We are very thankful today that we decided to push on to the north side of Columbus, Ohio last night. We were able to sleep in until nine this morning and get a relaxing start. The Comfort Inn that we stayed at was great and very cheap. A good decision all around. We got a good night’s sleep and are feeling good today. And we only have to drive about two hours or maybe a little more but less than three to get to my aunt’s house in Louisville, Ohio where we are going to be hanging out all day and staying tonight.
It is bitterly cold in Ohio today. It was nine degrees when we got onto the road. Dominica and I listened to some more of Eragon on our drive. The drive was smooth until we got to Massillon where we ran into a lot of snow and nearly blinding conditions. It was a slow go from there to East Canton. We were doing only twenty five miles per hour.
It was around one when we arrived at Aunt Marlene’s house. This was my first time having driven there all on my own, which is pretty surprising as we go there all of the time and she has been living in the same house for about twenty years! Grandma was already there. It was just the six of us (Aunt Marlene, grandma, Dominica, Liesl, Luciana and me) for a while. Uncle Don came home early and was there around three. Eventually my cousins all came over (Gwen and Mike, Brett and Molly and eventually Monica and Joe.) Aunt Cheryl and Aunt Gayle came too. It was a full house. We all got pizza for dinner and hung out until around midnight. The girls had a great time playing with everyone.
We had a really nice time getting to visit with everyone and having enough time to really get to visit and not just popping in quickly, saying “hi” and leaving again. Spending two nights in Ohio plus getting some sleep, not needing to deal with interviews and everyone having a few days warning on the visit helped a lot.
We spent the night there like we did a year ago. The upstairs sitting room has been completed since the last time that we were there. The girls had a great time playing upstairs and naming all of the rooms. The new sitting room is called the “Fall Room”. And the bedrooms are the “Pink Flower” room and the “Diamond” room.
Getting the girls off to bed was quite a chore tonight. First of all the time change back to the east coast is causing no end of issues. Their schedules are all messed up. And then all of the naps in the car have made them wide awake late at night too. We were struggling to get them into bed by one tonight and they were mostly not asleep until three in the morning!
We started off with Liesl and Luciana in the diamond (full size bed) room and Dominica and I in the pink flower room (queen bed.) But Liesl was having a bit of a temper about having to go to bed and ended up losing access to the iPad for the night. Luciana had to be moved to the fall room (upstairs sitting room) while we dealt with that. Then they got put to bed but after a while Luciana came to our room and said that Liesl was so loud that she could not sleep. So it was the three of us for a while.
Liesl sneaked in and did not fit in the bed so tried sleeping on top of my diagonally which kind of worked. Eventually, somehow, Dominica and Luciana wound up in the diamond room and Liesl and I wound up in the pink flower room. I think that Dominica was in the other room by herself for a while, if I remember correctly. We lost quite a bit of sleep during that whole mess. The only reason that I ended up staying put at all is because the CPAP more or less anchors me to a single location with some major effort. Everyone else can move around pretty freely.