The Fabulous B@ker Blog

Just a quick plug for our favorite RD2B - Annie B! She is making her way in the pre registered dietician world by sharing her fave food preps and demos on her YouTube channel. I've had the pleasure (or the pain) of being her camera man (woman) and director for several of her demos. They are fun! Next stop, Good Morning America? Enjoy, and keep checking back!!

OMG am I cranky! So cranky and lazy that I have not managed a post since Christmas. The winter blues are in full force, and this winter has been very brutal so far; freezing temps, tons of snow, and cloudy, dark days. In fact, we have not even had our Greco Christmas yet as it has been postponed twice because of hazardous weather conditions. I really could use some sun and surf right about now. Seriously! But, the new year is marching on. Cam is busy learning his new job, and on Monday Annalisse started her new rotation at St. Peter's Health Partners in Albany. She will be there for 10 weeks, then starting (I think) her community rotation. It's going fast, and I am wishing it away a little because I really want spring! It's hard to believe she will be done with "school" for good soon. Well, mostly. She still needs to finish her online master's degree, but I think she'll definitely need a break from academics (with the exception of studying for the RD exa

Christmas Eve has come and gone, today Christmas 2017 cold and blustery with one kid asleep upstairs for the first time since he moved out in January, and one far away in Florida. Christmas came with an opening of gifts (we are calling this Christmas "Practical Christmas" because the nature of the gifts are things we needed - like an EZ-Pass and AAA). After lounging a bit, we were joined by our Shiao relatives for a delicious breakfast, and now, a relaxing day of hanging at home awaits. Every year I seem to experience a sense of dread as the year flies by and we are once again entering the holiday season. I think it's because I feel like the years are passing so quickly, the kids are getting older, we are losing loved ones to advanced age, and there is a true sense of our own mortality. Oh, how much time we had from an 18-year old's view. This has been a very disconcerting and unsettling year for me with the political landscape. I always though I was on the "

When I think about the blog, I often think about how I started it right before we got Jasper in 2007. (For those keeping track at home the B@ker Blog is almost 11 years old.) So, it's a little sad to think that Jasper has aged right along with the blog, but he, sadly, is definitely in decline. He's had seizures approx. six times since the beginning of 2017, and it seems like every one take a little toll on him.  Additionally, he has arthritis and is plagued by small, twitchy muscle spasms. We have options to determine what is causing the seizures; we could do a cat scan (or in his case, a dog scan), but we've decided not to do that. If the test did determine he has epilepsy, we would have the option of medicating him, which is not ideal (the medicine would make him drowsy and dopey). If a cat scan revealed something more serious going on with his brain, like cancer, we would not do anything heroic for him at this stage of his life. As a result, we just enjoy every da

I don't know what got into me...was it laziness? The winter blues? A certain type of sadness that takes you over when the kids are gone and it doesn't seem like there's much to write about? The routine of the day-in and the day-out that just goes too quickly and is generally pretty boring and mundane? Whatever is is (or was), I feel really, really guilty about not checking in with the blog for almost a year. So much has happened, most of it good (all of it pretty good, really). Since we last chatted: Annalisse On April 2 our prayers (and pleas!) were answered when Annalisse got the long awaited internship match with Russell Sage College (or Sage College, as the grad school is known), along with entry into the Nutrition grad program. Whew - I would rank that as one of the most stressful waiting periods in recent memory! Since that day we all continue to be super excited (and grateful) that she made it happen. It was three years of very hard work on her part, and coun

The year is starting out pretty well for the Bakers. Cam secured the UR job full-time (he just needs to sign a contract which could take up to two weeks - we will all breath much easier when it's official), so we're all really happy that this job odyssey has worked out for him. Truthfully, he's been pretty lucky in this whole process ~ things have really gone in positive way for him. I expect once the job is locked in he'll finalize his plans to move in with his friends. On Tuesday, Annalisse and I took a quick trip down to NYC to visit New York Presbyterian Hospital for a dietetic program open house. She met seven or eight of her friends there and they attended the two-hour program, after which she was pretty overwhelmed. The day was very, very nasty with cold, blowing, icy rain that hit your face like pin needles. We got back to Albany around 8:30pm and each snuggled into our beds, tired from the busy day. Yesterday, before heading back to Rochester she met wi