Sheep Guarding Llama

It is so warm here today. Fifty four degrees today. I can’t believe it. It rained all night and it feels like a cool late spring day today. Going outside to head to work it was so warm that even standing in a pretty solid raid you did not need to be wearing a jacket! Absolutely crazy.

I am back on a strict diet today. Time to get back in shape.

Dominica said that Liesl played her 2DS most of the day. She has several new games for it that she got for Christmas. One of them, that she started playing yesterday, she actually completed today! One day, she beat an entire video game in a single day. And then she started playing through it again. Pretty impressive considering that she is under the age recommended for the game.

I had a pretty solid day of work. On the way home I finished “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” and started reading “Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801-1805” which covers the First Barbary War which was one of the very earliest U.S. military actions. It is one about which I know absolutely nothing so it is pretty interesting reading.

I got home and Liesl was very insistent that she get to play “The Night of the Rabbit” because we did not get a chance for her to play it yesterday. So I spent the entire evening down in the basement with her. Luciana came and went. Dominica worked with her with the Nintendo 2DS to find games that she would be able to play.

Liesl did really well on “The Night of the Rabbit” tonight. She only needed help from me from time to time. She can navigate her way around and knows where everything is so well. She does puzzles and exploration and has conversations all without me. I just sit on the couch and kind of pay attention and from time to time look up something that she might need to do. We are really excited that there is a “dewdrop” thing in this game, kind of like the gargoyles in Fable 2, where there are one or two of these tiny, almost impossible to see dewdrops on each screen that you can collect. I found one and after that Liesl has been amazingly good at finding them on her own. She is loving going around collecting them.

Tonight I read, and finised, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” for the girls. They really liked it and are looking forward to starting the next book in the series tomorrow. This is so much more fun than reading the little kids stories that we used to do. Now we get to have a story that goes from night to night and is real literature that we can discuss.

Bed early for me today. I was a little tired.

Dominica made one of the famous vegetarian chorizo breakfast scrambles today. That was really good.

The “big project” today for Dominica was working on assembling all of the new storage furniture down in the basement. We have a lot of new places to store the girls’ stuff. We really need it as the house is a disaster with all of the toys all over the place and we have not even moved our stuff from Texas yet! We have no idea what we will do once all of that stuff arrives here which is only about one month away at this point. This helped quite a bit. The house is not so full of toy sprawl as it was. We need a lot more shelves and cubby holes and storage units though. This is just a small start.

Dominica made dinner and while we ate we watched two episodes of the third season of Melissa & Joey which, I was surprised to find, Luciana really liked and asked to keep watching more. After we were finished watching, though, Luciana decided that she was tired and crawled up into Dominica’s lap and fell asleep there. She had been saying that she was tired and wanted to go to bed for much of the day so I guess that she was not kidding. We put her to bed very early.

Once Luciana was in bed, Liesl and I made a fire and brought out the Kindle and did story time for quite a while. Liesl said, “I love that thing that has the stories in it.” I was confused but then figured out that she meant my Kindle, which is where I have The Chronicles of Narnia downloaded. This is the first that I have read to her using something other than a normal, old-fashioned paper book.

It was very cozy reading by the fire. Liesl sat right beside me as I read for easily an hour or more. Dominica sat on the couch listening too. Liesl went and got her Lego kits that she had been putting together with me yesterday. This is just like how it was when I was Liesl’s age. My mom reading The Chronicles of Narnia and me playing with Legos.

After we put Liesl to bed I finished reading “The Arm of the Starfish” and loaded my Kindle up with the next two books in the series and started the first chapter in “Dragons in the Water.”

Before we went to bed tonight it started raining. It had gotten pretty warm today and by the time we were about to fall asleep it was pouring rain that went on for most of the night.

Got up at seven thirty.  At nine thirty Dominica asked me to go get breakfast.  So I drove out to Yorktown Heights to my Kurdish Deli there and got breakfast for the family and some fresh bread.  That ended up taking about an hour.  It’s not fast to get places around here.

Dominica really liked the breakfast that I brought.  And I picked up some food for later in the day too, spanakopita and fresh bread.  Luciana wanted bread and butter over and over today, she apparently appreciates old world style fresh bread over the store bought loaves.

This evening Dominica went out shopping to get storage supplies for the house.  We really need them.  The house is just covered in the girls’ toys and stuff.  Mostly stuff from Christmas.  We have no shelves or storage here of any kind so it is a real issue.  Everything is all over the floors and we are tripping on things and losing things.  It is a huge mess.

While Dominica was out shopping today, Liesl, Luciana and I built all of Liesl’s Christmas Lego kits. They are all very small ones and very cute being homes for small forest animals. They are adorable. Both girls really enjoy them.

This evening Liesl really wanted to play more of “The Night of the Rabbit” that we started playing last night. So we played it a little bit Luciana was really into it so she climbed up on the chair with Liesl and tried to play for almost an hour. This was not particularly fun for Liesl and Luciana is just too young to understand what is going on in a game like this. Although Luciana did surprisingly well using the mouse and making her character walk around. I was impressed. She is only two and a half, I do not remember Liesl using a normal computer this well at that age. So we did not get very far in the game with Luciana controlling it most of the time.

Tonight I read another two chapters in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Liesl is doing a great job of following along and is loving the story.

I got to sleep in today as the office was on a delayed open.  I had been planning on not attempting to go in until late anyway knowing that the snow had to stop falling and the roads had to be cleared before I could make an attempt.  So I did not get up until seven thirty, which was nice.

I tried heading into the office, using the Acadia as it is much larger and has the new tires, a little before ten.  The sun was out and it was super bright and crisp but it was a scant seven degrees when I went outside.  I made it no farther than the turn onto the next road before I realized that I could not keep the car moving reliably and needed to turn around.  So back home I went.  No way can I make it to the office, the roads were solid ice with hard packed snow on top.  So slippery.  Our own development is under continuously plowing and they actually have it mostly cleared, but the moment you are on the county roads, you are out of luck.

We got to spend the morning together as a family.  The girls were so excited that I was home.  We played with some of their new toys.  When Dominica got up she assembled Luciana’s Fisher Price ipad Barnyard set (it’s a physical barnyard that gets built on top of the iPad so that you can interact with things – it is a really cool idea) and later on worked on building Liesl’s enormous new collection of Playmobil toys.  Liesl now has the complete Playmobil zoo collection and wants to put it all together into a single, massive zoological park.

We had a great time with our surprise morning together.  We pretty much did nothing but just play with new Christmas toys and make fires in the fireplace all morning.

In the early afternoon the sun had been out long enough that it seemed like there might be a decent chance that the roads might have been cleared so I gave it another attempt with the Acadia.  This time the drive went fine and I was able to get into the office.  This made for a short day for me but I felt that it was good that I went into the office, even for a short day, because there was working needing my attention and I did not want people to be waiting on me just because I live in the middle of nowhere.

I made it to the office on this second attempt without incident.  The roads were mostly good the entire way.  Nothing really bad at all.  I was very productive at work and was one of only very few people who made it in at all.  So I feel good for having made the effort.  Everyone left on the early side as it was expected to be crazy cold tonight once the sun was down.  I did not want to deal with another layer of ice forming where the salt water had been before.

I am in the midst of reading “A Swiftly Tilting Planet.”  That will last a few more days.

On the way home I stopped off at the Yorktown Deli and grabbed dinner for Dominica.  They know that we are vegetarians and they made her a platter of freshly made falafel which Dominica said was awesome. (How does Google Chrome not know that falafel is a common food?  I can’t believe that I had to add that to my local dictionary.  That is just sad.  How common does a food have to be to not be in there?)  It really looked good but I had had lots of great cheese and crackers at work’s happy hour so did not need anything further for dinner.

This evening Liesl and I began playing “The Night of the Rabbit” which I got recently in a Steam sale.  The graphics and music are amazing (the story might be too, we just are not far enough in yet to have determined that.)  Dominica came down to the basement with the laptop and set up on the black couch to be near us.  She had us turn the one monitor around and duplicate the screens so that she could do her own thing but watch us play the game when she wanted to as well.  That worked really well.  It made it a lot more like a family game night rather than Liesl and I doing our own thing.  Liesl played for probably an hour and a half or maybe more.  She loved this game.  She was so excited that she was bouncing all over.  I barely had to help her at all, she is so good at the game.  It has new controls that she has not used before and yet she learned them in just a couple of minutes.  Luciana really liked watching the game too and spent a lot of time on my lap trying to squeeze in with us while we played too.

When bed time rolled around I read the girls another two chapters in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  I am very happy that the girls are enjoying real literature rather than just children’s stories so it is actually fun to read the story, not only to spend time with them.  I am looking forward to all of the stories which we will get to read now.

It was a good day.  I was very thankful for the many hours of extra family time that I got today as a surprise.  The girls and I pretty much spent the entire day together.  It was a great day.  And while I still went to work, it will make this feel almost like a three day weekend – a great wrap up to the holiday weeks.

Luciana had a bad dream and woke me up with her crying at a quarter after six. I went in and checked on her and moved her and Liesl into the bed with Dominica and I got ready for work. They were happy once they had snuggles and I am assuming that they slept that way for many more hours.

The car worked fine this morning although I gave it quite a long time to warm up as it was very cold out today. The drive into the office went fine.

Work was not as slow today as it has been. Many people are beginning to return to the office. The parking garage was not so empty, I did not get an automatic space right by the elevator door today.

Left the office a little on the early side tonight, there is a blizzard expected by seven this evening and I do not want to get stuck partway home and Dominica wants to go grocery shopping before the storm hits too and needs me home before she can head out.  I was on the road before five thirty and it was clear but by the time that I was in northern Westchester County and turned onto NY35 the snow had started and there was easily half an inch on the ground when I got to the house.  I finished reading “Many Waters” on the drive home.  It was far better than the other books in the series but was not at all as good as I had remembered, and it was inconsistent with L’Engle’s universe so it conflicted with some of her other books.  Not well done.

The little girls were very excited that I was home.  It’s nice to have them waiting for me, screaming for daddy as I come in the door.  I’ve missed that, haven’t had that for weeks.

I told Dominica that she had better get moving if she was going to do the grocery shopping now (she should have gone earlier in the day but wanted me to come home and watch the kids) because there was so much snow.  She had been on her laptop and acted surprised that there was snow.  Then she turned on the light and could see the woods all under a blanket and headed right out.  She just went to the nearest store and straight back as there was so much snow coming down.  As it was, she had a really hard time making it back up the hill again.

I made a fire in the fireplace while Dominica was gone.  The girls and I played upstairs for a while with my lying on the bed and them jumping on my back like they used to do every day when I got home from work in Texas.  Then we played “Silly Socks” in the living room by the fire while Luciana attempted to use the potty.

Once Dominica was home we headed to the basement and watched some Doctor Who before heading to bed.  At bedtime I read the girls another two chapters in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  Liesl is really getting into the story and Luciana seems to be enjoying it although I am not sure that she is following along or not.