Monthly Musings: October 2025
ft. my new favourite photo, a baby update, and the usual ramblings
Hello friends! Happy October! How are you keeping? Welcome to our Monthly Musings: October 2025 post — I hope it finds you well rested, adequately caffeinated, and with something fun lined up for the weekend ahead. Our weekend plans will hopefully include welcoming Baby Bean into the world — currently 8-days past our due date! — but we’ll see how things pan out. I know it’s a little unusual for me to be dropping by your inbox on a Thursday morning and not a Sunday like normal, but I figured you wouldn’t mind, seeing as I’m working off borrowed time here, baby-wise. Shall we?
Our musings for the month ahead are listed below, featuring all the usual suspects — travel, recipes, movies, books — , as well as some off-piste ramblings.
Enjoy, friends!
monthly musings: october 2025
In baby news: I cannot believe we’ve made it all the way to October without Baby Bean arriving! I mean, at the beginning of the pregnancy, I was pretty certain I’d be probably 2-weeks late, and I even had a dream BB was coming on October 3rd — but then all hell broke loose in July and I thought it would be a miracle if we just made it to the beginning of September; the fact that we’ve made it into October is amazing! It’s just a waiting game now, eeeep ❤️
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This seems almost beside the point now, but the final wound from my appendectomy eventually healed up! The whole saga started back in July, 9-days post-surgery, when one of the laparoscopic sites got infected. In order to heal the wound, my lovely surgeon had to cut open the stitching, clear it from the inside out, and essentially, leave me with a gaping hole in my stomach that had to heal up naturally without any further stitching. Sorry if that’s TMI, but that’s the truth of it and now I’m at the other end! The wound took a grand total of 47-days to close over completely, and wow, what a crazy road that was! Aren’t bodies incredible?
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In case you missed it, I shared a What We’re Meal Prepping Before Baby Arrives post last month! It’s filled with every single breakfast, lunch, dinner, and baked good we made and loaded into our freezer before Bean arrives, and oof I really hope it helps you! I already know how much our future selves will appreciate all the time and effort we put into making these (mostly) nutritious meals when we still had the time and energy!
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I also shared my first three Notes from the Archive posts last month: One Week in Rome, Italy, 3 Things to See in Vatican City, and My 2012 Inter-Railing Itinerary! I mentioned in September’s MM post that I planned to start sharing some posts of my most well-documented pre-blog travels to the site, and that’s exactly what these are! Although the trips described in the posts are from a good while back, I’ve tried my hardest to make sure all the information is as relevant as possible for use today. It makes me so happy knowing some of my earlier travels will finally have a home here on the blog 😊 If you click through to read any, please let me know your thoughts!
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Okay friends, what are we watching at the moment? TV-wise, I devoured the end of The Summer I Turned Pretty, and, although I feel cheated because it wasn’t the same as the book, I thought it was pretty good as far as final episodes go. We’ve since started S5 of Slow Horses, which is pretty good, but it drives me crazy the way they’re only releasing one episode at a time. Movie-wise, there really hasn’t been anything in the last month that lit my world on fire. What about you? As always, if you’d like to follow along with our movie viewing in real-time, here’s the link to our Letterboxd.
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Have you read anything good lately? I somehow had the time to finish 3 books last month — time moves differently when you’re literally sitting around waiting for a human to come out of you! — which I’m very proud about! First was André Aciman’s Enigma Variations, then Stephen King’s Never Flinch, and then lastly Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone; the first of which I didn’t love, but the latter two I devoured! I especially enjoyed the Lou Berney book and would definitely recommend if you’re looking for a good mystery!
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Related: my besties and I have all joined The StoryGraph recently, and so far I’m loving it! It’s essentially the same as Letterboxd, except for books; you add the books you’re reading/have read recently and it tracks them all for you. It also compiles everything you read into a little stats breakdown, and I find it so fun to look through! According to my stats: I mainly read fictional, medium-paced books between 300-499 pages long, and that are often mysterious, dark, or tense. Fun! Here’s a link to my profile — let’s be book friends!
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Update: I baked that Cinnamon Apple Cake from POY twice over the last month and it was totally amazing! I was going to freeze some of the slices for snacking on during the upcoming newborn days… but both times we just kept eating until the whole thing was gone and I couldn’t even be angry because it was so! good! If you’re even the slightest bit tempted to try it out, definitely do — it’s so easy and so rewarding!
And there we have it, our Monthly Musings: October 2025 post! I hope you found something to take away with you — be it a recipe for the perfect autumnal cake, a hankering to stock up the freezer, or an urge to track your reading habits moving forward. Let’s catch up again next month, yeah?
Please send all the good vibes and positive thoughts toward me and Baby Bean!
Vicki xo
related october posts
2024 // 2023
2022 // 2021
2020 // 2019