La Princesa Sofia

As anyone who knows me personally knows, I am obsessive about making sure that my daughter Valentina only speak Spanish with me and her mother at home, because I want her to be fully bilingual [1]. Since English is the dominate language here, everything is a “threat” to her continuing to speak Spanish. Read more


Living in a house with four kids, grocery shopping is not something we do bi-weekly—or even weekly. Most weeks, I find myself in the local Safeway grocery chain at least three times, and there have been times where grocery shopping is a daily occurrence. Read more


About the only time I don’t like washing my food down with alcoholic beverages is when I eat Salvadoran food. The reason for this? Horchata.

Nothing beats the sickeningly sweet, creamy taste of freshly-made horchata, with that nutty aftertaste.

Wait. Nutty aftertaste? Read more


People who live in Washington, D.C. have this annoying habit of thinking that anything outside of Washington, D.C. is “the country”—as if civilization stops at the diamond-shaped border. We live about 30 minutes outside of Washington, but are routinely told that it’s hard to make it to our events, because they are “so far away” and that we live in the “boonies!” Read more


The town we live in here in Virginia is a planned community, and there are many wooded areas interspersed throughout the community. These wooded areas are great during the summer, when one can take advantage of the many shaded walkways and bike paths to get outdoors while not being scorched. Read more


90% of the time, I am rather serious; so serious, in fact, that I tend towards anxiety when things don’t go according to plan or there are too many unknown variables. But every once and awhile, I go to the opposite extreme, and just let loose. Read more


On Fridays, I take my baby Valentina to a babysitter in the neighborhood. She’s a nice Bolivian lady whom we’ll refer to as M.E. on the blog in any future posts. After handing over Valentina (who now has started exhibiting some separation anxiety), I turned around, and froze like a deer in headlights. Read more