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Home and Back Again

Wow, time sure does fly! It seems like just yesterday, I was moving into school to start off the semester, and now it’s almost over?!? I was lucky enough to have an easy week before Thanksgiving, so I actually flew home on Wednesday night. Surprisingly, a majority of my classes were cancelled on Thursday and Friday, so I was able to get ahead on my work for the rest of the semester while enjoying my family and friends at home.

At home, I have a pretty standard routine. I wake up and go to yoga. I fill the rest of my day with some combination of eating, shopping, going to the beach and playing with my dog. I also spend a lot of time with my parents and my sister. I miss them terribly when I am away from home. My family eats dinner together every night and I think that is what I miss most when I’m away at school. It’s always nice to eat a home-cooked meal as a complete unit. My sister says the dinner table is quiet without me, and I don’t doubt it. As a family, we also went to the movies and on a family run this break.

This little guy and I did some serious bonding this week

My Thanksgiving dinner was fantastic, too. It was pretty big, with almost every member of my 40-person extended family in attendance. We ate and shared stories and watched football for hours, but it was so nice to see everyone. My entire family is pretty close, and we have big gatherings about once a month. I felt like I was playing catch-up all night, but it was definitely entertaining to hear about everything that I missed.

Now that I am back at school, I have three papers and three exams to finish out the semester. It is crunch time, but somehow, I always manage to make it through. As stressful as the coming weeks will be, I know that I can count on my friends to spread some holiday cheer and make the next few weeks manageable. My friends and I get pretty creative in regards to studying. Today, for example, we went to the Commons Center. We studied upstairs and were hardly distracted (probably because we were the only upperclassmen in the entire dining hall). We then took a delicious dinner break (the worst part about living on main campus is the far walk to the Commons Food Gallery). Vanderbilt generally does a great job in helping students cope with the stress of finals, but more on that later.