Luciana enters her second day today and is happy and healthy and far, far more relaxed than her uber-hyper older sister. Liesl is louder and more rambunctious than Luciana by quite a margin. They may look similar but we can already see some serious differences in personality and Luciana is only on day two. To be fair, though, Liesl was born at 41 weeks and Luciana at just 39. Those last two weeks make for an awful lot of development. The size and strength difference alone is significant. Luciana was healthy but Liesl was thinking about crawling that first day (well, at least holding up her head and looking around.)
This morning I got up and got to work trying to catch up as much as possible from yesterday. Dominica’s parents got up and took Liesl into the hospital this morning so she is not alone and I have the house to myself so that I can be productive for the morning. Everyone is doing pretty well this morning.
At noon I headed in to the hospital to join everyone. On my way in I swung in to downtown Carrollton to find Vintage House, the local Vera Bradley store. Dominica has been wanting the Vera Bradley Mother’s Day bracelet that released yesterday morning and that is only available for a very limited time. It turns out that Dominica did not realize that the bracelet is not available online and can only be purchased from participating Vera Bradley stores so when she told me that she expected me to get up early yesterday and find it for her, she did not understand that she was sending me physically out attempting to find it.
I did pretty well, though, I was able to find the store and pick out a bracelet for her. Then I hit Jack in the Box and headed on in to the hospital.
I brought my laptop with me so that I could work from the hospital but, for some reason, neither Dominica nor my laptops are able to connect to the hospital’s weird WiFi. The iPhone connects to it but when it is connected it cannot get email or do anything but surf the web. Clearly they are blocking all non-web protocols which is pretty ridiculous – why would they attempt to block hospital patients from emailing people? If anything, isn’t that the most important function that they would need Internet access for and web browsing just secondary? So I’ve been using my iPhone on 3G the last two days just because it works better than the WiFi in the hospital. But now we realize that our laptops (Windows 7) are useless here. This meant that I couldn’t stay for very long at the hospital and had to run back to the house to work. That really sucked. We had been planning on me working from the hospital. I took Dominica’s laptop home too since she wasn’t going to be able to use it. That was probably the worst part – she was unable to use her laptop for entertainment while stuck in the hospital.
I came home with Liesl who was very tired and bored from being in the hospital and put her to bed while I worked for several hours. Once Liesl woke up I took her back to the hospital to spend the evening with Dominica and Luciana. Liesl was pretty bored after having been at the hospital yesterday and all day today. Since everything but the web is blocked things like Netflix aren’t an option to keep her occupied either. Luckily the iPad was loaded with some existing videos that she was able to watch. Today she decided that she was in to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” which seems pretty weird to me. She found it and picked it out all by herself. She is way past the point of needing us to help her use the iPad for much of anything, especially not watching movies.
We stayed probably a bit too late as Liesl was going crazy by the end. We tried watching some Disney Channel but there was nothing on that interested her and the tiny television high on the wall was nearly impossible to watch if you were not in the hospital bed.
Luciana is doing really well after day two and it is expected that she and Dominica will be getting discharged tomorrow morning around eleven. We will find out for sure in the morning.
Dominica is really lonely in the hospital and really wants to come home. Hopefully nothing goes wrong so that she can come home tomorrow. She will be very upset if she gets stuck at the hospital for another day – especially as tomorrow is the last day that her parents will be in Texas helping us out.
Liesl and I got home pretty late – probably after midnight. And it was straight off to bed. Liesl was super helpful again tonight. She is really being just so perfect putting up with her mommy being away and all of the change going on. I can’t believe how good she is being.
Tonight she got in to bed and was playing with her toy phone. The phone is meant for kids much younger but she has taken a liking to it which is pretty funny. She does much more advanced play with it, though, and tonight I found her having an entire conversation on it where she was explaining about her day and the baby and hospital and everything. I asked her if she was talking to Aunt Checka and she said yes. I told her to tell her bye bye so that she could brush her teeth. “Bye bye, Aunt Checka” she said and hung up the phone and brushed her teeth.
Then, after she was done brushing her teeth, she called each of her cousins in succession saying “Hello Garrett, what are you doing? Okay, bye bye.” and going on to the next cousin. It was so cute. She even told me that Emily’s phone number was “123”. We were quite surprised that Liesl understands the concept of phone numbers already. Considering how little we use the phone (we use email, instant messenger, etc. instead) that was quite amazing.
As Luciana is doing so well at this point, we have reservations for La Cima for Mother’s Day. We are hopeful that we will be able to make it. Missing brunches at La Cima is a tragic thing indeed.