Sheep Guarding Llama

Around five this morning Luciana sneaked into our bedroom and climbed into bed to snuggle with me. She put her head on my shoulder and slept there all morning J

I didn’t leave for the office until after eight. I was not about to get out of bed early when both girls were being so snuggly this morning after over a week without seeing them. Dominica and Francesca were awake as I left for the office and Luciana had just woken up to ask for her morning chocolate milk.

The Grices are planning on driving on up to Frankfort today.

On my way to the office this morning I finished reading “Lean Mean Thirteen” and have started reading “Fearless Fourteen”. I am only one book behind Francesca in the Stephanie Plum series now, but this is the last one currently in my Audible library so it might be a while before I read any more of them.

I got home around seven and everyone was really tired. I was horribly tired but Dominica was already wanting to go to bed and the girls were a little tired. We put on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and watched two episodes of that. The girls started off not wanting to watch it but eventually settled down to snuggle with me on the couch and watched it with me.

Dominica found some new Lego games on the iPads for the girls tonight. They both really got into them and were super excited to play them. They were doing really well at it too.

Liesl got ready for bed just after nine and was actually in bed by nine thirty which was amazing. She did a great job of getting ready quickly. We were all so tired that Dominica and I were in bed before nine forty ourselves! I have to be up and in the office early tomorrow so it was a good night to get to sleep early anyway.

My plan today was to leave the office a little early so that I could get home around six thirty to see the family but that would end up not being possible today.

At lunch today I went up to Wilton and had lunch with Danielle’s brother Tim at The Little Pub up there.

The family was on the north side of Baltimore last night and so had only a short drive to do today. They drove up through New Jersey and were hope by the middle of the afternoon.

Work itself was fine today and I thought that I was leaving early right up until I was stuck staying a little late. I was emailing Dominica and she was planning on having me meet the family at Grandma’s (the restaurant in Yorktown with the pies) for dinner. This works well as it is on my way home – I can easily go right by it without any effort at all.

I ended up getting stuck late in the office but the family did not manage to go to dinner either. Francesca fell asleep and ended up still being asleep when I got home after eight!

Liesl was very excited to see me. She came running as soon as I was in the house. Luciana took a little longer before she came down the stairs and jumped into my arms from the landing.

We got all of the kids packed up and we all drove out to Yorktown to get dinner. Emily and Madeline rode along with me in the Spark, everyone else piled into Francesca’s truck. When we got to the restaurant there was no one there except for a couple of cop cars. We were sure that they were closed but it turned out to just be too late for people to be getting food in Westchester, a very sleepy county.

We were the only people in the restaurant for much of the evening. That was good because the kids were all very tired from being in the car for days and were really wound up. It took all that we could do to keep them under control.

Luciana wanted to sit with her cousins but Liesl sat away from all of them to sit with me. Luciana sneaked over later on and sat on my lap to eat her mac and cheese. Liesl got spaghetti to which she adds pepper. That is her new things now. She recently discovered that she loves black pepper and loves to use it. She gets that from Dominica. It is funny how much she loves it.

After dinner we all went home and it was straight off to getting everyone ready for bed. The kids all decided to sleep in the girls’ room. We thought that Liesl and Luciana would sleep in our room and we had the airbed in there ready for them but they wanted to be with their cousins.

Before everyone fell asleep, Liesl sneaked into our room because she wanted a quiet place to watch a new show that came out on Netflix. So she ended up climbing into bed with us.

It is Sunday and from what I can estimate today is going to be my final day alone at home. The family has been on the road all day today, they left Florida late last night and are driving all day today.

Today is my day to actually relax after working a lot yesterday. Yesterday was exhausting and stressful. So I decided to do very little today. I sat down and finally settled in to watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine which I watched for a while when it first aired but I stopped watching probably around 1994 which was early in the DS9 run. I didn’t have television when I went to college so I missed a lot of things during that era. I keep hearing from people that it was a better show than what I remember it being and worth watching again. I tried watching it with Dominica a while ago but she was not really interested in watching it then so we pushed it off. So I am watching it on my own now.

I made it through more than half of the first season of DS9 today. While I watched it I put in a ton of work cleaning the living room. This was a lot of work because it has been being used as storage so it took a lot of work to get it cleaned up. I also, finally, set up our stereo in the living room. We have been avoiding doing that because we kept thinking that we were going to only do that in the basement but we have not made any progress at all in regards to getting our theatre set up down there so I resorted to at least having the stereo in the living room. Partially this was to clean up the living room some because the receiver that we will have, the Marantz, and the Totem speakers have been sitting around since we moved in to Peekskill and that doesn’t look very good while not providing us any usage.

I spent much of the day in the living room but it was looking pretty good by the end of the day. While going through boxes cleaning I came across some of the girls’ BluRays that Dominica has been looking for like Finding Nemo, Cinderella and Peter Pan.

This evening I decided to watch some movies. I watched Hot Tub Time Machine which I have not watched in a few years and have only ever seen once. Then I watched Super Troopers which I have surprisingly never seen.

While I was watching the movies I did a load of laundry and then it was time to get off to sleep.

I had to be up early this morning so that I could work.  I got up at about a quarter till seven and went straight down to the basement and got back to work starting just before seven.  It ended up being a hellacious morning.  (Note, Chrome doesn’t know the word hellacious.)  Work was terrible.  Everything went wrong so I was scrambling all morning to get things working.  It was much worse because I had a firm deadline at noon because I needed to go pick up the Toccos at the airport in Brooklyn.

I was watching Facebook all morning and saw that Dominica, Francesca and the kids all got to Disney World super early this morning and were ready for rope drop.  They managed to keep the trip a surprise and it took Liesl a little while to figure out that they were in Disney World.  Their plan is to be there all day, from opening until closing, and then drive north to find a hotel outside of the Orlando tourist area.

So my entire morning was nearly five and quarter hours of continuous work, going as fast as possible trying to get everything done and fixed before I had to leave.  That wasn’t possible and I had to turn things over to someone to handle while I was gone.  I didn’t have time to take a shower or anything.  Not a fun morning.

I left just after noon and hit some traffic getting down to JFK in Brooklyn but that was okay because I had left time for that and managed to get to the airport and pull up to the passenger pickup zone just as Dominica’s parents had come outside.  So none of us had to do any waiting.

I drove the Toccos back to our house and they were right into their car and off home.  They were exhausted from all of the travel and ready to get home and get naps in.  I went right back down to the basement and picked up where I had left off, more or less, and worked for another few hours.

The kids got to ride the brand new Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train ride that just opened in Fantasyland, except Luciana as she is too small.  Everyone was really excited about that.  You don’t really get to do new rides very often.  Luciana got to ride the Barnstormer and really loved that.  She had been too small for that the last time that we were in Florida back in November.

Once worked finally wrapped up I was pretty worn out and took some time to relax.  It was mid-afternoon already.  I watched a couple movies and called it a night.

Today is Friday.   Work was very normal today.  I am still home alone without the family.  So I got in around nine and left the office slightly early, around five thirty, but only so that I could get home and switch to working from there as I had to work all evening.  So I ran home between five thirty and six thirty and immediately got back online down in the basement with my laptop and got to work.  I ended up working all evening and was not done until after eleven which was pretty late since I need to start working tomorrow morning at seven in the morning.  So a short night for me.  I got done with work and it was straight to bed.