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