern art worldwide. Part of the museum is dedicated to the couple and their legacy; a really great documentary that conveys their passion for modern art and artists. The outside courtyard houses some of the larger and more immersive exhibits. I especially loved Walking to the Sky and Skyspace. The former was interesting because the effect of the escalator reaching toward the sky is made possible by the practical need to bury the anchoring point deep into the ground. The latter exhibit had you walk through a dark walkway with white noise, only to emerge in a stone courtyard with a perfectly square and borderless skylight. Watching the clouds go by through the skylight was like looking at a museum frame on a wall with a moving image.

Of course, food was also a prominent part of our trip. We ate at a wonderful breakfast spot just north of downtown Dallas called Cafe Brazil. On another morning we went to a great South American bakery called Zaguan. I recommend the Alfajore; a cookie that demands that other cookies be renamed to something that better depicts their mundane natures.

At this point our news was becoming harder and harder to conceal…

How to even begin this post. I turned 40 this year in March. Despite the significant number, my birthday did not feel radically different from any other one I have had. That changed when I walked into the party that Ella organized for me in downtown Austin at Taste. This birthday was one of my best. Among the many memories I will always hold of this night:

• the beautiful table setting and menu card
• the many birthday cards (one with the naked backsides of elderly cartoon figures sticks out in my mind)
• the seemingly bottomless yet tastefully designed black plastic goblet
• the food and the wine (which seemed to magically appear in the previously mentioned goblet)
• the cupcakes from Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop
• flood of friends that came to share their favorite birthday jokes
• the loud and fervent references to Prostametto, an herbal prostate product that became a chant for one of the party-goers

Thanks to Ella and Kristi from Taste for making my birthday a truly memorable event!

Luckily, our big news was not discovered on this fine evening…

Ella and I traveled up to Michigan to spend Easter with my in-laws. We had a great time visiting with family and friends. We spent some time at Eliza’s condo where she served a great dinner followed by some serious Wii time. After Easter mass we went for brunch at a local hotel. The brunch was held in a ballroom which contained over 50 tables full of happy families. On one of the beautiful evenings, Ella and I took in a local comedy improv show with her friends Mike and Katie. One of Katie and Ella’s friends from high school was a cast member and came to talk to us after the show. Always a good time in Michigan!

While we were in Michigan, we had a chance to share some very big news with Ella’s family…

I have been meaning to post photos from Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. As we get closer to this year’s Thanksgiving and Christmas times, now seems like a good (if not almost too late) time to finally post them. Thanksgiving was here in Austin and Ella and I were joined by my Dad, Luz-Maria, Luis, Andrea, Karl, and their baby. Aimee, Luis’ girlfriend joined us on Friday and we enjoyed meeting her and showing her Austin. Karl and Andrea and baby moved to London from San Antonio, and Aimee went to Azerbaijan for a year. Luis has visited her a couple times, giving new meaning to the term “long-distance relationship”.

Christmas was a lot of fun in 2008. For a couple of years our good friend Negina has organized “the 12 Bars of XMAS”, a custom planned pub crawl through the heart of downtown Austin. This year was attended by many good friends in festive hats and bells. The night ended at Taste, a very fine establishment that caters in fantastic gourmet entrees and wines. The owners, Regan and Kristi, were kind enough to offer us some samples of their incredible food and wine and made us instant fans. A very fun evening that ended with a special gesture.

In September Ella and I traveled to Irving, CA to attend Mason-Julia Chen’s first baptism. Her parents, Gloria and Tony, hosted a great brunch at a local chinese restaurant where we destroyed a multiple course meal. Later that night the parents and friends congregated at Malarkeys, the bar where Gloria and Tony first met. Basic decency and a reluctance to undermine Mason’s image of her parents prevent me from telling the story of their first meeting, but all of us who went back to the bar attempted to recreate the historic atmosphere. We all tried the famous 9-1-1 shot, which appeared to be a mixture of whatever hard liquors were situated closely to the barkeep’s hands.The pictures below are the only ones appropriate for showing here. I intend to save the others for future blackmailing needs.

Last year Ella and I joined some good friends (Nicole, Ryan, Egon) and decided to start a new coed Ultimate team. In doing so we achieved one of the best outcomes of undertaking any type of team-building endeavor; we met all sorts of new players that we enjoy calling friends.

Our team held regular practices, went to a few tournaments in Texas, and competed in Sectionals in Denton, TX and then Regionals in Austin, TX. Sadly, I managed to catch some kind of bug and missed Regionals, but as you can see from the photo below, the team put aside their grief and competed with great spirit.

How did we get the name “Cougars!”. Well, interesting story.  The name was a product of an official naming session in a small (read: cheap) hotel in College Station. We were sun-burned, had a couple beers in us, and everyone was building groups to support their name ideas. One group of college grads was forwarding “Ultraviolet Catastrophe”, a physic concept. Another group wanted “Gravity Storm” in memorium for an old team Ella used to play on called Vortex. And I, of course, thought only the Simpsons could do the name justice, so I was pushing for “Spider-Pig”, Ella’s love went to “King of Kong”.

In the end, the combination of brain-sapping circumstances and the late-night caused a sudden last minute mania for “Cougars!”, a cultural phenomena term lifted from today’s finest periodicals like People, Us, and their global rivals, Hola! Alexa was our shirt logo artist. She knows how to capture the spirit of pouncing predators.

Ella and I visited Rome and Siena from 5/4/08 to 5/18/08. We had a great experience visiting this amazing part of the world for the first time. Every day we walked extensively in both places. We also made use of the local bus and train systems to get around in each city and to journey from Rome to Siena and back. Some of the highlights of our trip included:

• The food, which required constant sampling. I had a wonderful stuffed-pepper dish in Rome at an osteria by our apartment in Trastevere. Ella had an amazing pasta alla carbonara in Rome. The gellato overflowed everywhere we went. And the coffee was truly good, including every capuccino we sampled in bars and restaurants.
• All the big site in Rome, including St. Peter’s square and the Basillica, the Vatican Museum, the Circus Maximus and Coliseum, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, the Villa Borghese,  and every piazza we discovered just by turning the corner.
• In Siena, the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo were the big sites. The Campo is the site of the annual horse race, the Palio. We could not enter the tower at the campo because they were filming the next installment of the James Bond series (the Quantum of Solace, whatever that means).
• Our neighborhood was the old Jewish ghettoe in Rome near the river Tiber. We crossed the river everyday to get into the ancient part of Rome.
• The view from our agriturismo in Siena was like a painting. At night we could see the lights of the villas all over the Chianti countryside. We actually ordered pizza on our first night in Siena.

Some life lessons I learned on our trip to Italy include:

• A combination of English, Spanish, high-school French, and phrase-book Italian does not compensate for not speaking Italian. Most people seemed less frustrated if I just spoke English.
• Deodorant does not last on a multi-leg flight. It just doesn’t.
• The pasta is truly better in Italy.
• Every ill can be cured by taking an afternoon walk while eating a scoop of gellato.
• You can get tired of seeing amazing sites every day, so you need to space it apart with doses of pizza and wine.

Next time we plan to visit other areas of Italy in order to keep sampling the gellato and write a paper on the regional impact of gellato manufacturing processes.

The link below will take you to the hundreds of pictures we took during our trip:

Italy Pictures

Some of our favorites are below.