Sheep Guarding Llama

We are heading out to the hospital at 4:40am today.  I am already awake and getting SGL completely up to date so that there is nothing that people are missing before we go in.  To follow along with the latest in baby news watch the Twitter feed (@scottalanmiller) and watch the Flickr feed.  In theory I should be able to post updates all morning from the new iPhone which is fully charged and ready to go.  I tested everything out yesterday and we should be good to go.  Both should show up automatically on the left side bar here on SGL, but just in case, use the links.  FaceBook will have some info but Twitter and Flickr are the definitive sources.

Dominica and I have been up pretty early each of the last two days.  This is good since tomorrow we have to be up really, really early to get to the hospital.  Our brunch seating at La Cima is at ten thirty this morning and with this many people (thirteen) to get showered, dressed, loaded into cars and driven over there we need some serious time to pull this all off.  Everyone was up around seven and it was still a bit of a challenge to be out the door by ten.

We actually arrived early, a miracle for us.  Brunch was awesome at La Cima as always.  The food was excellent and the selection was really broad.  The crab cakes eggs benedict was a particular favourite.  There were balloon animals and face painting for the kids and little Easter goodie buckets.  It was very nice.  All of the kids seemed to have a good time.

After we ate it was time to go down on to the lawn for an Easter egg hunt.  There was a special area for the two and under crowd.  Liesl and Garrett both did very well running around collecting Easter eggs.  They had practice since they both did it at the house this morning before we left.

We came back home and now we are on the “cruising into the delivery” mode.  That was our final pre-baby activity.  Now it is time to relax and get ready to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning.  I went in to the office and worked all evening trying to get everything possible done and out of the way so that there is nothing hanging over my head tomorrow.  All of my out of offices are set and no one is expecting to hear from me.  My email mailboxes are effectively empty.  The bills have been paid.  We should be in good shape.

Dominica went to bed around nine.  I did closer to eleven.  The iPhone is depleted and plugged in so I should have a full charge for tomorrow.

I spent the morning working, actually there turned out to be quite a bit of work needing my attention, while a ton of baking was going on in the kitchen.  Dominica was forced to spend the morning relaxing on the couch and not moving – which she really needed after all of the exertion the last few days.  It turns out, however, that the girls were planning a secret baby shower (or diaper drop, really) for her and did not want her to know, which is pretty hard to do in her own house.  But they pulled it off.  Francesca and Brittany would sneak into my office to hide cupcakes on the servers.

The party was at noon.  Liesl kind of felt that the party must be for her as all parties at her house are for her.  She had a very good time, though.  She especially enjoyed the blow up bounce house that Debbie brought over.  At one point Liesl made me stay outside with her for about an hour all by myself just so that she could play in it.  She didn’t care if the other kids were there or not.  She had a blast.  Dominica thinks that we might need to get one for her, she liked it that much.

I drove Dominica’s mother and Emily out to the Verizon store this evening as mom’s cell phone is broken (HTC Droid Incredible, it just reboots continuously) and she needed to get it fixed.  It turned out that they could not fix it or do anything to help her even though it was a very well known Android update issue with the Incredible that broke it.  I was eligible for an upgrade and getting her a smartphone, even one she didn’t like, would have been well over three hundred dollars and a good one over four hundred.  So we decided that she would get my BlackBerry Tour temporarily until she was eligible for an upgrade and that I would take the opportunity to go to the iPhone 4 since my eligibility had already come up.

Dominica has been bugging me to get a new phone for a while as the BlackBerry doesn’t do what we need and has been having horrible battery issues which makes it nearly useless for us since I am nearly always without a working phone (BlackBerrys have the major issue that their radios turn off about halfway through their battery life so running them down in order to recharge them means going nearly a day without a phone and then all the time to charge them!)  So this is the perfect time to have a new iPhone.  I need the battery life and battery behaviour for emergencies and coordination with the new baby plus the better camera, ability to reliably Twitter and FourSquare,  and just generally to communicate.

The house was a pretty big disaster post-party and everyone was exhausted.  For dinner we ordered in sandwiches from Joe’s, same as we did late last night.  Everyone really enjoys their Italian subs – very authentic.

We got Liesl’s “television”, the 46″ LCD, hooked up in the living room tonight so that people could watch something.  Francesca went out in to the garage and dug out the Playstation 3 that was lost out there so that we could hook something to the television.  Netflix is not working there, though, as the Platstation Network has been hacked and is no longer working.  It has been down for days.  So everyone watched The Sorceror’s Apprentice on BluRay since it was what we had on hand.

Obviously most of my evening was spent getting the new phone set up and working.  I think that I have just about everything working on it tonight.  I will test it heavily tomorrow at La Cima for brunch and try to run it down throughout the day so that I can have it at 100% when we go to the hospital.

Dominica was up very early “nesting” this morning.  She got up in the wee hours of the morning and completely cleaned our bedroom while I was asleep.  I slept in some because I desperately needed the sleep.  Once I was up it was frantic cleaning time.

The air conditioning, dehumidifier and industrial fan in the den did their jobs and the carpet was decently dry.  I moved furniture as best as I could and got nearly all of the floor shampooed.

The Grices made really good time and arrived hours before we thought that they would.  Joe and Britt were caravaning with them and they all arrived before eleven, I believe.  So we did not get as much done as we had hoped before they arrived but having Joe and Bennie to help move furniture helped a lot.

At noon, Emily and I drove to the airport to pick up Dominica’s parents.  This is the first time for them, as well as for Joe and Britt, to see our new house.

I had to work all day but work was very, very light.  So mostly I just had to check in regularly to make sure that no one was needing me.  Perfect timing on the Good Friday holiday for us to be sure.  It would have been really tough if I would have had to have gone in to work today.

For lunch (or even breakfast for many of us) we went out to BJ’s in the middle of the afternoon.  Then rushed home so that I could work as there was actually work to be done by then.

The evening was spent mostly just hanging out and visiting.  The girls did a bunch of baking as the joint Garrett and Clara birthday party is tomorrow.  Soon it will be a triple birthday part as soon to be born baby Miller’s birthday will fall right in between Garrett and Clara’s birthdays all of them being within several days of each other.  The party is at noon tomorrow.

Dominica and I got up early this morning and found the carpets still quite wet.  I went to empty the Rug Doctor and realized that there was nothing to empty.  Disaster.  Apparently we had done something wrong and the machine is not working.  This isn’t good.  I needed to get off to work and was not able to hang around to try to figure out what to do.  So Dominica did some troubleshooting while I was at work in the home office – I did a work from home morning as this was a bit of an emergency under the circumstances.

We finally got it working and did as much carpet cleaning as we could.  It was really hard to do very much with the carpets still being so wet after the shampooing.  It is very logistically challenging trying to do this quickly.  It did not help at all that it has been raining out and so the air is humid and nothing wants to dry at all.  We eventually had to go to air conditioning and run the dehumidifier as well in the hopes of sucking as much water out of the air as possible.

There was tons of other cleaning to do so there was no limit what there was to do even if we were stalled on the carpets.  We were really feeling overwhelmed by how much needed to be done.

I went in to the office in the afternoon but came home as quickly as I could so that I could continue to help.  Fortunately tomorrow is Good Friday and while I don’t have the day off it is a work from home day and things are going to be super slow.  This afternoon was very slow as it was.

I got home and Dominica informed me that Liesl told her that she wanted to eat at Waffle House – just out of the blue, no prompting or anything.  She just decided that she wanted Waffle House.  So we figured that that was as good of a decision as any and went to Waffle House in Farmer’s Branch for dinner.

We came home from dinner and set to cleaning carpets until quite late.  By the end of the day my back was hurting from moving furniture, servers and pulling that Rug Doctor around.  We rented it for another day so that we can keep working on the floors.  They need it so badly and we have been holding off doing anything with them because of the construction in the garage.