Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Monday, my day at home with the girls.  Dominica was up and out the door at a quarter till seven as usual.   I got to sleep in for a bit.   Liesl got me up first and hopping into bed to snuggle for just a little bit.  Luciana slept in quite late.  She has been just exhausted recently.

Both girls were absolute angels today.  Liesl spent a ton of time entertaining herself.  Luciana spent much of the day in my room watching shows on her own.  They kept themselves apart and quiet for an unprecedented amount of time and even when they played together it was quiet and friendly.  No fights, no problems.  It was amazing.  If they were like this everyday I could stay home with them all of the time.  It is amazing what a really good night of sleep will do for them.  Going to bed at or before nine really helped.  It also allowed more story reading time which helps too, I think.

Luciana even went down for her afternoon nap without the slightest bit of complaining.  I was so productive today, it was awesome.  It was really a great day.

Luciana took a really long shower this afternoon too.  I’ve learned that I just can’t let Liesl play with her in the shower.  Liesl is good but Luciana gets upset because she gets splashed and because Liesl wants to share the rubber duckies.  Luciana just needs alone time in the shower and she is perfectly happy with her rubber duckies, Dora the Explorer toy and her pink bucket.

I did some serious vacuuming today with the Roomba again.  Last night Liesl and I picked up her room so that it would be ready for vacuuming today.  So I turned the Roomba loose on the entire “private wing” of the house and it did a great job again.  I ended up running the vacuum for three whole runs of that part of the house.   I also got my office floor completely picked up and ran the vacuum in there for about an hour.  That made a big difference too.  The house is just looking better and better.

Dominica ended up working an insanely long day.  She put in a full twelve hours in the office getting home just after seven and then she had dinner and logged in again and worked all evening remotely taking care of things that had been lined up while she was in the office.  She was really exhausted by the end of the day.

We watched some “Are You Being Served?” tonight but very little.  I had some work that needed by attention.  The office needed me to write and run a Python script tonight that would do some automated work that would going to be impossible to do without a good script so I had to work on that this evening.

Got the girls off to bed at a decent time again tonight.  We are focused really heavily now on getting them to bed earlier as it really seems to be making a big difference in their behaviour, and Dominica really needs them in good moods tomorrow considering how tired she is likely to be.

Dad comes to Texas to visit one week from tomorrow.

We were up too late last night watching Sherlock.  I hate when we get addicted to shows like that.  Today is a “no television” day for Dominica and I to keep that from happening so that we can be a little bit productive instead.  Liesl came into our room at seven thirty and got me up to set her up with the iPad and her morning chocolate milk.  She still drinks one bottle of it first thing in the morning and another last thing at night every day.  It’s a routine but since it isn’t actually chocolate milk but actually that formulated super healthy kid protein shake stuff it actually works out perfectly since she is so bad at eating well during the day.  Luciana slept in a little more.

Dominica had a salon appointment at noon and did some shopping while she was out.  I had the girls.  I got no work done with them hanging all over me today, it was crazy.  They took a long shower together.  They love playing with the ducks.  Luciana at one end staying more or less dry and Liesl just standing in the water the whole time.  They are so funny.

Dominica made dinner and we ate is mid afternoon.  While eating we watching a single episode of Are You Being Served?.  And that was the only twenty-two minutes of television that we saw all day.  We were both at our desks much of the day.  I know that I got a lot of work done and I managed to hang out with the girls quite a bit.

Liesl is really getting in to “doing school.”  Dominica sets her up at her desk with ABCMouse, an online educational site and Liesl just goes crazy doing the lessons.  She really loves it.  She has so much fun and it is the highlight of her day.  She gets so excited when Dominica offers to let her do it.

Luciana went to bed really early, about eight thirty.  And Liesl went to bed before nine, which never happens.  I read her her nighttime stories, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Leo the Late Bloomer and Caps for Sale and while I did she diligently cleaned up her room, all of her own accord without me having even suggested it.  Very odd.  When I was done reading I joined her and we had her whole room picked up in just a few minutes.  She is excited that it is clean and that the Roomba is going to be able to vacuum it after she gets up in the morning.  We are all hoping that the Roomba proves to be motivation for keeping all of the house clean as we can then use it to do the hard work for us if we just do that much.

Dominica went to bed shortly after Liesl did and I stayed up until after three in the morning getting some backlogged work that I had to do completed.  I was very happy knocking out an article that I wanted to do as well on DRBD clusters on OpenSuse.  I got some very positive feedback on that article before the night was done.

Hard to believe that dad will be coming to Texas in a little over a week.  It has seemed like the trip was so far away for so long but now it is only like eight or nine days.

Slept in nice and late this morning.  I got up at nine thirty and Dominica at nearly eleven.  The girls both slept in really late this morning too.  We have all been really exhausted this week and our sleep schedules have been all out of kilter so it was nice to get a nice, late morning to relax.

I am on call this weekend so I can’t really leave home to go anywhere, not that I wanted to.

Lots of family time today, not a lot of productivity.  We did set the Roomba loose on the carpeted part of the house today.  We had it do three runs down there with only Liesl’s room closed.  It did a great job of vacuuming there and didn’t take too long.  The pattern that it does is really wonky and I’m not convinced that it hits everything but overall it did a really good job including investigating way under the bed which is nice since obviously we never vacuum there by hand.  So it is really good at reducing the dust that collects in the house which is important since the kids like to play under there.

This evening we went out to Denny’s for dinner.  Dinner went okay but Liesl was very “not listening” to us by the end of dinner and we had to cancel a trip to Ikea to buy her school supplies (like desks and chairs) that we had planned to do this evening and just grabbed some quick FroYo to go which we ate in the car (none for Liesl, she lost that too) and straight home and the kids off to bed.

We watched the last two (there are only three) episodes in the second season of Sherlock tonight.  What an awesome show.  At the end suddenly it hit me that the guy who plays Dr. Watson is Bilbo Baggins from the new Hobbit movies.  Since we haven’t seen them yet, we hadn’t made the connection.  I looked up the main star, who plays Sherlock and found that he is in the Hobbit movies as well.  What a small world!  Weird.  Now we are a lot more excited to see them.

I overslept quite a bit this morning and it was almost time to be in the office by the time that I woke up.  Oops. So I was out of bed and out the door pretty quickly.

I worked through lunch today, that’s pretty normal these days.  I didn’t have to stay late tonight much at all which is pretty nice for a Friday evening.  I was able to head for home around six.  Not bad at all.

Did pretty much nothing this evening.  Thought about going out but decided to just stay in.

Ciana’s new thing is demanding that I play guitar for her in the evenings.  It is pretty funny, she says “Gee!  Gee!” and wants me to sit on the living room floor and play her music while she watches me.  It is so adorable.

The second season of Sherlock is now out on Amazon’s video service so we watched that.  We absolutely love that show.  We only managed to get through one episode (which is the length of a movie at 81 minutes) because Watson came over for a while to have a few beers instead of going out tonight.  We are all being cheap and lazy.  Today was his last day at the job that he has had for the last five years.  He is very excited.  He starts his new adventure on Monday.

I was up until about three in the morning working last night but I finally went Double Pure Capsacian on Spiceworks.  That is, roughly, seven years of continuous posting to make that happen.

Today is my day at home with the girls.  Luciana got up at seven thirty and climbed into bed with me for about an hour.  Liesl was up before nine which I found pretty surprising considering how late she went to bed last night.  That is not very much sleep for her and it was a bit of a short night for Ciana too.

The girls were pretty rambunctious this morning so it was pretty hard to work.  We had fun together though.  Luciana decided that she wanted to take a shower this morning pretty early on.  This is her new thing.  He loves getting into a warm shower and playing with her ducks (and one small dinosaur, one Dora the Explorer figurine, one camel and a bucket.)  I put the water on really warm but turn the volume down really low so it is like a light, warm rain.  She just loves it and because the tub doesn’t fill up she is very safe compared to a bath.  She’s decided that this is one of her favourite things ever in the last two weeks.  Now every day she runs to me and yells “Duck! Duck! Duck!” to take a shower.  She normally pulls hard at her shirt too trying to get herself undressed so that she can get in more quickly.

Sometimes, like this morning, Liesl gets excited and gets into the shower with Luciana.  This always makes Luciana decide to get out pretty quickly, though.  Luciana likes to sit under the faucet with the shower shooting over her head and just getting the mist and sitting in the “river” and playing.  Liesl has moved to loving just standing in the shower itself and just standing there with it falling on her – a long way from the Liesl of a year ago who was still scared of the shower.

The Roomba picked up a lot of stuff just from the hard surface portions of the house last night.  Really excited to try it out on the carpets.  Maybe tomorrow we can do that.

Dominica worked her five hour day and was able to come right home so we actually got family time together today a little.  Mostly she spent the afternoon running interference for me with the kids who were determined to be all over me today.

It was a busy day but I am happy because my cluster was completed and works.  That has been hanging over my head for so long that it was really beating me down.

This evening we mostly hung out in the play room.  Just the normal family evening.  Luciana had an accident during her nap (diaper leakage) and took a really long shower and bath.  I had had a long day so I just sat in the bathroom outside of the tub beside her and rested.  She would occasionally poke me and laugh but was happy to play on her own.  She loves having a bucket.  At one point I put a towel over my head and she would sometimes pull it off to play peekaboo.  So cute.