Sheep Guarding Llama

When I got home from work this evening we were out the door almost immediately to hoof it up the hill to go to the playground that we discovered over the weekend.  The girls were very excited to be getting to go back there.

 

The walk up the hill is pretty exhausting, but it is a good idea for us to do this every day.  Good exercise and it makes our evenings a lot more family oriented than if we stay in the house and it makes us less likely to eat.  Doing a walk like this when I get home is better than sitting around a table for food as far as getting family time in because we are all walking together and there is nothing to do except to spend time together and talk.

The girls had a great time on the playground this evening.  I can’t believe how well both of them do climbing up on everything.  Liesl is attempting to go up the big kid climbing ladder things on the outside of the playground unit.  She is still pretty scared to just climb them and needs me to stand with her but she is braver than she was over the weekend and is getting better at it.  She still wants me to stand with her though.

Liesl really wants to go down the fireman’s pole but is terrified of it and won’t try it.

Luciana thinks that it is great fun to pretend that the playground unit is a ship and that she is a pirate.  She runs all around being a pirate.

The walk up and back and time on the playground rapidly eats up our evening.  But it is a great way to spend the time.

Back to work but today is Tuesday and it is only a four day work week.  So the week will fly by.  I suspect that the office will be pretty empty and slow today as well.

And I was right, it was a slow day.  Got home at a decent time and we just relaxed tonight, nothing really of note.  We continued reading “The Magician’s Nephew” which is nearly finished now..

A warm, quiet morning.  I was up at eight thirty and Dominica at nine.  Liesl at ten and Luciana at ten thirty.  We have no plans today, time to relax some.

I found a wasp in the basement this morning.  No fun.  I sprayed it but have no idea how it got inside.  It was pretty sluggish even though it is warm out.

My goal this morning is some pretty major catching up on SGL.  The online communities are very quiet this morning.  It took me all day, till eight this evening, to get caught up completely on SGL but I did it.  That was a major backlog.  Using OneNote to keep track of my week as it happens helps a lot, though.  I lose track of a lot less now.

Early this afternoon, before two, Dominica went out to go shopping.  She was gone for almost three hours during which time both girls were in the basement for the entire time hanging out with me.  Part of the time they watched shows and played.  They got me to play Skunk Bingo with them and play some games with them.  Luciana was with me in the basement for the entire day, from early in the morning until bed time.

I did a bit of work on Kidding Around Europe and the new Kidding Around Europe Community today too.  We are getting a lot done there.  I have next week’s podcast already edited and scheduled so it should show up like clockwork on the site on Sunday morning.  That process seems to work really well.

Liesl watched Pocahontas this evening.  We are pretty sure that she has seen it before but she does not remember it.  Even after watching it she did not remember seeing it before so this is like the first time that she has seen it, one way or another.

One thing that I think is interesting is how things like Netflix and Amazon VOD have changed the perceptions of Disney movies.

As always, putting the girls to bed was an enormous job.  I told Liesl to start getting ready for bed at a quarter till ten.  She stalled for a bit but finally started for bed around a quarter after.  Even with that stall, it was another hour before she was in bed!  Getting them ready for bed is just impossible.

It wasn’t until eleven thirty that Liesl finally went to bed.  I stayed up for a while and got some more work done, did some posting, got the new Model Railroading community up and running, etc.  Dominica found that she had access to some HBO shows that she has not had access to previously, such as True Blood, so she started watching that tonight and was up very late addicted to that.

No real plans today.  Dominica’s parents were still here this morning but only stayed until early in the afternoon.  Probably around two or three they were on the road back to Frankfort.  The weather is very nice today, sunny and calm.  Very much what you picture, but rarely get, for Memorial Day weekend.

My Kindle got a major update this morning automatically.  It now has a lot of apps designed around helping to get kids into reading.  That is pretty cool.  I can’t wait until Liesl is ready to start using the Kindle and reading real stuff.  She is going to love it.

Dominica and I did a little investigating on travel television shows, trying to find more good content out there.  There really is not very much.  We started watching a few shows to check them out, to give us some stuff to discuss on the new KAE Community, and decided that we haven’t watched one of our favourite movies, My Life in Ruins, in a while so we watched that since we own it on Amazon.  That is such a great movie.  We love it.  Great story, great actors, great location.  We watch it again every few years.  It was the first movie that we ever bought via Amazon’s online video on demand service.

We decided, finally, that we are done with buying movies on physical media.  We stopped buying music that way years ago and video games over a year ago and books a few months ago.  That we still buy movies that way should change too.  We don’t buy many but when we do, they end up in a box and impossible to use.  Time to rethink that, at least when possible.  We need to buy very few since we have Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu+.  But there are some things that you just have to buy.  We mostly buy on Amazon and once in a while on iTunes since we have the AppleTV and get some things pre-release (like the Hobbit movies.)  We are, more and more, realizing how much we need to scale back on the physical things that we buy, we don’t have the space to store it all nor does it do us any good and moving is a massive pain primarily because of all of the books, movies, etc. that are in scores of boxes (and the books ones are super heavy.)

We decided that we really wanted to watch the new Lego Movie with the kids tonight.  We’ve been wanting to see that one since it was coming to theatres, one of the rare movies that we are actually excited about.  So we made an exception and bought it so that we could watch it tonight (bought it via Amazon VOD.)  It took forever to get through the movie because the girls kept needing this or that.  Overall we liked the movie but it was not as good as we had hoped.  It was cute and the graphics were amazing.  Dominica actually thought that it was stop motion and not computer generated, it looked so much like actual Lego bricks.  I’d recommend it but not at full price.  Great lineup of actors though.  Amazing cast.

After that we all went to bed.  The girls are back in their own room now.

Everyone slept in this morning.  I was the last of the adults up, it was after nine when I rolled out of bed but I was awake before that and just waiting for Dominica to be done getting ready so that I could get up and not be in her way.  The girls slept on for a while after I got up.

Dominica sent her dad and I out around eleven to go to the Daily Bagel to stock the house with bagels for the weekend.  Normally Liesl and I would go but Liesl decided that she did not want to go today, although she did tell her grandparents about how she and I are listening to Tony Shaloub reading “The Cricket in Times Square” together.  I was quite impressed that she remembered the name of the book!

The plan this afternoon, early on, was to take the girls up to our playground that we have in our development here.  It is hard to believe that we have owned the house here for six years and have never even gone up to look at the playground before, but we haven’t.  I ended up having to work earlier than had been planned so everyone walked up to the playground without me and I worked for a little bit before going up to join them.

The playground turned out to be really nice.  Not too big and there where two other kids there when I got there but they were just leaving.  So Liesl and Luciana basically had it to themselves.  There are three slides, a couple of climbing things, a fireman’s pole and a really neat tube where you talk into one end on one end of the playground and it goes underground and comes up on the other side.  Cool for kids to play with and works really well.

They were probably on the playground for at least an hour.  Lots of fun.  We checked out the activies center too, while we were there.  Believe it or not, in six years of owning the house here we have never come up here to investigate all of the cool stuff that we “own.”  There are two pools that we need to get IDs for in order to use, we are going to try for that this week, and there is a gym too!  I really need to start using that.  I can’t believe that I never even looked at it until today.  The girls will be asking to come up here often, I am sure.  Liesl really, really wants to try out the pool but we won’t have our IDs until next weekend.

After we were done on the playground the whole family took the long, round-about way back to the house via the nature trails.  That was a lot more walking but a nice walk and Liesl had a great time.  She thought that the nature trail was great fun.

I had some issues at work today and got stuck, because of a mistake on my part, working for a few hours.  That sucked.  Lots of stress and extra work.  So that kept me tied up roughly from three until six.  So I missed having dinner with the family.  They went down to the Westchester Diner and had dinner while I stayed home to work.  They brought me back the Fisherman’s Platter that I like so much.

We all watched a movie together in the living room.  After watching Romancing the Stone with dad last week, we decided that this weekend we would watch Jewel of the Nile.  It has been forever since I have seen that movie but I was really shocked at how much of it was familiar, some parts of it like the jail cell and the F16 “car” that they drive around were completely familiar.  We did not quite finish the movie, though, so we have a little bit at te end for Dominica and I to watch later on in the week.

We got the kids off to bed and then Dominica and her dad decided to run out and go to the movie theatre to see Godzilla.  So I read to the girls and Dominica’s mom went to bed.  So an early night for half the family.

I went down to the basement and worked for a few hours while they were at the movies.  I managed to edit the latest podcast for Kidding Around Europe edited and posted tonight.  That takes around three hours.

So it was around three in the morning when I finally got to bed.