Dominica and I got up this morning around nine and immediately showered and headed out to join Bennie and Francesca at a new breakfast place that Bennie wanted to try: The Egg & I. It was probably ten thirty when we finally got there after both Dominica and I had to showered and get Ciana set up to be entertained while we were gone since she is always up between eight and nine in the morning every day. Liesl and Emily were still fast asleep and probably would be for quite a while.
After breakfast we came back to the house and Emily & I watched the kids for several hours while Dominica and Francesca went out to do some shopping. Our first project was doing Luciana’s new Goldiblox set that she got for Christmas. This one was a story about a dirty dog named Nacho that needed to take a bath, but he does not like to take baths. So we built a working dunk tank which we tricked him into. So he got a bath.
The girls really enjoyed that project and I used the GoPro to record all twenty two minutes of us working on it. My first long use of the GoPro. It worked well. I used my head mounting kit to try that out. Pretty good but the camera was clearly angled way too high. Lessoned learned. The footage is not too bad, at least.
Then Liesl and Luciana both took a shower together so that they could play with Liesl’s new bath toys. They played with Liesl’s new Dora the Explorer bath paint set and the bath crayons from her other Dora bath toy set. Luciana only stayed in for a little bit because she accidentally bumped the water controls and scared herself. She got out and coloured from ourside of the tub. Liesl stayed in for a nice, long time.
Luciana and I played a couple of rounds of her new pop-up Rapunzel Disney board game. She beat me soundly both times.
Then Liesl, Luciana and Emily played some “running around the house screaming” games for a long time until Dominica and Francesca returned from their shopping excursion.
I spent some time learning how to use the GoPro software that comes with buying the GoPro. I edited together the clips from today’s Goldiblox session and am attempting to get them loaded onto YouTube.
After Dominica got back she did some sewing projects with Liesl. Liesl has been asking to use her sewing kit, that she got for Christmas, every day since Christmas. She had asked for a sewing kit, it is something that she has been wanting. Finally today she got her chance and had a great time making two little pillows and a little purse for her CareBear that she plans to give to it for its birthday “tomorrow.” I managed to take a video with the GoPro of the second pillow being made and hope to have that posted tonight or tomorrow.
My laptop is already completely out of space working on these videos. I need some massive storage to work with even these little videos. The GoPro, doing high definition video, eats of storage like crazy. We are already guessing that we are going to need something on the order of a terabyte of storage per week, or four terabytes per month while we are traveling in Europe! That is going to be incredibly cumbersome to deal with!
Around four we packed up the kids and headed over to Francesca’s house for the evening. It was a board game evening, mostly.
We played a few games of Quelf. Dominica and Francesca really liked the game. Madeline and I definitely did not. Emily did not seem to like it but I am not sure. It is a game that has bizarre rules and depending on what cards you draw it can be very funny or downright annoying to play (like some of the rules make you unable to eat, drink or talk during the game which takes the fun of group activities out of it – if you don’t get those cards and don’t understand how it makes the entire evening just downright boring because you are not participating it might not be apparent what a bad game it is.)
Then we tried playing Cranium, which is a much better game, but the little kids were so loud and rambunctious and their movie was so loud that we had to give up on that. We got dinner from Domino’s. Francesca said that it was the first time that they had had food delivered there in years. Madeline looked shocked that you could get food delivered.
We played another game of Quelf and called it a night. It was getting late and everyone was pretty tired.
Tomorrow night we are having the “real” family New Year’s party at Joe and Brittany’s house.