Russell Wood Fontoura

So he is here! It's almost been 2 weeks since our sweet son made his debut and things are going great. He is a perfect baby and we are so blessed. It still feels pretty surreal most of the time to know that we are parents, especially when my mom was here helping. It felt more like we were playing house. Does anyone else feel that way?

So the week before he was due I went to the doctor and they pretty much assured me he wasn't coming anytime soon and told me we could talk about induction at my next appointment. I was kind of worried because I had already stopped working the week before and I didn't want to spend my maternity leave without a baby. So I called my boss and picked up some extra shifts that week. I ended up working a full workweek- 3 12 hour days, one of which was Friday, May 10th. During the day on Friday I started getting some back pains, but they weren't really bothersome and I'd had similar pains before so I didn't think much of it. By the time I was heading home at 7 pm they were becoming a little more painful and occurring regularly. I thought maybe this was the start of something, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. Plus, Ricardo was kind of mad at me for working 2 days before my due date because he didn't want me to have to go through labor after working a 12 hour shift. I didn't want him to be right :)

After dinner I was convinced I was actually having contractions 5 minutes apart and they were getting increasingly painful, not terrible at this point but definitely noticeable. Around 10 oclock I called my OB and the on call doctor said I could come in but warned me that they may send me home if it wasn't time. When I got to the hospital they monitored me for an hour and saw that I was having regular contractions but weren't convinced the baby was coming yet so they sent me home. People kept saying, "it's your first baby, it's going to take awhile..." They told me to take a Benadryl and try to get some sleep and come back later in the weekend when things got worse. At this point the contractions were getting pretty painful, so I didn't really know when would be the appropriate time to come back. I thought things were already at worse! I took the Benadryl like they told me but neither one of us got any sleep for the 2 hours that we were home. Soon enough my water broke and that was our ticket back to the hospital. They were pretty surprised to see us again and even more surprised that I was already halfway dilated at this point. I am convinced I just wasn't dramatic enough when I came in with contractions the first time. Turns out if you calmly tell someone that you are having painful contractions they don't necessarily believe you! It was 2 AM by this point and after labs, receiving fluids, and waiting for anesthesia to show up, I didn't get my epidural until 4:30. Worst 2.5 hours of my life, but after the epidural it was smooth sailing. Ricardo and I both got to sleep for an hour and a half. At 6 they woke me up and checked me and said, "ok, it's time to have the baby." I was shocked! He was born at 6:41 AM on May 11, one day before his due date and of course, as Ricardo predicted, immediately after working a 12 hour shift. :)

We had a great stay in the hospital. I delivered at one of the hospitals where I work and it was great. This hospital is out in the suburbs and just opened in September. It is beautiful and the staff was amazing. Even the food was good. Sunday was Mother's day and it was so fun to spend it with my perfect newborn baby my husband. We went home on Monday and my mom flew in on Tuesday. She stayed for a week and just left this past Tuesday, which was a lot of fun. We ate like kings and just enjoyed hanging out with Russell. Ricardo only has one class this summer so he has had a lot of free time to spend with us, which has been really nice. Anyway, see below for pictures, which I'm sure is all you want anyway!

     Last pregnant picture! Yay for being able to sleep on my stomach now.

     First father and son picture.

     How he spends most of his time...

     We love Grandma!

     He's not a huge fan of tummy time yet. He does like getting his hair washed though, which is a perk!

    ALL of the pictures of me with Russell consist of me sitting in this chair either right before or right after he eats, so I will only subject you to one.

    More father and son bonding

      Do they look alike?

  We love this boy.

Life before baby

...is quickly coming to an end! As of today there are less than 4 weeks until my due date, which means he could really come anytime now if he wants. I feel like the anomaly amongst pregnant moms, because I'm really not in any rush for him to come yet! I just don't feel ready! For one thing, our apartment is currently under construction so he doesn't really have a place to sleep right now. For another, Ricardo is going out of town in 2 weekends for a school event so I hope he doesn't come before or during that trip. And, if we need a third reason, I'm supposed to work up until May 3rd. Maybe I'm putting too much pressure on our little boy to do what I want, but he's been pretty well-behaved during my pregnancy so far, so I'm hoping for the best. :)

Life has been good since my last post. We have been keeping busy with work and school, but we both both enjoy what we do so that is a plus. My parents came out to D.C. in March so my dad could run a marathon through the city. We were lucky enough that Ricardo was on spring break at that time and I had a few random days off of work so we were able to go hang out for the weekend. My dad did great and we had a blast spending time with my parents and my sister and her kids. I did have some pictures of this occasion, but unfortunately our house was broken into a few weeks later, so I lost pictures on my camera that I hadn't uploaded onto our computer yet. Luckily, no one was home when we were robbed (apparently burglarized is the proper term for being broken into when you're not home, but it doesn't flow as well in conversation. Sorry, Lane!) and we had renter's insurance so everything we lost is being covered. We feel super lucky that things ended up the way they did and that we're both ok, as well as our neighbors who were robbed also. However, I probably won't ever enjoy April Fool's Day quite so much in the future. :)

On a lighter note, I also recently had a baby shower, which was thrown by some awesome friends here. Alisha's husband Brad snapped a few pictures, which was great. The theme was Beach Baby, since this really is a Florida baby despite the fact that he'll be born in the frozen north. On a side note, spring has finally started to arrive here and we love it!

Other fun things we've been up to since my last post.. 

We got cheap seats to see the 76er's play the Magic. We went with some dental school friends and had fun trying to decide who we should cheer for.

We also dyed eggs on Easter with our good friend Stuart. Poor Ricardo is being squashed by me and the baby in this picture.

Last weekend Temple celebrated its 150th anniversary of the dental school. Fun fact, they are the second-oldest dental school in the country. Can you name the oldest? The school had a huge celebration weekend which included a gala on Saturday night at a really ritzy art museum. Lots of alumni came out and some even sponsored students to go since tickets were super expensive. Ricardo got chosen to go and had a great time meeting Temple alumni and enjoying the event.

P.S. He's a little worried about the wine glass in this picture-it contains soda, we promise :)

Well...next time I post it will probably be about a little baby! Wish us (mostly me) luck!

12 Highlights of 2012

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a great time celebrating. For our New Years celebration, we had a deep frying party with some friends. We made sweet potato fries, jalapenos, cauliflower, mozzarella cheese sticks, won tons, and donuts. It was delicious and also the perfect way to start the new year by eating healthy. After a few plates of fried food, it's amazing how your desire for salad increases!

Since then we have been back to the daily grind of school and work, but I wanted to take a moment to look back on 2012 because it was an incredible year. Probably the most eventful year of our marriage so far. Here are my top 12 of 2012, in no particular order except for the last one. :)

12. Trip to New York City! See my last post for details, but we had an awesome time sightseeing in New York for the day over Ricardo's Christmas break. We are trying to reap the benefits of living in the northeast where everything is so close!

11. Living in Miami. We love Florida! It was so much fun to live so close to both of our families and enjoy the perks of the Sunshine State, including this trip to the Keys pictured below. We made such good friends in south Florida and are looking forward to a return visit hopefully soon!

10. Kylie's trip to Toronto. I got an all-expense paid vacation to this fun city for a school conference. It was wonderful! Toronto is a really neat city and Niagara Falls was a fun day trip as well. We got to compete in the national Physician Assistant challenge bowl competition and though we lost, it was a fun last hurrah before graduation.

9. Ricardo's trip to Chicago. He had a similar school conference in Chicago this November for the American Student Dental Association. He is now obsessed with Chicago and is looking forward to taking me back there.

8. Ricardo's trip to Brazil. Honestly, we have never traveled so much as we did this year. Ricardo got to go to Brazil with his dad for a 10 day vacation last March. It had been years since he'd been back there and he had a blast traveling and seeing his family.

7. Our move to Philly! In July we packed up and drove from Miami to Philadelphia, with just a few detours in Orlando, Jacksonville, and DC to see friends and family. We had a great few days in DC with my sister's family sightseeing and relaxing before school started.

6. Ricardo graduated with his Master's degree in Biomedical Sciences from Barry University. Unfortunately, with the timing of our fun-filled year we didn't get to actually attend his graduation, but he still deserves kudos for getting his master's degree in a year and getting into dental school! Here we are celebrating getting into Temple!

5. Three year wedding anniversary! It's hard to believe that three (now, almost 3.5) years have gone by since we were married. We had a fun anniversary and continue to enjoy married life together.

4. Ricardo started dental school at Temple University! He is loving school and is thrilled every day to be attending Temple in particular. School keeps him busy, but we're very blessed to be here!

3. I graduated from PA school. After 27 months of very long days and learning mountains of information I successfully completed my master's degree and graduated from Nova Southeastern University. It was such a fun time in my life and I'm grateful for all of the close friends I made, as well as my useful degree!

2. I got my first job as a PA and am working at Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. I'm enjoying my job and slowly coming to grips with the fact that I'm not a student anymore and I actually make the decisions. I tend not to take pictures of myself while working, so you all will have to just imagine what it looks like.


1. We found out we are going to be parents! I have been getting a lot of flak for not posting this piece of news sooner, but here are a few pictures of our baby boy that will be born this May. We are excited/nervous/terrified/grateful to welcome a new person to our family and appreciate any and all advice!

Christmas Fun

Merry Christmas! We hope everyone has had a great holiday season. We're very sad to see it quickly ending. In fact, we were just talking about how long we could leave our Christmas decorations up and not be judged. Our house just looks so much better with our tree and all of our decorations! One Christmas we had such a great tree that it stayed fresh until the end of January and we totally kept it that whole time. I think it was still good going into February, but by then we had come to terms with the fact that Christmas was over. We'll see what happens this year. :)

We planned a day right before Christmas to head to downtown Philly and see all of the Christmas stuff. We started the day off at Macy's and saw the famous Wanamaker organ- it has the most pipes of any organ in the whole world and for some reason they decided to put it in a department store. It's actually not that big size-wise, but it has its claim to fame anyway. Here we are in front of it:

This is me in the middle of city hall-it is huge and you can just walk right through the middle.

Ricardo in Love Park. They have a bunch of people selling Christmas paraphernalia here-we enjoyed walking around window shopping. I wanted to find a Philadelphia Christmas ornament, but no one had one!

Last time we were here it was about 40 degrees warmer than it is now. This day was actually really nice though. We got lucky.

Ricardo and the nutcracker. Yes, he has facial hair in this picture. See hunting pictures below.

                                           T is for Temple University!

We finished the day off with lunch in the Comcast building, which is one the tallest buildings in Philadelphia-no one is allowed to be taller than William Penn's statue, but Comcast is a close second. We have a good friend that works for Comcast, so he got us in for lunch on the 43rd floor. It was a really cool view of the city! Thanks Stu!

I had to work Christmas Eve night and Christmas night, so that made celebrating a little difficult. Ricardo made this delicious dinner on Christmas Eve before I went to work and we also enjoyed the leftovers for Christmas dinner before I went back to work. We made Cornish game hens our first Christmas when we lived in Utah, so we decided to revive the tradition again this year. It was phenomenal. Poor Ricardo was alone for much of the day on Christmas while I was sleeping, but we were able to open gifts and talk/skype to our families, which was fun. It also snowed for the first time this year on Christmas Eve night, which was great timing. Hope you all enjoyed your Christmases!

The day after Christmas Ricardo went hunting with his good friend Jake. As you can probably tell from the picture, Jake does this a lot. Ricardo told me throughout the whole month of December that he had to grow out a beard because that is what hunters do and you're not allowed to go without one. After a few days of protest (I'm not a beard lover), I agreed. Unfortunately, there were no deer to be found that day and they ended up walking around in the snow and rain for much of the day, but they had fun and I'm sure there will be more outings in the future. As for the beard thing...we'll see.

The next day we headed to New York City for the day! We bundled up and took a bus from Chinatown in Philly to Chinatown in New York. We spent the morning walking around Chinatown and Little Italy and ate a great Vietnamese lunch.

We took the subway uptown and got out right across the street from Trump Tower. Ricardo loves Donald Trump. Really. So he was so excited that we got to see this building.

                           
                                                Columbus Circle, New York City

                        Our next stop was Central Park, which was surprisingly beautiful in the winter.

After a day in New York, our perspective of Philadelphia being a big city has definitely changed!

We were also able to go to the Manhattan LDS Temple. It is incredibly beautiful on the inside as well as the outside and we enjoyed being able to see it.

                     Ricardo was excited to have a hot dog from a street vendor in the big city.  Can you tell?

                                                   Rockefeller Center and the famous tree!

             The line to ice skate here was incredibly long. It was fun to watch though!

                                                               Little Brazil Street!

                                    We saw this giant ad in the middle of Times Square!

Times Square was packed! I can't imagine what it will be like in just a few days.

After some New York pizza and a short bus trip, we were home again last night. So convenient to live in the middle of the northeast. We are still making plans to visit Boston and Niagara Falls at some point in the next few years. Wishing everyone a wonderful new year!!