April 9, 2014: Luciana’s New Bedtime Routine

Back in my own office today.  Longish day but not bad.  Weather has been staying nice.  Got home at a roughly normal time.

We have been watching Frasier a bit recently, getting back into that.  We last watched it six years ago.  It was a lot newer then, in 2008.  Now it is over two decades old and what felt, more or less, like a modern show six years ago now feels pretty dated.  Amazing that we must have been living in Newark when we last watched it.  The original show only went off of the air in 2004 so when we started watching it for ourselves somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (back when we lived in NJ and I worked for CitiGroup) it was truly a recent show, only three years off of the air and only barely coming out on DVD.  The variance between watching a show “just three years off of the air” and starting a show over that is “one year more than two decades from when it first aired.”  These early episodes are from when I was in my first weeks of being a senior in high school!  Dominica was just starting high school when this show came out.  I did not watch it much during those years and to me I really think of it in the next few season from the 1997 to 2000 era when Andy and I used to watch it a lot while living up at Greenleaf Meadows, in Greece, New York.  That and Ally McBeal were regular shows of ours.

Luciana put herself to bed shortly after I got home.  The girls scream as I come in the door and run to great me.  It is so adorable.  They are so happy to see me getting home.  It’s great but they have so much energy right at the moment when I have so little.  Ciana seems to just be waiting for me to get home and then she feels that everything is good and she can go to bed.  I think that she is effectively waiting up for me these days.

Her new thing is that she goes up to bed, very early in the evening like around eight or maybe earlier, and takes her chocolate milk and the “orange” iPad wither.  She goes up and gets into bed and quietly watches a show, like “Blue’s Clues” or “Kai Lan” for a long time by herself.  I think that she really just needs quiet time.  Then, sometime much later like at ten thirty, she will come downstairs for ten minutes.  Then she has us take her back upstairs and really put her to bed.  It is very cute.  It’s sad that she needs her quiet time when I am home, though.  But it is nice that she is comforted by me being home and waits to know that everything is well before she does it.