He's home!

That's right, Noah Michael Foster is home from the hospital and doing quite well.  It is so exciting to have him home, while at the same time it makes us both quite nervous that we won't have a staff of nurses at our disposal anymore.  This last weekend was quite an adventure for the three of us, so I'll give you a quick recap of what took place.

First we were scheduled to go into the hospital to be induced on the morning of the 28th, at 630 am.  They said to call in case they were real busy, and as it turned out, they were real busy.  We didn't get into the hospital until about 11p that night, so it made for a long day of waiting for a phone call from the hospital.  I got to know one of the nurses fairly well over the phone from talking to her 4 or 5 times that day!  Once we got in, the nurses started the process to induce labor, and it took right away.  I'll spare the gory details, but in short Julie was a champ and only needed the initial medicine to get labor going.  She also was magnificent when pushing out the not-so-little guy, both the doctor and I were really impressed with how she held up and her determination.  Good job honey!! 

The two of us happy he is here!

After Julie got a bit settled, the real excitement began as both set of Grandparents, a few Uncles and an Aunt showed up to hang out with the kid.  Most exciting for me was that my Grandfather was there too, so Noah got to meet his Great-Grandfather right away.  They seemed to hit it off right away! Everyone left after a little bit, and the nurses came and did their work on Mom (Julie!) and Noah.  He was a trooper and slept a good majority of the night, only one quick feeding to speak of. 

Noah with Grandma and Great-Grandpa

Reagan holding her new cousin

The second day his cousins came to visit and they both were excited but guarded for the new addition to the family.  Breckin seemed a bit overwhelmed by the amount of people in the room, and Reagan looked a bit unsure when holding him.  All in all, it was really cool to have them there and I'm sure they'll have many years of hanging out to come.  The hospital has a special dinner that they give to new parents called the Celebration Dinner, which is a fairly fancy dinner for both of us to celebrate the new kid.  It was wonderful!

4 generations of Foster

After that my family came over we found out that he had a bit of jaundice, which is fairly common for babies in Colorado.  He spent the night in a baby version of a tanning bed, and wasn't very happy about it.  The nurse took him for about an hour so Julie and I could get some rest, but after that (around 3a) he slept like a champ and we didn't wake up until after 7a! 

We finished up his tests, got some more sleep, and loaded up with supplies and left the hospital today.  So far he has been fairly good, but he is getting a bit fussy now, I think the change in surroundings might be getting to him a bit.  We'll see. 

There'll be more to come as we figure out what to do with the little fella.  

Noah and his little teddy

Ready to come home!

Counting Down

So, it seems like this next week might be the longest of my life… this little guy apparently is in no hurry to come meet the outside world.  My due date is now less than one week away and I really can’t believe that he will be here any day now and Michael and I will forever be parents to a little boy.  I have still been working every day and am planning to keep working at least for the rest of this week.  Each day is getting a little harder to talk myself into sitting at my desk and concentrating on anything other than the fact that some day soon there will be a little life that is dependent on me and Michael.

It has been a long road to get to this last week, but it has gone pretty quickly when I think about it.  We had a pretty crazy year since we found out we were going to be parents.  There was the Waldo Canyon Fire in June where we were evacuated from our house for a week, although we were not quite sure about being pregnant, I had my suspicions and we found out the next week.  We traveled to Texas and Washington D.C. for weddings.  We celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary in Vail!  Then we had two wonderful holidays spent with our families.  It has gone by fast.  Having morning sickness seemed to last for forever, but now it seems like those four months were a long time ago and wasn't as horrible as it was. I haven’t gained too much weight, about 15 pounds (I had some extra room for him to hide in to start with) and the doctor thinks my belly is all baby!  It is kind of nice to think that I might be able to get back to my old body kind of quickly, but I know it will take a while, but the hopes are there.

We have really been blessed with an amazing amount of gifts and prayers from friends and family and I am not sure we can think of anything we might want or need.  We are very thankful for that!  Over the weekend I think we finished every minor touch we could think of for his room, we just need him to complete it!  Hopefully our next blog post will be sooner rather than later with the first pictures of our newest family member!  Now, if he would just stop these hiccups already and come on out!

TWD: Baking with Julia - French Apple Tart

It's the first food post of 2013!  It was a great recipe to try and I decided to try and make them in mini pie pans.  It turned out pretty well and I can say we had no problem eating them up!  I cheated a little bit with store bought pie crust, but I'll just blame the laziness on being 8 3/4 months pregnant!

First, Mikey worked on the filling for the tarts and I worked on the crusts and then after the apples were done cooking, I used the food processor to puree the filling and it seemed to work very well and seemed a lot easier than smashing them with a spoon.  We only made half the recipe for the filling, after making mini pies for Christmas we learned that a full recipe was way to much filling, and it seemed that half worked perfectly.  Then after I filled the empty pie crusts and we both arranged apples on two pies and sprinkled them with some sugar and cinnamon and got them to cooking.  We both like cinnamon, not sure if that would be alright with still calling it a French Apple Tart!  If you want to check out this week's host and the recipe head over to Laws of Kitchen.

Mikey covered his half with vanilla ice cream, and somehow we finished a whole mini pie in about three seconds!!

Happy New Year!!!

So now that we are pretty much caught up on our old posts, we figure we should shift some attention to the impending baby in our lives!  The last update we gave on the baby's room was that we were picking colors to paint it and deciding on just about everything else too.  Fortunately a lot of that process has been completed!

We decided on a nice color for the room, and we got a little bit fancy with it.  We had Julie's Mom come over and paint a tree on the wall then had Julie's friend Tameka come over and paint Calvin and Hobbes on the wall.  It turned out awesome!

You'll notice in the pictures that we also have furniture in the room now, woo-hoo!!  We also decided on a crib, a dresser and a rocking chair to use in the kid's room.  You may notice that it all came from Ikea!! Our kid is going to be so hip.  Julie's Mom made the baby a super cute blanket for Christmas, one of his first Christmas presents!!  

Speaking of Christmas, we had two lovely Christmases with my family and Julie's family and we hope that you had a great Christmas as well.  We can't believe that it is 2013, and this is the year that our son will be born, crazy.  Hope everyone has a Happy New Year and we can't want to show off our little kid in just 8 weeks.

Oh, and we got new pictures of the little fella, he is a little over 3 pounds at this point and growing like he should.  They said he was in the 50% percentile for size, so good job Julie!

He kinda looks like me

The last of the really old update... San Fransisco!

So, we didn't wanted to skip out on the San Fran update, so here is finally is!!  Even though it was last year!  Man, we are not good at blogging sometimes :(  We stayed with my Aunt and Uncle outside of San Fran for a few days before we ended our summer vacation.

We first got to meet up with them and see one of my cousin Claire's basketball games and then they took us to In and Out!  It was a first time both Mikey and I got to taste the wild side.  It was alright, I am sure we would need a few more experiences to know all about our likes and dislikes of the place.  Then after dinner we headed to their house to come up with our San Fran game plan.  We knew we wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge, wander around the Fisherman's Wharf, maybe take a trolley ride and go see a Giants game.  We did all of that and more!

We drove into San Fran and hit up the Golden Gate Bridge, we even scored excellent parking amongst the millions of people.  It must have been the luck of the Mustang!   We looked around the gift shop and then decided to grab our jackets and walk a good ways on the bridge.  We walked a bit past halfway and decided it looked the same so we turned around after snapping a few pictures.

Then after the Golden Gate Bridge we met up with the relatives and had a great lunch at the The Cliff House.  With full stomach's we decided to go walk along the beach one last time, I think my cousin Katie missed playing in the ocean.  She got a little wet!  Here we are putting our shoes back on.  Then we drove through Chinatown and headed up to Coit Tower.  We then wandered our way around looking for some secret passageway that supposedly has parrots in the trees, but we couldn't find it and we were getting a little tired.  So, we just headed back to their house for the night!

Cleaning up after playing in the ocean

The next morning, we decided we would take the BART into San Fran instead of driving into town.  We decided we would go check how much tickets to the Giants game were and decided to watch the game!  It was kind of chilly, but we had a great time.

After the game, we walked to Fisherman's Wharf and got some tomato soup at Boudin's Sourdough shop.  It hit the spot after sitting around in the cold for a few hours.  Then we went a found the seal's, I don't think that there were as many as the last time I was in San Fran 20 years ago!  After that, we headed down the Wharf to the Ghiradelli factory and decided we deserved a snack, so we got a peanut butter sundae.  It was great, and there is no way I could have finished one, I am glad we split it.  So, with full bellies, we decided it was a great time to hit up a trolley ride to take us back to the BART.  We stood in line, and finally got our turn.  We did jump off a bit early so that we could walk around Chinatown some more and then headed down the hill to catch the BART.

It was a great stay in San Fran!  We will have to make it back again someday! 

TWD: Baking with Julia - Gingerbread Baby Cakes

The real title of this should be horrible failure!  That's how it ended, as a horrible failure.  If you want to see what it should really look like, check out the host Karen's wonderful pictures and the recipe at Karen's Kitchen Stories.

Mikey helped me mix up all the ingredients and got it in the oven.  We don't own mini cake pans, so I tried it in a bundt pan.  It looked wonderful going into the oven, but that was the end of it... I followed the directions of cooking it as one whole cake for 50-60 minutes.  It was not done after 60 minutes, and it was not done after 75 minutes, then I thought it was as done as it could get after 90 minutes and even had a clean toothpick test.  The edges looked really dry and I didn't want to burn it.  So, we called it quits and took it out of the oven.

The cake fell after about 70 minutes of baking, which wasn't anything super unusual in Colorado, but it fell a lot.  After it cooled, I tried to flip it out onto a plate, well not really tried, I flipped it out onto a plate, but it didn't really flip it more like flopped.  It was not done at all.  It could have cooked for another hour.  I either blame our oven or I blame the high altitude or I blame the sugar and molasses that was in that I knew I should not be getting ready to eat!  Anyways, before I digress much further, here are the pictures of the failure...  it looks good before you see the final result.

Hopefully the next recipe will turn out much better! Check back in two weeks :)

TWD: Baking with Julia - Buttermilk Crumb Muffins

This week we baked up some muffins!  They were really easy to whip up and didn't take too long unlike the bagels from the last recipe.  I made half the recipe and ended up getting nine normal muffins.  Well kind of normal.  If you want to see the recipe or maybe what they should look like, check out Alisa's blog Easier Than Pie.  Although ours did not look amazing, we had no problem finishing them in two days!  Here are the pictures of our Buttermilk Crumb Muffin adventure.  I think we will probably make these again someday, maybe with some applesauce instead of shortening and I think small chunks of cut up apples in them sound good too!