March 31, 2009: Liesl Learns a New Sound

Liesl, as expected, got us up very early this morning.  I don’t even know what time it was when Dominica got up but it was way too early.  I was awake after a quarter till seven, though, that much I know.  I stayed in bed for a little while but Dominica was exhausted and Liesl was wide awake so I got up with Liesl and we went down to the living room and played for quite some time while Dominica slept in.

Liesl and I had a good time hanging out this morning.  Being up so early allowed me to get a jump on my work for the office as well.  Liesl and I played and talked and she had some of her learning time with her play mat that Dominica usually gets to do with her.

This morning, while in her jumper, Liesl looked at Oreo for the first time and reached out for him.  He was too far away but she is communicating to him that she wants him to come to her in the same way that she reaches out her arms to ask one of us to pick her up.

Dominica definitely appreciated getting the extra sleep.  She got up around nine or so.  I was pretty tired but thankful that I got a morning with my daughter.

This afternoon Liesl began making a new sound.  It is a little like a forced laugh.  From a distance it sounds like a loud giggle but it is a new vocalization that she has not been able to do before.  She did it all through the afternoon and evening.  I expect that her throat hurt by the end of the day.  It is very cute.  She was so excited to be able to show off to us.  She just kept doing it and doing it.  We were even able to get it on video for a little bit and were able to call Liesl’s grandparents so that they could hear here as well.

Dominica finally got a chance to do another one of her lessons in her UNIX SA class today.  We have been so busy recently that she just hasn’t been able to get very much done.

The weather was great today and we all managed to take a nice, long walk pretty early this morning.  The sun was out and it got up to around sixty today.  These walks are really helping with the diet.  Getting a chance to exercise is pretty tough but when it includes getting half an hour to talk to Dominica, taking Liesl out to get air and getting Oreo in his big walk it makes it a lot more possible.

I was pretty busy all day.  Got a lot of work done, though.

Our evening was spent with Dominica and Francesca on the phone planning stuff for Disney World.  I spent the evening trying to get to the bottom of the HP Integrity rx2600.  Boy that thing is complex and poorly documented.  Very frustrating.  It is an amazing piece of hardware but why HP doesn’t have a set of really simple, straightforward guides to it I will never know.  There must be a lot of people who have similar problems and just give up.

I have some theories on what needs to be done with the Integrity and I will document on SGL as I break down the barriers.  I think that the system uses more on the hard drives than I am used to having with Sparc and AMD64 systems.  I need more details as to how this all works under the hood to have some idea as to what is happening.  I know for certain that I am missing a cable that everyone seems to assume that I need so that could easily be the first step.  I hate systems that require special hardware for the most basic of functions.

Liesl fell asleep around eight and I tried to go to bed at ten thirty.  I wasn’t tired enough, though, and ended up not falling asleep for a long time.  Dominica didn’t go to bed until sometime after two in the morning because she was trying to watch all of the available episodes of BBC shows that have been available on NetFlix OnDemand that are going to go away tomorrow because they were just a special promotion or something.

We have a busy weekend coming up.  I am not sure of all of the details but we are going to leave Peekskill on Friday night to drive up to Frankfort because Dominica’s cousin Stephanie’s bridal shower is Saturday afternoon.  I have to work at seven in the morning on Saturday so we have to do the drive on Friday night.  There is no way to do it on Saturday.  So I will work all day Saturday and Dominica will go to the shower.  Then on Sunday afternoon we are having a big Palm Sunday dinner at Dominica’s grandfather’s house which is going to be a full “Thanksgiving” dinner because that was missed this year with everyone being in the hospital with Liesl being born.  This way Liesl gets to attend as well.

Then on Sunday afternoon, after we eat, the plan is to drive out to Pavilion to my dad’s house so that we can deal with picking up the BMW to use for the summer and to get the tires changed on the Mazda so that we are not driving on our snow tires in the good weather.  Then driving back to Peekskill on Tuesday or Wednesday.  It will give us a chance to grab two car loads of stuff while at dad’s as well.

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