Listen to the Rain

So Laila had a playdate last Thursday with another kid that we met through baby Shabbat. Exciting! Of course, the thing about children that everyone knows is that they're germ factories, and poor Mira had a cold. The playdate was only a couple hours, but that was enough time for Laila to pick up Mira's cold and then spread it to sashagee and me. My parents came to pick up Laila for a grandparents' weekend on Tuesday, before we knew that I was sick, and it's a good thing they did, because I got sick on Wednesday morning. I came home from work, worked from home that day, was sick Thursday, and now I'm mostly feeling better, just in time for Laila to come home. She was exhausted when she got home but I got a big hug.

Unfortunately, that does mean I'm very behind on my reading page, but I have a lot of tabs open so I can catch up after Shabbat (when I stay off the internet).

Yesterday evening I was feeling a little better, and sashagee was as well, and we've been wanting to go to a new Japanese restaurant that opened up on Thorndale called Kōhoku-ku Ramen, apparently a second location for a restaurant that's in New York. Sure, they have ramen, and that's fine, but I didn't want any of that. What I wanted was curry, and curry was what I got:


It turned out to be an extra-good decision for warming up, because two minutes before we reached the restaurant there was one of those Chicago squalls where there's a few raindrops and then the sky just opens up. We walked maybe half a block and got half-drenched, entering the restaurant as lightning and thunder crashed outside, and then ordered our delicious curry. And it was delicious.

They had taikyaki too! I was too annoyed that they were $8 to appreciate it--I still remember paying ¥150 each from the truck that showed up outside of Thanks sometimes--but sashagee got one.

Alright, back to drinking more tea to heal my throat.

Less and less of a baby by the day. This was delayed two days from her actually two year and eight month date (Saturday) partially because of Shabbat and partially because she didn't take a nap either Saturday or Sunday so I had much less time to actually sit down and write!

Laila is now firmly in toddlerdom. She has the combination of callousness and empathy unique to toddlers--she loves sitting in laps and giving hugs, and if you have a visible injury of any sort she'll say "kiss?" and give you a kiss on your wound with a big "Mwah!", but she'll also smack you right in the face with a smile or say "pinch?" and pinch you really hard with no understanding that it hurts. It's our job as parents to encourage more of the former and try to remove some of the latter.

We're still working on her language skills--she's still reluctant to use sentences much, though we've gotten her to say "I want [X] please" with no prompting at all, so she's learning the value of multiple words. We've also stopped responding to her pure gestures entirely. If she wants up, she can't just grab on to my legs, she has to say "up" at least, or preferably "Up, please." On the other hand, she understands what we say just fine. Lately I've been the favorite one, and so she'll often drag me in her room and sit me down ("Floor!") so I can read to her. I've been requiring that she put her old books back before I start a new one, and she does it, even picking up extra books from the floor if there are any down there. She'll throw things away in the trash if we ask her to, and during the evening cleanup session she'll help us cleanup, though she does get easily distracted.

In further big news, she used the toilet for the first time yesterday! Now we just need to get her to tell us when she needs to use the bathroom--she'll already tell us when she needs a diaper change. Baby steps (as they say).

She's still full of energy and coping with the bone-chilling temperatures outdoors by running all around the inside of the house. We did get to go out to eat for Shabbat brunch, though. Here's Laila all bundled up for brunch:



Of course, the pictures where she was smiling, she wasn't looking at the camera, and the pictures where she was looking at the camera she wasn't smiling. Same as it ever was.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Spent time reading the news yesterday and it was depressing, as always (and especially lately). As I was reading, Laila came over and climbed into my lap and I gave her a big squeezing hug. When I was done, she looked up at me and said, "Better?" and then stretched up and said "mwah" as she gave me a kiss.

It did make me feel better.

As part of Laila's state-funded (in America! Gasp!) intervention. I'm in the office today, so I wasn't there, but I asked sashagee what she had to say about it and I was told:

"She said not to tell the behavioral therapist but she is not worried about Laila at all. She said she's been doing this since '97 and Laila is fast to learn and adjust and likes to be engaged and said some sentences while with her. And she said she's doing really well. I told her the evaluation was through Zoom and she held back an eye roll haha

I've basically always assumed the "she has the language skills of a 14-month-old" as given during the Zoom evaluation (at 25 months) was complete nonsense, but it's nice to see an actual professional confirm it.

Poor Laila woke up the night before last in a panic, calling to get out, and when sashagee went in to soothe her, Laila threw up on her. Queue everyone waking up, us trying to get Laila to calm down and drink some water, Laila going into her usual upset panic mode--she just kept saying "Water?", "Apple?", or "Better!" over and over again--and sashagee's parents worrying that there was something about their bed that she wasn't agreeing with. But in the end, Laila went back to sleep, slept through the whole night, and the next morning she was totally fine other than a slight cough. And though she's at the grandparents and sashagee are at home, she's been okay all of today too.

Less so sashagee. We were originally thinking of going shopping downtown today--I need a new coat--but she's laying down in our room at the moment trying to recover. She's promised me she'll have the energy to go shopping tomorrow and hopefully she does.

We just got a phone call from sashagee's parents. Laila does have a cold, which means sashagee has a cold, so that's why everyone is sick.

I got a new phone. I haven't been upgrading very often lately--I had an iPhone 12, and before that I had an iPhone 7 (that poor 7's batteries needed to be charged three times a day by the time I let go of it), so I've had a backwards experience for quite a long time. I've only had the iPhone 15 for less than a week and so far I haven't noticed much of a difference that doesn't step from it having more hard drive space, though the new dynamic notch (or whatever they call it) is pretty neat. But it's not like when I could suddenly use my phone to pay for things, which brought America into the magical world that Japan had a decade or more previously. They may still use fax machines there but they're way more advanced in some ways.

Alright, time for bed.

The one thing from me I had hoped she wouldn't inherit.

Monday, around the end of her nap, Laila just stared wailing out of nowhere. We gave it a few minutes to see if it would calm down, and then sashagee went in to soothe her. And, well.

If you're not familiar with night terrors (sashagee had never heard of them), they're basically waking nightmares. People having night terrors might walk around, they'll scream and cry and wail, they'll open their eyes and look around, they'll say things, but they're not actually awake and they aren't actually interacting with the world. That's what Laila did, she was shaking and screaming and looking around and nothing sashagee did would get her to respond, which obviously made sashagee start to panic. When I held Laila and tried softly calling to her I could recognize what was wrong immediately, so I pulled up the symptoms and showed them to sashagee during a period when Laila was a little calmer. It didn't really reassure her--I don't blame her, if you don't know what a night terror is, it seems like demonic possession or something--and when Laila woke up and was listless and not eating, we went to the hospital.

It all turned out okay. They did a few tests, drew some blood and took some urine (with poor Laila very unhappy about it and making the sign and saying "Done! Done!"), and the results were nothing but a bit of dehydration. After about an hour at the hospital she lost her lethargy and was her old self again, walking around, reaching for things, and the only bit of strangeness was that she didn't really want any water or food. She'd ask for apples but didn't want the juice or the applesauce, and when we offered her water she kept saying "No." But when the tests came back negative and we went home, she ate some bread with jam and drank some water and went right to sleep and woke up the next morning her happy normal self.

I really hope this doesn't happen too often. I don't know if sashagee's nerves can take it.

Laila had an assessment today by the Early Intervention specialists, who we were recommended to by the hospital because of her history of infantile spasms. The long story short is that she has speech delays--not in terms of her vocabulary, which is average or above-average for her age, but in her usage of words. When talking to us, she sometimes won't use words to indicate her wants at all, just whining and hoping that we'll understand her. The specialist talking to sashagee (I was out of the room) said that Laila should not just be trying to communicating her wants, she should be eager to do so because she can finally talk in a way that other people understand. But she often doesn't.

The grandparents tell us that Laila is more talkative when sashagee is not there, so I do wonder how much if it is lack of necessity--Laila knows that she doesn't need to ask us "Up please?" when she wants to be picked up, and she doesn't need to ask for food specifically by name. At lunch today, after the meeting, I stopped counting "Please?" from Laila as good enough for a food request and made her ask for exactly what kind of food she wanted, and she did eventually say "Bread. Please?"...though not until after sashagee said "She saw the bread," which gets back to the concern. Laila understands the meaning of words, and will imitate our usage of them, but she's not synthesizing her own requests as often as they like.

The good news is that everything else is basically on track--her motor skills, her ability to focus on play that interests her (she spent a while drawing circles), her movement up and down obstacles, her ability to feed herself, her response to requests we make of her are all good. They're going to put her in weekly therapy to improve her language skills and recommended that we get her a play group--sashagee want to put her in gymnastics.

My parents are a little dismissive of the idea that Laila is so far behind (the evaluator said she had the asking skills of a fourteen-month-old). I do think that part of the problem is that we've been too indulgent with her, though. We were so happy that she got through her infantile spasms without suffering severe brain damage, and sashagee has been sick basically from eight months before Laila was born until this past May. She's worried that her being sick has sabotaged Laila and it's all her fault, but getting Laila more help this early is good, as is that this is really the only thing the specialist was concerned with. Laila knows the words, and she can use them abstractly. We just need to teach her that she needs to use them.

When she sees herself in a mirror or a picture of herself, Laila still points and says "baby!" so baby update it is.

At the Twenty-Two Month Baby Update, I was capable of listing basically all the words she knew. I'm no longer capable of doing that. She seems like she learns new words every single day and is capable of extrapolating meaning from the way we use the words. For example, lately we've been trying to teach her to put her toys away (with very minimal success, but changing habits takes time) so we'll ask her to "Laila, could you put that back please?" Having learned what "back" means, she now uses it when she's somewhere she doesn't want to be. If I pick her up to change her she'll start crying and babbling and say like "😭😭 asdfjkslfd back. 😭😭 owieriwj back." She'll pick up rocks and sticks outside and say "rock" and "'tick" (consonant clusters still give her trouble). When she wants to leave, she'll pick between "walk," "'side" (for outside), or "go." When she opens a door, she'll say "beep beep beep."

Lately, sashagee has been watching Kimono Mom, and in the way that Japanese women often do, Kimono Mom will elongate the end of her sentences when she's speaking formally. バターを入れま～す (butā wo irema~su, "add in the butter") or もうちょっとだけ待ってま～す (mō chotto dake matte ma~su, "We're just waiting for a moment").

Yesterday, while watching, Laila starting going "ma~su, ma~su, ma~su." She's also learned 可愛い (kawaii, "cute") and 美味しい (oishii, "delicious) from watching it. Because she likes watching Kimono Mom's daughter, when she wants to watch a video from her she'll ask "Watch baby?"

That's not to say that she's all fun and smiles, of course. Despite her normally cheery disposition, she definitely is more prone to throwing tantrums now as she's developed her own idea of what she wants to do and how she wants to behave, and it does not always coincide with her parents' desires. Even when her parents are trying to help, like earlier today when sashagee was cooking pasta for Laila to have for lunch and Laila kept wanting to be held up to the stove so she could see what was going on. When sashagee didn't want curiosity to kill the cat, Laila got very angry about being left in the dark.

Or, here's another example:


My happy, cheerful, helpful little girl, carrying the cheesecake that we bought for sashagee home from the store. But this picture was take about one minute after she got absolutely furious that I wouldn't immediately turn over the cheesecake so she could carry it. I handed it to her and she slung it over her arm, carried it about a block, and then decided it was too heavy and was happy to turn it back over to me.

She still loves books, though she doesn't quite have the patience to sit through a whole one unless Nana is reading it to her. Lately, though, she's been asking for a book before bedtime, so it might be time to start incorporating bedtime stories into our routines.

Right now, as I write this, sashagee is singing a song about stars and Laila is trying her best to sing along.

What other ways will she grow and change?

We take Laila to the park just about every day to get some of her energy out, and the park that's closest to us is designed for babies and toddlers far more than for older kids so there's plenty of equipment for her to burn off her energy. She's taken to running around the edges of the park through the leaves, and that's led to two stories in the past week:

One

Lately Laila has taken to walking along the raised concrete border of the park, either holding onto one of our hands or by herself, and a few days ago she ran into a boy around her age who wanted to do the same thing but going the other way. They got close to each other, then very close, and then Laila--who is used to everyone who gets close to her face wanting to give her a kiss--closed her eyes and leaned in to "MWAH" the boy. With a very 😐 expression, the boy turned his face away, stepped carefully around Laila, and kept walking along the concrete border.

Two

There's another kid at the park who seems to just have a bad disposition. Twice now he's yelled "NO! NOOOOOO!" when Laila came nearby and once yelled "NO BABIES!" at her when she went over to see what he was playing with. sashagee even told me that one time he even pulled his fist back like he was going to hit Laila, and when his father stepped in and told him that he had to apologize he started throwing a tantrum. sashagee overheard him talking to another father at the park, saying, "Sometimes I just don't know what to do. He's just so angry."

This is a Laila story because Laila still just takes it all with a smile--she doesn't take it personally at all. Even when the kid yelled no loudly at her, she just looked at him and kept on going. She's so pure-hearted.

She's pretty cute.

As sashagee and Laila are heading out to the park
Me: "You didn't say goodbye!"
Laila, without even turning around: "Byeeee~~~~"

...

Laila: "Dog!"
Me: "Look, Laila, there's two dogs."
Laila: "Dogdog."

...

Taking Laila outside
Laila: " 'No! 'No! [Snow! Snow!] Wooooooooooow!"

...

After breakfast, Laila wants to be picked up. She points straight at the bowl of fruit on the counter.
Laila: "Ah-puh."

...

Laila drinks some bubble bath water.
Laila: "Why?? Wow! Poo-poo! Why!?"

Mobile Task Force Lambda-10 ("Toddling Terrors") conducts manned exploration of SCP-3008:

My favorite part is when she gets to the arrow on the floor, looks down, and then turns to face it.

Our original task was to get a set of shelving to put into the kitchen. They didn't have it at all, but it turned out alright. sashagee got a bunch of plant accessories instead and has already repotted the poor snake plant that was about ready to burst forth from the pot--when we took it out, it was a solid mass of roots and dirt--but somehow still had the energy to put out some flowers. My mother said she had never even heard of a snake plant flowering, but sashagee did it!

We got a lot of shopping done and Laila spent the whole time wandering around and exploring. Everyone was a winner.

We had set an alarm to wake up at 8 a.m. on Shabbat morning, and I did indeed wake up when my alarm went off at 8 a.m. on Shabbat morning...and then proceeded to lie in bed for thirty minutes until I heard an excited "wah!" from Laila's room. This proved to be a mistake, because we got out the door later than we wanted to (out into the -11°C wind...) and just missed the bus by two minutes. We sat in Dunkin Donuts while sashagee drank coffee and Laila marveled at all the donuts behind the counter until the next bus came, and then we boarded it and made the trip down to Ravenswood to Mishkan's main office for baby ShabbatRise and Shine.

Last time I was at Rise and Shrine, Laila spent the first half of the service very nervous and only really got into it around the halfway mark. This time we didn't even arrive until the halfway mark, so Laila spent all the time hanging around us. She only got braver once the actual service ended, the singing stopped, and the people thinned out. Then she latched on to rabrams210 for hugs and ran around for a bit before it was time to go. By the time we left, it was 11:20 a.m. and sashagee was pretty hungry, so we walked down the street to a place called Early Morning Delight for brunch. Shabbat brunch is not really a thing the way Sunday brunch is--generally, Jews go to each others' houses on Shabbat rather than out--but I like sashagee's suggestion that we make it a tradition to go out for brunch after Rise and Shine. Especially if we find more places like Early Morning Delight. Before we even ordered, they brought us out a churro cake slice with nutella and fresh strawberries, which Laila absolutely loved, and then:


The fruit cup came with the omelet without me needing to order it! Now that's service. It was very good, much better than the Greek omelet I got a couple weeks ago where I asked them to remove the gyro meat and it turned out that gyro meat was all that was holding the omelet together. This was the artichoke omelet, with artichoke, roasted tomatoes, spinach, caramelized onion and goat cheese, topped with pesto. It was delicious (which was good because every other omelet on the menu had was treif) and I ate the whole thing. We got a children's quesadilla set for Laila and she ate most of one quesadilla and took at least one bite out of each of the other. She obviously had to make sure they were all just as good as the first one.

With brunch eaten, we took advantage of already being in Ravenswood to go to the Chicago Vintage Fest March Market a couple blocks to the north. Right inside, we found a Thai woman selling jewelry who was happy to hold Laila while sashagee picked out a little purse and some barrettes for her, and we bought them before looking around more. It was mostly clothes, which definitely wouldn't fit me and which sashagee wasn't that interested in, but we did get a set of iron butterfly sculptures that we can hang out on the back! At that point it was approaching 1 p.m., so we waited for the bus, it was a ghost bus, we started walking to the L when another bus came, and we caught that bus and a second bus and made it home and put Laila down for her nap.

Near the end of her nap I noticed that thosesocks had messaged me very early in the morning about not having any plans, and after some consulting with sashagee we had an impromptu Shabbat dinner of leftover chicken nikujaga with hamantaschen for dessert. We all got Laila hugs, I talked with thosesocks about how we'll both be working downtown about three blocks from each other, and everyone went to bed a bit happier.

The next day sashagee wasn't doing super well, so we spent most of the day relaxing and playing with Laila. As I wrote in the baby update, Laila's latest new obsession is drawing. She'll go over to her play area, look down at the paper, and then look over at us while making the baby draw sign and saying "doraw? doraw?" over and over again. She did that a big chunk of Sunday, and I got a video of her drawing with a black marker. Like abba, like daughter. Please ignore that I used the black marker because she drew so much that the other markers temporarily weren't working.

Monday always feels a little like the weekend is leftover for me since I work from home, but because I had to work we didn't have big plans. The biggest plan was take Laila to the park, where she hadn't been in weeks, because the weather see-sawed up to 10°C and it was sunny out, so just after work we got Laila all dressed up and walked to the park where we saw Rabbi jonathanposner613 and his daughter Baila! Baila was very shy--jonathanposner613 said she's going through a phase where she's extremely leery of men other than him or her grandfathers--but we chatted with him a bit. I mentioned that I hadn't immediately recognized him because his beard had gotten much more magnificent since the last time I saw him at the Mishkan baby group. Laila and Baila didn't interact but--Laila reached out to Baila once or twice but Baila didn't respond--but I was talking to sashagee about how cute it would be if they became friends. They're the same age, their families go to Mishkan, Laila's name means "night" (from Hebrew לילה), Baila's name means "white" (from Yiddish ביילא)... but one thing having children teaches you is that the blank slate theory is completely nonsense. If they want to be friends, they will.

Today is mayoral election day in Chicago, as well as the election for sixteen new aldermen. One of them is the alderman for our ward in Edgewater and Andersonville, and there are ten people running to replace him. Our mailbox has been stuffed full of election ads for weeks, all of which we immediately tossed into the recycle bin, but over the weekend my ballot came. I did some research online, filled it out, and then yesterday I went on a walk with Laila down to the armory where the early voting was taking place. I dropped off my ballot and boom, democracy has been enacted. 🇺🇸

It won't be the only election, though. Chicago requires a runoff for mayoral candidates who don't achieve an absolute majority and the race is currently split. If no one wins a majority--and unless the polling is extremely wrong, no one will win a majority--we go to a runoff in April and then if it's close there might be a recount and, well, election season won't be over for a while. I'm not super excited about any of the mayoral candidates but I definitely don't want Lightfoot to win again. Treating the CTA as her personal feudal domain and shutting it down with zero warning during the pandemic means I have a grudge that cannot be alleviated. Lightfoot's big problem, from my point of view, is an inability to admit that she's ever wrong. This is an enormous problem in American politics and culture, but I specifically remember her refusing to open up the beaches even after it was obvious that being outdoors in the hot summer air was much safer during the Plague Years than being indoors at a bar, even if the bar was well-ventilated and everyone was wearing masks. I wrote back in the day about people on supposedly-closed beaches (I was one of them) and it reminded me of the old military adage to never give an order that you know won't be obeyed.

Ah, well, I didn't vote for her.

Laila was back at the hospital today for an MRI, just a checkup on her health. She had one a long time ago, when her seizures first showed up, and they didn't find anything back then, but she was only six months old and her brain has gone through a lot of development since that time. sashagee told me that she had no problem waking up after the MRI and ate lunch just fine with minimal complaining. We have no reason to assume they'll find anything concerning but it's good to check. It meant that I got to take the bus with them but it also meant I was late, so I need to stay a bit late at work. And I had better get back to doing that and save the other post I was going to write for later. Or maybe tomorrow. We'll see.