Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday.  In Houston today.  Trying to get work done, but it is very hard when trying to be productive down here.  Not much space for me.  No real updates today.

Had lunch with John Nicholson at Chili’s today.

Tuesday.  Today is Colton’s first birthday party with his cousins.  For his birthday, all of the cousins went to the aquarium in Galveston.  Dominica went with them, I stayed at the Grices’ to get work done.  I have plenty of work to do and it is expensive to go to that aquarium so definitely no reason for another adult to be there.

The kids got back home a little after one.

At five, I joined the family outside for some beers.

Monday.  The girls camped out in the living room last night.  It was very funny to find them this morning.

Too much rolling around and the tent eventually collapsed.  But that’s not going to stop sleeping in!

I worked all day, then this evening we went down to Houston.  It was late, around eight, when we finally got onto the road.  So a very late night drive.  We got into Houston around two in the morning.

Sunday.  Got up, made coffee, and fired up Steam to spend some time with the kids this morning.

The rain seems to have sent the atrium ants swarming and we have a kitchen full of ants this morning.  Wonderful.  So we got to deal with that.

Liesl and I snuggled in and played XCOM most of the day.  I really enjoy that game and Liesl loves watching me play it.  She really gets into the story and the strategy and characters.

This evening the girls and I had a Just Dance – Disney dance party game session on the Wii U.

Tonight the girls decided that they wanted to sleep in the living room.  They built a tent out of chairs and blankets and just slept in the middle of the living room.  They are very goofy.

Our first quiet weekend at home in a very long time.  At some point during the night, Luciana snuck into our room and fell asleep on my arm.

Liesl was the first up this morning, then me.  Dominica and Luciana slept in for a while.  Apparently, Luciana had come into our room having a tummy ache last night.

Liesl set up The Sims 3 this morning and played that for several hours in the living room.  Luciana voluntarily did school all morning.  She is loving learning her math, especially.

I did some work in the dining room where the makeshift office is still set up.  Dominica spent much of the morning working on cleaning around the house.  There is still a tonne to do.  The girls’ room in the far back (Luciana’s room as we call it) is in good shape after we emptied it to nothing and ran Ruby the Roomba nearly a dozen times.  That’s the one super clean room in the house.

Dominica did a lot of work on the secondary “guest” bathroom and discovered that we have a load of wall damage from the broken shower that has been continuously used even though there was a broken hole in the wall for years while we were not here.  So we know that we have to completely rip out that wall and see how bad things are back there.  The tiles are so bad that they are moving around on the wall when she was cleaning and that shower should not have been used in weeks!  Not good.

At least we have been planning for a “to the studs” overhaul of that room anyway all along.  It’s one of the rooms of the house most in need of being completely ripped out and replaced.  Everything in it is dated, ugly and now destroyed.  Sadly, this means that the shower in there is totally useless which is a bit of a problem.  We can’t do anything in there until we invest in some serious repairs.  So we will not be able to do anything incremental, it will be a lot of work all at once now.

Luciana played Slime Rancher this afternoon.  The girls have been loving that we have the Amazon Echo back.  They ask Alexa to play music regularly and dance around the empty living room.