I got up and packed up this morning so that I would be ready to leave directly from work to head to Frankfort as soon as I got off of work today. It was a very slow morning. The office is basically empty, as is expected.
I got released from the office at noon and was ready to go. I had checked online and saw that Vera Bradley delivered Dominica’s Christmas present to the house today while I was at the office so I ran back to Peekskill, which is only slightly out of the way, and grabbed it before driving north to Frankfort. Dominica and the girls left dad’s house at nine this morning so arrived at Frankfort before I got out of Peekskill.
My drive was not bad. Only saw a few flakes of snow the entire way and traffic was not bad. I drove up to Plattekill Service Area and went in there to grab myself some lunch as I did not eat at the office before leaving and it was the middle of the afternoon now. So I grabbed food at Arthur Treacher’s.
I had finished reading “Venice: Pure City” the other day and today decided to do something that I rarely do and reread a book. On the drive north I read the first half of ”A Wrinkle in Time” which I read when I was quite young. I cannot place the reading of the book in my memory so I have no idea if I read it when I was in second grade or high school but my best guess is somewhere around third grade. I remember having read the “Time Trilogy” by Madeleine L’Engle and there were only three books. The fourth book, “Many Waters”, was not written until 1986. I did go back and read that one, but it was later than when I read the earlier books because I exhausted the available titles at the age that I had been reading them. So third grade is my best estimate for my original reading of “A Wrinkle in Time.” There is a fifth title in the series, “An Acceptable Time”, but that was not published until 1989 when I was no longer following the series and was unaware of its writing until recently. I read several of Madeleine L’Engle’s books when I was in elementary school including all or nearly all of the Austin’s and O’Keefe series (the O’Keefe series being the sequel series to the Time Quintet but written contemporary to it.)
The drive from Peekskill to Frankfort is under four hours but pretty close to it. It was just after five when I arrived and everyone had just walked in from mass. We had a relaxing evening for the most part. A bit later on, maybe around nine, we tried to put the kids to bed but Luciana was over tired, we think, and had a really rough time. She kept Liesl awake and caused all kinds of problems. I eventually had to go up and lay down in their room for a while. Even that didn’t go so well. At first Luciana came and snuggled with me and tried to hang out reading what I was reading on my phone. But Liesl got upset because she was being good but wanted snuggles. So she climbed into my bed too. Then, after not too long, Luciana started picking on her sister and eventually got kicked out of the bed.
All in all it probably took an hour or more to get Luciana to go to sleep. She finally fell asleep in her bed and Liesl in mine. Around eleven I had to sneak out without waking up the girls so that I could go down to the living room and assist with the set up of all of the presents for tomorrow. That took, as it usually does, until around two in the morning. I was very tired having gotten quite little sleep over the past few days combined with lots of driving.