November 11, 2012: Aida

Luciana has several new words today and her first sentence.  She said “episode”, “cheese” and “close the door.”

Most of our morning was spent getting ready to head out to the opera.  It is a busy day for sure.  The opera is an “all day” kind of thing, not like a movie that you just run out to go to.

Kayla came over to watch the girls at just after noon.  The opera was scheduled to start at 2PM but it takes a while to get downtown and get to the Winspear Opera House before the show begins.  So at twelve thirty we drove the Spark down the street to the Trinity Mills Station and caught the Green Line heading downtown.  I am really loving that we are starting to take advantage of the trains here in town, it makes living in Carrollton make so much more sense and be so much cooler.

The ride downtown was fine.  It is a little chilly today and there is a light rain.  We got downtown to the Arts District stop and walked the few blocks to the opera house.  Boy the train is perfect for going to the symphony and the opera or other concerts in the Arts District.  Just so easy and so much cheaper than trying to park downtown.  It is only $7 for the two of us to go downtown, round trip.

We got to the opera house and thankfully I remembered the tickets for a change.  I’m very bad about that.  We got there just in time to head up to the Grand Balcony and take our seats.  Our seats were definitely “nosebleed” but they were central and all of the seats there are pretty good. These were very close to where Rachael and I had seats back in April.

Aida was really good.  Three and a half hours, but very good.  Dominica really enjoyed it and it was her first ever opera.  This was, I believe, my fourth having seen La Nozze in high school with Jenny Alexander, probably around junior year, at Eastman in Rochester.  Then I saw an opera somewhere around 1999 in Ithaca put on by Ithaca College.  Then the opera in April in Dallas and Aida today.  Those are the only four that I can think of at this point.

After the opera we walked back to the train station but the train pulled away just as we arrived.  Since the trains run every twenty minutes we decided to use the time to just walk down to West End Station, three stations away, rather than just sitting still and getting no exercise.  It takes no more time but at least we get a nice walk this way.

We got back to the car and stopped at a brand new Indian Diner on Trinity Mills called Eat Street Kabob Factory which turned out to be awesome.  The food was really amazing.  We will definitely be going back there a lot.  Excellent Indian food right around the corner from the house.  This is a huge win for living in Carrollton.

November 10, 2012: Saturday with the Kids

Today is our day at home with the kids.  Both Dominica and I have been super busy this week with all kinds of concerts, dancing and other stuff.  So today we took to spend time with the kids.  The girls are always so excited when I stay home.  Liesl and I always talk about the days of the week now because she knows that there are days when I stay home and days when I go to work.  She is really good at knowing that Friday is the last day that I go to the office and that Saturday and Sunday “daddy stays home!!”  It is adorable how much effort she puts into knowing when my days at home are.  She and I have really bonded.  She probably says “I love you, daddy!” twenty times a day or more.

Very relaxing day.  Some cleaning done around the house.  We thought that we were going to have house guests tonight.  We had some friends who thought that they were coming over but ended up having to cancel on us.  So then we thought that we were going to have a quiet night at home alone.  Then, at the last minute, the Vielmas decided to come over.  So we had a rapid set of changing plans all night.  It was nice getting to see them, it’s been weeks since we had a chance to hang out.

November 9, 2012: Out Dancing at Cool River

It is Friday and I am in the office as usual.  Went to lunch with Dan as we are want to do on Fridays.

After work I came home and hung out with the girls all evening.  Around ten I headed out to Cool River to go dancing with Chris and some of the other ballroom folk.  Dominica has been out to Cool River before so tonight was my turn.  I was not very impressed, though.  The dancing was pretty lame.  No one does any formal dancing whatsoever and the dance floor is smokey and nothing but a bunch of people jumping up and down.  It was pretty silly.  We did our best to dance and I did manage to do some salsa, cha cha, calypso and latin hustle but there was no room and no one appreciated the moves.  Not my scene.  I’m not sure why they try to go to Cool River.  This seems like the worst possible place to try to dance.  It was kind of fun but overall, it wasn’t very entertaining.

November 8, 2012: Dominica’s First Symphony

I left work on the early side this evening and drove up to Lewisville to pick up our babysitter and then down to the house to get ready as quickly as possible.  Liesl was so excited to see her babysitter.  They get along great and have a lot of fun playing together.

I got into my new olive green suit and Dominica and I were out the door.  We drove over to Trinity Station and took the Green Line downtown to Akard so that we could walk over to the Tower Club for dinner.  This was, surprisingly, Dominica’s first time going to the Tower Club!

It was around six thirty when we arrived so we did not have a lot of time for dinner but the Tower Club is used to people needing to make shows as the Arts District is a short walk away.  We had a really good dinner and Dominica really enjoyed getting to go to the Tower Club, finally.  The food and the view was excellent and we pretty much had the dinning room to ourselves.  It was  a really nice evening.

We did really well on time and got over to the symphony without any problem.  I had forgotten to bring the tickets so had to hit will call to pick up reprints.  Our seats were excellent, though, six row center.  Tonight’s performance was Britten’s War Requiem which is a very famous but very depressing piece.  Not necessarily the best piece for Dominica to have experienced for her first ever full symphony performance.  They did an excellent job with it but it is a hard piece to sit through, that is for sure.

After the show we headed back to the train and rode back up to Trinity Mills Station and went home.  Dominica drove Kayla back home and I stayed to watch the kids who were already asleep.

We had a really nice time tonight.  It is great being able to get out to have a nice night out like this once in a while.  We are so thankful to have a real babysitter now too!