Sheep Guarding Llama

The nights are getting better with Luciana and Dominica is getting stronger day by day as she recovers from her surgery.  Figuring out that she needed to sleep in the recliner rather than in the bed was a very big deal.  That has really helped a lot.

We are alone this weekend.  No family was able to come stay with us so we are just staying home and doing our best to keep up with Liesl and Luciana and to keep the house in order.  We are definitely feeling overwhelmed and struggling pretty hard to keep up with the girls and everything that needs to be done.

This coming week is going to be extra tough with all kinds of appointments for Dominica and Luciana.  Getting to all of the places that we need to go is going to be very hard to fit into the schedule.

Last night was much, much better with Dominica and Luciana sleeping out in the living room.  Dominica had a much easier time and I only had to go out and help when she called me (yes, she would call me on the cell phone.)  Getting a halfway decent night’s sleep helped a lot and Dominica is feeling tons better today with having to have gone through a full night of getting up and down from a prone position over and over.

Francesca and the Grice kids were supposed to be coming up from Houston this afternoon to spend the weekend with us but Francesca found out this afternoon that Clara has pneumonia and so they are not able to be around Luciana.  Dominica is really depressed as we have been so busy with the kids and had been planning on having pretty much continuous family help but now have no way for anyone to come see us until dad arrives in two weeks.  This is going to be rough.  Even if Clara gets better right away they won’t be cleared to be around Luciana until after it is too late for next weekend too.  We are starting to worry a little bit about our ability to take care of work and the kids all by ourselves.

For dinner this evening we knew that we needed to use our La Cima meals so when we finally decided what we wanted to do I called down to La Cima to see if it was too late to place an order.  They were completely busy tonight and needed forty-five minutes to even look at the order.  So I just drove down to Las Colinas and went to the club to order and wait there.  I got dinner and drove it back home.  It was around nine when I arrived there so probably ten thirty by the time that I was able to get home and we were able to eat our dinners.

Dominica is still sleeping in the living room tonight with Luciana while Oreo and I sleep in the bedroom.

Last night was a really rough one for Dominica and I.  The entire family attempted to pile in to mommy and daddy’s room with Luciana in a bassinet at the side of the bed and Liesl trying to sleep in the middle.  That did not last long.  We went for about an hour of Luciana not letting us sleep at all before we decided that Liesl just had to go to her own room – she was not able to get to sleep at all and there was so much activity going on that she was quite far from being asleep and just talking and talking.  When I finally carried her over to her own bed and tucked her in she was actually quite happy to be able to go to sleep.  So, in reality, that did not work out so badly.

Overall we got just about no sleep last night. There were stretches where we got an hour or so but that was about it.  It was a long, hard night.  Dominica was in a ton of pain trying to get up from lying down so she thinks that she is going to skip attempting to sleep in a bed after this.  Just not worth it.  Especially right now as Luciana just needs continuous attention during the night.

I “got up” before seven and at eight we were off to the airport with Dominica’s parents.  That was a quick trip.  On the way home I swung into Walgreens and grabbed some Ibuprofen for Dominica’s pain and then hit Jack in the Box to pick up breakfast for the family.  Today I tried getting Jack in the Pack silver dollar pancakes.  The pancakes ended up being a hit and Liesl just loves them.  She even likes to eat them cold and without syrup.  Hard to believe.

My aunt and uncle came over before I made it back and visited for the morning.  For lunch we left Dominica and Luciana to nap, if possible, and we took Liesl and drove down to La Cima for lunch.  They really liked it there.  We were really late so the place was empty in the dinning room.

Once we returned from lunch Dominica and I had to scramble to get the kids ready so that we could take Luciana to her first pediatric appointment up in Frisco.  So Sharon and Leo decided to get on the road as they are headed for Missouri.  Today they get to experience the joy that is driving across Oklahoma.

Luciana’s appointment went okay.  There is definite concern over her level of jaundice so they did a blood test and we will get results of that tonight.  Her weight is down quite significantly too so their is concern that she is not getting enough nourishment so we are going to have to start supplementing with formula and Dominica will have to take measures so that we are able to measure how much food Luciana is intaking.

We came home and I worked for the evening.  Nothing too eventful tonight.  We just stayed home and relaxed with the kids.  Boy is it weird to have “kids” rather than “kid.”  It is no longer Liesl, it is a “they”.  In some ways, having a second child is just as weird as having the first.

The blood test came back and Luciana is not too bad but she is going to need a lot of sunlight and careful monitoring.

Tonight Dominica and Luciana are sleeping in the living room.  Liesl in her own room (from the very beginning) and Oreo and I have the master bedroom to ourselves.  We are hoping that this means that everyone will have a better night.

I got up early this morning and got as much work done as I could before running in to the hospital at nine thirty to help Dominica and Luciana with getting discharged.  Liesl stayed at home with Dominica’s parents.  It would have been horrible if they had not been home as it would have just been way too much work to try to deal with everything while taking care of Liesl too.

I had to stop at CVS on the way and pick up Dominica’s prescription and then, it turned out, I was quite early so I stopped at Einstein Bagel Bros. for a quick breakfast.  The manager recognized me and asked where the family was because he is used to all three of us coming in after Dominica’s OB/GYN appointments for Luciana.  So we had a whole long conversation about kids as he as four boys of his own and it is quite a struggle for him to get time with them too and make it to work every day.

I was early enough still at the hospital that I was able to take all of Dominica’s stuff to the car and get ready for her to get done with her discharge class that she was taking from ten until eleven.  She took Luciana with her to the class so I had little to do once the car was packed except to play Trade Nations on my iPhone.  Boy am I loving having an iPhone.

I spoke to my Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo this morning.  They were in Bard, New Mexico when I first spoke to them and they were on their way towards Carrollton.  That is a pretty long drive so they were expecting to arrive sometime late this evening.

It took about forty five minutes from the time that Dominica got done with class until we were released.  But that was not too bad.  Dominica was not moving too quickly anyway.  Her incision is still really hurting her.

It was around twelve thirty when we arrived back at the house.

I spent the afternoon working in the office, for the most part, while Dominica rested in the living room and her parents played with the children.

It was around six this evening when Sharon and Leo arrived at their hotel in Addison, not too far away.  They went to the hotel and then came over to the house an hour or so later to see Luciana.

Not long after Sharon and Leo arrived, Dominica’s parents drove over to Chili’s for dinner while the rest of us hung out at the house.  They brought dinner back with them for everyone else.

It was an early night for everybody, Dominica is exhausted and everyone else is traveling tomorrow.  I have to leave the house at eight tomorrow morning to take Dominica’s parents to the airport so that they can head back home.

Luciana enters her second day today and is happy and healthy and far, far more relaxed than her uber-hyper older sister.  Liesl is louder and more rambunctious than Luciana by quite a margin.  They may look similar but we can already see some serious differences in personality and Luciana is only on day two.  To be fair, though, Liesl was born at 41 weeks and Luciana at just 39.  Those last two weeks make for an awful lot of development.  The size and strength difference alone is significant.  Luciana was healthy but Liesl was thinking about crawling that first day (well, at least holding up her head and looking around.)

This morning I got up and got to work trying to catch up as much as possible from yesterday.  Dominica’s parents got up and took Liesl into the hospital this morning so she is not alone and I have the house to myself so that I can be productive for the morning.  Everyone is doing pretty well this morning.

At noon I headed in to the hospital to join everyone.  On my way in I swung in to downtown Carrollton to find Vintage House, the local Vera Bradley store.  Dominica has been wanting the Vera Bradley Mother’s Day bracelet that released yesterday morning and that is only available for a very limited time.  It turns out that Dominica did not realize that the bracelet is not available online and can only be purchased from participating Vera Bradley stores so when she told me that she expected me to get up early yesterday and find it for her, she did not understand that she was sending me physically out attempting to find it.

I did pretty well, though, I was able to find the store and pick out a bracelet for her.  Then I hit Jack in the Box and headed on in to the hospital.

I brought my laptop with me so that I could work from the hospital but, for some reason, neither Dominica nor my laptops are able to connect to the hospital’s weird WiFi.  The iPhone connects to it but when it is connected it cannot get email or do anything but surf the web.  Clearly they are blocking all non-web protocols which is pretty ridiculous – why would they attempt to block hospital patients from emailing people?  If anything, isn’t that the most important function that they would need Internet access for and web browsing just secondary?  So I’ve been using my iPhone on 3G the last two days just because it works better than the WiFi in the hospital.  But now we realize that our laptops (Windows 7) are useless here.  This meant that I couldn’t stay for very long at the hospital and had to run back to the house to work.  That really sucked.  We had been planning on me working from the hospital.  I took Dominica’s laptop home too since she wasn’t going to be able to use it.  That was probably the worst part – she was unable to use her laptop for entertainment while stuck in the hospital.

I came home with Liesl who was very tired and bored from being in the hospital and put her to bed while I worked for several hours.  Once Liesl woke up I took her back to the hospital to spend the evening with Dominica and Luciana.  Liesl was pretty bored after having been at the hospital yesterday and all day today.  Since everything but the web is blocked things like Netflix aren’t an option to keep her occupied either.  Luckily the iPad was loaded with some existing videos that she was able to watch.  Today she decided that she was in to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” which seems pretty weird to me.  She found it and picked it out all by herself.  She is way past the point of needing us to help her use the iPad for much of anything, especially not watching movies.

We stayed probably a bit too late as Liesl was going crazy by the end.  We tried watching some Disney Channel but there was nothing on that interested her and the tiny television high on the wall was nearly impossible to watch if you were not in the hospital bed.

Luciana is doing really well after day two and it is expected that she and Dominica will be getting discharged tomorrow morning around eleven.  We will find out for sure in the morning.

Dominica is really lonely in the hospital and really wants to come home.  Hopefully nothing goes wrong so that she can come home tomorrow.  She will be very upset if she gets stuck at the hospital for another day – especially as tomorrow is the last day that her parents will be in Texas helping us out.

Liesl and I got home pretty late – probably after midnight.  And it was straight off to bed.  Liesl was super helpful again tonight.  She is really being just so perfect putting up with her mommy being away and all of the change going on.  I can’t believe how good she is being.

Tonight she got in to bed and was playing with her toy phone.  The phone is meant for kids much younger but she has taken a liking to it which is pretty funny.  She does much more advanced play with it, though, and tonight I found her having an entire conversation on it where she was explaining about her day and the baby and hospital and everything.  I asked her if she was talking to Aunt Checka and she said yes.  I told her to tell her bye bye so that she could brush her teeth.  “Bye bye, Aunt Checka” she said and hung up the phone and brushed her teeth.

Then, after she was done brushing her teeth, she called each of her cousins in succession saying “Hello Garrett, what are you doing?  Okay, bye bye.” and going on to the next cousin.  It was so cute.  She even told me that Emily’s phone number was “123”.  We were quite surprised that Liesl understands the concept of phone numbers already.  Considering how little we use the phone (we use email, instant messenger, etc. instead) that was quite amazing.

As Luciana is doing so well at this point, we have reservations for La Cima for Mother’s Day.  We are hopeful that we will be able to make it.  Missing brunches at La Cima is a tragic thing indeed.