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!

November 6, 2012: Dinner with the Vielmas

I was in the office today.  Nothing special, just another day.  After work I came home and helped Dominica get the girls out the door to go to kids’ night at Brookhaven Country Club.  We have been trying to coordinate going out to dinner with the Vielmas for several weeks and have not been able to pull it off.  Finally tonight Kim and the kids were able to meet us at Brookhaven for dinner.  Armando tried to make it but got stuck late at work so had to call off at the last second but at least the rest of us managed to get together.

We tried eating outside and thought that that would work well as there were so many of us (seven) but it was chillier than we had realized and no one, except me who plans better, was dressed warmly enough to be outside so we changed plans and ate inside instead.  I did a really good job and only had the really healthy blacked salmon salad tonight.  Kim and the kids seemed to really enjoy eating at the club too.  They had a good time.