Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Sunday.  Our first day in our “new home.”  With this move, for the first time, we are treating Texas just like any other foreign destination and we have rented a home here in exactly the same way that we have rented in Spain, Panama and Nicaragua and this is our first day in it.

Today was our down day.  Nothing scheduled and we need some time to just relax and have Miller family time.  It was a short day for us, we all slept in late needing time to catch up a bit.  We’ve been pretty tired and the stress is catching up quickly.

For lunch today, we ventured out and explored our condo complex.  Right in the centre of it is a place called Kitty’s Seaside Café which is awesome.  So easy to get to, just a quick walk without needing to leave the complex at all.  Unfortunately it is not in the same building as us so we need to go down to the ground floor and walk outside between buildings to get to it, but it is as close as could be.  Kitty’s is open six days a week (closed on Mondays) and is a diner with a large menu including breakfast all day and lots of shrimp options.

We did a late breakfast today.  The girls got pancakes and Dominica and I both got enormous omelets.  Dominica also discovered that they do biscuits and gravy with a vegetarian gravy.  So excited, that is something that we have not been able to get in a very long time.  The girls liked their food and ate well, too.

This evening I ran Dominica up to the Grices’.  We hung out for a while before leaving.  She is going to spend the night there so that she can get the kids off to school in the morning and will likely hang out there for the day.  Then the girls and I returned to the condo for an evening together.

Liesl requested Panda Express so I stopped there and picked up food on the way back down to Galveston.  That was at five.  Liesl still loves their chow mein and I am always happy to splurge on some honey walnut shrimp for me.  Panda threw in two fortune cookies so each girl could have one.  They love their fortune cookies.

Mario, a friend from SpiceWorld, was in town this evening and thinking about stopping by.

So I set up Liesl with hidden object games on the Fire TV.  Liesl was so cute about the games, she knew that those were “relaxing games” and she knew that the idea this evening was to just relax and rest and so she said that she wanted to play them this evening in order to relax.  She is adorable.  She also “gamed” the games in a matter of seconds figuring out that she could click wildly all over the screen and get nearly all of the hidden objects immediately without needing to actually look for them or get up from the couch.  So she spent a few hours doing that and had a very good time.  She did so well that she completely beat her first game and had me get her a second one so that she could play that one as well.

Luciana spent the evening playing Disney Princess games on the laptop sitting at the dining room table.  She loves her collection of Disney Princess games and can really play them.  They make her very happy and her video game skills are improving quickly.  We are very thankful that we bought this game collection.

I spent the evening getting the condo all cleaned up and put away.  After a few hours the place was pretty much spotless.  There were no toys out, no clothes out, no luggage out.  Everything was away and neat.  It looked like it was in “show condition.”

Mario ended up having to run back home as his young son got a fever while they were out tonight.  So it was just the girls and me all evening.

Luciana ended up demanding to go to sleep in a coat tonight.  She is so goofy.

Saturday.  Dominica managed to make contact with the people who are renting us the condo on Galveston Island for the month and they do not have anyone else renting the condo at the moment and were happy to just extend us at the same daily rate that we were already paying for our month there.  So we are going to be able to move into our own place tonight and be out of every one’s way.  This is a really big relief for us.  It really stresses Dominica out being an imposition on everyone and it makes it really hard for all of us not to have our own space to do our own thing, set our own schedule, etc.  We are very excited to be getting into the condo and the upside is that while we lost time at our place in Nicaragua we gained it at our place in Galveston and it was mostly the time floating around in different parts of Nicaragua that we had to give up so we are actually gaining, not losing, longevity and stability by being back early.

The girls and I had to be up early this morning, the alarm was set for seven thirty but I was actually up and getting ready before seven.  Dominica stayed at the hospital last night with Francesca and I needed to get Emily to her football game at school quite early.  So I got the girls up and out the door very early.  They were terribly groggy.  Liesl actually dressed herself in Luciana’s clothes, which we did not realize until it was too late, and she had to spend the early part of the day in ridiculously small clothes.  She is so goofy.  Both girls struggle to figure out whose clothes are whose at the best of time and they were exceptionally tired when getting dressed this morning.

Madeline was awake to watch the kids and Garrett had just gotten up and Clara was still asleep when I dropped Liesl and Luciana off at the Grices’ and picked up Emily to drive her down to Dickinson.  I had to have her there by a quarter after nine which meant leaving the house at eight thirty.

On the way back from dropping off Emily I stopped at the Taco Bell in Dickinson, right off of I45, and picked up breakfast for Dominica and I and drove it back to the house.

Bennie, Francesca and Dominica got back right after I returned from dropping off Emily.  So that was getting close to ten as it takes about twenty minutes to get to the high school from the house.

I set the kids up with my laptop hooked up to the television in the “media room” again today.  They loved it so much yesterday and were asking for it again today.  Garrett, especially, was interested in getting to play more games on it.  This is still my HP Envy that we have been using in Nicaragua that only has the anaemic Intel GPU and not a discrete NVidia or Radeon.  So it is pretty bad at games but can play some of them.

We ran over to the Toccos’ place and gathered up all of our stuff and got packed up so that we could move everything to the condo.  Since we did not have the kids with us at this point we were able to load up the little green Spark with all of our luggage and take everything in a single load – just barely.  That car is just a little bit too small for moving us around.

On the early side we ran down to Galveston and dealt with getting checked into our new home at the Victorian Condos.  It was a quarter till one when we got our keys and into the condo.  We are so lucky not only to have gotten in early but also that our two and a half bedroom condo is absolutely ideal, possibly the best unit in the entire complex, with amazing waterfront views.  We sit right on the beach, basically, and the view from our living room, master bedroom and balcony is right onto the gulf.    Standing even in the kitchen you look at the water, it fills the view.  This is an amazing spot.  Another perfect home find from Dominica.

We were barely moved in for twenty minutes when we started talking about potentially reserving this place a year in advance for December so that we could get the same deal or better and know that we would have a place that we love like this and not have to worry about it.  Having a great place to be able to come back to year after year and knowing the area would provide a tiny bit of stability, even if it is only for a month at a time, in our very hectic lives.  This place is just perfect.  It turns out that there is a restaurant on property too, a diner.  That is going to make things really easy for us.

Our location is pretty ideal.  It is super fast and easy to get here from the mainland and we are right in the middle of things with food and shopping options within easy walking distance and lots of stuff that we pass on our way on and off of the island, too.  This really could not be better.  I think that my dad is really going to like his room here too, although his room does not have an ocean view.  The layout is a master bedroom that has ocean views and a television, a second bedroom that has a sideways view onto the ocean and no television, two bathrooms and an alcove, rather than a room, with a bunk bed that the girls are going to use.  The kitchen is small but very functional.  There is a decent balcony off of the living room with two chairs outside.  The living room is very comfortable and there is a television there.  Internet is complex-wide wifi.

We spent a few hours moving in and getting settled without the kids.  That made things much easier.  Then we headed back to the mainland but swung into Best Buy on the way to see if they had the Amazon Fire TV, which they did not, but they said that the location up by Hobby had it in stock.  We decided that we needed something for the condo and we needed a diversion for everyone so we drove around a little and managed to get the Gaming Edition of the Amazon Fire TV and then went back to the Grices’ for the afternoon.

We needed to pick up Emily from the high school after the football game which ended up being around seven.  What a long day for her – she had to be at school, on a Saturday, from nine till seven.  That is longer than a normal working day and that’s after a week of school and takes up nearly all of her time to do things like homework.

Dominica rode with me to pick up Emily in Dickinson and on the way back we stopped at Panera Bread and grabbed dinner for the family.  We took that back to the house, ate rather quickly and hit the road to go down to the condo with the kids.  Dominica is staying with us tonight, the only time for the last few days and she will not be staying tomorrow so this is our one family evening.

We stopped at Walgreen’s on the way to the condo and did some shopping for basic necessities so that we would be able to function in the condo.  Then once back we had a very short evening that mostly consisted of setting the girls up with the laptop so that they could entertain themselves with Disney Princess video games while I worked on getting the Amazon Fire TV hooked up and working in the living room on the television.  This is the first that we have had laptops or anything here so we had to get the Internet working everywhere, but that was not too bad.  The signal is okay and the speed is not horrible, but it is not fast either.

There was not enough time for the slow Internet to get things loaded onto the Fire TV so we set some things to download and hopefully it will be usable tomorrow.

Today is my baby Liesl’s seventh brithday!  She had slept with me last night and slept in long after I had gotten up.  At one point she was asleep and I went to check on Luciana and when I returned Liesl was wide awake with a huge smile on her face.  I said “Happy Birthday” and she was ready to explode.  She is so excited about being seven.

I had a talk with her about how she was was not going to get to celebrate her birthday today or really even get to see her mom.  She was so understanding even though she does not know what is going on. She is so mature and sweet.  Such a good girl.

Dominica was already gone this morning when the girls and I got up at the Toccos.  We got up relatively early and went over to the Grices.  I am the only adult around for the bulk of the day.  Everyone was gone by the time that we arrived.  Madeline and Emily were watching the little ones.

Once we arrived, the four little ones ran off to play together. Madeline and Garrett were playing games on the Wii when I arrived.

I set up my laptop in the media room and nearly everyone played video games for much of the day.  We tried a lot of games.  I even got Madeline into the Back to the Future: The Game which she played for hours.  All of the kids moved into the media room and watched her play for a long time.  She has never really played video games before and definitely none like this and she had a good time.

It was a long, rough day.  I took care of getting dinner for the kids.  We got Panda Express, of course, because it is Liesl’s birthday and she got to pick.

I made two trips out to the hospital.  One to do deliveries early in the evening and later, when I was taking the girls home to go to bed at night we stopped by again so that Dominica could see the girls at least once and say happy birthday to Liesl, our little trooper.

The hospital decided to keep Francesca tonight.  So Dominica is sleeping at the hospital tonight, too.  Bennie went back late at night to stay there and I took our girls back to Joe’s.

It was a late night for my girls getting them back to go to bed.  We were exhausted by the time we got to bed.  Both girls decided to sleep with me tonight.  Luciana did not want to be alone.

I can’t believe that my little Liesl is seven now.  She is getting so old and growing up so much.  And she did such a great job today even though she did not get any real presents or anything.

When we got back to the house I gave Liesl a Lego Minecraft set that Emily and I had found today to surprise Liesl with.  Liesl and Luciana were both really excited about it and spent a while putting some of it together tonight before bed.  But much of it will be saved for later.

What a morning.  We started our day today, which is a day without any sleep, at the airport in Managua.  We arrived before midnight and as today, the 26th, began we were working our way through the luggage drop off and security lines at the airport.  We are flying Spirit which we have never flown before and we were caught by surprise that their luggage policy is forty pounds per bag, not fifty like all of the other airlines that we use and even with rebalancing what we could we were hit with ninety dollars of overage fees.  Could not be helped.

Security was super fast and in no time we were sitting at the gate with plenty of time to kill.  The girls kind of napped a little while sitting.  Dominica was feeling pretty ill.  I spent much of the time pacing around the airport.  Everything was closed, there was no means of buying anything while we were there.  This is a very small airport and not enough business to keep anything open at night.

Our flight boarded on time, at one forty in the morning.  Everything went smoothly.  The Spirit flight, while bare bones, was roomy and nice and we did not have any issues at all.  As always it was Liesl, Luciana and I on one side of the aisle and Dominica on the other.  Dominica and I did not sleep on the flight.  Liesl had a neck pillow and was able to get an hour or two at least.  Luciana put a blanket over her head and went to sleep like a little bird.  They never used their iPads at all.

Our arrival in Houston at Bush Intercontinental was around five, right on time.  While exhausting, the red eye from Mangua to Houston is super convenient and not very full.

It is always a little bit of a shock to be back in the US.  Houston’s airport is so large and spacious, it really throws you off.  You have to do so much walking to get anywhere.  We got our bags and go through customs.  That went smoothly.  No immigration issues.

Francesca and Madeline picked us up around a quarter after six in the Sequoia.  So we were able to all load in and get all of our luggage easily.

We went to the Grices and visited for a little while.  Dominica got to working on making food for Thanksgiving.  The kids were super excited to see their cousins, they have been missing them.  After not too long I went into Garrett and Clara’s room and took a nap for about two hours.  That helped a lot.

They woke me up from my nap when it was time to head over to the Toccos’ for Thanksgiving dinner!  It is very nice that we were able to make it home in time to at least join everyone for the holiday.

It was a packed house at the Toccos’ for the holiday.  Lots of food, as always.  We brought our stuff over and moved back in upstairs just like we were over the summer and back at the beginning of the year.  We have spent a lot of time at this house this year.  Hopefully not for too much longer; after today Dominica is going to try to reach the people with whom we have rented the condo in Galveston to see if we can get in a week or two early to our condo so that we can get out of everyone’s way.

Francesca has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning and Dominica is going to be going with her so she went back with the Grices family tonight and is spending the night over there to make things easier in the morning. So I am staying at the Toccos’ with the girls tonight.  Luciana opted to sleep alone in her room going to bed early and Liesl stayed up just a little while longer but came in with me to snuggle.

Today is Wednesday.  The day started off pretty normal.  Hot and I decided to spend a lot of the day sitting with Dominica in the lounge chairs that we have in front of the pool.  It is the spot that gets the best breeze in the house.  I worked all morning and had several meetings and calls today so needed to be on the phone for much of the day.

I had barely gotten off of my afternoon long meeting when Dominica got the tragic news from Texas and all of our plans for December changed.  We are returning to Texas as quickly as we can and we have a lot that has to be done before we can do that.

We called United, which has our tickets currently for our flight back, and while they could get us flights back to the States on Saturday that is both “too late” and they were going to charge us more than the value of the tickets to make the change.  The cost was so high that we even mentioned the possibility of the girls and me staying behind in Nicaragua while only Dominica changed her flights and us joining two weeks later!

Dominica searched and searched and managed find a light out of Managua tonight on Spirit at one forty in the morning!  It was far cheaper than changing our flights with United.  She grabbed the tickets, and I texted our house manager to see if she could get us ground transportation from Granada to Managua lined up for ten thirty tonight.

So Dominica set to packing with reckless abandon and I set out on foot to run to the bank and get the necessary cash to pay our electric bill that is due before we go.  I stop at the corner store for the last time and grab four last Kinder Sorpresa for the girls to give to them after they have helped us get ready tonight.

Dominica did an amazing job of packing under pressure.  She was basically done by nine and we actually were not under that much pressuret leading up to the ten thirty pick up by the same guy who had gotten us at the airport in Managua two months ago.

We are a bit in shock, but from why we have to travel back to Texas and also that we are leaving Nicaragua tonight.  This has been home for the last two months and we were expecting to be here for a bit longer.  We are not mentally prepared to be leaving the country yet.

At ten thirty our friend arrived and this time with a van instead of a Corolla and we easily fit in with tons of room to spare.  Dominica and I sat in the second row and the girls shared the third row behind us.  It was dark and mostly quiet as we pulled out of Granada passing by the grocery stores going back out the way that we had arrived a couple of months ago.  It is weird seeing the same trip now that everything is well known and so familiar as opposed to new and exotic and strange when we first arrived.

On the way out we had to suddenly dodge three horses in the highway.  It was pretty close.  A reminder of what life is like in Nicaragua.

Sadly, not far outside of the city, a dog ran out in front of us and we ran over it.  There was no way that our driver was going to avoid it.  He hit it so hard that Luciana was mostly out of her seat and I had to climb back and get her settled back in.  The girls didn’t really notice what had happened but it was very sobering as if the day was not sobering enough.

The trip up to Managua airport is one hour.  We had to dodge one more horse on the way.  Other than that, it was a quiet drive.

We got to the airport just before midnight.  By the time that the sun comes up we will be far to the north in Houston.  Goodbye ninety degree days, it is time for sixty degrees and rain.