And so the new year begins.
I was home alone this morning, Dominica and the girls did not leave Frankfort until eleven.
Dominica and the girls made great time and got home around two thirty, way earlier than I had been expected. I spent much of the morning cleaning around the house as today was my first day of daylight in which I could actually spend some time cleaning and actually see what there was to clean. Working these long hours makes it really hard as the house is always so dark. I leave in the dark and come home long after dark. There is never a time when the house is bright except for the weekends and I am rarely around on the weekends. So today was a rare cleaning day. I even took the hand cleaner and worked on some of the spots on the living room carpet.
It was great to have everyone home. This is our first afternoon at home together in nearly two weeks. The girls were very excited to be home. The living room was filled with their Christmas presents and they were very happy to get to start taking them out and playing with them. Luciana’s first mission was to get her Calico Critters Drive Thru Café set put together so that she could start playing with it.
I made a fire in the fireplace and we all stayed up in the living room for a while. After an hour or two Dominica and I decided that we were hungry and did not want to deal with going anywhere today so we ordered in dinner from Nonna’s and when that arrived the whole family went downstairs and watched Doctor Who all evening.
When we put the girls to bed tonight instead of reading the normal bedtime stories, which in recent months have been primarily “George Shrinks”, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…” and Luciana’s all time favourite “Pete’s a Pizza”, we read a couple of chapters in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Liesl got really into it and immediately sat on my lap and was perfectly quiet and intent while I read the story. Luciana took a little while to calm down but when she did she came and snuggled up beside me as well. Dominica even stayed in the room and listened to me read the book to them.
Liesl is now the same age that I was when my mother read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and recorded them onto cassette tape that I listened to all throughout my childhood.
I read a little more of “The Arm of the Starfish” before falling off to sleep myself.