Ode on the Month of October

I remember when it was September 30th and I was so excited for October to begin! I remember thinking that my birthday month couldn't come fast enough. Well it did. And it went just as fast.

So lets see if I can keep this post, on everything that has happened this month, to a minimum.

The month of October began like this:

Beautiful and warm!

Luisa has only gotten bigger and crazier

And so has baby cow #2 who we found out is definitely a boy!

My birthday weekend was amazing to say the least. Honestly, it couldn't have been more perfect! It began with a birthday miracle; Luisa slept in from her usual 7:30 to a blessed 9:30! Donny and I took full advantage by enjoying with peaceful and delicious cup(s) of coffee and pancakes. After Luisa woke up and had her fair share of pancakes, we went to Mass and then to the park across the street. It was the most gorgeous day. After we got home, Donny and I cleaned the house in preparation for the babysitter who was coming that night so that we could enjoy a birthday dinner. It was all I had asked for this year. Just a nice dinner, baby-less (well technically there was a baby there but quietly incubating). The last time we had enjoyed a dinner without Luisa was on our first anniversary, when Luisa was still a newborn. This is hard to do since we don't have family nearby and even though we have tons and tons of teenage girls who beg to babysit Luisa, we never felt very comfortable having them babysit for many reasons which I will spare you of in the spirit of keeping this post from taking up all of your day.

So back to the story of my birthday. We just finished cleaning the house and we sat down to watch a mid-day movie (something we love to do on our days off) and all of a sudden...knock, knock, knock...who was at the door? My entire family (well most of them)! It was a huge surprise! Apparently, Donny and my mom had been planning this for weeks! Donny even sneakily planned for the babysitter to come on Monday night instead of Sunday, all the while I had been telling her Sunday! My sister had just got engaged the day before so I was able to see her and her fiancé, and give them tons of wedding details. It was so much fun!

Let me derail for a second to tell you about another birthday miracle; no school on Monday. See, here at the Abbey, we never have a legitimate weekend. Classes continue on Saturday and most Sundays, Donny and I have some sort of commitment which means its more like a 7-day work week. But on this glorious weekend, the planets and stars aligned! My birthday fell on one of those few weekends where the Abbey has an actual weekend!

And as if the family surprise and the promise of dinner with just the two of us wasn't enough of a gift, Donny and my mom coordinated another surprise; my birthday gift!

A Vitamix blender! The most powerful, versatile blender ON EARTH! It is said that if you want to know whether a restaurant is great, ask if they have a vitamix in their kitchen. Why? Because it saves tons of prep time, it makes the freshest dishes quickly, and it makes it easy to be creative and change up the menu often!

Since getting this irreplaceable kitchen tool, we have been livin' it up! Healthy style! From smoothies to soups, to sauces to sorbets, even to flour, freshly ground from wheat berries! We have had this blender for a couple weeks now and we have noticed a huge difference in our health and our happiness. For example, we went pumpkin and apple picking this month.

                

With everything we picked, we made pumpkin bread, apple and butternut squash soup, apple pie, apple juice, apple sauce, and so much more! 

Another example of how this blender has revolutionized out lives is in the morning. My midwife told me that a good way to know that I am eating well for me and the baby, is to eat a fruit or vegetable of each color of the rainbow. I can eat an apple or a banana or even a salad in a day, no problem, but thats only 3 colors! Plus its boring! Now, with my ingenious tool, I fulfill my rainbow requirement before 8AM with my rainbow smoothie. 

It includes:
Strawberry Kefir
Banana
Orange/Carrots
Spinach or Kale
Frozen Blueberries

Frozen Rasberries

Beets








And the best part is that it doesn't even taste healthy! Donny, Luisa and I just suck them down! We love our morning smoothies!

No, no, no! You want to know whats REALLY the best part?! This blender cleans itself! Let me repeat: IT CLEANS ITSELF! Which means I can make so many dishes in no time! So when Luisa sleeps, I blend. I blend the soup we will have for lunch, I ground the flour we will have to make our pasta, bread, or pizza dough we will have for our dinner, I blend the sauces that go with our dinner, I even blend us a nice healthy sorbet for dessert! I make it all with the freshest ingredients, all pretty much local and seasonal. 

This thing is truly a game changer! And getting this blender couldn't have come at a more perfect time. My 7 year old niece was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. To be honest, I never thought diabetes was that big of a deal. I knew plenty of people with it. But man, for a 7 year old with 3 (soon to be 4) younger siblings, it is tough! Testing her blood every 2 hours, even through the night, giving her shots 4-5 times a day, watching every little thing she eats! Its crazy! Anyways, ever since the diagnosis my family and I have been researching diabetes like crazy. What we have all come to realize is the serious problem with modern wheat. As a result, I have cut out all modern wheat from our house. We try to avoid it as much as possible but when we do have wheat, it's Einkorn wheat. Einkorn is the purest and the only unhybridized wheat that exists today. Because it's been untampered with for thousands of years, it is more nutritious and naturally low in gluten. It is a much simpler wheat, much less chromosomes, and therefore easier to digest. Since making the switch, we have come to see that Donny in fact has a mild gluten/wheat allergy and its unbelievable the difference the switch has made. Anyways, the Vitamix helps make this switch to Einkorn easy and delicious!

Suffices to say, I'm very happy with my Vitamix!

Luisa was a cat/leopard for Halloween. 

We did trick or treating with the other faculty kids as they went house to house, dorm to dorm, around campus.

Although October began bright, warm, and sunny, it has ended like this:

With Boots and hats!

Oh, and here is my first Maternity Monday...Wednesday! 23 weeks!

 

 

Sweater: Banana Republic

Pants: Gap

Shoes: Minnetonka

What was your October like?

5 Recents

Hello! Sorry for the long pause in blog activity. I wanted to start a new post theme called 5 Recents (I will come up with a better title soon, hopefully). In this type of post, we can just keep each other updated by posting 5 recent things that have interested us or have happened recently. Simple enough!

1. I realized that Luisa has officially run out of clothes. For the latter half of the summer, I have been trying to really stretch the use of the clothes she already has. I didn't want to buy her summer clothes for the last few weeks. Her pants turned into capris and her dresses into tank tops. It worked for some time but as it began getting colder, I had to face the realization that Luisa needs a new wardrobe, and an appropriate one. So we spent Saturday shopping for Luisa. Here are two of the purchases:

2. School has started here at the Abbey. I am one of the coaches for Varsity girls soccer which has been so awesome! The girls that play are really fun and as a plus, I get to jump in and scrimmage with them.

3. I was spoiled all summer by going to be no later than 10 pm. However, now when I'm working in the dorm, I can't go to bed earlier that 12am so its been a little rough since I looooove sleep.

4. Still no real news on the thesis front. It is finished and submitted but has been going through the whole approval process. I'm hoping to graduate this fall which would be great but there is always a small chance they hate it and want me to rewrite it. If thats the case, who knows when I'd graduate! 

5. Last but certainly not least, there is a new member to our little Cow farm...

This little one is due in March and we are beyond excited about it. Plus, we're pretty sure its a boy! Its funny that as Emily will soon be ending her Maternity Mondays, I can begin! Whoohoo! Pregnant bellies galore!

Ciao for now, friends!  

August already?!

I really am in awe that its August which means that September is only a few weeks away which means school will begin in no time. So sad.

But on a happier note, the thesis is complete and has been sent in for approval. Hopefully all goes well and I can graduate at the end of August. 

Since the last post, I was able to do some fun non-thesis related things like:

Take a mini vacation to Virginia to see family

Luisa with cousin Benedict

Visit my grandparents and aunt who came to the US from Argentina for 3 weeks

Grandparents with some of their great-grandkids

Visit Emily and Caleb

Best Buds

Oh, and one more monumental moment, Luisa threw my phone in the toilet.

[not pictured]

Guilty?

Thesis work

So I figure that it's time to talk a little bit about how the thesis is going.

Right now I have three chapters finished, about 15 pages each. I feel like I have said the bulk of what I need to say about Aeneas, his education, his transformation, and the founding of the new civilization. After scouring the UDallas website, I found on the MA politics page that the thesis should be 13,000-20,000 words so I think I will just follow that format even though I am in the Humanities program. My plan right now is to edit edit edit which will no doubt add a couple hundred words because my problem is always *clarification*. I also need to write an introduction and a conclusion which should put me close to the 20,000 word rang since I have about 15,000 right now as is.

So what is my thesis about? Well before I talk about what its about let me tell you how I got to writing on the Aeneid first of all.

In college, my senior thesis was basically on the identity of the Roman people/civilization. I was already drawn to that, even before I went to Rome. I also did my JP on Machiavelli which also ties me to Rome. I really think there is something inside of me that is drawn to Roman history more than any other people/civilization (well maybe only second to Argentina). Anyways, Donny is convinced its my Latin blood, and that I must be descended from Caesar himself (which would mean I was related to Aeneas himself)! Well anyways, when I got to UD I took two graduate courses which included the Aeneid, one of which was actually entirely on the Aeneid! Can you imagine spending an entire semester on just one poem, one work?! It was amazing. That class had two professors teaching it. One was Bainard and the other was a classicist from Ohio, I think. It was pretty insane having an English and Classics teacher in one class. Boy, did they look at the work completely differently! While I almost entirely disagree with the way classicists look at the Aeneid (its a poem for goodness sake!) I was inundated by the amount of writing on the Aeneid. But thankfully, I am approaching the work as a poem and not an artifact so most critiques on the Aeneid don't help too much with interpretation although they help tremendously with the finer details and references made.

Okay, so why the Aeneid? Well I think more than any other work, philosophical, political, or theological, the Aeneid gives the most insight into the identity of the Roman people and of the novus ordo seclorum. And consequently, I think it gives us insight into who we are as moderns and Americans. Anyways, I was reading this awesome book on Virgil and he was saying how we are so confused today in how we understand the Romans. Primarily, we are baffled by the fact that it was the Roman empire that first accepted Christianity, making it a state religion. It is pretty insane to think that the most powerful civilization in the world, much much much more powerful than anything today, was the first to take Christianity and run with it (albeit only through the blood of the martyrs). It wasn't those smarty pants Greeks or the Jews even, it was the Romans who set the stage for Christianity and who make it THEE state religion. I mean, Rome had every single god/goddess in the Pantheon and they were ready to put a statue of the crucified Christ in there too if Christians would just accept to worship the other hundreds of gods as well. But as fate would have it, the Romans side not with those all-powerful muscular man gods, they side with the crucified Christ, the god that they tried to kill! Well having read the Aeneid about 4 times in classes and about a dozen other times on my own, I'm starting to think that its more baffling that we moderns don't understand Rome at all. I mean, the American founders did. Why don't we?!

So my thesis concentrates on the political nature of the Aeneid, obviously (go poli-sci people!). I argue that Aeneas changes the paradigm within himself to change the paradigm of the known order of the world. Looking at Aeneas, we can see how Rome becomes a new order for the ages, unlike anything before it. And then I go into what characterizes this new civilization, what makes it last, why it is the eternal city. Of course I bring in some Voegelin, Aristotle, Faulkner, Louise Cowan. Oh and a famous critic actually went to Portsmouth Abbey! The school library has all of his work, and actually, the library here is amazing. I have no problem finding what I need, they even have Voegelin, AT A HIGH SCHOOL!? The monks of course have all the intellectual works in their library but they let me use it whenever (cutest old men ever, and brilliant!).

After three semesters at UD, I got married, moved to a new state, started a new job, and had a baby. The past two years have been crazy to say the least, but that time was crucial for me and the thesis. During those two years I would read the Aeneid and sources but scattered throughout weeks and months. I would try to write but it was hard. I thought I would never get to finish it. I started thinking that maybe I should take a 6 credit course over the summer at the Dallas Institute which would fulfill the requirement and I would be officially a master. But I only thought that way for a second. I wanted to write this thesis so badly. So Donny and I came up with the schedule that we have this summer and it has been working. It is like a muse has been hanging out with me in the library all day, every day. Donny and I still plan on doing the Dallas Institute some day. Have you guys heard about it? They do these summer seminars where you are in class all day in the heart of Dallas at this amazing southern house. They even provide you with lunch (of course I'm thinking of food)! They get the best teachers from all over to teach at the program (Louise even still gives lectures!). Its only 2 weeks I think but its amazing. And the topics change every year. Like for English, they do epic one summer then lyric, then comedy and so on. So Donny and I want to do that, and get some teachers from around here to do it too. The summer institute is for teachers and educators so the Abbey would love to send us down and take care of it for us. Some TMCers who work here all want to do it too. Maybe we can all plan a summer to do it and it could be the reunion we have been waiting for!!! Or we can all just go to Rome and reunion there!

Okay, sorry for the post with only text and no photos but I need to get back to my thesis. I will make up for the photoless post soon.

Chau for now!

Update!

Hey! It seems like the whole blogosphere is slacking on posting. I can't even count on reading posts from blogs that would normally post 2-3 times a day. Where is everyone? Enjoying summer? Weird.

Well I'm guilty of not posting in a long time, too. Here is the update on what we have been up to over here in the ocean state:

I'm in the library every day from 9-5. I come home for lunch but that's about it. I leave the house after I put Luisa down for her morning nap. Then I come home, eat lunch, put Luisa down for her afternoon nap and then I return to this:

While I work on the Aeneid, Donny and Luisa do things like this:

And this:

While I do more of this:

 

Seems somewhat unfair...I totally have more fun!

But on Saturday's, I get a break which is nice because two important days fell on Saturday's this year: Luisa and Caleb turned one! 

Since Luisa loves strawberries so much, we went to pick some strawberries at a local farm and I made her a strawberry shortcake.

I still can't believe she is one already. Frenchie, watch out because M will be one in no time!

So, the following Saturday, we went up to NH, had lunch with Dr. Sampo & Dr. Mumbach, and then we went to the real party, Caleb's birthday!

 

Look at these buddies!! They were so cute together!

But now, I return to this:

I love this book and need to write a blog post just on this book!

So, what is going on in your lives?

Emily- Maybe you can write a post about your upcoming trip to Spain! Or post another Maternity Monday, I looove those posts!

Francesca-You should post about how you and Emily are GOING TO BE IN SPAIN TOGETHER! So unfair! Also, you need to post more photos of M. I miss her!

Haeley-Write a post on the books you are reading, especially Rabelais. Also, I want photos of you because I miss you!

Lucie&Sean- Those cryptic FB posts are not doing it for me. You have so much going on in your lives that I need a serious update on the LSATs, jobs, family, everything! Oh and photos of everyone would be nice too :)

I look forward to reading your posts SOON!

Happy Independence Day!

Chau!

Beach Baby!

Well the Ocean State at least provides us with easy access to the ocean. First beach day of the summer and Luisa was ecstatic. I was talking to a friend about how Luisa has a serious love of water. I remember when my mom gave Luisa a bath at 2 weeks old and my mom could no believe how much Luisa liked it. My mom said that Luisa was like a fish! Till this day, Luisa takes a bath every night. She will drink the water, dunk her head under, splash her face, and even lie down in the water. Anyways, this friend mentioned that Luisa must be a water sign from the Zodiac calendar, and although I think that stuff is ridiculous, I looked it up and in fact, Luisa is a water sign (Caleb is too, Emily). I still think that stuff is still ridiculous.

The water was freezing but that didn't stop lil' Luisa. And after a couple hours, she cuddled up in the beach chair with me and just hung out. And Luisa does not really ever cuddle! She also seemed to soak up all the sun because I returned home with little to no color but she was perfectly tan! 

Summer update

Hey all,

This summer has started off pretty great so far. We finished up with school and meetings and headed over to Providence and Boston for a couple nights. We did a good job of planning the trips too. We looked up things to do and planned for something big each day. 

On Sunday, we went to mass at the beautiful cathedral in Providence- sorry, no photos of that- and then we went to the Zoo!

And then we went to the Children's Museum in Providence. It was awesome! So much fun things for Luisa to do, and I'm not gonna lie, Donny and I found it pretty entertaining too. There were two floors full of great activities. I want to go back!

And then we finished our mini vacation with a trip into Boston. I pretty much only have one photo of the trip, sorry its kind of boring. But we walked a lot and ate great food and we went to a foreign book store and bought tons of books! 

 Anyway, that has been our summer thus far. Since this trip I have been pretty much locked in the library reading and writing while Donny and Luisa have just been chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool... but since the weather has been so crappy lately, I really don't mind being indoors, so far.

How's your summer been going?