Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight, when I put the girls to bed, we started reading the sixth book in the Chronicles of Narnia series: The Magician’s Nephew.  We had thought that the girls would not be that into it, neither Dominica nor I liked it that much compared to many of the other books, but Liesl was really into it, even after the first chapter, and I think that this might be her favourite of the entire series although I have no idea why.  So it seems like making the decision to read the sixth book was a good one.  We are definitely not going to be going on to the final book in the series until we have read them all again at a minimum.

Monday morning.  Nothing really happening today.  Work, normal day.

I’ve started using Microsoft OneNote recently to keep track of what is going on to make it easier to keep SGL up to date.  But, sadly, nothing was recorded for today.  I’m a bit behind so likely I just came home at the usual time, hung out with the family, watched some Frasier.  

The girls decided not to have a story tonight, so we will start the new book tomorrow instead.

Dad comes to visit this week.  He arrives on Friday and will be here for the weekend.

Today we posted the fifth podcast on Kidding Around Europe – Antwerp and the Trip to Germany.  We are very excited that these are posting regularly now.  I am going to be trying really hard to keep these up.  They take tons of work but if they don’t come out on a regular basis we won’t have people subscribing to them.  So trying hard to keep them flowing and we seem to have a good process for making them now so hopefully that will keep them going.  In a few weeks, while the family is away in Florida, I will be working on getting them into iTunes Podcast library as well which will make it very easy for lots of people to subscribe to them.

Ciana came down this morning and joined me in the basement and snuggled with me all morning.  She just wanted to hang out with her daddy.

We spent basically the entire day down in the basement today.  We moved on from doing the big room changing stuff that we did yesterday, like setting up new shelves, to doing the really tough box by box sorting of toys and stuff.  Dominica found an entire large box of toys to donate, though, which is awesome.  That’s four boxes ready to be picked up next weekend when one of the local charity groups stops by for a pick up.  The living room has these huge boxes in it right now and it is really annoying to have to deal with that.  This will make it much better.  The girls have so many toys that they can never find anything that they want.  If we can figure out what they really don’t use anymore and will never miss it will be much better on many fronts.

Luciana managed to poop today and feels much better today.  She has not been herself for two days from constipation.

Tonight we finished reading “The Horse and His Boy” which the girls really liked.  We’ve been trying to figure out what to read next and Dominica thought that we would switch from the Chronicles of Narnia to Little House on the Prairie but Liesl does not want to and wants, instead, to go on to “The Magician’s Nephew” because she loves the Narnia story.  So we plan to start that tomorrow.

Overall a pretty relaxing Sunday.  We got a lot of housework done and spent a lot of time playing with the girls.

 

Today is very warm in downstate New York.  Way over seventy.  We opened all of the windows but it was so warm that we were uncomfortable, even early on in the morning.  Nearly eight today and bright sun.  We got lots of fresh air, at least.  That means that the day was focused in the basement where it is nice and cool.

Luciana was sick as soon as she woke up today.  We aren’t sure what is wrong.  She says that she doesn’t feel well but we can’t figure out exactly what is wrong.  She does not seem to have an elevated temperature.  She got up early and crawled into bed with us but was very restless.  It took a bit of prodding to get her to tell me that she wanted to get out of bed and wanted to use the potty.  So I raced downstairs with her and she spent easily an hour in the bathroom very unhappily.

After that, Luciana just climbed into my laptop, put her head on my chest and fell asleep for about forty five minutes.  Dominica went out to hit the salon and do some shopping.  Luciana woke up for a little bit and watched “Go Diego, Go” and, after less then an hour, was asleep again.  She was up and down all day with only short bursts of being awake and mostly being asleep.  A very tired little girl.

Dominica, Liesl and I went down to the basement and worked on doing some cleaning and putting things away.  I did a lot of work last weekend but there is still much to be done.  The basement is looking good, though.  We moved the plastic shelving units which were just in a temporary spot in front of the basement’s wall of mirrors to be over next to the book shelves where they kind of fit in a sort of natural way.  We lowered them, reducing the number of shelves per unit vertically and adding another unit horizontally, and got them to just squeeze in between the book shelves and the black couch that we have in the basement.  They are ready to be loaded with the basement toys.  The basement is really the girls’ play area more than anywhere else so even though this isn’t a very attractive situation it is workable and utilitarian.  The most practical solution that we could come up with for the basement as it is.

We cleaned the rest of the house today too and it was not looking too bad by the end of the day.  It hit eight five degrees outside today, by the evening we decided that we just needed the air conditioning or it was going to be too hot and humid for us.  This is our first time running the air conditioning since returning to the Peekskill house.

It’s Friday.  Pretty much a normal day at work.  I was able to get out of the office a little bit early today at six (after happy hour, of course.)

On the drive home I finished reading “Dragons of Autumn Twilight” and started reading its sequel “Dragons of Winter Night.”  Such great books.  I am so glad that I am going back and reading them again.  It has been long enough (likely about twenty six years or more) since I last ready them that I only barely remember the story and while I know most big generalities there is a ton that I do not remember including some really major characters and events.  So it feels a lot like reading them again for the first time.

I got home and almost immediately had to jump into a call and take care of some stuff for a while.  Made for a busy evening but it is Friday night and the weekend is free otherwise.