July 27, 2014: The Girls Are Recovering

The girls are both doing well this morning. Luciana has no signs that she had a major accident and ER trip yesterday except for a little goop in her left eye probably from the cut healing (you can’t see the cut.) Liesl says that her left eye is still soar but she is able to see today and it is not too bad. It started off soar but appeared to be all better by the end of the day.

I had much more work still to do today so spent the morning and the early afternoon upstairs in the bedroom working at the “office” to get things done. Liesl did a great job of leaving me in peace so that I could complete stuff. Luciana had a harder time of it and would come upstairs and try to play with me, play under my desk or hide underneath our bed as much as she could.

Dominica played Wind Waker with the girls, mostly with Liesl, for several hours. They loved that and were so excited that she got ahead of me today.

I was able to wrap up in the middle of the afternoon. Boy that felt good to get completed. I came down to spend time with the girls and Dominica took the opportunity to go out grocery shopping and to go to Subway to pick up dinner. While she was gone I played some Wind Waker on my own account with the girls but I did not manage to catch up to where Dominica was and Liesl does not think that I am nearly as good at this game as mommy is. Which I am sure is true. Dominica is an old Zelda player and I am new to it. I have only ever played a little Twilight Princess and nothing else and did not really get very far in that either.

Once Dominica was back home we watched several episodes of 30 Rock and called it a weekend.

July 26, 2014: Luciana Falls Down the Stairs

Luciana sneaked into our room this morning at around seven and climbed into bed and snuggled with me for a while.  We had to get up at eight thirty as the guys were coming to fix our broken bedroom ceiling this morning at nine.

The family was all up and ready when the repair guys came, there were two of them.  We had to move everything in our bedroom to make room for them, as expected.  This gives us a good chance to clean under the bed I suppose.

Liesl and Luciana wanted to watch me play Wind Waker this morning on the Wii U so we set up in the living room to do that and played for a while.  After about half an hour, Luciana was upset about something and went upstairs to change her clothes so I went up to help her.  Once she was dressed she started to go downstairs.  I was a bit behind her, still in the bedroom, and she slipped off of the top step and did not manage to catch the railing and pitched forward going head over heels the entire way down the stairs.  Eleven steps in all.  She did not roll at all, it was all straight down in the most horrific fashion you can imagine.  It was horrifying.  There was nothing at all that I could do.  She was too far in front of me there was no way to reach her.  Dominica and Liesl could hear the noise and me yelling.

Luciana hit the landing hard and in a terrible position.  I ran down the stairs as quickly as I could safely.  Dominica lept off of the couch forgetting that she had a laptop on her lap and came running but I was to Luciana much faster.  Poor Liesl did not know what to do and just collapsed in the middle of the living room sobbing heavily – she was terrified that Luciana was hurt.

I picked Ciana up in my arms and we tried to determine how bad the damage was.  Dominica immediately noticed that Ciana had blood coming out of her left eye socket.  None of her limbs seemed to be broken.  She was crying heavily so at least we knew that she was partially alright.  Dominica threw on shoes and we took Ciana straight out to the Acadia and they ran to the hospital to take Ciana to the ER.  I noticed when putting her into the car that her mouth was bleeding too.  I asked Ciana where it hurt and she only said her eye, which she would not open so I could not inspect it at all.

I stayed at the house with Liesl and the painting crew.  Liesl took a long time to calm down.  She was really scared.

While they were gone we played more of Wind Waker for a while and got through another “level” of the game.  Then I took some time to buy and download Mario Kart 8 which took more than an hour to download and about half an hour to install.  But we had to get it before the end of the month so that we would get another game free too with it so I did that today.  The Mario Kart games are always good choices.

While it was downloading Dominica got home with Luciana.  They were gone for less than two hours.  They got to the ER which is fortunately really close to use, maybe five minutes away tops, and she was rushed straight in. The doctor only really kept her in for observation, though.  They thought that she was doing okay and were not too concerned.  She got a coloring book there and stickers.

So that made for a very scary morning.  My guess is that this might be the earliest memory that Luciana retains.  We will have to see in ten years if she ends up remembering this.  She was in good spirits when they got home and ran across the parking lot to see me.

This evening we were pretty worn out and did not want to do anything, so we ordered in Chinese.

July 25, 2014: Watching 30 Rock Again

Finally Friday. Very glad that the end of the week is here. Looking forward to a weekend with the family. One without rats and hornets making noise in the attic.

When I woke up this morning I realized how much cooler it was in our bedroom than it has been all summer. I am pretty sure that the new insulation in the attic is really making a difference. Really noticeable.

On the drive to work this morning I went to start reading Novo Ordus Seclorum but realized that I had actually already read it and just didn’t remember reading it by name. So kept reading “War and Peace” instead. That is going to take me forever to get through. I have fifty five hours of the book left to go and I have already completed the entire first part of the book!

More work for me this evening. If I skipped working this evening I would have too much to do over the weekend. I’ve been pretty good about this all week and continued tonight.

We started watching 30 Rock again late tonight. We both love that show and it has been a while since we last watched it so going back and watching it again is pretty entertaining and I don’t just know everything that is going to happen.

July 24, 2014: House Renovations

Today is the big day for dealing with the rat problem (and the hornets too.) The crew is scheduled to arrive around one this afternoon. Normal work day for me so Dominica gets to deal with the critter control people.

They came around one and Dominica and the girls had to vacate the house so that they could work for most of the day. So they went shopping and out to the movies. They got to see Disney’s “Planes 2” which I am guessing was good since I really enjoyed the first one.

They ended up having to be out of the house for about five hours. One of the guys working in the attic was attacked by the horde of hornets living up there and put part of his foot through the ceiling directly above our bed. So we have a half foot square hole there and a mess in our bedroom. Someone will come over the weekend to fix that. They had to close the hole with cardboard for now and at least half a dozen hornets got into our bedroom because of that but overall it was pretty uneventful.

They managed to finish up before I got home and Dominica said that they were really nice. While patching up the attic they found a baby bat living in our eaves so they couldn’t patch the hole there and can’t for another month or two until the bat matures enough to be able to be moved out of the way before doing the patching (bats are extremely good for the environment, never hurt a bat.)

The attic is now rat and hornet free and completely re-insulated. The house is looking pretty good with all of the cleaning that Dominica has been doing knowing that people were going to be in the house all of this time. We are very hopeful that the new insulation will make a big difference in the amount of work needed to keep the house cool. The air conditioning really struggles to keep the upstairs cool in any way.

Liesl was playing her Nickelodeon Fit video game on the Wii when I got home. She is amazingly good at that game and really loves it. It is a really good workout for her too. I am really thankful that we have that one and some ones like that.

I had a bit of work to do tonight so went straight up to the bedroom to work at the computer up there. The evening was very short for me as I did not get out of work until seven and did not get home until well after eight. So only two hours before the girls were off to bed.

I finished reading “The Darkest Summer” today. It was pretty good.

July 23, 2014: Rats

Today the exterminators are scheduled to come to the house and take a look at what we believe is a squirrel problem up in the attic above the master bedroom.

I went into the office this morning. The exterminators were coming late in the morning. Dominica spent the morning cleaning the house as it was a bit of a mess and strangers were going to be traipsing through the house much of the day.

Dominica called me at work. The verdict is that it is rats and hornets, not squirrels. And there are a lot of them. A lot! They are taking over the attic. Normally you can’t hear rats. There are so many that we are hearing them very loudly. The infestation is so bad that they were concerned about us staying in the house. They have gotten into the duct work and they have been going all of the way down to the basement and have been attempting to eat their way into the open basement area.

It is going to take a massive house overhaul to deal with the rats. We got quoted $3,000 for it and they don’t have an open slot to deal with it for two weeks. But once we decided to move forward they decided to see what they could squeeze in because of the girls and they found a way to come out to deal with it tomorrow. So tomorrow afternoon we are having the rats removed, all attic damage repaired, all entry points to the house closed up, all of the insulation removed, everything sanitized including the duct work and heavy duty, all out spray in, rodent repellent insulation laid down. Not the news that we wanted but at least it will be all dealt with.

I got home and Dominica and Liesl were busy playing one of Liesl’s games on the Wii, a Disney dancing game that she has not used before. Liesl was having a great time. We then went right up to the playground for a little while before it was too late.

Once we were back at the house Dominica immediately went out shopping and I did the dancing game with Liesl the entire time that Dominica was out. Luciana played games on the Nintendo 2DS.  I beat Liesl at the dance game, which didn’t surprise me, but she told me that she is able to beat Dominica.  She said, “Mommy is horrible at this game!”

Dominica got home and they all spent some time downstairs while I attempted to get some work done. Then everyone moved into the bedroom with me when we tried to get the girls ready for bed and they convinced us to let them sleep in our room. So they were all asleep while I worked for several hours until about one thirty in the morning. Then I was off to bed as well.