End of Summer - School Begins

Arielle and I flew back to Seattle at the beginning of August for her cousin, Jessica's wedding. The flights over were pretty uneventful and it was my first time really visiting Seattle for vacation and not work related. We rented a car and stayed with Arielle's aunt and uncle. The rental car was a Ford Fusion and was fun to drive compared to our old car. Seattle was a blast! We visited some of my WSU friends and had dinner with them at MOD pizza (my favorite), went to the first Starbucks and went through Pikes Place Market.

Arielle decorated cupcakes for the wedding and helped to make the s'mores party favors, I helped make some massive amounts of Asian coleslaw. The day of, we helped to set up all of the food and cupcakes. The wedding was really nice in an event center next to the beach. The weather was nice and sunny, which is a rarity for Seattle.

After Seattle we headed back with Arielle's family to Spokane. Arielle went and visited some old work friends, we spent time with both families and the Walkers threw us a party so that we could see the rest of the family and some other friends. I spent a good portion with Mo Money playing FIFA and visiting with his family. I stopped and started my bike before we headed back out to Ann Arbor. Overall it was a fun visit but it was only a few days.

The flight back was a mess with delayed airports, a crazy guy who kept turning off my air, and a huge thunderstorm in the mid-west. Once we landed a friend of Arielle's picked us up and drove us home. It was raining so hard during part of the drive that people were pulling off the freeway to wait for the rain to let up. I do love the mid-west storms!
As the summer came to an end we visited campus and figured out where our classes were going to be. I started my new program in Applied Economics and Arielle is just finishing her last semester. Arielle is still working in the lab finishing up the study. They have one baby still in the study.

Halloween/Thanksgiving/Fall Semester

We've been pretty busy the past few months. The semester has been easier for me than it has for Dimitri. I am only taking 3 classes and they are all on Monday and Wednesday so I am free the rest of the week. I spend Friday mornings volunteering at an elementary school helping out in three Adapted P.E. classes and on Thursdays I am often doing data collections or in the lab working on data reduction. The rest of the semester will be pretty easy for me, I just have a couple of papers to write and one exam and then I'm done! Next semester I'm going to take 4 classes and so far they are all on Tuesday/Thursday so I will have long weekends again which is really nice, and it is really convenient for data collection since they are in the mornings and are at least a few hours.

One of the babies on a treadmill (they are usually naked).

The research project I am working on is called Myelomeningocele Intervention or MMC study. MMC is one type of spina bifida. For the study we have families do treadmill training 5 days a week for 10 minutes a day with their baby with MMC. The parents hold their baby on the treadmill and try to get them to take weight on their legs.  Every 6 months they do a bone scan to see if their bones are becoming more dense (which is a good thing) among other tests we run. Babies with MMC generally have very low bone density in their legs making them more likely to break their bones and depending on the level in the spinal cord where the lesion is people with MMC may only walk for a few years. We're hoping to increase their bone density and possibly help them to walk longer and avoid assistive devices. So far things are looking promising, but many of the babies haven't graduated from the study yet so we will see!

Dimitri is taking 6 classes this semester and can't wait to be on Christmas break. He spends at least 40 hours a week doing homework. He is currently waiting on the Master in Applied Economics program to see if they will let him do a dual masters (right now he is in Master in Financial Engineering). It's university policy that they have to see one semesters worth of grades before they can grant you a dual masters so he won't find out until December some time.

Ann Arbor by our apartment.

For Halloween this year we were really excited because there are a lot of kids in our apartment complex which meant that there would be lots of trick or treaters, BUT then we realized we're both in class until 8 pm on Halloween which meant we wouldn't be home until almost 9 pm. By the time we got home no one was out so we got stuck with all the candy. Oh well! : ) We carved pumpkins the weekend before Halloween. My pumpkin said 'Trick or Treat' and Dimitri's pumpkin was of Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas. They turned out pretty good I think!

Our 2012 pumpkins.

For Thanksgiving my advisor invited us to her house with the other grad students, but we decided to do our own Thanksgiving since it was our first chance to do one with just us. We ended up finding a 10 pound turkey and ate around 3 pm. We made cheesy potatoes, stuffing, rolls, cranberries, gravey, and pumpkin pie to go along with the turkey and we have A LOT of left over. Everything ended up being done around the same time which worked out really good. (Dimitri's Note: Arielle hasn't liked stuffing but this year said it has grown on her lol.)

Dimitri wearing his chef jacket from Natalya.

The finished meal before we ate.

We went on a walk after we ate dinner and heard a scratching coming from the dumpsters. We walked over and looked in the recycling bin because raccoons often get themselves stuck in them when the trash isn't full enough. He wasn't in the recycling so I lifted the lid of the garbage and couldn't see it until I looked down and he was looking right at me and hissed. After a few attempts Dimitri was able to get the lid to open all the way and we put a vacuum cleaner (someone left it by the dumpster) in the corner of the dumpster so the raccoon could climb out. We thought the vacuum fell over so we went to go get a big stick from the other dumpster, but when we were walking back we saw the raccoon go down the sewer drain in the parking lot.

Today we decorated our apartment for Christmas. Our tree is up and we put lights around our back slider door. We listened to Christmas music for a good 6 hours and watched Frosty the Snowman. We also got most of our Christmas shopping done online today so we won't have to travel with everything when we go back to Spokane for Christmas.