June 16, 2014: The Family Returns

My plan today was to leave the office a little early so that I could get home around six thirty to see the family but that would end up not being possible today.

At lunch today I went up to Wilton and had lunch with Danielle’s brother Tim at The Little Pub up there.

The family was on the north side of Baltimore last night and so had only a short drive to do today. They drove up through New Jersey and were hope by the middle of the afternoon.

Work itself was fine today and I thought that I was leaving early right up until I was stuck staying a little late. I was emailing Dominica and she was planning on having me meet the family at Grandma’s (the restaurant in Yorktown with the pies) for dinner. This works well as it is on my way home – I can easily go right by it without any effort at all.

I ended up getting stuck late in the office but the family did not manage to go to dinner either. Francesca fell asleep and ended up still being asleep when I got home after eight!

Liesl was very excited to see me. She came running as soon as I was in the house. Luciana took a little longer before she came down the stairs and jumped into my arms from the landing.

We got all of the kids packed up and we all drove out to Yorktown to get dinner. Emily and Madeline rode along with me in the Spark, everyone else piled into Francesca’s truck. When we got to the restaurant there was no one there except for a couple of cop cars. We were sure that they were closed but it turned out to just be too late for people to be getting food in Westchester, a very sleepy county.

We were the only people in the restaurant for much of the evening. That was good because the kids were all very tired from being in the car for days and were really wound up. It took all that we could do to keep them under control.

Luciana wanted to sit with her cousins but Liesl sat away from all of them to sit with me. Luciana sneaked over later on and sat on my lap to eat her mac and cheese. Liesl got spaghetti to which she adds pepper. That is her new things now. She recently discovered that she loves black pepper and loves to use it. She gets that from Dominica. It is funny how much she loves it.

After dinner we all went home and it was straight off to getting everyone ready for bed. The kids all decided to sleep in the girls’ room. We thought that Liesl and Luciana would sleep in our room and we had the airbed in there ready for them but they wanted to be with their cousins.

Before everyone fell asleep, Liesl sneaked into our room because she wanted a quiet place to watch a new show that came out on Netflix. So she ended up climbing into bed with us.