Quinn Update

Hey Family!
Ira is super mellow right now, and might be falling asleep, so here's my chance to let you know how things are going for us... which is, great!
* Easter and Conference: We drove up to Niagara Falls, which was a blast. The Romeros were fun as usual, and took us to Lake Ontario where we skipped rocks and squinted to see Canada. We also went on a hike, made peanut butter eggs, painted real eggs, and ate both. We hid and hunted for eggs, watched Where the Wild Things Are, and of course conference. Anthony and I decided that we'll have to spend the next several FHE's reading the talks since we were distracted by cousin cuteness and Ira much of the time. Ah, first conference as a parent. Ah, so this is what it's like?
* D.C.: After Niagara, we drove to to D.C. where we got a glimpse of the blossoms (beautiful!), caught a free concert at the Lincoln Center, and got to go to the temple for the first time since Ira was born. Woohoo! The concert was fabulous! It was a group from Brazil, doing fun stuff you just want to jump up and dance to. We felt kind of bad for the performers since they are probably use to a much more lively audience. We were also really lucky to be in the District during the Ellsworth Aunts' visit, so Aunt Janet, who forgot her recommend was able to watch Ira, while the rest of us went in. We also met Christian Hurst (for those of you who know him) and his wife for dinner. They just moved into town, and took us out to a Greek tapas place.
* Ira's asleep. What a cutie! We can't get enough of that kid. He's cooing, and sleeping more at night, and squeeled with joy so loud yesterday that after recovering from the shock, I couldn't stop laughing.
* Project of the week: I made a mei tai. It's an asian style baby carrier, and I loooove it. It's really comfortable, and cute..at least I'd like to think so. We'll keep using our Maya wrap, but it'll be better for long walks and hikes.
O.k. visiting teachers are on the way. Love you guys!
Sharon

Fall Fun

This fall has been rather enjoyable. This is the beautiful view on our back porch. Sharon has also written an update, so I will keep this short as we have a lot of overlap.

School: I survived the first half of the semester. I front loaded it, so I would have more time the last half to work on my capstone project. This has turned out to be a good thing because no one else on my team seems to have time to get things done, so it's good one of the six of us is thinking about it. That made it sound really bad, but it isn't that bad, it just feels that way some times. Tomorrow we have a major milestone due, that will be a good measure of how much effort everyone has been putting in. I've been enjoying my last classes, trying to get as much as I can out of school before I'm done.

Pregnancy: Sharon is doing well. I am amazed at how easy she makes being pregnant look. I always thought women got moody and cranky when they were pregnant, but so far life has been good. That could change as we enter the 3rd trimester. Everyone has been asking for a belly shot, so we came up with this idea on our walk.

Jobs: Sharon gave a good update on this. The job hunt has been taking a lot of time, about the equivalent to a whole other class. It could have been worse if I were traveling for more interviews; fortunately few companies are flying candidates out for on-site interviews. I guess that comes with difficult economic times. If the executives can't get flown around, why new hires? It's looking like Pittsburgh, Connecticut, or Boston could be potential landing spots for us right now. I've been reading about Connecticut the most and liking the possibility, except for the cost of living.

Fun: We did our annual pumpkin carving. As we were leaving DC we found we found ourselves wondering if they would be smashed when we got home. We took that as an omen. When we got back, they were gone. Down the street a ways we found remnants of pumpkin, but there was no way of identifying if they were ours, just the circumstantial evidence.











In my opinion this fall has been much better than last fall. I don't know if last year my head was down more or what, but fall this year has been spectacular. We've been able to get out and enjoy it more too. There is a great park near our house that drops into a ravine so you can't hear or see much of civilization. It was nice walking along the path and enjoying the trees. It was a nice calm day with little gusts of wind that would come and blow through the trees knocking dozens of leaves off the branches. The leaves would then slowly and peacefully float down to the ground. It reminded me of watching snow fall in the lamp light in front of our house when I was growing up. It made me happy.

Going back to DC was nice. I really liked Georgetown. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal ride was fun. I liked when they filled the lock to bring the boat up to the next level. It was cool that they still had the original tow paths and had mules to pull us along for most of the tour. I wish they did longer tours. I liked learning about the history of the canal too. We were lucky to catch it on the last weekend of the year. If anyone is in DC when it is running I commend it.

I'm looking forward to the next few weekends. We are going to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and a ballet called Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project. So we should have some good updates/reviews coming up soon.

For more fun photos you can see our online photo album.

Sharon’s Updates

This week was busy and I have created a couple of posts below to capture the major events. I have put Sharon’s family update first, which is a good quick overview. I should note that Sharon is good about writing family updates and it was suggested that I post her updates for a second point of view and since this is the Quinntessentials it only makes sense to have updates from both of us. I will start posting them from here on out, so without further ado, Sharon’s update….

Hi Family,
   It's been a fun, kind of party-ish week and a half.  I think I'll try to write it in bullet form so you can skim through all my lengthy commentary. :)
*  Balloons: Anthony and I won over $50 in gift certificates at a little town event adult balloon toss.  It was really fun.  Live music and free food.  The fact that I made it out without getting soaked was nice too.  If only Anthony could say the same.  :) 
*  Family!:  My cousin Mary and her husband Barney arrived late Saturday night from Orem.  She's due about 3 days after me, so it was fun to have another prego around. :)  I enjoyed showing them how to use the Metro system, and around D.C. a little.  We went to the temple on Tuesday to do a session and go out to lunch with my parents who have officially started serving their mission in D.C!
*  NYC:  Anthony took a couple of days off work (which has been suuuper slow), so we could go up to New York with Mary and Barney.  We slept at my parents place in PA, met up with our friend Gabe Proulx and made our way to the Big Apple.  It's fun because Gabe, Ant, and Barney all lived in the Bountiful Court apts. and were all friends before I moved in.  I grew up with Gabe, who talked me into moving into the BC, where I met Anthony.  Yay!  And then in a round about way, Mary and Barney met because I had lived there.  Anyway, so it was good to be with so many close friends/relatives.  In New York, we saw Phantom of the Opera, ate some New York Pizza, saw Ground Zero, the Apple store, took a Ferry to and from Staten Island where we could get a good view of the Brooklyn bridge and Statue of Liberty. 
*  Amish country:  The next day we felt like being lazy, so we checked out Hershey Chocolate World, and went out for some seriously authentic Pennsylvania dutch food.  Mmm.  Hamloaf and woopie pie.  Then back to D.C.
*  Mary and Barney headed back last night after we had a fun visit/lunch with my parents and Quoc, and old family friend.  And then we headed North to Maryland where we could watch Phish...Anthony's one and only favorite band. They broke up a few years ago, but have reunited for a tour this summer.  It was pretty sweet, but it was past my bedtime most of the time.  And I couldn't help but wish for tiny earplugs for the baby, who is now 4 moths along!  Woohoo! 
   It was definitely a fun week.  I guess it was kind of the last Hurrah before heading back to Pittsburgh (which we're looking forward to) and going back to teaching preschool (which I'm trying to get pumped up for).  I guess I'm a little nervous since I've been so spoiled with so much free time to play and sleep. 
  Love you guys!  We constantly feel blessed to have you as family!
  Sharon  

She also had a lot of pictures attached all of which, plus more can be found in our online photo album for the summer here.

DC

Phish Concert

Saturday we bid farewell to Barney and Mary and headed up to Columbia, MD for my first Phish concert (and probably the last) at the Merriweather Post Pavilion. This was Sharon’s Christmas/Birthday present to me. I have wanted to see this band live since I got into them in High School, you can read my previous post about it here.

It was a nice evening and we had great seats in the Pavilion. The concert was really good. I wouldn’t say it was ‘amazing’ just because I had set my expectations pretty high. I wish I could have heard the music a little better, but the experience was really fun and totally worth it. I’m looking into how I can get a copy of the show now. Phish is cool that way, they encourage the sharing of concerts, music, etc... One guy behind us was videotaping it, which I think was against the rules at the Pavilion to do so, but there were a lot of illegal things happening. After the first few songs he asked me to switch places with Sharon because I was too tall and kept getting in the way. He said he would send me a copy of the tape. I switched and can only hope he comes through with the tape.

I think I came to learn many things at the concert one of which is that a bunch of the songs I like are sung or strongly influenced by the pianist, Page McConnell. I need to look more into his side projects and band, Vida Blue. I also realized that as much fun as the concert experience is with the crazy people, fun light show, and seeing the band interact, I like having recordings to really hear the music.

In true Phan fashion I will end with the set list

First set:
Crowd Control 
Kill Devil Falls
The Sloth
Beauty Of A Broken Heart
Axilla I
Foam
Esther
Ha Ha Ha
Party Time (World Debut, a Jon Fishman song)
Tube
Stealing Time From The Faulty Plan
Strange Design
Time Turns Elastic
Second set:
Tweezer
Taste
Alaska 
Let Me Lie
46 Days
Oh! Sweet Nuthin' (Velvet Underground)
Harry Hood
Encore:
Good Times Bad Times (Grateful Dead)
Tweezer Reprise

The Big Apple

Sharon’s cousin, Mary, and her husband, Barney, came to DC for a little vacation  before Barney starts his MBA and Mary gives birth to their first child. I got a few days off work so we could all go and play. We headed up to Marietta, PA to pick up Gabe a friend Sharon grew up with and the rest of us got to know when we all lived in the same apartment complex in Provo.

With the gang together we drove over to New York to get as much in as we could in one day. We took the ferry over from Staten Island which allowed us to see the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. We then took the metro up to time square and got tickets to Phantom of the Opera (we tried to get into Wicked, but that didn’t happen). We had some New York pizza, went to Central Park, saw the Apple store, checked out the Trump Tower and its supper expensive ice cream shop (we passed on that for some Baskin Robins), saw ground Zero, and then headed home.

New York was a packed day so we took Thursday nice and slow in Marietta. We visited Hersey, PA (really Derry, pronounced dairy, Township) and enjoyed the magic of Hershey’s Chocolate World. We stopped by Sharon’s old work, ‘The Country Table’, to get a taste of the Pennsylvania Dutch food. It was really good. That afternoon we headed back to Washington. More pictures can be found on our DC album for the summer.

This was a really fun trip. We were with good fun people and we all got along well. It was nice to get out and just have fun. However, as great as a place as New York City is I realized that I probably wouldn’t want to live there. I do think that living close enough to make it there once or twice a year to enjoy Broadway and other attractions would be really fun.

4th of July

Sharon’s sister and brother-in-law came down with their family the morning of the 4th to visit. We enjoyed having them here. We took them including our cute nieces and nephews out to ice-cream at our favorite local shop, ‘The Dairy Godmother’. It is a really fun little shop that has two flavors of frozen custard, Vanilla & Chocolate, with a mystery flavor every day. They also have a handful of Sorbet flavors that are fun and creative. We discovered that since our last trip there President Obama had paid a visit to the shop and we were the lucky ones to sit in the chair he had used. We felt pretty special.

We decided to brave the crowds in Washington DC to have the experience of celebrating Independence Day in the Capital. It was hard not to feel patriotic watching the fireworks going off behind the Washington Monument and cheering with the hundreds of thousands of people sprawled all over the Mall.

Our Metro ride home was almost as much fun, just more personal with the millions of people trying to get home. I think I might have to add it to the top three of my ‘most crowded public transportation moments’. I never expected one of them to happen in the U.S. Every stop one person got off, three or more people tried to squeeze in. Sharon didn’t even have to hold on to anything for balance. In the end, we made it home safe and sound.

My conclusion is I prefer the small town 4th of July experience. I was reminiscing with Sharon about the 4th of July in Park City. I would sleep out on the trampoline, wake up and do the city fun run, eat\help at the city breakfast in the quaint city park, then watch the parade on Main Street. That would be followed by an afternoon BBQ or Dutch oven cooking in the back yard with family and friends; concluding the day watching the fireworks against the majestic mountains from our deck. It sounds like we might get that experience next year.