Sheep Guarding Llama

Liesl got much better sleep last night than she has for the last few nights.  Hopefully that extra sleep means that she is on the road to recovery.  Her sleeping means that Dominica and I slept much better last night as well.

I had to get up a little early this morning as I had a conference call an hour before I normally start working.  Today is going to be a very long day at the office.

The day ended up being absolutely crazy.  I had to skip lunch and work straight through just trying to keep up.  At two thirty I finally had a chance to run to Rockfish and get take out which I then ate at my desk while I continued to work.

I was in the office until around eight this evening.  What a long day.  Then I drove Nicki home and headed to the gas station to fuel up and then off to home.

Once I got home we had about an hour and a half before the Grices would arrive so it was a mad cleaning frenzy as we attempted to do all of the things that Dominica was unable to do by herself.  Mostly this was moving furniture, storing a ton of boxes and bins behind the bar and getting beds set up.

It was nearly ten when the Grices arrived.  We got them unpacked the Francesca and I ran over to Jack in the Box to pick up dinner for everyone.

Shortly after eating, everyone was off to bed.  Liesl is definitely seeming some better tonight.  Fingers crossed that she will be better tomorrow.

Finally, around six this morning, Liesl actually fell asleep and she and Dominica were able to sleep in kind of late – like until around ten.  So they actually got some sleep.  I got up and went in to work without waking them up.  Even Oreo was still buried in blankets, snuggled in between them when I left.

So my paycheck didn’t come again today.  Normally it comes on Tuesday.  But sometimes not until Wednesday.  We didn’t really panic until it didn’t arrive today.  We already knew from two weeks ago that there were issues with my paycheck and that we were only going to get half pay this week and, if all goes well, it will get made up in the next check.  But the bulk of the time needed to get the accounting fixed for the next pay check has been burned up and there is little or no progress so I am down to just a few days yet before the accounting disaster causes me to not get paid for another two weeks making the total, as it seems, push out to a total of six weeks without pay.  A month and a half is a long time for a single income family to go without seeing a paycheck – especially when we have two mortgages to pay since we can’t sell the house in New York.

We confirmed that no money is coming for another two weeks.  This is going to be a tough month for sure.  Fortunately the bills are paid and nothing is really due until the very end of the month so it is just the interim liquid funds that are really an issue.  Not the end of the world, just extra stress and stuff that I have to follow up on or else it gets missed and months would go by before anyone noticed.

So we had to do some monetary maneuvering today.  Dominica finds this stuff incredibly stressful.  It’s really not as bad as it sounds.  The past year has been really tough and we are not where we should be with our finances but certainly sounds far more bleak than it is in reality.

When I got home Liesl was sleeping on Dominica’s lap in the living room.  She had not managed to take a nap today and this is the first sleep that she was getting.  Even asleep you can really see how sick she is.  Poor little girl.

Liesl did not sleep for too long.  I barely had time to feed Oreo and warm up dinner for myself, but not get to eat it, before she woke up.  We spent most of the evening with Liesl sitting on my lap on the couch in our bedroom.  She is still very sick but seems, to me at least, to have improved since yesterday.

Her fever continues to go up and down.  For a little while she will be fine then she will be awful again for a few hours.

Off to bed early tonight.  Hopefully a good night of sleep will get Liesl over the hump.  The Grices come tomorrow evening for almost a week.  They will be here from tomorrow evening until Wednesday.  Then I head off to Maryland on Friday evening, one week from tomorrow.  The new office carpeting comes in on that Saturday.  It is a busy week ahead of us.

Liesl had a temperature above one hundred and two this morning.  Poor little girl.  I got up around seven to start work.  I had already taken this morning as a work from home morning because I was going to be going to the doctor with Dominica for her late ultrasound so that I could take care of Liesl during the appointment so the timing worked out well.  Dominica got up about an hour after me, got ready and headed off to her appointment while Liesl stayed asleep until after eleven!

By mid-morning, Liesl’s fever seemed to have broken and she was feeling some better.  She ate a tiny bit and drank some water and stayed in our bed watching “Wonder Pets” until Dominica got home.  She continued to stay in our bed until after I went to work and on until the middle of the afternoon.

The ultrasound went well this morning.  Little baby-to-be Miller is doing well and is on track.  We are most likely going to be meeting the newest member of the family on April 22nd or 25th.  The doctor was supposed to be there today to make the final schedule details with Dominica but was out today so that needs to be done yet.

I ate lunch, attended an Oracle M-series webinar and then went in to the office.  I didn’t actually get any time off for lunch at all – I just ate while attending the webinar for work.

Dominica had a really busy work week up until today but fortunately, with all that there was going on today, she didn’t really have to work too much.  So that really worked out well.

Dominica’s video game, Dragon Age 2, arrived this afternoon as did a book for me and a new USB headset for my computer as the one that I have been using for years and years got totally destroyed when the wire got wrapped around my foot and I tripped over it a few days ago.

This evening we just hung out with Liesl who swung back and forth between feeling pretty decent and feeling awful.  For about thirty minutes she would play and be mostly okay and then she would feel terrible and just need to be held and cry.  If this fever runs like Clara’s, we are looking at having a sick child until maybe even Saturday.

Liesl put herself to bed in our bed around ten but was unable to sleep and kept getting up.  I got into bed with her and Oreo and tried to get her to relax while Dominica started her first round through Dragon Age 2.  She didn’t get very long to play but maybe two hours.  The install and update process took forever so she probably lost half an hour or more just getting up and running before getting to play at all.  She has been looking forward to this game for so long, though, that I knew that she needed some time to get to play it today.

It was a rough night.  Liesl tossed and turned and just cried and cried.  Her fever was very up and down all night long.  We all got very little sleep.  This is one of the few times that we have had to go through Liesl really being sick.  She is generally a really, really healthy toddler – much healthier than I think of kids at this age tending to be.  So we are not as prepared for her being really sick as we might be.

For those wondering as to the never ending garage project – no, nothing has happened.  We have not seen nor heard from anyone for five days now.  Five days of silence.  It is getting more and more ridiculous.  The carpet is, in theory, supposed to take nearly four weeks since we paid for it on Sunday but at the rate that they are going the project that was supposed to only take two weeks or less from inception isn’t going to be able to be completed in twice that time from now.  Argh.

So the house next door, the one that we walked away from several weeks ago, is back in the picture today as ridiculous as that sounds.  The selling brokerage contacted our agent today and dropped the price yet another ten thousand dollars and asked us to come back and bid again.  I have no idea what they are thinking.  But we only need a tiny bit of concession over what they had been willing to do last time and they now know that we are not going to even be remotely intimidated or pushed into an emotional buying decision so perhaps they are ready to bargain since they now know just how hard it is going to be to sell that house and they know that we know all of the details about how much it will cost when all is said and done.

So we are bidding on the house yet again.  Not getting our hopes up.  We ran the numbers again and spoke to the bank today.  In theory everything is lined up and ready to go if the brokerage accepts our offer, which we still think is rather unlikely.  But you never know.  We are the first bidders, again, on this new round of bidding.  So we will see.  The selling brokerage still has our earnest money that we have been trying to get back for some time so we are thinking that that probably gives us some leverage as they are holding our money as if we are partway through the transaction at this point.  Our mortgage broker thinks that it does.  He feels that they will be pretty foolish to let us go again.  We hope that that is the case.

I made it home for lunch today.  Got some time with Dominica and Liesl.  The weather is continuing to be awesome here in Texas.  I’m loving winter in Texas.  I keep forgetting that it is so cold back home.  They have snow on the ground still and we are feeling like it is summer here.

After work Dominica sent me over to Blu Ginger to pick up Thai curry for dinner.  I had a conference call that I had to make it back for so it was a rush from work to restaurant to home, ate half of my dinner and then on to the phone.  A very busy evening.

Today was the release day for Dragon Age 2 for the Playstation 3.  Dominica has been waiting for this game to release for months now.  She has never played any video game like she played the first game in the series and its expansion packs.  She has had this one on pre-order from Amazon since it was first announced.  The game did not arrive as planned, however.

It turns out that Dominica had had the game shipped to the old apartment since, at the time that she ordered it, that was where we were living and probably had not yet made plans to move anywhere else.  Oops.  So that is a problem.  So we spent half an hour or more this evening trying to figure out how to get the game rerouted so that she could eventually get it.  In theory it will arrive tomorrow.

As we often do, we sat on the couch at the end of our bed and watched some Netflix before going to bed.  At around ten Liesl said to me “Dora blanket” and had me go into her room with her to get her her Dora fleece blanket that she likes to sleep with.  Then she grabbed her pacifiers, her bears and other assorted nighttime sundries and marched into our room and just climbed up in to our bed.  It was so cute!

Liesl is generally pretty good about knowing when she is tired and wanting to be put to bed.  Last week one time she slowly snuck her blankets, bears and other sleeping items into our bed while we watched “Hot in Cleveland” and then climbed up into our bed and went to sleep hoping that we would not notice.  It was so adorable.  We could not believe how funny it was that she had just decided to sleep with us and to do it so obviously sneakily.  Liesl almost never sleeps with us, at least not when we are at home.  She generally likes having her own bed and her own space.

Tonight, within just a little while of going to bed, it was noticeable that Liesl was very, very warm.  She is running a fever.  Dominica is guessing that it is the same fever that Clara had last week while Dominica and Liesl were down in Houston with the Grices.  So that explains why Liesl had decided to climb into our bed.  She was not feeling well and she knew it.