Sheep Guarding Llama

I’m doing my best to get caught up with SGL after the holidays.  It is so hard once you have fallen behind.

This morning was the morning to begin cleaning up after Christmas.  The tree got taken down and the dining room cleaned up.  We got a table set up in the dining room so that Emily could set up and work on her Legos.

Dominica and Francesca also got to work in the kitchen on their own Lego projects.  Everyone really enjoyed working on Legos.  We have a major hit on our hands.

Madeline decided that she wanted to get Legos as well.  We ended up, due to dinner taking over three hours even though we were only one of two tables in the restaurant when we got there and being one of only three all evening, not having time to run out to do some shopping for them tonight so the plan is to take her shopping in the morning instead.

There was so much to do yesterday that Liesl did not even manage to open all of her presents!  She has two large presents waiting for her to get around to opening them yet today.

Today, Dominica and Francesca began assembling the Lego Harry Potter game that Dominica received for Christmas.  This is the first time that we have seen a Lego game like this.  You assemble the board game like it is a Lego kit then you can play the game.  A neat idea.

As it turns out, this is the first time that either Dominica or Francesca had ever put together a Lego kit!  Unbelievable.  We talked about it and it turned out that when they were young they had a denim bag of loose Lego parts and a book of “ideas” – just pictures of some simple Lego structures and things – and they had no idea that Legos normally involved specific kits with directions.  Being someone who grew up with Legos this was unbelievable to me.  Especially as I am so used to seeing Lego kits in stores – it never occurred to me that someone would think that those kits had no directions.

They had so much fun putting together the Lego kit that before they were even done Dominica had sent Emily and I out to go shopping for some Legos.  Emily had decided that she wanted to do Legos as well as had Francesca.  So Emily and I drove over to the Walmart in Herkimer.

We picked up the Lego Hogwarts Castle, not a small set at all, for Dominica.  It is the one that she had really been wanting.  We also got Hagrid’s Hut for Francesca.  We looked around for quite a while for Emily and finally decided on a house kit from the “Creator” series that comes with the parts and directions to do three completely different houses with one kit which is perfect for Emily who will only own a single kit for a while.  Madeline decided that she would wait to see if the Legos looked like fun and if she decided that she wanted a kit that we would go out tomorrow to get one for her.

No one did any of the kits tonight for lack of space in the house.  Emily was quite bummed as she really wanted to get started.  The plan is to make space for her tomorrow morning once the Christmas tree is taken down and the dining room is cleared.

After everyone went to bed, Dominica pulled out her Legos and did a little work, maybe an hour or two, on the beginnings of her castle.  She really enjoyed it and is planning to finish the giant kit tomorrow.

Dominica and I exchanged our gifts to each other before leaving Texas out of convenience.  I got her the GMC Acadia and a garage to put it in 😉  Actually we decided to not really do Christmas this year for each other because we were buying the house and car and have a baby on the way.  Just not a good time to be buying lots of extra stuff.  I was planning on getting Dominica the Lego Hogwarts Castle kit when we returned to Texas.  I didn’t want to get her anything that needed to be shipped around.  On Black Friday, Dominica had gotten me Fable III and Dragon Quest IX so I did get something from her too.  She hasn’t actually given them to me yet but I do know that I got them.  I’m trying to restrain myself from playing them, though, until I can completely finish Oblivion, at the very least.  So maybe in February I can get to them.

This is Liesl’s first real Christmas.  It isn’t technically her first Christmas but it is the first one where she can open presents on her own and actually understands what is going on.  It is, of course, her third Christmas which is pretty hard to believe.  It is her second in New York, her last Christmas was spent down in Houston.

Liesl had a lot of fun and did a really good job of staying on task and not trying to tear into every present that she saw.  She was a very good little girl all morning.  She got tons of great stuff too.  She is going to have a lot of fun when she gets home to Texas and gets to play with all of this stuff.

This Christmas we are a bit more relaxed than we have been in past years.  With the addition of Garrett, Liesl and Clara there are just too many kids now for the normal pace and planning of Christmas.  We are now staying at the house all day rather than racing to wrap up and get to Dominica’s grandfather’s house by mid afternoon which doesn’t allow enough time to do everything.

Boy is it cold in New York.  We are acclimated to Texas already and this is much colder than we find comfortable.  Who would have guessed!

We all slept in some this morning but not nearly as much as you would have guessed given the marathon drive that we just did.

This is the first time, I think, since Dominica and I have been together that we have been able to make it out to her parents’ place a full day before Christmas.  We traditionally show up very, very early on Christmas morning and barely get a nap before the Christmas morning festivities begin.  For once we have some time to actually relax.

I did have to work today but there was basically nothing going on.  It is a pseudo-holiday at the office.  Maybe I am supposed to have today off but no one said anything so I just worked.  It was super slow so not like it took a lot of my time.

We went to church this evening.  Liesl did pretty well until almost the end when she got very upset and I had to run out with her and sit in the car until church was over.

Getting ready for Christmas day is always a major undertaking so it was decently late by the time that we managed to actually get to bed.  Dominica, Oreo and I are sharing an air mattress that is starting to collapse on my side so I spent much of the night clinging to the bed to keep from falling onto the floor, taking Oreo with me and bashing my head into the night stand.

Today, for me, simply began at midnight as the clock rolled over from one day to the next.  No sleep for me tonight and so no clear separation between the days.

Dominica managed to get most of a night’s sleep during her normal sleep schedule which was good.  Liesl pretty much slept through the entire night as well making the trip a minimal impact for her.  Another reason why driving straight through really helps.  If we were to stop for the night we would have to wake up Liesl and bring her into a hotel which would make her really awake and cause us to lose hours rather than running in and crashing and getting up and going again.  Very inefficient and it always is needed, because hotels don’t normally have rolling check-in times, at the most inappropriate time for long haul driving.  If I could just get a room from six in the morning to one in the afternoon, that might work.  But that isn’t very reliable and you never know if you will really be tired at six or not anyway or where you will be.

On the drive I started “reading” the book The Disappearing Spoon which turned out to be so engaging that Dominica, who thought that it would be boring as she thinks everything that I read must be, was unable to go to sleep and stayed up just to listed to the book.  It is a really fascinating book of science history from the perspective of the periodic table of the elements.  How could that not be exciting?

Today was my first time driving through Kentucky since I did a north to south trip heading from Ithaca or Rochester to Birmingham in 2000 or 2001.  Overall the drive went well.  Nothing much to say about it.  It was long and exhausting but only as long and exhausting as a straight-through drive can be.  I drove the entire way, I was never tired enough that I needed Dominica to drive.

It was late evening when we pulled into Frankfort.  There was a lot of snow on the ground, an odd site to us Texans.  The entire drive took just over twenty seven hours.  Not too shabby for this old man driving straight through.  Francesca and Bennie traded off with Francesca doing about twenty four hours total and Bennie doing about five – they have a longer drive coming from Houston.

We all stayed up for several hours.  It takes quite a while to wind down from a drive of that long.  It seems like you would just fall into bed but that really doesn’t happen.  You need hours for your body to turn off the “must stay awake” response.