Merry Christmas!

.....or whatever you celebrate!

This was the only Christmas I can remember where it actually snowed all day long! Hope everyone else had a great time too!


Here's everyone on Dave's side of the family. We spent the few days leading up to Christmas in Loveland with them, where we built candy houses, played games, went to church, and had Christmas eve. Our neice Carly played Mary and neice Lily played the angel. Then, after a great Christmas morning, we braved the snowy roads and murderous blizzard conditions to go have Christmas day dinner with Cara's side of the family in Arvada. We ended up staying two days with them, because we didn't want to drive home in the whiteout. We went sledding, played more games, and opened more presents! Fun holiday. We only got a few little things for our baby, which is good because we wanted the presents all to ourselves. She's not even born yet, she doesn't know what she's missing. :)

What I asked for for Christmas

So, check this out: the most expensive ice cream sundae in the world! Five scoops of Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream, laced with Madagascar vanilla, and plated in edible gold leaf. Smother with Amedei Porceleana chocolate, add chunks of hand-crafted Venezualan cocoa, and serve in a crystal goblet with a 18-carat gold spoon with a mother-of-pearl handle. Wait, there's more! Serve with French candied fruits, cherries, truffles, and gold-plated sugar dragees, a small bowl of Grand Passion Caviar flavored with passionfruit and citrus, and top the whole thing with a spun-sugar rose gilded with gold. All for only a thousand dollars! They serve them at the Serendipity restaurant in New York City (www.serendipity3.com/food.htm) along with 13-dollar cheeseburgers and 15-dollar chicken pot pie.

I asked for one for Christmas. Let's see if Santa follows through.

It's a........baby!

So Cara had her 20 week ultrasound today. We went in, and the baby was somersaulting around so much that the technician had to keep searching around to get a good look at the stuff the doctor wanted to see. It was pretty cool, we say the spine, ribcage, bladder; the baby had its arms up like it was blocking punches in a prizefight and kept kicking at the inside of the uterus. Here's some photos! Not the highest quality, but ultrasounds are all gray and grainy anyways so it doesn't matter much. In the first one you can see the face, looking toward you, with the big fat belly to the left of it. The baby's arm is seen in cross-section, like its extending out towards you. The face kinda looks like some alien skull thing, but in the next one it looks more like a kid. You can see the baby in profile, looking off to the left, with a little nose and big poochy lips. The coolest sight, a picture of which the technician did not give us, was one where we could see all four chambers of the heart, all beating together. Anyways, come April 29th, for sure we'll be parents!

Oh, by the way, it's a girl. :)

Googling yourself

If you go to Google, and search the images for "Tarullo," the tenth picture is our wedding photo! Even though the caption under it looks like our names are Rod and Kathy. I didn't know our wedding site was still online. So, we are the fourth most popular Tarullos on Google. Ahead of us are:
Matt Tarullo, the former Dallas Cowboys guard who now plays on the practice team (whatever that is) of the New York Giants
Mike Tarullo, of the firm Schottenstein, Zox, and Dunn, who sits on the board of directors of The Builder's Exchange Forum
Vincent Tarullo, a certified public accountant operating out of Wolcott, Connecticut
Also, there is a company in Italy called Tarullo Video that apparently specializes in wedding recordings, but since it's a company and not a person, I'm not really counting it.

Anyways, here is the link to our old wedding website. Maybe if enough people visit it, we will become the most popular Tarullos on Google!

http://www.tarullo.com/index3.html

A week in the hospital

Well, not as a patient, but as a first year med student... and what an experience! I've spent time in hospitals before, as a volunteer, a research assistant, a shadower, or a visitor, but never as part of a healthcare team. It was really fun. I was assigned to Internal Medicine, and I think I can say that I'd rather specialize in something else. One resident I was talking with went on and on about how he loved internal medicine, because it was all about the physiology and biochemistry of the body, and how it's like a little mystery to solve with every patient that comes in. So I'm sitting there, thinking to myself: "I have been fighting an epic battle with my nemesis ever since school started, and its name is BIOCHEMISTRY, and it uses PHYSIOLOGY as its auxiliary artillery." I'm all about solving the mystery, but I think some other methods would be a more natural fit for me. Really nice people, though, especially one intern named Dr Armstrong, who took time out to make sure I was involved in everything. Only one exception: one of the attendings, who was from New York (and whose brother-in-law, incidently, is a writer for Scrubs, and she's always trying to pawn off her script ideas on him), and was a t-shirt wearing member of the Hierarchy of Medicine club - meaning, I dropped off her radar as soon as my resident introduced us, and she interrupted me before I had even finished my name. Ah well. I hear that's more of a regional thing: programs back east and in the midwest seem to instil the hierarchy into people, while the mountian states and, to a degree, the west coast, seem to opt for a more collegial paradigm. I know medicine doesn't interest all of you as much as it does me, but one more story - wait, I don't think I can tell you. Thanks a lot, HIPAA. People have gotten fired for posting stuff online about work. So, anyways, if I ever see you in person, maybe I can tell you then.

Kickin' babies and bad eyesight

So this last Saturday was the first time that Cara felt the baby move! We were driving around in some uncharacteristically foggy weather and Cara said she felt a fluttering, like "a bubble, but not where you would expect to feel a bubble." Hooray! Our kid is alive! We find out a week from today whether our first offspring is a girl or a boy. We have two neices on the Price side and two nephews on the Tarullo side, so either way, it will be the first grandchild of that gender for one of the sets of grandparents. Here is Cara looking as beautiful as always standing next to our apartment-sized Christmas tree; the baby is in the picture somewhere, but it's hiding. Cara also got a new job at church, as the president of the Primary! Which means she is in charge of all the kid's classes. Teaching kids all day during the week, then being in charge of them all Sunday, all on top of soon having our own? She'll become an expert in no time at all.

Dave just finished his first semester of medical school! Feels good to be, what, 1/8th finished? He's not quite done yet, actually... this week he's working in the Internal Medicine department at University Hospital, but there's no test or anything so the semester might as well be over. In other news, tragic news, the eyesight in his right eye has degraded some and so he's back in glasses. Bleh.... slightly annoying to have had LASIK surgery and to be back wearing spectacles anyways. We can't afford surgery again right now, so it was either glasses or an eyepatch as a temporary fix.

A few old things

Some of you might remember last year, instead of sending out Christmas cards, we made a little video and emailed it to everyone. During a recent round of hard-drive-clearing-out, I found it:

Dave's Brain

So, being a financially-challenged medical student faced with the prospect of over $180,000 in debt, we have tried to make and/or save money in any way we could. Living so close to a research hospital, there is a high demand for human research subjects... you do the math, I'm sure you would come up with the same conclusion I did. Anyways, I got paid $150 to sit in an MRI machine for an hour on two separate occasions, tapping a little button with my finger while the technicians looked to see if the medicinal patch on my arm was affecting my synapses or not. I asked them for a copy of all the pictures they took, and the obliged by providing me with 175 slices of the inside of my head, 4 or which you can see here. How cool! My skin felt a little tingly in the MRI, but that was about it. I tried to activate only certain synapses in a pattern that would spell out "Hello!" in order to surprise the technician, but that level of biologic control is attainable only by Hindu fakirs and Tibetan monks, apparently. Not only that, I am not sure what side they look at the slices from, so the message may well have been spelled out backwards, if I got it to work at all. Anyways, it looks like I have a healthy brain!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, we just had our Thanksgiving weekend. We went to Cara's parents' house, along with all her sisters and grandparents. Aunt Cindy and Uncle Don came up just for dinner on Thursday. I can't remember the last time we had a cold, snowy, and cloudy Thanksgiving; memories of Turkey Bowls from countless years past always seem to be sunny and slightly warm, even if all the grass is dead and there's no leaves on the trees. We finally turned the heat on in our apartment. Anyways, it was a whirlwind weekend, with 15+ people lodging at the Tarullo's house. I've always liked Thanksgiving, just because it doesn't seem to be as commercialized as the holidays that surround it. Halloween decorations pop up in late august, and Christmas ones appear in mid-october. I can't even remember a place selling Thanksgiving decorations... maybe a shelf or two of turkeys and pilgrims at the local dollar store, but that's it. The day seems more about lazing around and stuffing yourself stupid. My kind of holiday.
Regardless, now we can start on Christmas. We are totally on top of things this year, we have most of our Christmas shopping done already, and those things we don't have yet are on order or at least planned out. We are sending out Christmas postcards this year; last year we were out of the country and never got around to it. So, that's the plan for this afternoon anyway. How thrilling, I know.
Anyway, I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving, too!