Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a day of meetings. I felt like I was in them all day.

On the way home I stopped at Dunkin Donuts and got the blueberry cobbler donuts again for Dominica because they are her favourite.

It was dark and cool when I got home but it was not too late so the girls quickly cleaned up the living room and we all went for a walk to the playground. The walk up the hill was easier that it was last week. Like usual, we were the only ones there.

We were later than usual tonight and the sprinklers were running. The girls spent more time playing in the sprinklers than they did playing on the playground. They were cold and soaked by the time that we were done but they had a really good time.

Tonight we went to bed on the early side. The girls got good exercise going up to the playground and running around like lunatics and I have been pretty tired the last few days and need some sleep. So we called it an early night and were off to bed as quickly as we could muster, which is very hard when you have a Liesl who likes to take hours to get to bed. We had to skip reading her story, “The Wind in the Willows”, tonight because it took so long to get her to bed. I had a long talk with her about having to go to bed earlier now because we have to make up the time from her taking so long to get there.

Normal day in the office for me today. I was pretty tired when I got up this morning as I only got three hours of sleep. But I was feeling okay.

When I headed for home today, it was dark and raining a little. It was raining and light thunderstorms by the time that I got home to Peekskill. So no trip to the playground or to the pool tonight. It was late, anyway, by the time that I got home. It was eight so not a good night for going for a walk anyway. I did bring home Dunkin Donuts for the girls, though, tonight.

It was a very short night for us. Liesl had taken an hour and a half nap in the middle of the day so was not too keen on going to bed tonight. But we convinced her to finally get going and the girls were in bed by a quarter after ten.

Dominica has been watching Game of Thrones and she watched that for a while. I continued my project of installing Atlassian software from yesterday and got Confluence installed tonight. I only had about half an hour before we went to bed. I didn’t even turn on the television for me at all tonight.

A short day overall. I needed some extra sleep.

Today is Tuesday. On Friday, the Toccos are coming to stay with us for the day and then they, and Dominica and the girls, are heading to Florida early on Saturday morning. Then starts my long week and a half alone.

Back to work. I got up at six and got into the office. The weather is starting to get pretty warm. Dominica decided to stick with keeping the windows open today but this is probably going to be the last of it as it is supposed to be nearly ninety degrees over the next couple of days. The sun is out in force too.

I got home a little before eight. Today was a movie day at the house, apparently. Dominica had been doing some cleaning or something and had come across many of the BluRays that were for the girls and had been in boxes here and there. So today was “watching movies the girls had forgotten about” day. They watching Wreck It Ralph at least twice and some other movies too. Dominica, in the last two weeks, has managed to watch all six seasons of True Blood and has decided to now watch through Game of Thrones.

We are trying putting the girls to bed much earlier tonight. Luciana always wants to go to bed earlier than we would expect anyway. It is Liesl who takes between an hour and a half and two hours to get ready for bed. So we sent them off to get ready for bed at a quarter till nine. It didn’t speed things up really but it helped get them actually into bed at a decent time.

Tonight we read the second chapter in “The Wind in the Willows”. It started off slowly and Liesl was struggling on the first chapter on Saturday night but tonight she was definitely more into it.

Dominica and I squeezed in one podcast recording tonight, we are trying to get a lot of them done this week so that I can take some of the time while she and the girls are in Florida to be working on getting them edited and scheduled for the website.

Dominica went to bed early and I stayed up to get some work done. I got a Stash server and a Jira server set up and running on Ubuntu 14.04 tonight. Stayed up working very late but was happy to have them running smoothly by the end of the night.

After all of the fun that they had yesterday in the pool, everyone slept well and was looking forward to being able to go back to the pool again today. Dominica made her amazing vegetarian sausage crazy and biscuits for breakfast which she first made last weekend while her parents were staying with us. Amazing gravy. I have no memory of any gravy being so good even back in my pre-vegetarian days (which are getting harder and harder to remember now that I have passed the “the last one third of my life I’ve been a vegetarian” point.)

Late morning we made our way back up the hill to the pool. It was warmer today, last night was a little chilly even for those of us not in the water, and in fact I was sweating a bit hard as I pushed the stroller up the hill. Both girls decided that they wanted to ride in the stroller once we were underway, so Liesl sat in the stroller and Luciana rode on her lap which made for a heavy load to push up the hill. I got my workout.

The pool was packed today. There were lots of people sunbathing too, not just swimming. The kiddie pool was closed today because of a chemical imbalance so everyone was stuck using the big pool which was pretty well utilized. There were lots of kids in there today. Unfortunately there were a lot of rude and rowdy kids too who were not very respectful and that made it a lot tougher. Liesl and Luciana are not very used to being around other kids who don’t behave, have supervision or respect others. So they were not very well equipped to deal with a lot of the kids. This made Luciana not want to swim there. Liesl was able to escape by swimming away from the other kids. She got going really well today because of this. She was swimming all over the pool, interacting with all kinds of kids and even adults and was even pulling herself out by the sides of the pool and jumping in from the sides! Really impressive progress.

The kids that Liesl and Luciana hung out with yesterday were there for just a little bit too and stopped by to see them. Luciana had me take her to the playground for a while because she did not want to deal with the kids in the big pool and the small pool was closed.

The girls did quite well, though, and they had a good time.  The weekends are very crowded.  Unfortunately, right now, the pool is only open on the weekends, not during the week.  Otherwise we would use it during the week when there would likely be hardly anyone around.  The playground goes almost completely unused during the week.

It’s Saturday and today is a family day for us. Dominica and the girls are going to be heading down to Florida one week from today and I am going to really be missing them so this weekend is set aside for just spending time together. I did manage to get myself scheduled to be in the office next Saturday so that I can work while the family is gone in exchange for a comp day sometime when they are back home. That is way better. It is almost like shortening their trip by one day, sort of.

This morning we got up and took a walk up the hill and went to the playground. The girls had fun but were upset, especially Liesl, that they could not go swimming this morning. The playground is right against the swimming pool and the pool was busy and full of kids and the girls wanted to join them. So we didn’t spend as much time on the playground as we might have. While we were there, though, we stopped by the recreation center and got our IDs made for us so that we will be able to use the pool as well as the gym in the future. It is truly amazing that we have lived here for nearly six years (we moved in a few months before Liesl was born) and never once have used or even visited these facilities. We have all of the amenities as if we lived in an apartment complex but have never taken advantage of it.

We relaxed at the house for a little while but in the middle of the afternoon we packed the girls up again and went back up the hill. This time we took the small stroller and Luciana rode and I pushed while Dominica and Liesl walked up to the swimming pool. There were not many people there tonight. It is still early in the year for swimming and late in the day as well. We started off in the kiddie pool which is a small square and uniformly eighteen inches deep. So shallow that the girls do not need floatation devices. It was very cold, though. But they had fun. Dominica and I avoided getting in.

I took my Kindle with me up to the pool and spent most of the time, when I wasn’t keeping an eye on the girls, continuing to read “A House Like a Lotus.” I am probably halfway through it now. I get very little time to read in print.

They were not long in the little pool when they both decided that they wanted to go to the big pool. We thought that this would not be any fun for them because there were extra people and they would have to wear flotation devices but they insisted. It turned out that the big pool was heated, but not the little one. So it was actually quite a bit nicer. And, as luck would have it, about the only people that we know in our entire complex were the people who were in the pool! It was our local girlscout’s family, the one from whom we buy cookies and who thought that Liesl and Luciana were so sweet that she had offered to come help Dominica with them over the summer (this is a month ago or so that she had offered.) She and her little brother were in the pool so Liesl already knew her and was very comfortable and she was very excited to get to play with the girls. Liesl and her new friends had a lot of fun. Dominica went over and sat with their mother and they talked for a long time. It turns out that we are neighbours. Not next door to each other but close enough that we can see each other from the front windows.

The girls were very glad that we went swimming today, they had a really good time and Liesl is really getting good and being in the pool. She is able to swim around and make her way, slowly, around the pool. Lots of great exercise for her.