Dominica left for work at a quarter to seven this morning. Thus begins my first stretch at home alone with my girls for an extended period of time. Dominica might be home late tomorrow night but more likely she will be coming home late Wednesday morning and possibly later than that. So this is an adventure for the girls and I.
I had to work all day so that made it tough. But at least I was home and got to see the girls all day. Ciana was up first and watched some shows alone in the living room as she likes to do if she gets a chance before Liesl is awake. She and her stuffed animals get some quite time to just relax. I’m surprised by how much Ciana looks for alone time. She will often spend the day alone off somewhere on the far side of the house just hiding out doing something quietly. Liesl did that a lot but she didn’t have someone with whom to play so seeing Ciana work to get away from everyone is interesting.
Both girls went down for early naps today. Liesl just rested by Ciana slept a good long while which was helpful as working with the girls here is always challenging.
Dominica got out of work at four and went to Sonic and got on the road, in rush hour, to drive down to Houston. She is going to have a really long drive. The weather here was okay while she was driving but it was right as she was getting onto the road to head south that the massive hour long EF-4 tornado was tearing apart Moore, Oklahoma right up I35 from us so people from some distance away who weren’t sure that the DFW wasn’t getting hit with bad weather were pretty worried about her. Her drive was fine, though, she was driving directly away from the bad weather systems the entire time and I don’t think that in Carrollton we even got rain all day although it was dark and windy.
The girls were taking a shower this afternoon, Luciana decided to open a bottle of shampoo and wash her face. Poor little girl was screaming quite a bit when I got to her and had to hose her face off to get the shampoo out of her eyes. Hopefully that is a lesson that she will not forget soon.
The girls watched some Dora the Explorer in my room while I finished up work for the day which went way too long, working till about six thirty, then they came into my office so that we could play a video game together. Liesl has been just so excited about playing The Book of Unwritten Tales, she really loves that game. This is our third day playing it and she just can’t get enough of it. By the time that we turned it off so that Liesl could get ready for bed, which was way too late for her, we had just crossed the eleven hours of gameplay mark and appear to be around about halfway through the game. Liesl is following the story really well. She knows what is going on, she understands most of the puzzles and she helps out when she can. She either sits on a chair directly beside me or she sits on my lap and snuggles.
Luciana doesn’t really watch the game at all but really likes having blankets put on top of the chairs that Liesl drags into my office and she plays on and under them while Liesl and I play the game. Then, this evening, Luciana made me make her a cape so that she could run around the house being “Super Ciana.” I have no idea where this came from or how she managed to explain to me that she needed a cape but apparently Luciana styles herself as a pint-sized super hero. It was quite a game and went on for probably forty five minutes.
And that concluded the first ever, as far as I can remember, complete day in which I had the girls all to myself without any Dominica helping out with them at all. That is probably not true, but I cannot remember it happening before and if it did it might have been when there was only Liesl. Tomorrow will be the real challenge. One day without mom they barely noticed. But when Dominica is not here tomorrow Luciana will, at least, begin to worry I presume. Liesl will be fine. When I put her to bed she said that she had so much fun having a day just with her dad. She gets “just mom” days regularly, at least every few months. But a day with just me is unprecedented. And without Dominica here that meant that I was home all day, watched no television (never even turned the projector on) and did nothing, other than work, but play with the girls. And, of course, the big win in Liesl’s book is that when mom is away Liesl automatically gets to sleep in our room as it is only Dominica that she keeps awake. I get better sleep with Liesl there than without. It’s amazing how much Liesl is the snuggler and Luciana wants to sleep by herself. And Liesl has to have the light on to sleep and Luciana needs it as dark as can be.