Listen to the Rain

And we all survived. Even Laila--somewhat to my surprise, she's still asking for matzah today after the holiday is over. By name, too! She just really loves matzah.

Last night I went to aaronhparker's combined post-Pesaḥ ḥametzathon and birthday part at Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Wicker Park. I'm not usually much of a pizza person, but the pizza choices aaronhparker made--a standard red sauce and cheese one, sure, but also a mushroom white pizza and a margherita pizza. The white pizza went first with astonishing speed and the margherita pizza wasn't that far behind, and I even liked it! I told sashagee that she would have liked it, and that she should have come. It was just me since it took place at a brewery, but I guess the pizzeria part took precedence because there was a baby changing table in the men's bathroom. It could have been pizza for the whole family! As it was, I spent a lot of time talking to yoni-labow-5693413a, who was very interested in whether I was watching Tokyo Vice. I told him I had read the book but not seen the show, he encouraged me to watch it, we talked about kids (he and his wife are expecting a baby), we did vodka shots, it was a lovely time.

We went to two Seders as well. Last Monday we were at britshlez's place with just a few people for a small First Seder, and last Tuesday I went alone to aaronhparker's for another Seder. For the first one we didn't really do the after-meal portion of the Seder but we did for the second one, so I got at least one full-on Seder experience this year.

Laila spent most of the weekend at her papa and nana's while sashagee and I repainted the sun room, but the experience was somewhat marred by her having another seizure. This was much more worrying to us than to the doctors--it's been six months since her last seizure, and she's grown quite a bit since the last time her medicine was upped. By the time she was being checked out at the hospital, Laila had already gotten 100% back to her normal self--the doctors said that it can take up to 24 hours sometimes, so her recovering after only a few hours was a very good sign--and since she responded well to all the seizure tests they sent us home, with a prescription for a higher medicine amount. We even gave Laila back to her grandparents to finish out the weekend since it wasn't a serious problem, just scary in the moment. My mother said, "I'm too old for this" when we met them at the hospital.

Alright, Laila didn't take a nap today. Back to work.

This post is slightly backdated because somehow the original date passed me by!

Laila continues to expand her vocabulary. While she was originally placed in speech therapy after her early intervention assessment, apparently the speech therapist always had some doubts about its necessity--the day I worked from home to meet her, she told me that the very first day she heard Laila say, "Her bag has flowers!" when she was coming up the stairs and she was like "Oh, why am I even here?" She doesn't have any worries about Laila's development. I wrote back in the two years and eight months update post that she was reluctant to use sentences, but that reluctance seems to be fading. She'll very often string words together now, most frequently "No want" (of course), but also things like "sit here" or "I fell down" or "What happened?" My parents heard her say, unprompted, "I want some bread please." Of course her longer sentences are about food!

She's also getting a better understanding of emotions, though of course being a toddler, she thinks about it out loud. One of the cutest things she still does is when she thinks something is hilarious, which always leads to laughter that sounds like this: "Ahahahahahaah funny!" We were at the park and Laila was playing with another kid about her age, and when the other kid had to go home she threw a crying tantrum. And Laila looked at this other little girl, yelling and crying and falling on the ground, and did this:

Laila: "Sad."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Cry."
Laila nods solemnly.
Laila: "Mmhmm."

She'll sometimes do the same thing herself after she's done crying, along with analyzing what it was that made her cry ("Fall down" or "bonk head" are common). She has a much better understanding of when she's done something wrong--it doesn't mean she doesn't do it, because of course she's a toddler, but she'll sometimes run away immediately after it, or try to give us a hug and kiss in the obvious hope that we'll think she's too cute to notice her throwing her toys or trying to stand on the table. Just normal, ordinary toddler things.

She's been in a gymnastics class lately, and while the first class apparently ran sashagee ragged with how wild Laila was, it turned out to be because she had just come back from a weekend out at the grandparents and was low on sleep. She's been much better in subsequent weeks and has slowly started to learn that sometimes you can't just do what you want, especially if there are other people there your age who want to do it too. It's also good because it helps her burn off her energy, of which she has a prodigious amount. Even the other toddler parents at the gymnastics class talk about how much energy Laila has. They're right, and they don't even have to keep up with her!

It's not all good news. Our book-loving baby, who always wanted to be read to, has discovered video. She still likes books, but she's much more annoyed that we limit her screen time to an hour a day and always stuff that we watch together with her. She used to watch a lot of Sesame Street but lately, she's been on a Ghibli movies kick. She watches My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, The Secret World of Arrietty , and Howl's Moving Castle over and over again, half an hour at a time in the morning after breakfast, and then no screen time until after dinner, when lately she's been wanting to watch the Cars shorts. In the way of young children, she's perfectly happy to watch the same thing day after day.

Here's a recent of picture of her taken by her Papa and Nana after they dressed her up for St. Patrick's Day:


Not pictured here, but they painted her nails green too, and she was so pleased by that. For days after until it washed off she would keep looking at it.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Laila last week went into the hospital for an overnight EEG, just as a way to check up on her seizures. We got the results back yesterday, and they indicate no change and even a bit of improvement from her last EEG, and as it still says, we don't know what caused her infantile spasms (the best results--it means there's no obvious underlying condition that will continue to cause problems).

And so, here's a video of Laila being cute:

Yesterday was the first night of Ḥankuah and Laila was ready for it. A month or so ago, PJ Library--a service that sends free books to Jewish families with children--sent us a good called Hoppy Hanukkah about a family of rabbits celebrating Ḥankuah, and while it took her a bit to get into it, by the end of a couple weeks she was sitting through the entirety of the book. She'd ask for it by name--"Hakkah" in her pronunciation--and listen to the story of the two rabbit-children wanting to light the candles immediately (instead of sundown), wanting to blow out the candles (instead of letting them burn), and then eating latkes. And then yesterday, when she realized what was happening, she was sitting on my lap saying "Hakkah? Hakkah hakkah! Hakkah hakkah!!"

Right now, the message of Ḥankuah, that we must remain ourselves despite all attempts to stomp us out, really resonates with me.

May the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob break the teeth of the wicked.

Last week, sashagee added pre-cut hash browns to the grocery list while we were at Trader Joe's and yesterday, the fruit of that purchase hit the dinner table:


She wasn't a fan--she said that there were too many eggs in it, and she's been sensitive to eggs ever since she had a bad reaction to them after her pregnancy--but Laila and I both devoured them. As you can see, we had both sour cream and applesauce, though the truth is, my favorite topping for latkes is labneh. It's not as sour as sour cream, with a more yogurt-like texture. It's delicious and it's what I had with my latkes I had for lunch today, along with honey-smoked salmon and cucumbers. Delicious.

Yesterday I also went to the AnimeChicago physical meetup for the first time in a couple months, and as is common in similar gatherings, I ended up with the two other Jews there talking about Ḥankuah. And also Doctor Who and Spy x Family, because it was after all an AnimeChicago meetup. It was made.unglu3d's birthday too, so she brought cookies and I got a couple of them. They caught me by surprise--they were the super-crunchy kind, that snap when you bite into them rather than being chewy or toothsome--but some of them were "snowflake" shaped. Or maybe they really were ✡️ and the cookie-maker was trying to be inclusive. Regardless, they were delicious. And I need to watch more Spy x Family.

Alright, it's almost Shabbat so time to log off and light the candles. 🕯️🕯️

Laila is two and a half years old!

In the two year and four month update I wrote about how I was worried about her sentence usage, but she's been making up on that score. We taught her "I want [x]" and she picked up on it very quickly, and we've been quick to enforce it too. Of course, she's a toddler, so she gets derailed halfway through. She'll point and say "This. Bite." and then I'll say, "I. Want. Bread." and she'll think a moment and say "I...want...mohlow!!! [marshmallow] and then point to the kitchen cabinet where sashagee keeps her hot chocolate supplies. She know what she wants and what she wants is dessert.

She started her early intervention therapy after her assessment which showed her as almost a year behind in speech. After the speech therapist's first visit, she asked sashagee if the assessing therapists told her anything when they did Laila's assessment, and when sashagee said it was over Zoom, the therapist did a 😐 face. She has since said that she's positive she won't be seeing Laila after her next assessment and that most of the kids she sees don't talk at all, or barely. The occupational therapist had a similar reaction and that one I was there for--she interacted with Laila for an hour, and then rather than telling us what her plan was to help Laila get on track, she asked us if there was anything we waned her to work on. Laila is clearly not nearly as bad as the Zoom assessment would indicate.

Lately, she has really taken to Judaism, by which I mean that she'll sometimes take two cups from her dish playset, put them side-by-side like Shabbat candles, cover her eyes with one hand, and start trying to sing. And her current two favorite books were sent to us by PJ Library--one is called Fridays Are Special, about Shabbat preparations including baking the ḥallah (her favorite part), and the other is called Hoppy Hanukkah!, about a family of rabbits getting ready to celebrate Ḥanukah. That book is still a little advanced for her, but she's asking to read it. Book progress!

Also, she's finally helping mama in the kitchen. After watching a Kimono Mom video about a フルーツサンド (cream and fresh fruit sandwich), she helped sashagee make the cream and put the sandwich together and then got to eat it while wearing her Totoro apron:


Once again, I can use the Chiyo-chan cooking icon.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Well, now all of us are sick. I started feeling not that great yesterday and by evening my throat was clogged. sashagee felt bad all yesterday and doesn't feel much better today, but Laila is back home now so we have to put on our game faces. She was coughing like crazy and very upset when she came out, and she's very upset now that sashagee is sucking out all her boogers, but otherwise she's in an okay mood.

My mother broke her hip falling today. Just before she and my father were going to leave to bring Laila back into the city, too. I got an automatic "hard fall" message a few hours and when I texted make sure she was okay, my father answered that the EMT thought it was dislocated. Well, it's much worse than that--I just got another message that it will require surgery to repair. She just finished her recovery period from her hip replacement and then this happens.

sashagee: "Laila, what happened to your friends?"
Laila: "Uh oh!"
-On coming in this morning and seeing all her stuffed animals on the ground outside her crib

The actual day was yesterday but it was a pretty hectic day.

Last update was about language, and this update is a bit about language too. Laila puts words into short sentences, usually around food: "bite this" or "food please" and will sometimes say "me" or "you" when referring to people (though she has a bit of the child's confusion around pronouns since they don't refer to a single consistent person), but she still most often uses single words, which worries me. All the milestone lists for two-year-olds indicate a lot more sentence use than she does. I'm comforted by her understanding concepts, though. She'll start dancing to music and say "dance? dance?" indicating she knows that dance doesn't refer to a single song, for example, and just yesterday she woke up from her nap and was laughing in her room and then we heard "Help! Help!" She eventually fell back asleep, but when we checked on her at the end of nap time she had thrown all her stuffed animals out of her crib. Just recently when she knows she's done something wrong like trying to grab food off the counter, sometimes when we tell her no she'll self-exile to the corner and say "No. No no no" to herself softly. 🥺 It's important to teach her how to behave but it's still sad seeing her telling herself no.

All her thoughts are in her head, she just needs help getting them out.

She's really been getting into physical activities lately. She eats perfectly with a spoon, though she'll often keep swapping spoons around with one of us to see if we have the perfect spoon. And she loves dancing, either to music or not. She'll sometimes just start dancing spontaneously and saying "dance!" and her latest obsession is the Wiggles version of the Hokey Pokey. She'll often raise her hands over head and spin around, saying "Ooooooooooh the Pokeeeeeey." She keeps trying to climb on things and wants to go out for a walk every day, and lately she's gotten very competent at running. She still kind of looks like she's off balance while she's running and like she'll fall any moment, but she doesn't--she'll run up and down our hallway over and over, laughing the whole time.

She has opinions about clothes. Lately, she's really been into fall hats:

She looks like she's taking an Outfit of the Day selfie here.

On the other hand, toddlerhood is now in full swing. She'll keep doing things she knows she's not supposed to do because as a toddler she has very little self-control. As I write this she's trying to pull some plates off the end table and sashagee is telling her no. She knows she's not supposed to do it, but she doesn't really know why yet and she has a hard time resisting her impulses. It's normal but that doesn't always make it easier to deal with.

She knows her name at last, though. She'll even say it sometimes!

What other ways will she grow and change?

Edit: sashagee and Laila were just making homemade goldfish crackers and as Laila was looking through the oven at the baking fish, she said "Put the fish in my mouth." The words are in there!

We went to baby Shabbat in the park Shabbat morning, at the same park I've gone to Torah study in the past. They also had a Torah study there but I skipped it this time to help wrangle Laila. She needed a bit of wrangling--when the rabbi started reading a storybook (Chicken Man), she walked right up in front of Rabbi Lizzi and stared at the book and ignored the rabbi's polite requests to move away so other people and see. I felt better though when the rabbi's daughter, age 4, did exactly the same thing. Adira was old enough to complain about not being able to see anything, though, so after that the rabbi moved backward and everything was solved. Laila even listened to the story!

Working more on that mod for Cataclysm and it's reminding me of all of those Game Developers Reveal the Nonsense They Had to Use to Make Games Work articles that come out. To pick one example, CDDA makes it difficult to determine who the other party is outside of dialogue, where the other party is the person you're talking to, because the internal scripting language developed out of the dialogue system and wasn't originally designed to handle all the uses it's being put to. However, it's always obvious who the PC is. So when I made a monster that drained the PC's stamina and health (in that order), I rather than actually doing it as a drain I set it up in code so that the monster checks the PC's stamina and health levels and then has the PC secretly use a "drain stamina/health" power on themselves. This is necessary because there's no way to set attack priority or otherwise influence monsters' AI.

I just made a telekinetic power to let people lift cars to change the tires and the way it works in the game is by summoning a jack made of telekinetic force that you hold in your inventory and can use when you work on a car. It's not the DC Metro is actually a hat but I feel like it's on the same pathway.

I'm most of the way through Hollow Knight. I last beat Hornet in Kingdom's Edge, one of the blocker fights for a lot of people. It took me as many tries as all previous bosses put together I think, and while I looked up strategies and found a cheese one--equip charms for fast attack, thorns, faster healing, and just spam attack until you win--I'm stubborn enough that I refused to do it. I used magic and dodged her attacks and learned her patterns and eventually I did win. It's just like all that advice about never giving up.

This weekend we're going out to the suburbs for fireworks! The award-winning Batavia Fourth of July fireworks didn't happen this year because cellular network outages meant the coordinating computers couldn't actually coordinate, so everyone went to the field and spread out their blankets and then nothing happened. The town couldn't have that, so they rescheduled it for the first weekend in August. I'm not sure if it's going to be the same program and super AMERICA themed, which I don't have an ideological problem with but which would be a little weird in August, or if they're going to come up with a new program. They've had a month to do so. I guess we'll see.

While randomly scrolling through Facebook I saw an ad for a candlelit Legend of Zelda music concert put on by Fever. While I've been to multiple Symphony of the Goddesses concerts, those are all full orchestra. This is a chamber orchestra so it will be a genuinely new experience for me. I asked sashagee about it, and though she has never in her life played a Legend of Zelda game she was excited about it, so we're going to turn it into a date night! It's in Logan Square, where I don't know what the good restaurants are but I know there are good restaurants. I'll write about that after it happens.

sashagee and Laila spent last night in the hospital for a routine EEG checkup. They haven't told us the results but as far as I know they didn't see anything--the next one is scheduled for January and they let them go early, so that tells me they think there's nothing to worry about.

Speaking of which, we went to another two-year-old's party last Saturday. There were a bunch of two-year-olds there, playing in the pool set up the birthday girl's back yard, and one of the things that really helped sashagee feel better was that Laila wasn't acting any different than any of the other children her age there. She said a few words but mostly was quiet or made baby babbling noises, she was excited about the water, she played a bit with the other toddlers but in that way that toddlers play with each other, where they're kind of playing in the same space but not really playing together in any particular way. It's very cute and the interaction let us as the parents actually talk with each other. The people who complain about going to two-year-olds' birthday parties clearly don't have actual two-year-olds who will be distracted by the party. I spent some time talking with the birthday girl's father about Crusader Kings II! How is that not a good time?

I also took out a big whack of money and paid off sashagee's student loans ahead of the upcoming restarting of payments. I say a big whack, but it honestly wasn't that much--she payed off over 90% of it herself, which is why she doesn't really have any savings. I already put some money toward her loans when we first met after she got pregnant and these are the last of time. I wanted to get them all paid off so we wouldn't have to worry about more outflows, especially since I'm pretty sure the American economy will suffer as Americans suddenly have to come up with $18 billion per month that they previously could use on other things. Some people used that money to pay off the loans while payments were paused, but a lot of people did not.

Alright, work is done. Time to take the L home.

Laila is learning new words all the time now, and a couple of the latest words she used are the Shema ( " 'ma" ), one of the major prayers said at morning and evening, and Shabbat { " 'Bat' ). Every morning I ask her if she wants to say the Shema, and she'll run over to me and we'll step out onto the balcony together and she'll look out at the horizon while I sing. Every Friday evening I ask her if she wants to light the candles, and she'll come over and climb into my arms. Sometimes she'll even sing, though this last weekend the real reason came out--I had poured some grape juice for her to have with the wine I was drinking, and she pushed it away so I didn't press it, but when I finished, unwrapped the bread, and started saying the Motzi, she excited started trying to sing it along with me, probably trying to get me to sing it faster so we could get to the bread.

Just yesterday, I was putting the Shabbat candles away and the following conversation occurred:

Laila: " 'Bat!"
Me: "Yes, these are the Shabbat candles."
Laila: " 'Bat!"
*she climbs down and starts coming toward me*
Me: "No Laila, Shabbat was yesterday. We already lit the candles!"
Laila: 🤔

She was probably trying to get more bread. Laila's current religion is bread.

Laila is two now!

sashagee really loves themed birthdays, and online she found an invitation for a "groovy twos" birthday, so she got a bunch of peace and flower themed stickers, balloons, and garlands and got the house all decorated. We were originally going to hold it in a park by the beach, but the weather report kept calling for thunderstorms and changing when in the day they were going to be, so to be cautious we moved it to our house. The weather turned out fine, if a bit cold, but we had plenty of room for people so it all worked out.

Laila had a great time:


We didn't have any birthday candles, but we did have a leftover Ḥanukah candle, so we used that. Laila doesn't have a grasp of blowing out candles yet but she knows what they are since we light Shabbat candles every Friday night.

The party was mostly adults but someone else we originally met at the Mishkan baby group came with her older son and her daughter Laila's age. Laila and her played together with the Sesame Street toys that Laila got--Laila's favorite is the Count; she can already say "Two! Ah ha ha!"--and the other girl's favorite is Elmo, though she also uses Elmo to mean "a Sesame Street character." That meant they spent a while trading characters back and forth and having a great time. I was a bit more worried about the older boy since he was the only person there his age, but he turned out fine. We have a ball pit that's also full of stuffed animals and he immediately went over there and just melded into the ball pit. Even with around twenty adults milling around he was doing fine.

Laila had a great time running around, checking out her presents, eating tacos while sitting on her grandmother's lap, and seeing everyone.

In Laila news, she's using more words. Just today she was in the bathroom and looked at the bath and said "Not now?" and when sashagee confirmed that it wasn't bath time she ran away laughing--sashagee thinks she's happy she was understood. Yesterday I took her to the park and she ran around for fifteen minutes and then decided she had enough--she walked over to the park gate and said, "Go. Go. Gooooooo" and we left. She's started finding foods that she likes and foods that she doesn't like. She's a huge fan of meat and bread, and likes blueberries and bananas. She likes broccoli and cucumbers too but not as much, so I spend some time feeding them to her. Her latest thing is that she's decided she doesn't like sitting down in her chair for meals anymore, she wants to sit on our laps. It makes it much more difficult to eat meals but we know that there'll be a day when she doesn't want to sit in our laps at all anymore, so we let her sit there now. She decided that's what she wants to do one day, and some day she'll change her mind.

In addition to the other toddler at the party, Laila played with a kid at the park! Little kids are so funny when they're playing since they don't really know how to interact with each other, but there was a little boy who wanted Laila to draw on the slide with chalk, so she did that for a bit. Then she wandered off and the boy was obviously sad she left, but he couldn't talk yet, so he kind of yelled incoherently at her and Laila was clearly like "I don't understand you" and wandered away. Even when he got her attention and handed her a chalk again, she held onto it for a moment, gave it back, and then left. Social skill are skills--they need to be learned.

I'll need to change the tag. She's not a baby anymore!

I slept through my alarm an hour late today, but managed to make it to work on time through a quick shower and not shaving. And just like every other time I've slept in too late, I feel incredibly relaxed and refreshed. My sleep tracker shows that I didn't even wake up when my alarm went off, so I guess it's a good thing that I woke up an late (after a nice period of deep sleep) and then immediately got out of bed, ate my breakfast, and left. Laila's not going to like how scratchy my face is, though.

The weather is lovely now! Over the course of about two days, the temperature went from 12°C to 23°C and the weather went from cloudy to sunny. Laila didn't have to wear a coat when we went to the park on Monday and yesterday I didn't even bother bringing a coat to work. I went out on the riverwalk at lunch and while none of the businesses are open yet--the restaurants just say they'll open in "spring", which in Chicago starts in May when the cherryblossoms finally bloom--it was packed full of people eating lunch, going on walks, and otherwise enjoying the weather. It'll be back down to 8°C by next week so we have to enjoy the burst of warmth while we can. Portland already had their cherryblossoms, DC already had their cherryblossoms, but it'll still be a month or longer before we get ours. The reason Chicago summers are so jam-packed is that we pack a whole year's worth of activities into those three months.

In further news, Laila made friends with a polar bear:


My parents came out on Tuesdays as they usually do while I was at the office and picked up Laila so sashagee would have some time for herself. They took Laila to the zoo and she had a nice time, since this time the animals were out and wandering, but what she really loved were the polar bears. My parents took a video of her laughing and giggling as this giant head that's almost as big as her whole body gets to within a few inches of her. She has no fear, which is certainly one of our problems to solve as parents. I want Laila to be brave, but not foolhardy!

Looking forward to taking her to the park today and making some stir-fry. Pesaḥ ends tomorrow night, though late enough that dinner will still be unleavened. On Friday, though, it'll probably be burgers.