Sheep Guarding Llama

This morning we decided to go to the Westchester Diner for breakfast.  We had to wait for Liesl to wake up as she was the last one sleeping.  Everyone else was ready to leave and she was still completely asleep.  We made it down there before ten which is amazing for us but even so it was super busy and took forever for us to get our food.  The food was good when it finally arrived.  Why do we keep choosing Sunday mornings for breakfast, I have no idea.

Dominica made me string my old guitar and play it today.  We bought new strings a few months ago and they were hiding back behind the bookshelf in the dining room.  We fished them out and I spent an hour or so getting the guitar strung again and semi-tuned.  We had to put in at least half of an hour hunting around the house in boxes looking for my guitar music as well.  We managed to find everything, though, and I was able to play for a while.

This evening we watched a few episodes of BBC’s Sherlock.  Dominica’s parents had not seen it before and her dad is addicted now.  We watched two episodes all together before Liesl insisted that we try out some new video games…

Today I bought the Quest for Glory game series (five titles) for the girls from this weekend’s GOG sale.  Super cheap and I think that they will like them even though they are old (from my childhood.)  We played a little of Quest for Glory 1 this afternoon, maybe half an hour or forty five minutes.  I think that this game might be a bit hard for Liesl as it has a lot of time sensitive elements in it and she is not good at that yet.  I am going to have to find her an easier alternative.

 

We got up this morning and the morning was mostly focused on major household cleaning.    That was hours of cleaning.  A very busy morning.  The house is looking pretty good, though, especially the upstairs.  The girls’ room is looking more like a guest room than a kid’s room.  The house is feeling much improved after this week’s work.

Dominica’s parents arrived in the early afternoon.  The girls were very excited.

For lunch we had tomato and fake bacon sandwiches.  The tomatoes were fresh from Dominica’s grandfather’s garden and the sandwiches were amazing.  So tasty.

We had a pretty leisurely day.  This afternoon Dominica’s father took the pressure washer out that he had brought with them and pressure washed the house and the deck. That is another thing off of our list of things that the homeowner’s association wants us to do.  What a pain it is living here.  Now we need to get the deck sealed.  Always something.

Dominica cooked stuffed shells for dinner tonight.  After dinner we watched The Amazing Spiderman 2 which is really a perfect example of why I don’t watch comic book movies.  It was like the director didn’t even care.  The movie was uninteresting, ran on for forever and made no sense.  It wasn’t true to itself.  Suspension of disbelief is different than lazy writing.  Good writing, even in a fantasy world, still rewards people for paying attention.  Sloppy writing does not.

Liesl had a good time at movie night, snuggling with her grandmother most of the movie.  Liesl felt that the movie was far too long, though.  She started off strong but for the last forty-five minutes was like “isn’t this over yet?”  Luciana fell asleep before the halfway point on my lap.

Luciana slept on the inflatable mattress in our room tonight.  She was asleep hours before we all went to bed.  Liesl came into the big bed with us being the only one awake at bed time.

Today is a short day because of the holiday weekend.  I got in early and was pretty busy this morning.  At noon we had a luncheon at a tavern near the office where the food was awesome.  I had one of the best fish fries that I have had in a very long time.  Great fish and a great batter.  It is really too bad that this tavern is so far from the house because both Dominica and my dad would really like to get the fish and chips there.  They had good beer too and until recently they had had Shiner on tap.  I was very sad that that was no longer available.

Getting back from lunch the day was nearly over.  I had to do a little bit before leaving but was out of the office around two thirty, a very short day, especially when you consider the long luncheon at the tavern.

Dominica did not tell the girls that I was coming home early so it was a surprise when I came home.

Dominica took today to completely rearrange the house. She is finally embracing my theory that we have to just accept that the house is dedicated to having kids and trying to make it be something that it is not will just lead to unhappiness.

The big move was taking the girls’ bunkbed down from their bedroom to the basement where it is getting set up where Dominica’s desk used to be. We broke down her desk and gave up on it. It just gets piled up with stuff and is unusable. Time to face reality that it is not going to get used now that Dominica has a laptop in the living room and I have a desktop in the office upstairs. Since the girls stopped sleeping in the bunk bed long ago both because they were both getting bigger and because the big queen bed in their room is almost always set up and so much more comfortable it made sense to move it to the basement so that it can serve as a play house rather than as a bed.

Most of the toys from around the house were moved into the basement. Now the girls have more access to them while we have more access to open space in the house. The girls’ pop up café playhouse is up against the back door too which gets it out of the way as much as possible while letting them really play in it. Also it makes it full of sunlight during the day so that it is a lot more fun for them rather than just being a dark space in the middle of the house. They used to play with it against all of the huge, bright windows in Texas so this is a little bit more like how it was when they first got it.

The whole house is looking much better. Much more space and the ability to potentially keep it clean.

Luciana decided that she was going to sleep in the basement tonight. What a funny little girl. So early on in the evening she requested the iPad and went down to the bunk bed and put herself to bed in the basement! We couldn’t not believe it. She was asleep in no time and slept down there from probably eight thirty until two or three in the morning when she came upstairs on her own and went into her own room to go to bed there.

Worked a long-ish day today since tomorrow is going to be a short day leading into the three day weekend.  Looking forward to three and a half days off.  Of course, I’ve taken a few days off recently so I have had more time at home than usual for this time of year.  Today was decently busy.  Then I came home this evening on the late side and we just did a tiny bit of cleaning and watched 30 Rock this evening before going to bed.

Heavy traffic on the drive in this morning.  Easily lost twenty minutes just sitting in stopped traffic.  I finished the first part of the very long History of the World that I am reading.  That will take a few months to get through, I am expecting.

Work was fine today.  Nothing of note.  Managed to leave at six and get home just after seven.  The girls, as always, were an explosion of activity the moment that I walked through the door.  They always have a full day of news to unload on me as soon as I am home.

I ended up needing to take care of stuff at my desk all evening.  We were very low on food so Dominica went out grocery shopping for a few hours and I watched the girls.  After she was back she went down to the basement and worked on school stuff for the girls most of the evening.

Dominica’s parents are coming down in three days for the long weekend so we will be spending the weekend with them.  It is Labor Day weekend so I am off on Monday.    So we are just taking it easy today and tomorrow.

Dominica and I stayed up a little late tonight watching a couple episodes of Downton Abby.