I slept in until seven and found that it was still raining and continued to rain for most of the morning. It was wonderful. The air was cool and the light was muted. It was a great morning. Nicaragua is so wonderful in the rain. If only it would rain a lot more. Like ten times as much at least.
A busy day of posting and writing. We stayed in today, never went out at all in any way. Not even a run to the corner store. Partially because of the rain, it was coming down pretty hard.
We are basically out of water today. We were getting low yesterday. No water delivery boys came yesterday or today. We have some water in the fridge but that is nearly the end of it. I made sure that our front door was open on the early side today as we could not risk missing them.
GOG’s weekend sale started today and there were six new games that we wanted. That takes our week total to more than forty!! We are up to 699 PC games on the online services now. It is a little out of control.
Luciana asked to make video letters today. They have talked about doing this for a while but have not actually attempted it. Today they did a few of them and uploaded them to YouTube. They had a great time.
The girls slept in, they must have been really exhausted, until after ten thirty and then spent the entire day upstairs. Both girls have new video games on their iPads and decided that they really wanted to play them today. Liesl has her first Skylanders game and spent the whole day on it. We decided to let her skip school because she was so excited (and because Dominica is totally addicted to hidden object adventure games and wanted to spend the day doing that which she did from the moment that she woke up until we went up for family time in the evening. Twelve hours of them at least!)
The rain stopped for a few hours and returned in the evening and then stopped again.
Liesl and I had had a long talk last night about how they cannot go storming out and do their own thing every time that we have family movie or game night and do not play the game that they had been hoping to play. Liesl expressed how she felt that we never watch the shows that she want and I explained how she never gets a vote because she does not participate with us so isn’t there. She came up with the idea of making a voting chart and how to implement it so that every one gets a vote and a turn.
She got up today and set right to work putting together a family game night and family movie night voting chart and solicited votes during the day to figure out what we would be playing tonight. It was very good, mature problem solving. I am very proud of her.
I wrote until late then brought the laptop upstairs so that Liesl and Luciana could have game night. They had both voted for Octodad: Dadliest Catch tonight so that is what was played. Dominica fell asleep early but I stayed up until one in the morning with the girls so that they could play their game.
Liesl did amazing on the game and is better at controlling the character now than I am. This is a very hard game to control and her hand eye coordination has gotten really good quite quickly. But the more amazing thing is that she read every on screen instruction in the game! She did not need help and I was not even watching her. She just started doing it. She declared that now she can read and some of the stuff that she was reading was pretty hard: cafeteria, employee, uniform, messier. This was the big breakthrough. Until today she has always said “but I can’t read” and used that as an excuse for not doing it. But today it clicked and she feels confident in being able to read and really is just zooming through new words with little effort.
She played a little Message Quest which I had just downloaded and is pure reading. She was having such a good time and working so hard on her reading that we let her stay up for at least another twenty minutes. It is like she is doing school. I am not sure that any of her school work would be pushing her nearly so hard as reading these games!
We are so happy that our big girl can read now. She says that she is ready for books, too!