January 23, 2013: Liesl’s New Bicycle

This new year is flying by with reckless abandon!  I cannot believe that we are already at the end of the first month.  I fell like it just began.  And now my birthday is only a month away.  Dad comes down from New York to visit in under two weeks!

Dominica woke me up this morning, as you can imagine, after working until four in the morning and having insomnia till almost five I wasn’t out of bed until a quarter till nine.  I quickly showered and weighed in, the diet is going really well this week now that we are really back onto it, and before I could get out the door I got a phone call that I needed to join a class for the office to complete some requirements.  So I ran into the office in the house and signed on and took the class from there.

Liesl spent the morning sitting on my lap at my desk as I worked.  She loves just hanging out with me.  She wanted to play on the iPad 2 (she mostly plays Temple Run and Subway Surfer) so I got her a chair just inches from me so that she could play without having the iPad between me and the keyboard.  She is so good at those games, it is completely ridiculous.

Today Liesl started wanted to talk about the scores that she was getting on the games.  This worked perfectly for me to introduce her to reading large numbers.  She made crazy progress today just playing her games for a few minutes and then asking me, each time, to help her read the score.  She was reading numbers into the tens of thousands with me!  It was her first time seeing thousand and hundreds in use, so she was struggling.  But she loved it and had a lot of fun learning.

Luciana slept in very late and got up just before I left to head for home.  She came into the office and had me read to her for just a little bit before I went to work.

This morning ended up being insanely busy for the office.  I got stuck working at home for two hours before I could jump in the car and drive in.  So it was a little after eleven when I finally got into the office.  My whole day was just super busy.  I could not believe how busy it was.  I couldn’t get anything done.  Very frustrating.

This afternoon Dominica and Liesl went to Toy `R` Us to go bicycle shopping.  Dominica had ordered Liesl a bike that she really wanted from Walmart but they contacted us this morning to say that that was a computer glitch and that they were not getting that bike and there were none in stock.  They gave us $10 for the inconvenience though, so that was nice.  So that is why they went to buy one today.

Liesl was so excited.  Dominica set her up so that she could ride the bike in the atrium.  I got home and she had to tell me all about it and had me help her to ride in circles for quite a while even as it was getting dark out.  She loves her new bike and is so proud of it.  She can steer pretty well already but is having really problems with generating locomotion – partially because the bike is a little large for her yet (it is only a 14″) and partially because the atrium is uneven rubber tiles so there is always a little climbing to do no matter what direction she goes and that makes it extra hard beyond the rubber being soft and absorbing a lot of the energy.

Most of the evening was spent in the play room all together. We found a new Reba show called “Malibu Country” on Hulu and have been watching that tonight.

Our new Roomba came today and that was plugged in charging until after Luciana went to bed.  Then, when it was charged, and just before Liesl turned in for the night we cleaned up the house and got everything off of the floor and turned it loose.  It took a while but it covered the entire play room, living room and kitchen pretty well.  Liesl had a lot of fun running around the house as it drove all over.

We had fretted a bit over which Roomba to get but finally decided on the $350 via Amazon Roomba 630 which is a new unit from them.  We could have gone cheaper and gotten an earlier generation but the benefits of this outweighed the cost savings.  It looks like this is going to work really well.  I can’t wait to try it out on the carpeted part of the house too.  Maybe we can do that this weekend.  We need some time when we have picked up all of the toys and can leave the girls’ rooms open.

Off to bed as early as possible tonight, which really was not that early, because Dominica has to work tomorrow.  It was so late that it was actually half past midnight when Liesl got put to bed!  We had no idea that so much time had passed by.

Leave a comment