Sheep Guarding Llama

The travel schedule has already been pretty crazy and the state of things is accelerating.  We have been traveling for the last several days and today we are driving, early this morning, from Frankfort to Peekskill.  Tomorrow I am heading off to Seattle for most of the week!  This will be my first time in the Pacific Northwest which looks like it will be pretty fun.  I will be out there for three days and means that I will have been traveling pretty much for a week and a half straight!

We got home just in time for me to do a first screening for a job in Boston that I am interested in.  Then I had a few other calls later this evening.  Dominica spent the evening getting my stuff ready for me to head off to the airport in the morning.

We are very thankful that my flights were able to be scheduled from White Plains rather than from the city airports.  This makes things dramatically easier for Dominica and the girls to handle.

Today was our day hanging out in Frankfort.  We will be heading back to Peekskill tomorrow.

This morning we got up at a decent time, got the kids dressed and the car packed and we headed out to Geneseo to get there for ten thirty.  We went to the Geneseo Family Restaurant on Main Street for a change of pace.  Dad drove down to Leicester and picked up Aunt Sharon and brought her up to Geneseo.

Breakfast was good.  Liesl ate cake before leaving the house because no one told her that we were going to breakfast.  Luciana had her usual pancakes.  We discovered that the Geneseo Family Restaurant has a great vegetarian selection that we want to come back and try.

It was right at noon that we got on the road to drive out to Frankfort.  Traffic was not bad at all.  We stopped at Dunkin Donuts and got coffee for Dominica and I and we had to make one stop at a texting stop to get some stuff out of the back of the car.  Other than that it was a quick drive and we were in Frankfort just barely after two thirty.  That was a fast drive.

We got to see Truman, the new Boston Terrier puppy.  He is about three and a half months old.  He is a little sweetie.  We spent a lot of time snuggling with him.

Liesl opened her birthday presents shortly after we arrived.  She is really excited about her new Playmobile boat.  She put that together immediately.

We got Big Willie’s Pizza for dinner tonight.  At eight Dominica and I went out to Gerber’s in Utica to meet up with Brandi and Kerry.  Brandi is Dominica’s sorority sister from Geneseo.  We figured out that Dominica and I last came to Gerber’s one year ago tonight!  How weird that we did it exactly a year later.  Neither Kerry nor Brandi have ever been to Gerber’s either.  Completely by coincidence half a dozen or more of Kerry’s coworders ended up coming in right after we did and none of them had ever been to Gerber’s before either!  Lots of weird coincidences tonight.  Her friend Nicki ended up joining us for much of the evening at our table.

We had a really nice time.  It was a lot of fun.  We were out until probably one in the morning.

When we got back the girls were fast asleep, thankfully.  We poked our heads in to check on them.  They were so cute, the two of them sharing a small bed.  They hate to be apart.

We all slept in rather late this morning.  Liesl and Luciana were actually the first ones up and out of bed but Dominica was right behind them and dad was right behind her.  I was only ten or fifteen minutes later.

We did not do too much this morning.  We got dad set up with a Steam account and he bought his first two modern video games: Age of Empires HD and Tropico 3.  Both of these were in the Steam Black Friday sale so were only a few dollars.  He is going to try out some video games to see if he enjoys them so we wanted to have him start with two very different types of games to see what he may or may not like.

Art and Danielle stopped up this morning.  I bought Danielle’s iPad Mini 2 (with Verizon WWAN option) as I have been without a tablet for quite some time – several years since I gave my original iPad to the girls.  I have been wanting to get one for me to use.  I got to use a company one for several months last year and it was awesome having it.  The Mini is better for me, I just don’t need anything too large.  I am really excited.  I am going to be traveling a bit in December and possibly in January and who knows what we are doing in February so having good means of being online and having a really mobile device to use while traveling will make things much better.  It is good timing for us to get a new tablet.

We went down to Aunt Sharon’s at noon so that the girls could play with the kittens that they have: Pico and Toby.  They are very cute.  The kittens were very playful and the girls had a lot of fun getting to play with cats for the very first time.

After the cats we went to Brian’s USA Diner for some “lunch.”  I got a garbage plate there, I was craving another one after having the one last night.  They are so good.  I miss them living outside of the Rochester area.  We had a really nice lunch and then it was back to the house.

The girls opened their Christmas presents from grandpa this afternoon since they are unlikely to have a chance to see him before Christmas actually rolls around.

The girls took a long bath together this afternoon – Luciana got a new Barbie bath play set for Christmas and both girls were very anxious to have a chance to play with it.  Both of them are still so focused on imaginary play and just love being able to play that kind of stuff together.

We spent a lot of time just hanging out in the living room relaxing.  Liesl was pretty focused for several hours on building her new Lego beach house set.  It’s a really nice one.  Dad got it for her yesterday for her birthday.  She is loving it.  Luciana played with several different toys.  We mostly got time to visit.

Around seven, dad settled in to the office and started playing Tropico 3 which he bought earlier today.  This is the first “modern” video game that he has played.  So this is going to be a pretty big experiment to see if he enjoys where games have been going over the past thirty years!  Things have changed a lot since he was last playing video games regularly on the ColecoVision that we got when I was in second grade!!  I am writing this paragraph sitting in the same room that he is playing the game so I have no hindsight to give me a view as to how he likes it.

We did dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers, mostly baked ziti, and then it was time for a few science experiment with Liesl’s new science lab kit.  She had a lot of fun with that and Luciana helped out as much as she could.  That probably lasted an hour or more and I managed to get several videos taken and uploaded to YouTube tonight.

After the science experiments, Liesl and Luciana played for a little while then dad set up the theatre in the basement and he, Dominica, Liesl and I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth which Dominica and I have seen but dad and Liesl have not.  Liesl really enjoyed it.  Luciana came downstairs but grabbed the white iPad and took it into the girls room and said that she wanted to watch her own shows.  She wanted to be near us but did not want to watch the movie with us.  By the time that we checked in our her about halfway through the movie she was already fast asleep.  This week was really exhausting for her.

We finished the movie at eleven thirty and everyone was off to bed.

Today our oldest turns six years old!  We really cannot believe it.  Five is such a huge year, the first year that I really remember concretely from my own childhood.  Sure, I have memories from three and four, but mostly they are spotty and fuzzy.   Five is so iconic.  The year that school starts (for most people), for example.  That Liesl is no longer five and all of those memories and events for her from that age are now over is unbelievable.  How did our little girl get so old?  Liesl was still awake at midnight last night so I ran downstairs and wished her a happy birthday before we sent her off to bed.

Liesl and Luciana both love snow and Peoria, NY is completely covered in snow this morning.  Not snow that will cause driving problems, but enough that everything is covered in it.  This is what people wish that Christmas would look like.

Liesl got me up at six this morning, she needed me to escort her upstairs to get tissues.  She doesn’t like walking around grandpa’s house alone at night in the dark.  She went right back to bed and back to sleep after that.  I did not.  I ended up laying awake for an hour and a half before deciding to get up and get started.  Dominica was up at a quarter after eight to start cooking.

The morning was spent getting ready for the festivities.  Dominica was making baked ziti for everyone and that took much of the morning.  The gang was due to arrive around eleven thirty.

We had a total of seventeen people come for Thanksgiving dinner today.  It was a very long day, the crowd was here from about eleven thirty until seven in the evening.  And nearly everyone was here the whole time too.  We had a really good time, it was a lot of fun.  The girls had a blast.  They had a bunch of twenty-somethings to play with them all day too which they thought was just awesome.  So they were really worn out by the end of the day.

At nine, Art and Danielle stopped up and picked Dominica and I up and we drove up to Rochester to go to the old Nick Tahou’s (now Steve T’s) on Lyell Avenue.  This is the nineteenth year (1996 was the first year of the tradition) of our gang getting together there right at 10PM as they open up after being closed for Thanksgiving.  We are always nearly everyone there.  Very few people think of going there at that time.

We had an amazing thirteen people come this year.  Jeff Simpson and two of his cousins arrived first and Joe Howlett was waiting in his truck when the four of us got there.  Nate and Tammy came up bringing his cousin and a friend and Tess came for the first time too.  It was a huge turnout.  Bob was thinking of coming out from Syracuse but with the bad weather it just was not worth the long drive.

It was great being back.  We had a great time and everyone stayed until after midnight.  The food was awesome too.  It has been many years since I have had a garbage plate.  I love this tradition.  It is so much fun.  Dominica always hates the idea but loves it when we actually go.  She was very happy that we went too.  Maybe now we can get back into the swing of this.  This is our first time making it back since Liesl was born!  It was great seeing everyone again too.

It was just after one when we got back to the house.  Dad was still awake.  The girls had been pretty rambunctious and did not actually go to bed until a quarter after eleven!  We are not happy with them.  But their internal clocks probably made getting to sleep as early as we had put them to bed pretty hard.  They never go to bed before eleven and rarely before midnight.