Back to Washington

We're moving our blog to http://mmmwashington.blogspot.com/ because we're no longer in Massachusetts! Hopefully everyone that checks this knows that by now.... We'll be posting Mira pics there soon!

SEATTLE!

We moved! It was a quick decision, but a good one. We are in Redmond now, very close to Matt's new job with Microsoft. He's working on a super-secret project he can't even tell me about! But he's enjoying it. Mira is growing and changing so much every day - it's amazing. She's starting grabbing toys if they are placed within her reach. She mostly sleeps through the night now (9:00pm-4:00am, then after eating back to sleep until 7:30am or so) and her hair is REALLY red! I apologize for no new pictures yet but we are still SO far from unpacking everything I have no idea where the little USB adapter thing is to download the new pictures. I promise I'll do it soon!

Mira Christine Mickelson

Mira Christine Mickelson was born on Feb. 7th, 2007 at 12:52 pm. She weighs 8 lb. 4 oz., and is 20.25" long. The hair and eye color is a bit ambiguous right now, but she appears to have brown hair and blueish green eyes, which will probably get darker.
We'll eventually catch up on updating everything. If the video below doesn't show up yet, then just try back in a couple of hours.

Baby video!

Here are some pictures from our wonderful Christmas with Tim and Meg (marilee's brother and sister-in-law). We were so worried our first Christmas away from "home" would be sad but with Tim and Meg here it was nothing of the sort. We had so much fun with them, taking in NYC, Boston and Sturbridge Village in just a week! It was a great Christmas and here are some pictures to prove it.

Matt and I at Rockefeller Center - that tree really was spectacular: a great way to start the Christmas season!

Tim and Meg in front of Faneuil Hall during our Freedom trail day in Boston!

Cooking is fun! Especially baking Christmas goodies - here's the gang on Christmas Eve.

Two and a half weeks to go...

Here I am at 37 weeks waiting for the baby. Hopefully there will be baby pictures up here soon. I'm still feeling good, having a few "false" labor contractions periodically which is unnerving but totally normal. I'm really looking forward to meeting our son or daughter...it's so soon!

Christmas time is here

Flyball video

flyball team

You can also view the entire flyball team (it's a relay race of 4 dogs on each team) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74Md264HOk

Thanksgiving!

We had a great Thanksgiving - it was a George Fox reunion. Seriously, check out the picture. We had Ben, Liz, Joel, Cherice, Adam, Sarai and Tim (oh, the two unnamed people in the middle are Matt and I but, if you didn't know that, maybe you shouldn't be reading this blog)

Anyway, it was a blast. We played Cranium in which we learned Adam has an uncanny ability to fill in the blanks and Matt can't really take the pressure of spelling things backwards. We also found out that NONE of us can recognize Stairway to Heaven even when it's hummed really well.

After everyone left Matt and I decided a really good thing to do after a long holiday at 1am in the pouring rain would be to wait for Circuit City to open for the day after Thanksgiving deals. I made it about twenty minutes before going home to sleep and Matt literally risked his life and employed all his charm and wiles but we ended up with a LOT of good, really cheap stuff.

Oh, I also wanted to post the picture of Cherice and my belly comparison. Joel and Cherice are expecting their first baby (a boy) two weeks after us so it was really fun to see each other and compare pregnancy notes. If there's any truth to the old wive's tales about boys being carried low and tight and girls higher and wider, well...just look at us - it looks like I'm having a girl!

The belly grows...

So I'm officially at 28 weeks (that's about 6 and 1/2 months for you lay people) and we have had some requests to display the belly.

Here you go - Marilee and baby in all their glory (at night with glasses and greasy hair)

The baby is for real!

Yep, now I've confirmed it. I saw the ultrasound and all that, but that could have just been a bunch of trickery... Anyway, I felt the baby move with my hand on Marilee's tummy tonight!

We promised...

We promised to start trying to update this blog a little more, so here is my attempt! I just had to put up this picture of Marilee that I took, because it really exemplifies her life right now. She's grading papers, because she's a TA. But she's also lying down in bed with her pregnancy pillow, because she's exhuasted. And of course, Dakota is always right there to help. =)
PLUS, you can see the beautiful new IKEA shelves we just put up.


I also thought I'd let people know in passing that I am working in a different job now until I go to MIT. I'm designing and building centrifuges. The bio-tech kind, not the uranium enrichment kind. Still not sure when I'm going to start at MIT, because it depends on when funding comes in. I'm crossing my fingers for starting this Spring, otherwise it will be Fall '07.

long time no blog

Well, before we just start right in with blogging again, I suppose that there needs to be an explanation of why we HAVEN'T posted anything for such a long time. It was definitely not due to a lack of important things happening! More like a couple of very important things happening, but unfortunately we couldn't post information about these important events until the timing was right. Many of you have probably already heard about these, so you can just skip to the pictures. =)

First of all, just a few weeks after we moved in, Matt went outside while the landlords/upstairs neighbors were having a family BBQ. We really want to get to know them, because they're really fun people. Anyway, Matt was talking to some of the relatives about our story of moving out here and then not really liking Matt's grad program at WPI, and then that leading to us moving into Boston. Well, it just so happens that our landlord's aunt who Matt was talking to turned out to be the graduate admissions person for the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT. He mentioned that he applied there and didn't get in, and she said it wasn't because his scores weren't good enough or anything. There are just so many really great candidates that apply there, you just don't get in unless you stand out for some reason. And how do you stand out when everyone has perfect scores on the Math GRE, and close to 4.0 GPA? Anyway, the crux of the story is that she later went back to MIT and accepted Matt based on his previous application. Didn't even have to re-apply! He was accepted to start in Spring '07, but he will defer to Fall '07 because...
We're having a BABY! Here is the most recent ultrasound picture:


Because of the way the baby was holding its legs together and crossing it's ankles, we were unable to tell whether it is a boy or girl. We never saw any "boy apparatus" so we're thinking girl, but our technician says it's a bad idea to take a guess when you really can't see anything in that area. Anyway, regardless of the sex, we're having a BABY!!!!! The due date is Feb. 2nd. Here is a picture of my preggo wife:


And just to prove how different she looks, here is a "before" picture:


Now it's nap time, because my preggo wife is very tired. I'll try to post again soon.

Dakota the wonder-dog

I had to post these pictures of Dakota in the backyard. She learns VERY quickly, and does anything we tell her to do, as long as she thinks it is pretty much safe. Here she is climbing the ladder on our landlords playground set, and then going down the slide and jumping off midway. She can also climb the climbing wall next to the ladder, but she only does it when something is blocking the ladder, so I didn't get a good picture.

The future is rosy...

Well, we have disgracefully neglected this blog lately, leaving out essential tidbits of information about our New Englad lives.

The first (and arguably most important) tidbit is: I was accepted into graduate school! I will be attending Northeastern University in the fall. There, I will pursue a master's degree in sociology leading to a PhD (ultimate research topic still to be decided). I am extremely excited about this program not only because they are very open to interdisciplinary work (meaning I'm allowed to still love Poly Sci and integrate it into my sociology work) but also because they offered me full funding (tuition and a stipend) for at least five years. Wowee, huh? So that's a huge blessing and a I feel very pleased to be "on track" to be a professor one day. Yay!

Let's see, other tidbits: we bought a new bed. And not just any bed but a King-sized bed. Yipes. Turns out that as much as my husband and I love each other and like to snuggle, we both sleep much, much better when we're not kicking and rolling into each other all night. It's a bit of a luxury but we have REALLY enjoyed our uninterrupted nights of sleep. Oh, and also, the dog fits better. :) Yup, we've become those kind of people. Every morning it's Marilee on the left, Matt on the right and Dakota in the middle.

Also: A BIG one: we went to Opening Day at Fenway! Amazing, no? Yes. Amazing. Here's the thing: I have never considered myself lucky before but since February I have won TWO radio contests. One resulted in our "snow"boarding trip we posted about and the second got us tickets to Red Sox opening day. It was wonderful. More to follow when we get our picture...and a fun story about the picture.

I guess that's enough for a friday morning.

A REALLY funny commercial.

I though so anyway. Click here to watch it!

Matt's new hairstyle

This picture doesn't need a caption to be funny.

Dog park

Marilee has been taking Dakota to a dog park near our house pretty much every day since we moved here. It's great because everyone just takes their dogs there and lets them play while they stand around and talk. Anyway, it is just a really cool new part of our lives, so I thought we should post a picture of it. This was the weekend crowd, so there were about 3 times as many dogs as normal, but you can probably only see a third of the dogs in this picture anyway so it evens out.


The next picture is just Dakota being her daring self, and me egging her on:


And the last picture of the day... Dakota playing with her new friend Nugget who lives upstairs.

Personal Record (maybe even WORLD record)

Marilee and I went to a theater Saturday to see Why We Fight (a great movie by the way). We took the bus/subway so that we could get a feel for the system before we have guests stay with us that may need to use it. After paying and arm and a leg for movie tickets, we decided we really wanted popcorn and soda, so we bought the largest size of each so we could get free refills.

After draining the entire 5 gallon bucket of soda during the movie, on principle I still had to get a refill on the way out the door. I found that I already had to pee pretty bad when we got on the subway, so in an act of moderation I threw away the pop with a few drinks still lingering at the bottom of the cup. By the time we got off the subway I was already feeling a pee emergency, but we had to rush out of the station to see what time the bus came. It turned out that we had another 20 minutes to wait, so I went back into the station to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, I found that I would have to pay another subway fare to get back in to use the bathroom, so I decided to wait it out.

On the bus ride home, It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming in pain from trying to hold back. The ride took about 20 minutes, so I was literally about to explode upon getting off, and we still had half a mile to walk. Bravely, I staggerred toward home. Halfway home, however, I decided that it was physically impossible for me to hold it any longer, and so I shuffled my way off the main road onto a dead end side street. Just as I was about to unzip and let it all out on someones bush, a man appeared on the opposite side of the road. My plans foiled, I rushed back to the road and started shuffle hopping as fast as I could towards the house.

By the time I got home my stomach was cramping and I knew this pee would be a record-breaker. So as I made my way to the bathroom I brought out my watch for timing the upcoming event.

SO here's the breakdown. Seriously, no exagerrations here. I peed for 1 minute and 15 seconds. Then my stomach cramped up and stopped the flow for about a minute. Then I peed for another 30 seconds.

If anyone can beat that, let me know.

New House Pictures!

Okay, the place is still too much of a pigsty to show much of it. But here are the two rooms in the best shape. More to come as we get ourselves figured out:

The Kitchen
(the bar is our own addition, thank you Ikea. We LOVE it.)
(And the white unit underneath is our new portable dishwasher which we also LOVE)

The Bathroom
(it's small but it's home)

More pictures to come...

NEW HOUSE

Yeah, as if we didn't have enough going on. We moved to our new apartment on Saturday (2/11). It was quite a venture. We were completely blessed by the help offered us by our downstairs neighbors and our friends from WPI. At the end of the day it took 3 hours to load up, 45 minutes to unload and we came away with only a severly bruised elbow, twisted hip, scraped knuckles and REALLY REALLY sore quads (thank you three flights of stairs).

We are gloriously happy to be living on the first floor (and our quads are already flabbing up). We LOVE our neighborhood and the family who live upstairs are GREAT.

Perhaps the best part, so far, is the dog park we found about five minutes away. Dakota and I have gone there every day this week and we stay for as much as two hours each time. We just love it. Weekdays there are up to 15 different dogs there at a time. They are all very well-behaved and Dakota gets a long great with all of them. Today we met a border collie that is the only dog I have seen that can outrun her. Dakota and this dog, named Emma, just did laps chasing each other for so long. It's also a fun place for me because I can just stand around and talk to the other dog owners who are also very well-behaved. :)

We'll post some pictures of the apartment as soon as we get settled in a bit more. Since we both had to work this week, we've pretty much just been surviving rather than unpacking. So if we took any pictures now they would be less pictures of our house and more pictures of piles of boxes and furniture.

Happy Valentines Day Dakota!

Ah, Valentine's Day. Not my favorite holiday, though a fun one since it involves chocolate. This year Matt fulfilled my deepest desires by buying me a one pound box of chocolates. What a husband, huh? So we watched a romantic-ey movie and nibbled on the chocolates, eating maybe 1/4 of the box between us.

The next morning I decided to go for a slightly guilt-induced run. It was a lovely run and I came back happy and sweaty and sat down at the computer. After a few minutes in the computer room, I noticed that Dakota wasn't in the room. This is not typical. Normally, Dakota MUST be in the same room with us at all times. Then I noticed a sort of crinkling, scratching sound from the living room. On my way to investigate, Dakota came out of the living room, tail between her legs, licking her chops.

Yup, you guessed it. Dakota told me later she was only trying to help me out by removing the temptation. I asked her if she really needed to remove ALL the tempation. I freaked out at first (because we all know chocolate is poisonous for dogs) but found out that she would have had to eat about twice as much to do any real damage.

So we all had a happy Valentine's day this year, including - or perhaps, espcially - Dakota.

Update on Poor Puppy Parenting

There has been a recent breakthrough in the poor puppy parenting realm that I thought I should report. Previously I posted an entry about when we discovered how our sad little puppy spends the 6 hours during the day while we are at work - whining and crying and pacing. It was quite pitiful and made us feel like terrible parents.

Well, the other day I came home from work and Dakota wasn't laying in front of the door as usual. I found her in the guest room ( a MAJOR "NO" room, as we keep all our souveneirs in there and she has been known to chew them if not supervised). We always keep this door shut but it, apparently, came open that day and Dakota was just laying on the rug smiling up at me like, "oh, are you home already?" She hadn't ripped or chewed anything - she hadn't even knocked anything over!

So after that incident we thought the key to our dog's happiness might just be more rooms. We sat Dakota down and gave her a stern talking to about the big responsibility we were giving her and that she would only have the privilege of the other rooms in the house if she proved herself mature enough to handle it.

Since then we let her roam the kitchen, dining room, living room, office and guest room while we're gone. She is still restricted from our bedroom (she won't stay off our bed) and the bathroom (she can't resist the tempation of Q-tips and toilet paper in the garbage can) but the rest of the apartment is hers.

This change has made a big difference. Dakota is SIGNIFICANTLY less spastic and uncontrolled when we come home. She's still happy to see us but she no longer makes the high-pitched puppy weeping noise while flailing on the groud as though having a seizure. I guess our little ADD puppy is just (*sigh*) growing up. :)

Quick decisions ... really quick.

I think being able to make big decisions quickly is a prerequisite of being a young couple. Mar and I have made three MAJOR decisions in this past week.

I (Matt) have been looking for a job for the past two weeks, because I decided to work full-time and just take night classes for my M.S. degree. I just wasn't getting into the research I was doing. After a two week search netting two interviews that didn't develop into anything, I was starting to get a little discouraged about my decision. Then I called an engineering design consulting firm on Sunday, interviewed on Monday, did a second interview Wednesday, and accepted their offer on Wednesday evening. You can check out the previous products they have designed at http://www.bleckdesigngroup.com/ in the portfolio section. They have some pretty cool stuff on there!

Then we needed a car, since I would be commuting now. So we went out Thursday and bought a certified pre-owned 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid. Here's a picture, it looks silver, but it's actually "metallic blue". We found someone to take over our lease in our current apartment last week, because we decided we wanted to move into Boston to shorten our commutes. We hadn't found a new place to move into, although we had gone into Boston to look at apartments twice. Then Saturday we looked at three places, and the last one was just perfect. So we filled out the application and gave them a check right then and there. We're moving into the North Side of Boston in two weeks!

Did you catch that schedule? Wednesday new job, Thursday new car, Saturday new apartment. What a relief to finally get it all settled though!

Snow? boarding

The following account recaps our journey to Loon "Mountain" ski resort last weekend. Marilee won free lift tickets in a radio contest, so we decided to go check out the East Coast version of snowboarding.

This picture is what we first saw when we pulled up to the ski "mountain." Where's the snow, and what's with the train, you may ask? Apparently the train was for transporting people between lodges, and the snow part will be explained later.

This is what greeted us as we went up the chairlift. Once again, the lack of snow was concerning. I probably wouldn't even have gone up the lift at all, except we had seen some glimpses of snow on runs off to the side.

Ahhh, that's the stuff. There was actually "snow" on the runs after all! Apparently the way it works over here is that they have huge water pipelines running up the sides of the runs, and they mist everything with water vapor when it freezes at night. So the effect is that there is a 6-12 inch layer of ice, covered with about 1 inch of ice shavings and slush. It actually didn't make for bad riding, except when you fell. This picture is Marilee, who was turning both directions and doing extremely well! But she was REALLY sore for the next few days, and had bruises all over from falling on the ice. I don't think it would have been worth $69 each for lift tickets, but we had fun going for free!

Christmas break

I realize that in order to keep the locals happy we had better post some pictures of our Christmas break. It was Sooooooo great to go back to the Northwest and visit our family and friends. We started with one night at Christy and Larry's house in Bellevue, then we took a one night trip to Newberg, then we bounced around some more in the houses of Marilee's family in the Seattle area over Christmas. Here are the prime pictures:Matt and our niece Danica, the newest addition to the family, whom we hadn't met until this visit.

Marilee and Sasha, our niece who we had seen briefly on the day of her birth, but not for 6 months!

Luke is intently studying the present that we brought for him, which he REALLY wanted to open AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

Marilee and our lone nephew, Luke.

Marilee and Elaina, who is now 6 years old, and missing her front teeth!

Christmas Break part 2

Two days after Christmas we left Seattle to visit Matt's family over in Idaho. Marilee had only a short 5 days there, but Matt got to stay an additional 6 days. So great to see old friends and family, and AFTON, our other adorable niece, proudly pictured below being COOL, as usual.

This shows the final length of Matt's hair, as he cut it all off shortly afterwards, for religious reasons. Everyone was saying he looked like Jesus, and he just can't live up to that kind of pressure.

How many Engineers does it take to post one picture?

Well, only one. But apparently it may take a VERY long time. Anyway, here is the picture of our car that we bought 9 days ago after we sold the Passat. Now it's all dirty, so it looked much nicer before. Oh well!

Adios Pachaku

I've been putting off writing this post becuase I don't yet have any pictures. But, I thought that it must be known that we have sold our car and bought a '95 Honda Accord with ALOT less miles. We will miss all the cool features the Passat had, but we won't miss the high miles! The guy who bought the Passat is actually a student at Harvard who plans to take the car back to Ghana with him. So now it's been all over this country, and it's headed to Africa soon!
Get this though... we bought our new car and took it in to the RMV (REGISTRY of motor vehicles in Mass.) to get a new title and transfer our registration. It turned out that not only did they charge us $65 for those two things, but they also tacked on $210 of sales tax! Massachusetts has to be the #1 most ridiculous tax state. Apparently not only do you have to pay for registration and inspection every year, but they also send you a yearly bill for "excise" tax or something like that. And sales tax every time a car changes hands? Geeze.
Anyway, I'll try to get a picture up soon!

Thanksgiving

We awoke this morning to a beautiful 2-3 inches of snow! It was wonderful. We went out to the parking lot and let Dakota discover what snow is like. She was afraid and confused at first, and didn't want to go outside. But when she did, she started running around sniffing at the snow and shaking her head to try to get it off her face. Then we started throwing snowballs for her, and she realized she could eat it, so then she just ran around licking it up. Then we went up to the park and went sledding for a little while. Matt made an attempt to take Dakota down the hill on the sled, but it ended with a pretty spectacular crash halfway down.
Today we are thankful for snow, probably selling our car, our warm apartment, our usually great and only slightly frustrating dog, money enough to pay the bills and still have some fun, our loving families 3000 miles away, and finally, each other. Oh yeah, and free pie (from Marilee's nanny family).

Poor puppy parenting

For the most part, we figure we're pretty good dog parents. We feed her, get her lots of exercise, only yell when we're REALLY mad etc. Dakota does have to stay alone in the apartment for about 5 hours every day while we're at work and school respectively but we fill up her Kong with peanut butter and leave her lots of toys and she has always seemed to do fine. Every once in a while we come home to find a chewed up letter or pen, but for the most part her time alone in the apartment has been uneventful.

Well today while Matt and I were eating breakfast I said, "Wouldn't it be fun if we could somehow see what she actually does all day? I mean, then we could know if she actually plays with her toys or just lays down and sleeps?" Matt of course used his super-technology alert smarts to point out that we could do just that using some special feature on his video camera. So we set it up today and left for our day at work.

Anyway we came home tonight expecting all kinds of awful thing: tearing up letters, barking out the window... But we didn't expect what we actually got. Dakota just walked around the kitchen all day whining and crying and pawing at the door. It was like she was in a panic all day just wasting away for the moment we'd return.

So now I am riddled with guilt! Now when we leave her at home for five hours I won't imagine her playing with her toys and taking a little nap, I'll see her running in panicked circles crying her little brown eyes out. Now how are we going to be able to leave her? Sucky. Sometimes technology doesn't help. Better to not know. :)

Matt's reaserch

I just thought I would give you a little update on what I'm doing in my reaserch at WPI, now that I have some good pictures of it.
In the picture below, the thick black line on the left is actually a airfoil (like an airplane wing). You can also see a parachute, which is the green blob on the right. The whole setup is sitting inside a water tunnel. What I'm doing is studying the effect of the airfoil (which creates a vortex, like a tornado) on the parachute. The water flows from left to right. We're doing it in water instead of air because it is easier to study, but the results are actually directly comparable, since they are both "fluids."
We have a grant for this research because there have been some occasions where paratroopers chutes have collapsed after they jumped out of the plane. I don't believe anyone has died from it yet, because they all have had backup chutes. And if you're thinking of skydiving, don't worry about this unless there are other planes flying in close formation with you. =)


This picture shows the parachute "breathing" or expanding and contracting. (Look close, it is very subtle).

Dakota at the park

When our visitors were here last week, we discovered that Dakota LOVES playing on the playground equipment at the park! It really hilarious. I've posted a picture below of her going down the slide. All we have to do is say "Go down the slide" and she'll run up the stairs and go down the slide. We're also teaching her to do a whole routine, jumping through hoops, over benches, across bridges, and down the slides. She is probably the smartest dog I've ever dealt with. Yeah, we're proud parents.

Around the house

This picture is of the Fall colors at the park by our house.

Target, the New England way!

Mickelson - Porter visit!

We were incredibly blessed this week to have Matt's parents and sister and our NIECE come to visit us from Idaho! We had a really fun time. Visitors are always good, especially because we are pretty homesick and bored. Anyway, I have put a bunch of pictures below of our visit. I tried to weed out as many pictures as I could, but we took hundreds, so it was hard.

This first set of pictures is from our visit to NYC.

Afton on Matt's mountain board

Dakota in her new MAINE hoodie! Surprisingly, she loved it, and was prancing around all day.

Down by the pier in Maine.

New Job!

Well, our landlord had been talking about turning our backyard into a parking lot for quite some time but all the bids he got from professional contractors were really high. So I figured, "hey, I got free time - the nanny is only 6 hours a day..." So I started my own construction company, specializing in concrete and paving. It was a bit time consuming getting started but our first job is going well and I foresee a strong future for my company, aptly named "Jolin Paving and Excavating".
No, no, fear not...I of course am not anywhere near being qualified to excavate or concrete anything. I just think it's a fabulous coincidence that the company our landlord hired is named Jolin, expecially since I've never before met anyone outside my family with my last name and now I see it all over trucks!

Anyway, we've had fun watching the paving happen but are also totally saddened to see our lovely privacy-giving trees being taken down. Oh, well that's city life I guess. And now we dont 'have to fight for street parking during the winter. Our neighbors promise we'll be glad come December. We'll see.