December 21, 2008: Midwinter

I slept in a lot this morning after having gone to bed just before the sun started coming up.  Once I got up I discovered that the snow had started again in earnest.  It has remained cold here so we still have all of the snow from Friday and now quite a bit more has been added to it.  It seems awfully likely that Liesl will be having a white Christmas on Thursday.  Boy is it hard to believe that it is already winter and that Christmas is in just a few days!

Today is midwinter, the winter solstice, marking the first day of winter for the majority of my readers or the middle of winter for the traditional Irish calendar.  Today is the shortest day of daylight of the year.

Today would have been a nice, relaxing day but Liesl was very fussy all day.  We are pretty sure that she has a tummy ache and is not very happy.  She did not sleep very well last night and is not wanting to sleep very much today.

Late this afternoon Dominica went out shopping as it was an emergency both because we need last minute Christmas items that we have not been able to get because of the weather and because we have to cook for Oreo as he will run out of food later this evening.  So there was not choice.  I would have gone shopping but the Christmas items really require that Dominica be there to make decisions.  So I stayed home with Liesl and Oreo for several hours while Dominica went out.  Liesl was not happy the entire time.  It was a long three hours trying to keep her as happy as possible.

We spent the rest of the day alternating between taking care of Liesl and Oreo and cleaning the dining room and kitchen (and cooking both for us and for Oreo.)  If we don’t do dishes every single day then we can’t even get to the sink.  The kitchen counter space is so tiny that we don’t have any spare space in which to work.  Partially this is because we have a counter-top microwave which we intend to replace with an above-range model eventually.  That will create a lot more space.  And partially because there is a lot of space used by the coffee maker but I don’t have a solution to that problem yet.  In either case, though, the total counter space is still quite small.

We finished watching the fourth season of Reba tonight which is the last season that is currently available either on DVD or from Hulu.  There are a few episodes of the show missing from Hulu, though, which is strange.  We can’t figure out if this is a mistake, if the episodes are just missing in general (Are You Being Served? famously lost an episode for ten or twenty years before a television station in the US turned up an old, videotape copy of it from their archives which is what was used to create the DVD box set) or if Hulu doesn’t get quite all of the episodes so that collectors are forced to get the DVDs.  The fifth season is due to release on DVD in about three weeks.

Our schedules are so thrown off these days.  We did not manage to head off to bed until after two in the morning.  Tomorrow is our last day at home before heading to Frankfort for Christmas.  This will be Liesl’s first time traveling farther than two “blocks” from our home.  She has only ever been to the hospital, the grocery store by the hospital, her doctor’s office between home and the hospital and home.  She has never left Peekskill or Westchester County.  The trip to Frankfort is going to be a really long one for her.  We will see how she does.

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