HAPPY EASTER!!!!! 

 

I hope everyone is having a restful, blessed break to celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord! Easter in our family has always been a very joyful celebration with lots of super fun traditions. 

 

In our immediate family, we have a candy hunt on Easter morning. We go to the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night and then, first thing on Sunday morning, the three of us (myself, Lauren, and Michael), race downstairs, snatch our Easter baskets, and run around our house, grabbing all the Easter candy we see (my parents hide it/set it in high places). It’s pretty much a race and Michael usually wins because he is the boy and he’s more aggressive. But it’s okay because we end up trading afterwards (Lauren and I like Kit Kats and Michael likes strawberry Laffy Taffy) so it all works out!

 

Then, we go to our aunt and uncle’s house in Marshalltown, Iowa, and have a FEAST (this year I got to make Challah bread and cupcakes!), then we have an Easter egg hunt with all of our cousins. We each have 10 eggs and there are 10 cousins (one goes to college in Texas so she couldn’t come back-there are usually 11) so the adults have to hide 100 eggs in the yard! Usually we find almost all of them and then we’ll find another one around Christmas. The chocolate is not-so-good by then.

This year was another blessed, beautiful day to spend time with the family we see less and less as we get older. We also watched the Masters, another tradition, which was pretty exciting. In case you didn’t see it, it came down to a face-off between Bubba Watson and Louis Oosthuizen and then Bubba won by one stroke! He had to hit it out of the woods at one point and Louis had a double eagle-the last time anyone got a double eagle at the Masters was in 1935, so it is a big deal!

 

Now I am back home with my parents and Lauren and Michael are back at school-they don’t have tomorrow off like we do. I played my mom in ping pong (and barely won!) and we are having popcorn and watching King of Kings, which is a movie about Jesus. It’s a pretty awesome way to end this Easter Sunday. Tomorrow at 10 I have a summer job interview and then at 12:30 I am headed back to St. Thomas! I already miss everyone so I am looking forward to going back, but it has been very nice to be home. Take care, everyone!

This kid is going to ROME next semester, Fall 2012, and there have been an exciting amount of meetings so far. And by that, I mean two. But boy were they exciting!

 

What do we do at these meetings? Well, I am going with the Catholic Studies Rome Program, so we get to sit in the beautiful classrooms of Sitzmann and eat excellent pizza from campus. They have fancy chicken and tomato pizza, it’s the bomb!

We also listen to very nice and smart people from International Education and Catholic Studies who educate us on what to expect, how much everything will cost, what classes we will take, and how much gelato we can afford to consume. They also tell us about dates of travel! In Rome, the semester is a bit later, so we leave at the end of September and get back at the end of January. Myself and two of my best buddies, Megan and Maureen, are hoping to leave EARLY to go to SPAIN to partake in a CAMINO, which is a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. James! How cool would that be?! We are still figuring out logistics…or we will be figuring them out soon. But we’re basically going and it is going to be so awesome!!!! We hike all day with big backpacks and sandals and we sleep in youth hostiles and go to Mass and converse in Spanish and other fantastic things.

 

This weekend, all of the Fall 2012 study abroad-ers will be having a big Information Party on Saturday morning, and my mom is coming! That will be reassuring seeing as I have a history of booking flights for the wrongs days and leaving my wallet at home…so I am relieved that she will be there. Plus I’ll probably get a free out-to-eat meal out of the visit, which is of course much less awesome than my mom’s presence, but nonetheless always appreciated since I am a poor college student.

 

I still have to fill out an Italian Visa Application and book a flight, but other than that, the adventure continues on! St. Thomas is excellent at taking care of us as we embark on these foreign seas, so I am not too worried about getting lost in the shuffle or anything. It is a wonderful thing to go to this University!

 

Meanwhile, Easter Break is just wrapping up and I have about 6 weeks of class left, so I will be happily working and living the joyful life of a Tommie until we meet again. Take care, everyone, and Happy Easter!