Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up early this morning, before seven, so that I could check on the ship’s status to see if Dominica and Katie got into port. Their ship was listed online as having arrived but I had no emails from them so I was figuring that they were still asleep. I got up and got a start on my day and it wasn’t long until I had an email from Dominica that they were up and getting ready to get off of the ship. She had had a blast on the cruise but was really exhausted and had a lot of travel yet in front of her.

I tried to do a bit of cleaning today to get the house ready for Dominica to return. She will be very happy to find the big 52” LCD up on the wall in the living room and the treadmill pretty much ready to use. And some more boxes moved and put away.

Around ten she got to the airport in Jacksonville, Florida and we talked via Facebook for probably an hour until she was on board her plane and she had to turn off her phone. I figured that I would shower then and head right on down to Brooklyn to get her. But as soon as we were done chatting Art needed me to work for twenty or thirty minutes so I did that and then showered and when I got out of the shower it turns out that I had just missed Liesl’s first tooth coming out. My dad had been with her when it came out. She was very excited to have lost it. He posted the news onto Facebook.

I rushed out to get down to Brooklyn, there was enough time if there was no traffic. I raced as best that I could. Westchester County was clear and I made great time until I hit the Whitestone Bridge and then traffic was pretty slow. But it worked out fine, Dominica had checked her luggage so she had to wait for that and she was only outside waiting for me for two minutes before I pulled up to pick her up. Had I been any earlier I would have to have made the loop or found “cell parking” which would have made it take much longer to go back to get her. So that was really ideal.

On our way home we decided to hit Friendly’s in Yorktown Heights for an early dinner while we were out. It was probably three thirty when we did that. We have not eaten at a Friendly’s in a very long time. Nearly five years, we guessed. I am sure that the last time is on SGL somewhere. I believe that we drove into Connecticut to do it back then, but I might be imagining that. We figured that this would give us a little time to catch up before going home too. We picked up take out for dad and ice cream for dad and the girls.

The girls were very excited when we got home, they really missed their mom. Liesl could not wait to show her the tooth that had come out. She is very excited about getting to put it under her pillow tonight and Liesl decided that she wanted to go to bed very, very early tonight around seven!

I had a short call to do but that was only about half an hour. That gave some time for Dominica to catch up with everyone. Then we all spent a little time in the living room but my seven thirty everyone was tired and we started the process of going to bed. As usual, that takes forever. Dad wanted to get to bed early too since he has to travel tomorrow morning back home via Amtrack. It took the customary sixty to ninety minutes to get the girls to bed. I read chapter six of “The Silver Chair” and while I read Dominica fell asleep on the girls’ bed. It took a bit to get her awake and into our room.

I tried to sneak into the girls’ room around eleven to replace the tooth with a dollar bill but when I did I found Liesl still awake. I was very sneaky, though, and managed to switch the tooth our without Liesl even guessing all while I was just talking to her. Go daddy!

Now that we have the television up in the living room it is very tempting to use it quite a bit. Today, being the last day of just dad and I with the girls, we started by watching the recent 2005 Disney version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” which Liesl really enjoyed. I remember now why I was not so happy with Disney’s version of the story – they had altered not just the timeline and events but did so to make the children much less innocent and much more naughty than they were in the books. It is a very odd change for Disney to have made and it slightly changes the flavor of the story.

After that movie we went right into “Prince Caspian.” Now I remember why I never really watched that movie again – it was completely altered from the books in really bad ways. I don’t really want Liesl to watch it now because it ruins the real stories by introducing all of this meanness and evil and were not present in the original story. Except for names and setting, the movie doesn’t follow the book at all, none of it. The people in the movie are really different characters than in the book. That does not make me happy. Nor does it make me happy that they made such a big deal about committing to making all seven movies and only bothered to make the three that everyone knew was all they ever intended to make.

We took a movie break for a while. Played a lot of board games with the girls today.

Liesl was very interested in her loose tooth all day.  This is her first day with it and she spent the day playing with it a lot.  It is getting very loose very quickly.

We snuggled in this evening and we watched “The Return of the Jedi”. Dad has been looking forward to seeing this one and Liesl is pretty excited. Luciana didn’t care and she set herself up with a little cave made out of their soft shares and a blanket and she took an iPad in there and camped out while we watched the movie. Liesl climbed into my lap and watched the entire movie on my lap snuggled in a blanket. She was riveted although we had to stop pretty often to explain what was happening in the movie and who was who. She really liked it.

After the movie Liesl asked if she could just go to bed tonight without a story because she was so tired that she could not handle reading a story. She is so funny.

Now for my long weekend. We have not heard anything from Dominica or Katie yet on their voyage. Today is their day in Nassau for the bulk of the day. The only day that they have any significant time on the ground in the Bahamas. I have been attempting to keep track of their progress via the online ship tracking sites but since they checked in at Freeport the ship has not checked in again so we only know where they are via their itinerary and not from anything solid.

Liesl had been asking for bagels this week and I had promised her that I would get them for her today. Dad said that he had never had a bagel before. I was pretty incredulous. So I ran out to Daily Bagel and got a dozen bagels and some turnovers for everyone and came back home.

This morning dad looked into mounting the television in the living room over the fireplace. This would be the same television that we had mounted up there back when Liesl was born and that we took with us to the apartment in Texas and then to the house in Texas where Dominica and I used it in our bedroom and never, in the more than three years that we had that house, managed to get around to wall mounting it (which I suppose ended up being a good thing.) So I ran out to Best Buy and picked up a wall mount for the television.

Dad worked on the television mount and I worked on some certification work that demanded my attention. I had a bit of work that needed to be done but I got it done today which felt good. Now I don’t have that hanging over my head for the rest of the weekend.

Once we had the television mounted I tracked down the PS3 and got that hooked up so that we could actually watch things in the living room. We talked about watching “Return of the Jedi” but Liesl said that she had a hard time remembering and understanding what had happened in the first two movies and dad had not seen them in forever so we watched those again. First “Star Wars” which I watched with them when we ordered dinner from Nonna’s – pizza all around. The girls have been wanting pizza since Thursday night when we tried to order some but the shop was closed.

During “The Empire Strikes Back” I went down to the basement and worked through most of it. I just saw it so good time to work.

Tonight, while they were watching an iPad in bed, Ciana accidentally head butted Liesl and suddenly Liesl started crying.  Liesl said “She knocked my tooth loose!” and she was right.  Liesl’s lower front right tooth was very wiggly!  I think likely it was already loose and this just pushed it along.  We talked about it for a bit and she was upset at first but started to understand that it was a good thing and meant that she was growing up.  That helped a lot.  I think by the end she was pretty excited about it.

Went to bed early last night and slept in as long as I could this morning.  We’ve gotten no communication from Dominica since her last second post to Facebook after the private concert last night that said that the ship was getting underway.  She will be out of contact as long as they are at see but they should be getting into Freeport today so we should get an update from her once the ship is online in the Bahamas.  It is just a quick stopover there but then on Saturday she will be in Nassau all day and will have lots of opportunity to get us up to date on how things are going.

Today, Madeline turns fourteen!  That means that she is 14 on the 14th of ’14!

Today is also dad’s one day that he will be completely at home alone with the girls.  But he got lucky again, the weather yesterday was bad enough that my office is on a delayed start this morning so I was with him this morning two hours longer than I would normally have been.  So the day was not as long as it could have been.

The drive to work was not bad at all once the roads had cleared.  I was glad to get to wait before going in, though.

I made sure that I left work at a reasonable time today.  Wanted to get home and relieve dad before the girls drove him crazy.  He did pretty well today, though.    The girls had a lot of fun.  They all survived and now it is all over, I will be home with the girls for the next three days.

Dominica left Valentine’s Day cards for the girls (and me.)  So they opened them tonight.  They each got a Disney card with a rubber charm bracelet in it.  They thought that those were really cool.

Watched some shows down in the basement before heading to bed tonight.

The alarm went off at three this morning. Dominica was up first and started getting ready and checked the weather and her flight status before getting me up. Her flight, on JetBlue out of JFK, was still scheduled to make it out this morning. So we packed up the car and off we went.

When we got out to the car, the snow had already been coming down for a bit and there was probably an inch and a half on the ground and the snow plows, even in our complex, had not been out yet. This might be a very bad morning.

It took a while to get out of our complex and we were moving like molasses as we tried to get out to the main roads. We were sliding by our first turn and almost could not make it up the hill on the snowy road. Not a good start.

The drive from our house to JFK in Brooklyn is only supposed to take an hour (that is crossing all of Westchester, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn can be done in that short of time) but our drive took at least ninety-five minutes. It was a long, stressful drive. We were really worried that we were not going to be able to keep moving and that Dominica would end up missing her flight anyway. The drive was just awful.

I got Dominica to the airport and her flight was thankfully still listed as being on time. We had seen no snow plows all morning thus far, although the roads were decent once we were into the Bronx, and the snow was coming down steadily the entire drive. And, of course, my windshield washer fluid is still frozen or broken or whatever so there is little means of cleaning the windshield. To add to the stress of the morning, I had forgotten my wallet at home so had only the cash that Dominica was able to give me for dealing with tolls and any emergencies that might happen along the way.

The drive home was so much worse than the drive down to Brooklyn. The snow had kept coming down and the roads were much worse. Luckily there were some plows out on the Sprain but they were shoulder to shoulder and moving at 12 miles per hour so I made almost no progress at all and there was so way around them. They created so much spray that there was almost no visibility.

Once I hit the Taconic there were no plows at all so suddenly I went from crawling behind treble plows to being out on a completely abandoned road with a long way still to go. That was really horrible.

I tried stopping at the deli right by the house to pick up breakfast for dad and I but the only deli that I would pass on my way home had not even tried to open today. So no food for us.

On the drive up, which took more than two hours, I finished reading Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” It was good but I was really surprised by how little “adventure” that there was. The whole book was them trying to get somewhere and then it was just over. I had expected so much more. I think that the book could easily have been four or five times as long and been much better. It had so much potential but petered out by the end.

Dad was waiting in the kitchen, watching for me, when I finally pulled into the parking lot at the house. Dominica had been emailing hoping to find out that I was home before she was en route to Georgia. Her flight remained on time and she had already boarded quite some time before I arrived home. I emailed her immediately upon arrival and she appears to have gotten the email but her response to my email did not come through until after she arrived in Savannah so it must have been right as she was going into “airplane mode” when I got home.

I pretty much went straight to bed after getting home. I was so incredibly tired. I only had about three hours of sleep and was tired before going to bed last night too. Before falling asleep I checked my mail from the office and was very happy to see that the office closed for the day. That means that I am just expected to work from home today – so I will not even be attempting to drive in but I was not going to anyway. The snow was so bad and still coming down like crazy – actually coming down much moreso now. There was no way that I was going back out there again, especially for an even longer drive.

I got a good, solid nap in. I felt much better after that. When I woke up I checked my mail and saw that Dominica had already disembarked from the plane in Savannah. She had had a very nice flight with nice goodies and stuff because it was the inaugural flight for that path.

Katie drove up from Jacksonville to Savannah, only about a two hour drive, to get Dominica and take her down to the cruise ship. They are really lucky that they had so many things in place to allow for these last minute changes in plans. It is amazing that Dominica was able to make this cruise!

I set up for work via my Windows 7 laptop (yes, I now have one that old) in the living room and hung out with dad and the girls. Dad is very thankful that I am home today. Now he only has a single day of being alone with the girls and that is only if I am going into the office tomorrow. I assume that I am, but we will have to wait and see.

The snow was coming down at an epic pace. Huge flakes and no end to it. Liesl was so excited as she loves snow to no end. She got bundled up and went out for a good, long play on the back deck in the foot or more deep snow. Luciana saw her go out and decided that she must go out too. So they played and played out there.

Work was pretty slow today. That is expected when the office is essentially empty. It was nice to be home, yesterday was a really long day. And the timing was perfect with dad there. Now he gets two days of training before having just one day all on his own.

Dominica and Katie made it to the ship before one thirty and were able to get onboard, set up in their massive stateroom and get their first meal while waiting for others to board. Dominica had time to take a nap too.

This evening, Dominica and Katie got to attend a special, private concert on the ship to which they had won tickets. The ship was originally supposed to leave port around three thirty, I believe, but had pushed off leaving until five and then six and was only just getting underway when she was done with the first concert closer to seven. That was the last update that I got from her as once the ship pulled away she had no Internet access so we are essentially out of touch until she gets back to port again.

This evening we all watched Star Wars again. Dad had not seen it in a long time and was interested in seeing it again with the girls and Liesl wanted to go back and watch it again because she liked it but had had a hard time following and remembering the story the first time. It is a much longer form movie and much more complicated than any movie that she has watched before so getting this one reinforced will probably make a big difference.

The girls were tired and ready for bed when the movie was over. They are sleeping in our room tonight. I read Liesl her chapter for “The Silver Chair” and we were all three off to bed.

As of the time that I was going to bed, the office is still planning on being open tomorrow but they will send out an announcement in the morning as being closed is a very real possibility. The snow stopped falling mid-afternoon but there was tons of it out there and it rained for several hours after that. Just as we were going to bed we had some massive lighting hits within a mile. Very bright and extremely loud. Luciana was scared.