WOW! Another year has flown by! It was a year of many changes in the Foster house. In February we found out we were expecting a baby! We welcomed Ruby Adelaide Foster on October 12, which happened to be her due date (punctual!!). She weighed in at 7 pounds and 0.8 ounces and was 20 inches long. She was just 36 minutes short of being born on the first ever National Fossil Day. Her name comes from both the gemstone and Ruby Canyon, which the Colorado River runs along here in our area. Adelaide is a German name meaning “of noble kin” – a nod to John’s German side of the family. Both names are also found in ReBecca’s family tree. ReBecca’s parents were in town for the big day and John’s father flew in the morning after she was born. Having all of our parents in town for her arrival was very special for us.
We had decided to let her gender be a surprise and once she was born it took us nearly two minutes before someone asked “Is it a boy or a girl?” and we realized we had forgotten to check! We were just happy to have her in the world with us, complete with all ten fingers and toes. She is a perfect little girl who brings us new surprises every day. We love waking up to her little smiles in the morning. She has started trying to talk with us, which never fails to make us laugh. She is also very good at looking like a beetle while she’s asleep.
Other news for the year was our move from our home in Grand Junction to our new home in Fruita. It was hard to say goodbye to our first home together, but we are enjoying our new place that has more space and is much closer to the museum. We cut our commute down to a mile and a half! All of the cats are doing well and have settled into the new place. They enjoy having a yard they can roam in, as does Tikka (our dog), who has a new dog cottage to sleep in. All four of our fish (Tank, Flavio, Chip and Chip) survived the move and have a better view of the action in our new living room.
With our new yard, John has become reacquainted with lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, and weed-eaters and has been introduced to the fun of broken irrigation pump low-pressure switches. We spent nearly a week in the field in beautiful northwestern Nebraska in May, collecting fossil turtles and oreodonts for the Museum – and ReBecca found a nice rodent skull. On the same trip we shot up to the Black Hills to visit friends and see the new paleo facility at John’s old school in Rapid City. An afternoon in the Deadwood produced, grudgingly, a few fragments of Late Cambrian trilobites. John also received a BLM grant for $25,000 to continue his research efforts at the Mygatt-Moore Dinosaur Quarry. In September, John hiked up Mount Shavano along with work colleagues; this 14,229 ft peak is a long enough haul that they needed to leave camp in the dark at 3 am! But hiking under the stars by headlamp and the view of sunrise from just above treeline was worth the effort.
ReBecca spent much of the early part of the year working from home, but was feeling much better by mid-spring and spent the entire summer working out at the Mygatt-Moore Quarry running public dinosaur digs for the museum, and occasionally working out at the Fruita Paleontological Area with John. The heat was not too bad this year (although the gnats were!) and ReBecca is quite proud to have not missed any work days this summer due to the heat/pregnancy combination. Who knew Ruby would have a whole field season under her belt before she was even born! ReBecca has continued to work at the museum as paleontology collections manager. Days not spent in the quarry have been spent inventorying the collections, which has been both productive and have turned up some interesting specimens. For fun she went over to Denver to catch a few Rockies baseball games and went to see the stage production of Mamma Mia with two great friends!
We again traveled to California and Nevada this past spring to collect trilobites for John’s continuing research. We also had a chance to see the King Tut exhibit at the Denver Art Museum over the summer. While we did not travel as much as we did last year, we did take time to go on several drives and enjoy our beautiful part of the Colorado Plateau. Work let us hang out in Moab several times this summer, and we rafted the Colorado River through Ruby-Horsethief Canyon in Colorado numerous times and took one trip down the river through the Professor Valley in Utah. To end the field season we took our canoe down the river from Grand Junction to Loma on a beautiful sunny September day. We spent Halloween in Denver with many friends and family and Thanksgiving in New Mexico with ReBecca’s family (Ruby had a chance to meet more family, including her great-grandparents).
We hope everyone had a great Christmas and that you have a happy New Year!
John, ReBecca, Ruby, Kelty, Duma, Grizz, Tikka, Tank, Flavio, Chip and Chip
2 comments:
Congratulations on successfully spawning! Yep, 2010 was quite a year. Must have been a good year for blogs because i started one and my little cyber-rag has managed to garner over 5700 views.
Thank! Glad your blog is doing well. I have not had much time to blog this year, and I do not see it changing much anytime soon :P
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