Sheep Guarding Llama

Or so we hope.  Tomorrow we are scheduled to close on the house at ten in the morning and, if all goes well, we will be starting to move in over lunch.  Our hope is to have the cars loaded and maybe take a truck with the bed over to the new house at lunch after the closing is done and be in a position so that Dominica and Liesl can spend the day at the new house while I am at work and then I can get another load or two of our stuff in the evening and get us into a “living” position by the end of the day so that we can spend the night in the new house and really tackle the immediate moving needs on Wednesday.

We have been holding off on doing laundry at the apartment for several days because it is so inconvenient and expensive to do it there and we should have a washer and dryer by tomorrow that Dominica can use all day without having to leave the apartment.  So our laundry is piling up on us.

I am quite sick this morning, I can barely speak.  I definitely caught whatever the Grices had.  So I am working from home today to keep from infecting the team.  This is going to make for a really long week.

We did very little today.  A little bit of getting last minute paperwork in place for the closing tomorrow but that was about it.  We called our real estate agent and set up a final walkthrough of the house for this evening.  She was surprised that we wanted this – apparently people do not do this in Texas.  We thought that that would be crazy since the house had had major foundation work, plumbing changes, wall repair and more since we last saw it and we really have no idea what the condition of the house is going to be.

We did the walkthrough this evening at five thirty.  It went well, nothing surprising.  House looks great.  The repairs seem to have gone well.  Can’t wait to start moving in tomorrow.  We are so ready to be out of the apartment.

After the walkthrough we went to dinner at Las Nenas in Irving on Beltline.  Dinner was very good as always there.  We really like Nenas.  We found out at dinner, though, that our closing was pushed back until two tomorrow afternoon – four hours later than we had planned.  That means that there is a lot that we can’t get done tomorrow on the house.  Basically our move to pushed back until the evening at best and that is going to be a struggle too.  But what can you do.  Too bad we didn’t get any notice.  Apparently the bank forgot to tell us about that.

After dinner we got back home and got to bed.  I was starting to get pretty decently sick by the time that we were done and really need to get rest before the long day tomorrow.

Francesca and the kids got up very early this morning and were on the road on their way back down to Houston before any of the Millers even woke up.  Now that we have the apartment to ourselves again, we have approximately forty-eight hours to do any prep that we are going to do to get the apartment ready for us to move in which we are supposed to do around noon on Tuesday.

Mostly we spent the day attempting to clean.  There was a ton to be done and we were really exhausted.  There was very little packing to be done.  We really are not sure where to start.  We can’t pack anything in earnest because we need to still be able to live in the apartment until we know that everything is good with the house.  So we are kind of caught in the middle waiting for the house to close so that we can schedule everything and get the moving underway.

A lot of today was spent doing some relaxing and spending a little time together as a family.  This is our first “day” together just us in over a month!  Hard to believe.

We watched some of the Harry Potter movies on BluRay this afternoon.  We needed some time to just sit and putz around the apartment.

We are all feeling a bit under the weather today.  Sinus issues.  The Grice family had been sick while they were here so we are fearing that we may have contracted some disease from them.  They have been known to spread the plague to us in the past.

It is unbelievable but today my little girl turns two years old.  In some ways it is so hard to believe that my baby is now in her “terrible twos” but it is also weird to imagine a time when she wasn’t a part of our lives.  Her actually birthday party is not going to be for two weeks yet so that we can have it in the new house since we have no place to do it right now.

The big thing that we wanted to do today was to take the kids up to Grapevine for the North Pole Express Experience which includes a show and a ride on the Grapevine Historic Railroad.  We tried to get tickets to it this morning but discovered that tickets for today were not available online.  As this is opening weekend we were pretty surprised that tickets would not be available – how busy could they be?

So to figure out what was going on we took a drive up to Grapevine with the entire family.  It turned out that tickets just were not available on the same day due to technical difficulties so we were able to buy tickets right then and there and schedule a ride for the five thirty showing.  Perfect.

So we left Grapevine and drove down to Denny’s to get lunch before going back to the apartment for a while before we needed to return to Grapevine.

We went to Grapevine a little early, or so we though, but the line for the show started early so we were in line starting around five.  We realized that we needed cash to be able to get things from concessions and that no one had any so while the rest of the family was waiting in line I walked briskly for several blocks through Grapevine to find an ATM so that we could load up on cash for the evening.  By the time that I got back from that very, very long walk everyone had already filed into the show and Dominica was outside waiting for me so that I could get in to join everyone.

The show was in a small exhibition pavilion next to the train station.  They did Christmas music and some light comedy and dancing stuff.  It was cute and the kids enjoyed it, I think.  They did some crowd-interactive things which got people involved.  It was more than we had been expecting.  We were not really even aware that there was a show associated with the train ride.  The show ended up being the majority of the experience.

The last bit thing that they did was the “Daddy Dance-Off” competition.  The emcee went around and asked for kids to volunteer their fathers for “something” up on stage.  The first two people were selected and I felt pretty safe.  I was hidden deep in the crowd and was hiding behind Clara, who I was holding, so I thought that he would avoid me.  But, alas, no.  My family went nuts trying to get me chosen.  Madeline and Emily really worked hard to get me noticed and having so many people making a big deal to get me noticed was hard to avoid, I guess.  So I was chosen as the third, and final, participant.

I must appear to be a character because the dancing girls who were positioning us on stage decided that I should be the highlighted father in the middle of the stage.  I am the cute one, after all.

“Fortunately”, both Dominica and Francesca had video cameras at the ready and were able to grab plenty of footage of me dancing.  This video was taken by Dominica’s new Droid X smartphone.  This was her very first time taking a video with it so was not used to dealing with orientation issues.  But she was also stuck taking video from between peoples’ heads so had a very tight field of view.

It’s hard not to be embarrassed being up on stage dancing at something like this but it was sort of fun too.  Once I heard that they were giving away tickets to the Grapevine Historic Railroad as a prize, well, I knew that I had to win them then.  And I did.  The dad on my left tried pretty hard and gave me a run for my money but the guy on my right didn’t even put in the effort.  But I’m used to being on stage with large audiences and making a fool of myself dancing in public just comes naturally so it was an easy win for me.

Liesl was very upset while I was on stage dancing.  She really wanted to come up and join me on stage and dance.  She is a little dancer for sure.

After the show we road the North Pole Express for several miles.  Liesl fell asleep almost instantly.  She was very tired and couldn’t handle keeping herself awake on the warm, slowly rocking train.  It was perfect sleep conditions for her.  She woke up just enough to open her eyes and acknowledge when Santa Claus came through the train to see the kids then she was asleep again immediately.

After the train ride we went to the little concessions area where the kids made some ornaments for free which was cute.  Liesl (with her daddy’s help) put together a foam penguin ornament to give to her mommy.  We also got hot chocolate, funnel cake and nachos.  There wasn’t a lot to do but it was nice and we had a good time.  At the end we went and got all of the kids’ together for a picture with Santa Claus.

It was a fun outing and very different from what we normally get to do.  A fun change of pace.  The kids all seemed to have a good time.  It was a little chilly for being outside.  It would have been a little nicer had it been just a little bit warmer.  Nice that we got to go out and do something memorable with Liesl on her birthday.

Dominica did manage to get up at four this morning to do some Black Friday deal searching online.  Not the great deals that you get in the stores but not too shabby either.  It is amazing how much of the shopping has been moving to online deals this year.  I don’t remember it being like this at all in past years.  I think that the frenzy of Black Friday shopping at stores, while generating a lot of traffic, also scares a lot of people away and that online retailers have realized that they can capitalize on that as well.

I am working today but from home.  No one is in the office as it is the holiday in-between day.  Early this morning, after I started working, Dominica and Francesca went out for several hours of shopping now that the insane crowds have died down and I stayed home to babysit.  Luckily having the older girls means that they entertain the toddlers and watch Clara so that I was able to work effectively.

Their shopping actually went really well today and they managed to get most of the deals that they were looking to get sans a few really big items that were basically impossible to get on the Black Friday deals anyway.  So it turned out to probably be the best strategy to just wait and shop today rather than last night.

We all slept in a little too much this morning but managed to get pulled together, loaded into Francesca’s truck and off to Fort Worth just in time to make it to the Fort Worth Zoo at a quarter after ten.  The zoo is open ten to four all year long which makes it pretty easy to remember when they are open.  Or so one would think.

We got to the zoo and the parking lot was deserted.  We had checked the Zoo’s website this morning to verify that they really were open normal business hours on the holiday and the signs that we had seen at the zoo two weeks ago as well as the website all assured us that they would be open.  But they were not.  They had chains across the gate and a big sign up saying that they were delaying opening until noon.

So we drove out to the Ol’ South Pancake House just down the street to get a late breakfast or early lunch since we had over an hour to kill.  Concessions are not going to be open at the zoo today so we do need to each before going in or we are likely to be pretty hungry.  So it wasn’t really the worst possible timing for them to be opening late.

Breakfast was awesome and fast.  Dominica and I will definitely be going to Ol’ South again on our many planned trips to the Fort Worth Zoo.  It is in the perfect location to eat there on the way to or from a day at the zoo.

We got to the zoo right as they opened and were among the first twenty people to enter today.  We are guessing that there were only seventy or so people all day anyway.  I’ve never seen the zoo so empty, but that is to be expected.

It was far, far colder today than we had anticipated and we were not dressed for it.  It was so cold that we almost expected to see little flecks of white in the air but it didn’t quite freeze although it was overcast like it could snow.  We were very cold, though, dressed for fifty degrees and not the high thirties.

There were several zoo exhibits, all concessions and all “rides” (e.g. the train, carousel, etc.) that were closed due to the weather but with so few people in the zoo and many animals happily coming out to partake of the cooler temperatures it was actually a great day to be at the zoo.  We were surprised by how many animals, including the lions, tigers and rhinos, that were out perfectly happy to have a cool day to enjoy.

We managed to do more of the zoo today than we would normally do in just four hours.  It was a super productive zoo day.  Since we weren’t stopping for food or waiting for any crowds we got to do what we wanted, when we wanted as fast or as slow as we wanted.  It really was a lot of fun.  In MOLA – the Museum of Living Art – Emily and I actually got to take the time to go to most all of the exhibits and actually read the information on them and look at the exhibits.  Normally MOLA is so crowded and the people that you are with are in such a hurry that you just walk through and never actually see what the museum is all about.  So that was really nice.

We stayed at the zoo right up on until they closed.  We got a full zoo day in and it was a lot of fun.  Today was also the day that Dominica and my zoo memberships paid for themselves and we have now, officially, saved money by joining the zoo.

On the way home from the zoo we swung north up to Carrollton to take Francesca to see our new house that we should be closing on in five days.  We couldn’t get into the house yet and most everyone was asleep in the truck after an exhausting day at the zoo so we just took Francesca around the outside so that she could get an idea of the house.  From the back yard you can see into the living room almost as though you were standing in it so you can get a pretty decent idea from there of the public parts of the house.  There is no seeing anything in the “private” section with the bedrooms and bathrooms, though.

After going to see the house, the big project was to try to find a newspaper with the advertisements for Black Friday.  That turns out to be harder than we had imagined.  We went to Walmart, RaceTrac, CVS and a few other places but everyone was sold out.  We ended up needing to give up on that.

We went to Denny’s for dinner.  Dominica and I were itching for a Denny’s salad – which is the best chain salad around with their amazing ranch dressing.  When we got there I ran over to the Valero right next door on the off chance that a small, local gas station just might have the newspaper, which they did!  Go me.  Dominica and Francesca were very, very happy to see me walk in with a newspaper.  Now they can strategize about their Black Friday shopping.

Dinner was quite good.  Denny’s has new menu items that looked great and some good special items on their holiday menu too.  Liesl absolutely loves Denny’s ranch dressing and eats it on everything.  She just eats and eats.  She is so funny about needing to dip everything in ranch.

After dinner we were all pretty exhausted and so it was back to the apartment for us.  Dominica and Francesca are planning to hit the first of the Black Friday sales at ten tonight and then go from one to another all night long and not stop until the morning.  Pretty crazy if you ask me.  I am staying home to watch the kids – a little scary for everyone, I’m sure.

The left to go shopping at nine forty-five which we all thought seemed to be way too late.  I looked on Twitter and someone said that Toys’r’Us already had over a thousand people in line right as they had left.  I don’t think that they really thought through what this shopping is going to be like.

As I half suspected, the girls were home by ten thirty having given up on Black Friday shopping.  The lines were completely insane and there was easily two thousand people ahead of them in line to get in the door!  So we just went to bed.  Dominica’s plan is to get up in the middle of the night and to try to do some online shopping to get deals that way.  They might go shopping tomorrow during the day when the crazy crowds have subsided.