Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It’s Friday!  We got some thunderstorms today.  They did not last long and the rain did not come down hard enough to be any problem.  The lawn will be growing again now, though.  I did figure out, since I had to bring the new weed whacker in from outside today to keep it out of the rain, that it hangs in the kitchen really well alongside the brooms and mop which is perfect.  Anything that keeps me from having to go in and out of the garage is a big deal with how bad the door is there.  And it is so much more convenient to just grab the weed whacker and start mowing without having to go and “fetch” it.

The kids played The Sims 3 and Luciana played Colors on Steam today.  Luciana has gotten even farther in that game than Liesl has!  Maybe Luciana is going to be our platform player.

This evening we started really playing The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles which is a prequel the The Book of Unwritten Tales that we completed (for the second time) last night.  Liesl is controlling the game and we are well past the first chapter after playing tonight.  This is our second time playing the prequel as well, but neither of the girls remember it at all, it was too many years ago.

Dominica did some shopping for school supplies today at Target.  The girls are doing crafts every day in school, and Luciana has been doing math every day and is really enjoying it.

Thursday.  The weed whacker is charged today and so we gave it a go.  It was a bit exhausting but overall it went well and I am very happy with the battery powered weed whacker that we go.  Very easy to use and very compact.  It doesn’t have as much power as other options would have, but it is cutting the weeds with some effort and it makes me more able to go out and actually attack the lawn than I would otherwise be able to do.  So, overall, I am quite happy.

I mowed, with Dominica outside watching me, until the battery died which let me do about a quarter of the front lawn.  It will take several passes before we catch up with things.  But this is not indicative of how it will be in the future. Right now I am spending all of my time taking out huge weeds that have grown up.  That will not be such a problem in the future.  But it is going to take a week of this to work through them now.

The weed whacker is lighter than I thought that it was going to be which is nice given that it is my only form of mowing the lawn.

Tonight the girls and I played The Book of Unwritten Tales and we finally made it to the very end of the game.  We played all of Chapter Five tonight.  What an awesome game.  It has been many years since the last time that we played it.  I think that Luciana was likely only two last time!  She wants to play it again now with her controlling it instead of Liesl.  They both loved it and I had forgotten what a fun story the game had, although all of the game was familiar to me.  To me, it was a recent game.  To them, it was in the murky mists of their memories.

We also fired up the first ten minutes or so of the prequel game The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles which we played right after the original game many years ago but the girls do not remember at all.  They are very excited to get to play this one, too.

I really like these games and it is nostalgic for me not only to go through the stories of the games all over again, but also to play them with my girls as we had played them together so many years ago (I believe when we were living in Peekskill in 2013 or 2014.)  We have certainly gotten a lot of value out of this series.  And I am realy looking forward to getting to play the third title in the series because that is the new one that none of us have ever seen. So for the first time it will be more of the story to enjoy and not just playing the old story over again.

Wednesday.  We are so excited that our new weed whacker has arrived today.  It might sound like a trivial thing, but we have been suffering from lawn issues for a while and now that we are back and living in our Texas home we need to take care of the lawn and in order to do that we need some device for cutting it and until now, we have not owned one.  We ordered a Black and Decker battery powered rechargeable weed whacker from Amazon on Monday and it arrived today.  Only about $79 for the entire unit.  We could not use it today, though, because it needed to be charged up.  The real test of it will be tomorrow.

Today is a special day for us.  Today is the first full day of us living in our Texas home with the house to ourselves, just the family without roomates, since October of 2013.  Almost four full years we have been either away from the house, not all living in it or have been sharing it with someone.  It is hard to believe that this whole house is ours, we have all of this space now!

Yesterday and today we worked on cleaning up the back bedroom, the one that we used to call Luciana’s room because Liesl had always claimed the front bedroom, the one across the hall from the master suite.  When we returned from Europe the girls decided that they wanted to use the back bedroom as it is a little larger but Rachel was already moved in there and did not want to move so we let her stay.  But now that she is gone the girls are anxious to get to move into it.

So after a few more runs of the Roomba (our main vacuum is dead as the belt is burned out from all of the hair on the floor) the room was pretty clean and this morning we moved the girls’ bed and dresser into the room and let them start moving in.  They are so excited. They have been waiting months to get to move in there. The bed is in the back corner to give them maximum space and the dresses (the one that we just brought back from New York) is by the window.  Eventually we will get a television mounted on the wall in there but there are a bit of logistics that need to be done because we can do that.  We really want to paint the room as well, but that just has to wait.  Right now it is a horrible dark brown that makes no sense. And it was painted in a single pass so even for being a bad colour, it looks horrible.  The girls are excited to get it painted to a light blue that they have picked out.

Getting the kids into their new room gives us a chance to swing the mess out of the old one into that one so that we can do more house cleaning.  We are slowly going to get the house in order.  There is so much to do after years of neglect.  We are having fun having our own house back, though, evenwith all of the work that is needed.  It has been so long since we were able to work on this house and make it our own.  Now we have to do it all over again.  So much to do.