Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Wednesday, I am home again today watching Liesl and Luciana while Dominica goes into Arlington to go to the hospital to stay with Casen while Ashley is at school.

Dominica was up and gone around six.  I slept in as long as I could.

Like yesterday it was great to be home with my girls but really hard to get anything done.  They were in my office continuously for one thing or another and Luciana just never stops begging me to come out, open the fridge and then she just stands there trying to convince you to give her one thing or another.  It is driving us crazy.  She doesn’t eat anything that you give to her out of the fridge, she just screams if you close the door.

I was quite exhausted when Dominica got back mid-afternoon.  She hit Target and did some shopping before coming back to the house.  We needed some supplies and were desperately low on all kinds of milk.  Luciana drinks the regular milk and Liesl drinks the chocolate milk.  Run out of either and we will have a mutiny on our hands.

It was a little after two when Dominica got back.  Like yesterday, it was too late and I was too tired to go back into the office.  So I just worked from home all day.

Dominica were thinking about going out tonight but ended up decided just to stay in and relax.  We have been really running ragged over the past few weeks.  Need some time to just relax.

Today is my work from home day this week.  I slept in until the very last, possible second and only got up then because Liesl insisted that I did.  So at just after eight thirty I got up and set Liesl up in the playroom – our morning routine of turning on a movie, giving her the iPad to play her games and getting her a “chocolate milk”, actually a nutrient rich pediasure protein drink.

I logged into work, caught up and laid back down for a bit with the BlackBerry by my head until around nine thirty when Luciana insisted that everyone be awake.  She is less tolerant of other people sleeping while she is up than Liesl is.  Liesl is very happy to have the house to herself for a while which she does, nearly every day.

I was very tired and spent most of the morning in a haze, very unproductively, sitting at my desk staring at the screen.

After lunch, which wasn’t food but just a long, hot shower, I felt a bit better and was able to do some Ruby on Rails troubleshooting today and managed to get my project working 99%.  I’m still having an issue with a dropdown box appearing incorrectly but that is pretty minor.  All of the real functionality is working.

I was pretty busy this afternoon and didn’t get any “free” time to do any catchup.  I’ve been so busy lately that I feel like I am just falling farther and farther behind, SGL being just one of the places that things are suffering.

Casen started his chemotherapy today.  He will be doing that for the next twelve weeks.  This is going to be really tough.

My contact dermatitis is much worse today.  It really looks like poison ivy now.  Both hands are covered in it.

This evening we watched a little television together as a family while we had dinner.  Liesl and Luciana moved into our bedroom to watch shows together so I went back to my office to get some work done.

Luciana is at a point now where she can pretty much tell us that she wants to go to bed and when she is ready she will actually grab her bottle (she drinks whole milk warmed in the microwave now) and actually runs to her bedroom.  It is so adorable.  She really wants to go to bed when she is tired and demands that you put her there.  She likes her sleep, that one.  I wonder how long that will last.  So she was in bed before nine of her own accord.

Liesl went to bed around ten.  We are about halfway through The House on Pooh Corner which is really hard to follow.  As the reader I am struggling to figure out what is going on; Liesl must really have a hard time.  But she says that she enjoys the stories.  I never realized how oddly written those books are.  The dialogue is just bizarre.  Disney did a lot of modification to make them work for a wide audience.

We were both tired and were in bed ourselves around eleven, very early for us.  I have to be up early tomorrow for the non-farm payroll announcement at the office.  Then I am coming home mid-morning so that Dominica can drive out to Arlington to help out with Casen at the hospital.

Went into the office this morning, just my normal schedule.

Early this afternoon Casen went in for his first surgery.  He’s been at the hospital since yesterday.  Today they are doing a biopsy to see what it is that he has.  This is his first surgery of what is likely going to be a long string of them.  Everyone is very nervous.

I came home at lunch today just because there is so much to do I wanted to get some time to do as much “catch up” as possible.

The word back on Casen this afternoon is that it really is cancer 🙁  Poor little guy.  Cancer at only six months old.  Dominica looked it up and said that for his type of cancer and the age that he is that the survival rate is really high and because of the location of it, in his chest, it was found really early and is far more treatable than most other places where it might occur.

This evening Chris was playing the open mic night at the House of Blues downtown.  Dominica needed to stay home with the kids so some friends and I went to the House of Blues to see Chris perform.  He did three songs and did really well.  Pretty esoteric stuff for the young, hipster House of Blues audience, though.  Not a serious music crowd in any way.

We ate dinner at House of Blues and then drove from there to Addison to go to karaoke night at The Quarter.  We stayed out late tonight but had a good time.

Going to be exhausted tomorrow.

Today is my “Monday” since yesterday was a holiday.  I love four day work weeks.  Five days is a bit long but four days you really don’t notice.  Amazing how that little twenty percent makes such a huge difference.

I was in the office today.  Our mini heat wave is continuing.  It is over one hundred today and we really feel it.  The house had a hard time staying cool today, it was that hot.  We made it most of the summer without that issue this year.

I came home at lunch today,  I had a phone conference that I needed to be on so I locked myself away in the back office for a while.  I’m feeling a bit buried with work this week, it seems to be a race to get everything done.

Back at the office this afternoon.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  Came home a little on the early side, but only barely, and watching the kids so that Dominica could shower and then we were off to Brookhaven for Kids’ Night there.

Liesl and Luciana are both doing so well recently at going to the country club.   Liesl gets distracted with her colouring and doesn’t do much eating of her food but that is just Liesl and there is very little to be done about that.  But she is very well behaved and you really cannot ask for more from your three year old.  Luciana is getting used to restaurants and is now roughly the same age that Liesl was when we started going to La Cima, which seems absolutely impossible.  How could Liesl have been so little when we were first going there?

Dominica is very excited that the baja fish tacos are returning to the Brookhaven menu.  That means that she will have access to tilapia there all of the time again.  That is a big deal for her as she does not like salmon.

We got home and I tried to get some work done.  It was kind of a frustrating night.

We learned, via Facebook, that Ashley had to take Casen into the hospital tonight because he was having issues breathing.  Casen is her baby, just six months old.  We saw them out at the lake house just a few weeks ago.  Ashley babysits Liesl and Luciana once in a while.  They did a CT scan on Casen tonight and found a massive tumor in his little chest that was pushing his left lung out of the way.  So the family is in complete panic now.  They don’t really know anything at this point but the doctors are pretty sure, it seems, that it is cancer.  They were unable to see the oncologist tonight but Casen is going to have surgery tomorrow.

Nothing to do now but pray.  We should know something more in the morning.

Rachael, whom I have not heard from in months and have not seen since before Europe, texted me that she had lost her phone and had a new one and is apartment shopping in our area, maybe as soon as tomorrow, which is very cool.  She lives annoying far to the east of the city so we never get to see her (that and she loses her phones, apparently.)

Chris wanted to go out tonight so after Luciana went to bed (around eight thirty) and Liesl went to bed (a little after ten thirty) we went out for a drink.  Liesl and I are about halfway through reading The House at Pooh Corner, the second Winnie the Pooh story book.  I never realized just how confusing and hard to follow these stories are.  The Disney versions are far more coherent and make way more sense than the originals.  Liesl likes them though.  Partially, I think, because they are longer than what we used to read.  We are nearly done with these so we need to find something new to read soon.  I am thinking that maybe she is ready for The Wind in the Willows.

I have today off from work so I am home working on a Ruby on Rails project, the one that I was working on all day yesterday.  We slept in a little this morning but not too much as Liesl was up rather early on so I figured that it was not worth going back to bed.  Dominica got to sleep in a little longer than me but no more than half an hour, I would guess.

It is a hot day today.  Early September but still one hundred and four degrees outside.  That’s brutally hot for this late in the summer.

I am still soar today from my workout more than half a week ago.  This workout is going to kill me.  I guess that means that it is working.

Dominica was just horrible tired today and went back to bed to take a nap at the same time that Luciana did.  Luciana, however, did not sleep more than two or three hours.  Dominica kept sleeping long after Luciana was awake and running around the house.

Brian even came over to borrow a CPAP hose and she did not wake up.  He was here for at least twenty minutes.