Sheep Guarding Llama

Luciana woke up early this morning and came into our room and snuggled in bed with a new bottle of soy milk for about an hour before we actually got up.  When I went out into the kitchen, around seven, to make her a warm bottle I noticed that the yard was nearly all white!  We actually got snow, quite a bit of it.  I had not realized that we were supposed to be in for a snow “storm” last night so this caught me off guard a bit.  I suppose that I did not go outside at all yesterday so maybe that is why I did not realize how cold it had gotten the last day or so.  The snow was still falling when I looked out into the atrium, not coming down fast but it was really coming down.  This was real snow.

This is the first time that Luciana has ever seen snow.  She has not made it to New York for a winter yet and the only times that we have had snow in Texas she was in Houston.  Liesl was very excited once she got up.  She didn’t notice the snow at all until I mentioned it and then she was jumping around and running to look at the windows.  She gets snow so rarely that it is really excited.  Having grown up in New York where there is always more snow than you wish that there was, it is strange to me to see my own children excited to see it.  Hard to believe that snow isn’t something with which they are used to having unlimited access.

I took a little while to fix some power and Internet problems at the house this morning, probably caused by the cold.  Our server closet was extremely cold this morning.

I left for work just a little before ten because I wanted to be sure to avoid anything close to rush hour.  As it was instead of the usual empty roads the highways were moving like molasses in, well, January which is what it is.  The drive in for me was fine since I stuck to the surface roads where the traffic was light and moving just fine.  There wasn’t any real snow on the road surface except for on one low bridge so it wasn’t treacherous or anything.

The office was pretty thin today, I am assuming that a lot of people were avoiding the drive.  There were only three people there.

I had to come home during lunch to do some work and put in a very busy afternoon.  I didn’t go back to the office because it didn’t make any sense.  I would have just been driving all day had I done that.

After work this evening we took the kids out to Brookhaven for dinner.  It is kids’ night and we have not been there for dinner in quite some time.  It turned out there was story time tonight, but The Grille was full so we had to wait for a while.  Story Time started while we were waiting so I took the girls and we sat down to listen to the stories while Dominica waited for our table.  Liesl was so cute sitting on her own listening to the stories.  Luciana just sat on my lap and hung out with me playing with my freece’s zipper and making faces at people eating dinner.  Then Liesl told Luciana to come sit with her and the two of them sat next to each other on the floor for a while listening to the stories, it was adorable.

We got home pretty late and Luciana was pretty much ready for bed when we got back.  I got her off to bed and she wanted a story.  She is just starting to be into reading books.  She has been asking for stories during they day for about a week but now she is doing it like Liesl connected with bed time.  She has been on a kick to read this Swedish book about two children who help to rescue a garden when the old lady who owns the garden goes away to take care of her elderly sister.  Liesl has a stuffed broccoli that is one of the characters from the book and Luciana was very excited to take the broccoli to bed with her.  We asked Liesl if it would be okay for Luciana to sleep with the broccoli and Liesl said, “Sure, maybe it will become a pattern.”  So cute.

We watched some more “Are You Being Served?” tonight.

Dominica went in to work this morning.  I managed to sleep in until nearly eight thirty.

This evening we planted ourselves in the play room and watched some “Are You Being Served?” which we have not watched in years.  My guess is that we have not watched this since Liesl was old enough to watch it with us.  We probably last watched it when she was just an infant, probably early on when we lived in Peekskill.  We watched quite a bit of older BBC shows during that era.  That was the same time that I did my last model railroading, too.

It is neat getting to watch this show with Liesl now.  Liesl is probably about the age that I was the first time that I saw this show.  When I was Liesl’s age this show was still being produced, which is incredible to think now.  This was what television looked like when I was little.  I watched a lot of this show with my mom when I was a bit older.  And now Liesl watches it with me.  Mostly she plays video games on the iPad while Dominica and I watch the show, but still.

Dominica had a bit of extra work to do tonight so she put in a few more hours working tonight while we watched our shows.

Story time and off to bed for Liesl.  She is so good about going to bed these days.

We were off to bed pretty early tonight. Dominica is always very tired on Monday nights after a long day at work.

We took most of today off so that we could watch travel videos that we found on YouTube.  We found some new travel vloggers that we were checking out, As We Travel, and ended up watching their entire section on their rail challenge around Europe where they took seventy-five days and went to thirty countries.  It was really cool.  They did a good job on the videos too.  We enjoyed watching them quite a bit, especially as their adventure was so similar to ours – we did twelve countries in about forty days but with two little kids with us, so the pacing was very similar but ours was a ton more work.  They also had the advantage of one of them being from one of the countries that they visited so for them it was more like traveling around the United States would be for us – doing thirty states in seventy five days would be pretty trivial, especially without kids.

Liesl started doing Litebright today.  She got one for Christmas.  It is mostly the same as when we were little.  Only when I was young it was stamped metal and now it is plastic, of course.  So the modern one is much nicer and easier to care for.  It also has a flip drawer on the bottom to hold the little plastic pegs so it is not the mess that the old one was.  It is smaller but that works better.  And instead of having to plug it in and have a light bulb inside of it, it is powered by a few little batteries, has a power button that switches between on, off and blinking, and is lit by an LED.  She had a lot of fun doing that.  That was a very good Christmas present for her.  Now I wonder how old I was when I used to do that.  Watching her do that really brought back the memories.

So on “As We Travel” we learned that the largest Orthodox church in west Europe is in Finland.  But I already knew that the largest Orthodox church in eastern Europe was in Belgrade.  This didn’t seem right to me.  It really made me question my geography.  So I looked it up.  And I was right.  The largest church of the west is three hundred miles east of the largest church of the east.  That is messed up.

That is like how West, Texas is far east of East, Texas.

I got paged out this evening and had to work for a few hours.  Same issue as last weekend.

A quiet Saturday at home.  Did not do too much today.  We have been avoiding dealing with the crazy mess that is our house.  It has been a disaster since Christmas.  So much to do.  We just never have the energy to start tackling it all.

We stayed home all day not venturing out at all.  We finished watching Family Ties.  Liesl was not very into that.  Then more of Shake It Up.  She likes to sit on my lap and sing along.

Very quiet day.  Just playing with the girls all day.

It’s Friday!  Last Friday was my early one so today was a relaxed Friday.  Got in normal time and worked all day in the office.  I worked through lunch which is pretty normal for me now.

Came home and spent the evening with the family.  We’ve been watching Family Ties and are almost done with the final season.  Dominica and I were watching it a few years ago and never quite finished the series.  She has a tendency to get tired of a show just before finishing all of the episodes so we took a few years off but finally came back to wrap it up.  Seven seasons.  Hard to believe that it ran for so long.  By the later episodes it felt like it was coming from a different era.  That show was so solidly from the 80s.  I probably saw every episode of it growing up.  Not a single one feels completely unknown to me.  If I missed any they were few and far between.

It makes me sad that so many of the classic shows from my childhood are not available today.  The shows that I liked the best are, mostly, unavailable.  So many shows that I don’t care about or outright detest, like “Alf”, are available but the great shows that defined the ’80s are not being released.  Shows like “Growing Pains” and “Who’s the Boss” and many of their spin-offs.  Some licensing problems combined with low revenue has caused these shows to effectively vanish.  Liesl and Luciana might never get to watch those shows simply because someone isn’t willing to allow us to pay them to see them.  Unbelievable in this era of “everything is available.”  That an entire decade is just missing is outright crazy.

We watched a little bit of the Disney show Shake It Up and got the girls off to bed.  Dominica is still completely exhausted from yesterday and went to bed early.  I went out to Redneck to hang out with Aimee and Stephan.  Haven’t seen Aimee in about two months.