Sheep Guarding Llama

This is our last “normal” day of the week.  Tomorrow we are prepping for Dominica to leave so we have to be in bed super early or there will be problems since we need to get up at three thirty on Saturday morning to get Dominica to LaGuardia in time for her early morning flight to Love Field in Dallas.

This morning I finished reading Jefferson’s War and started reading Meet the Austins.  “Jefferson’s War” was really good as it covered tons of history that I knew almost nothing about.  It went well with my recent biography reading about James Monroe.  Covering a similar time period, the end of the founding era of America after 1800 in the time period where Americans rarely study their history.  The period between the Revolution and the Civil Wars, the antebellum period, is barely taught or well known.  Quite a bit of defining history happened during that period that we often forget.  The First and Second Barbary Wars are pretty important bits of that period and were really important in understanding our place in the world in the War of 1812 (also known as the Second War of Independence.)

Today after work I swung into the Kurdish Deli that I go to nearly every day and got falafel for Dominica and I for dinner.  I had gotten out of work decently early since yesterday had been such a long day, so I was home at a good time, even having stopped for food.

The family ate dinner while watching Doctor Who.  Dominica is convinced that this is the best falafel that she has ever tasted.  It really is amazingly good.  We managed to watch several episodes and relaxed a bit.  I read more of “Prince Caspian” and the girls were off to sleep.

I was in at a good time this morning. Both girls slept in our bed last night making it hard for me to sleep as I was getting pushed out of bed. So I was up a little on the early side. I grabbed breakfast at the Kurdish deli on my way in.

Today was a really light and short day in the office. Well, in the normal office. Big meeting offsite this afternoon that had me leaving the office for a carpool before three. I got to see parts of Connecticut that I have never seen before, so that was interesting, I guess.

I did not get to leave work until seven and I was deep into Connecticut so carpooled back to the office and then headed for home, leaving the office at seven thirty. I immediately hit construction on CT15, which I should not have taken, and it ended up taking me until after nine to get home! That was no fun.

So I was exhausted by the time that I got home. Luciana was just about to head to bed when I got there. So the whole family watched one episode of Doctor Who with Luciana snuggled in my lap and Liesl under my arm then we put Luciana to bed and watched one more episode before the older three of us turned in as well. I read Liesl her “Prince Caspian” for the night, we are a good way through it now, and she was off to bed.

Got up at six thirty when I heard Luciana screaming. I ran in and got her and Liesl and moved them into our bed. Liesl stayed asleep for a long time, Luciana got out of bed when I went downstairs to head to work. That was at eight. So she slept for probably, fourteen hours last night! I got her a banana for breakfast and set her up on the couch with a show to watch and cleaned up the kitchen and took out the trash while waiting for the Spark to warm up enough for me to be able to see to drive. It is not that cold this morning, less than ten degrees below freezing, but the car was covered in frost and the driver’s side door lock was frozen and did not work. Had to open the door from the passenger side.

After I got to work, Dominica emailed to tell me that she got up and found Luciana at the front door crying for “daddy” after I had gone. 🙁  That is incredibly sad.  I wish that I did not have to leave the girls at home.  Luciana is going through the sadness of daddy going to work during the day and not getting nearly as much time with me as they want.  Liesl had it rough around Luciana’s age too.  It was a little younger for Liesl.

An earlier day getting home from work.  Still just an evening at home for us to relax.  Our evenings are really short.  We are trying to decide what we want to do about the house.  How quickly we want to move, rent or whatever.  Moving to Connecticut will be a huge pain.  We are so sick of moving and not having a place to call home for any length of time.  At least the Peekskill house is the same house “again” so it feels like “home” already even though we just got here.  We have had nearly a year and a half in this house total now.  One of our longer places.  It will catch up with Newark (1180) quickly now.  Our longest stays are Geneseo, Carrollton and Newark.  Geneseo will be quite some effort to overtake.  Newark was just two years.  Carrollton was three years (we celebrated Liesl’s second birthday as we moved in and celebrated her fifth just after leaving!)  Geneseo is the long one but the hardest to calculate because we bought it in April, 2003, moved in in July, 2003.  Dominica moved away that next summer for a few months to work in Ithaca and I lived 2005 on the road.  In 2006 I moved to North Brunswick in February and Dominica moved down during the late spring.  But we kept the Geneseo house and did not rent it so we continued to keep our stuff there and use it on weekends for another year until we sold it.  So we had it for four years, but neither of us lived in it as our primary residence for that long.  Dominica lived in it quite a bit more than me.

Back to work today.  It’s Monday.  This is a full week but next week is a four day week as Monday is a holiday.  So this week we have to get ready for Dominica to be traveling.  She is leaving New York very early on Saturday morning and not returning until quite late on Monday night.  She is flying down to Texas, meeting up with her sister and niece, and packing up the remainder of the Carrollton house to get it ready for shipping to New York in a couple of weeks.  We are very excited to have our stuff coming back to us finally.  It has been a long season without it.  By the time that it finally arrives we will have been four months without basics like chairs, tables, dishes, toys, books… pretty much everything.  So it is going to be a daddy / daughter weekend with just me and the girls being home together for three days.

Normal day today, into the office and back home at the end of the day.  Had a good day at work.  Not a great day, but an overall positive one.  A move in the right direction, I would say.

Got home on the late side this evening and we did pretty little.  Just came home, watched some Doctor Who and went to bed.  This is a relatively busy week for us, partially because of the preparations for the upcoming weekend so not too much going on in the evenings.

We all slept in today. I was up first, then Liesl and eventually Ciana and Dominica. Liesl convinced Dominica to play some board games with her for a while and then we all decided to go out to “breakfast”, which ended up being slightly after noon. We went down to the Westchester Diner which we have not been back to since we returned to New York. We had a nice lunch and then went to Home Depot to do some shopping.

We have been needing some stuff, like a garbage can for the kitchen, so we got that, more firewood, lightbulbs and other basics. Nothing exciting. Just home basics. The girls spent some time, while we were waiting on Dominica to research some paint, hiding in a dark recess caused by us taking one of the huge garbage cans so they would hide off of one of the main corridors for about half an hour. This kept the girl semi-occupied for a while.

We had thought about going out and going looking at apartments but it took so long to do Home Depot and the girls were getting so restless that we gave up on the plan. Instead we just returned to the house and I made a fire in the fireplace. Then we played one of the girls’ new Christmas board games, “Cinderella’s Royal Ball” for a while. We played it several times. This is a board game that Luciana can actually play and really enjoys. It is really cute.

We had cut video game time so short last night that I took the girls downstairs around three and we set up “Night of the Rabbit” and played for quite a while in the middle of the day. This made both girls, but especially Liesl, very happy.

Liesl just gets better and better at playing the games. She knows how to save her game all on her own, how to exit out of it, how to load up a new game once the system is running (she cannot start it on her own because Steam has some issues and requires that the administrator be involved every time that the game restart.) In the game today there was a new card game introduced that was a lot like playing Go Fish. Liesl picked it up and understood how to play on the very first try. I was really amazed.

“Night of the Rabbit” is definitely the best game that Liesl and I have played together yet. The graphics and music are amazing and the characters are really cute and enjoyable. Liesl and Luciana are both so into the story and the world. They love it. The puzzles are generally not so obtuse as most of the games that Liesl and I have been trying and the overall game just seems so much more solid and well built. This feels like a big budget game whereas most of what we have played felt pretty cheaply made, the Ankh games especially.

We played the game for a few hours. Liesl sits at the desk and I sit on the couch with the second monitor turned around so that I can watch her play and use the iPad to look up anything that we need online. Luciana tried playing with Liesl for a bit, they share the chair and Luciana tries to help, but soon she left the desk and came to the couch and snuggled in my lap. It was so sweet.

Luciana slept on my lap for a while. When Dominica came downstairs with dinner, a Quorn stew over biscuits, she helped me to carry Luciana upstairs and put her to bed. It was only six o’clock, maybe earlier, but if she is tired, then she needs her sleep.

Dominica, Liesl and I ate dinner and watched two episodes of Melissa & Joey. When we finished that Dominica went back upstairs and Liesl and I played “Night of the Rabbit” a while longer. This was her chance to play without Luciana being there.

Liesl did not play her game all that long, maybe an hour. She decided that she was more interested in snuggling than playing her game. So Dominica came back downstairs and we all finished watching the third season of Melissa & Joey.

After that I took Liesl upstairs and got her ready for bed. While I was reading her her nightly bedtime stories from the Chronicles of Narnia, Luciana woke up (after four to five hours of napping) and came in to join us. She listened to the bedtime stories and then I put Liesl to bed and took Luciana downstairs to hang out with us for a little bit before putting her back to bed. She needed to get up for a little bit – she kept saying that it was morning!

We watching one show and before we could get Luciana back to bed Liesl came downstairs rather upset that she had been waiting for Luciana to come back to bed but she never came.

We finally got them both into bed again after eleven. This time they both went to sleep.

Tonight they are sleeping with changing colour LED lights in their room. They were a present that I bought for them while we were waiting on Home Depot. They are regular light bulbs that are very dim and can be changed in color at the press of a button. Liesl voted for red lights tonight. So they are sleeping in a room lit so that it looks like a 1980s dark room for developing film. Something our girls will never know first hand, it having died out long ago.