Listen to the Rain

As a one-year-old, Laila is no longer a little baby and so the nomenclature must change.

On Friday night, sashagee and I drove out to her parents' place in the suburbs to spend the night so that we could properly get everything ready for the party. The suburban location meant that most of my friends couldn't come--a lot of live the true city existence and so don't own cars--but weather was going to be so lovely that the backyard was certainly the best place to hold it, so we did. On Saturday sashagee and I blew up balloons, her parents hung up the "🍓 HAPPY 🍓 BIRTHDAY 🍓" banner, and sashagee baked the cake that Laila would be eating.

I had never heard of the whole smash cake thing and neither had my parents--when I asked if my father knew about it, his answer was just "No" and when I explained it, he elaborated, "...why?"--and Laila didn't really do any fun kind of smashing. She saw some food in front of her and she immediately set about doing what babies do to food--eating it. No extra movements, no fuss, pure predatory efficiency. She ate the whole thing and then spent a while crawling around the yard, with no apparent effect from all the sugar (though sashagee picked a mostly cream frosting so it wouldn't be incredibly sugary). She did stay up until almost 4:15 p.m. but the excitement from a lot of people probably led to that.

There are plenty of photos up on sashagee's instagram but here are a couple more!:

( Two pics of Laila )

Here's to many more happy birthdays in the future!

Chicago is not a city you'd usually think of for cherryblossoms thanks to our weather--yesterday it was 10°C and rainy on the first of May--but there is a grove of them near the Museum of Science and Industry. The Park District has a dedicated website for the cherryblossom forecast that started in 2019, but that year about half the buds didn't open because it was so cold through most of the year. And, well, we all know how 2020 and 2021 went.

But this year, sashagee is starting to feel better (about which more in another post) and Laila is doing great, so I told basically everyone I knew about the cherryblossom festival on May 1st (moved from April 24th due to rain), we woke Laila up from her nap at 11:45 a.m., and drove down to MSI for the afternoon.

( Blossoms are falling )

It's been a bit hard to find time to read or write lately.

sashagee is still sick, which means the main responsibility for basically everything falls on me. She can watch Laila while I'm at work (most of the time) and feed her (most of the time), but basically every other household task--cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking garbage out, errands, etc.--I have to do. On a good day, she can do a few chores and sit out on the couch with me while I work. On a bad day, she'll take two naps and go to bed early just like Laila does. And apparently hypothydroidism comes with memory problems, so I still have to keep track of all the chores just to make sure that nothing gets forgotten.

She went to an endocrinologist, but he told her it was probably related to her pregnancy, gave her some thyroid medicine when she got emotional on the phone, and then when she called back and told her that the tiny medicine dose was making her feel better in the morning but it wore off after lunch, told her it was probably allergies and all but accused her of pill-seeking. She's going to her doctor to get a new endocrinologist referral on Friday.

Tomorrow, after over two years of work from home every single day, we finally return to the office. While the New Jersey office is still closed due to higher plague there, starting tomorrow I begin my new schedule of Monday through Wednesday in the office, Thursday and Friday at home. For me, the Plague Years have finally ended. No more matcha in the morning, chill cooking lunch myself, and watching little baby Laila crawl around every day while I'm at work. But I still get to do it two days a week, and to be honest, I didn't really want to work from home every single day. My ideal would be three days home, two days in the office, but three days in is still nice. I like the train ride downtown, I like walking on the riverwalk in the summer at lunchtime, and I like being able to head anywhere else in the city after work, though obviously there's going to be a lot less of that now that I have a family at home. And I'm happy that they're giving us two power cords so we can keep one in each location.

Our home is in a bit of disarray, since with sashagee's illness and the amount of money we've spent on her and Laila, we're probably going to be here a few years longer than we originally expected, and that means we're redecorating. All the walls have paint swatches on them, but the actual painting can't commence until sashagee has had some better days so she can help. We're going to replace the vanity in the back bathroom, get rid of one of the couches I've had forever, we've already put rugs down, and installed a baby gate. There'll be a lot of changes as Laila grows up.

Final Fantasy XIV released patch 6.1 today, on the last Tuesday I work from home (hence my Endwalker story review), and I've got it open in the background and not participating in any of the new stuff, because I have to work. I do get to read aaron.hosek's commentary as he blind progs the new fights, though.

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm going to try to be more consistent with updates in the future, but with my schedule now it's hard to find time to sit down to write. I should at least be able to read more now that I'll have reading time on the train!

After the highs of the eight month baby update and the lows of the nine month baby update, I'm happy to come back with good news again!

We spent yesterday and this morning at my parents' house, partially so sashagee would be able to go to her parents' house to water their flowers, but mostly so my parents could get a lot of Laila time in without any other tasks interfering, like the painting they've been doing the last few times they've come over or installing the baby gate (still on hold since it's not easily reversible). They even got extra time because we dropped her off with them when we first arrived and used some money they had given us for Valentine's Day to go out to dinner at a local restaurant that, by coincidence, my parents had themselves gone to on Thursday night. It's called "Oak + Swine," but they had brisket on the menu so that's what I got (sashagee got pulled pork, because it's not like I'm going to make it at home).

In further tangentially-related baby news, we finally got all our forms of address sorted out--I'm אבא (abba, "dad") and sashagee is mamá, my father is pápa--as I called my grandfather and my father called his grandfather before me--and my mother is nana.

Back to the baby, Laila is crawling! She's not quite at the level of zooming around but she's beyond the initial tentative steps she was taking last month. After her medication made her a silent baby (except for the 'roid rage roaring), she's speedrun the babbling gamut and is now back to where she should be--including saying "nom nom nom" when she's eating to remind herself to chew. Just today, when I went in to wake her up from her morning nap she was sitting in her crib and clicking her tongue over and over again. I wonder if she'll be disappointed that English (or Japanese, or Hebrew, or French) doesn't have any click consonants. I did it back to her a bit, but I'm not sure she really took it to heart.

And in other news, she's trying to stand up!


I haven't managed to get a picture of it, but she's made it even further to this, to up on one knee. For over a minute at a time. She's getting ready to start running everywhere and giving sashagee some real exercise!

Not quite on the actual birthday, but only a day behind this time!

Little Baby Laila continues to grow and develop. The most exciting thing that's happened in the last month is that she's started to associate sounds with concepts! Not really words, per se, since she doesn't actually treat them as discrete units of meaning, but she's heard us say mamá and papá enough when referring to each other that she recognizes those sounds refer to us. When she wants sashagee in moments of distress, she'll look over and--while crying--start babbling "ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma" At least once, while sashagee was holding her, she looked at me and started saying "ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba" which is pretty close! I know it's a common sign of parental egotism to assume that those sounds your baby is making must be referring to you, but her looking at us while she does it makes it more probable.

She has, at least once, very clearly said "Laila!" but she's never done it again. Yesterday, though, she did turn and look at me while I called out her name to her in the middle of a discussion that sashagee and I were having!

She's moved on to much more complex foods! While originally the baby food we fed her had ingredients like "blueberries" or "squash," now she's eating ones like "pumpkin pie" which has these ingredients:

pumpkin, coconut milk, apple, Japanese sweet potato, flax seed, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger

I've heard that it's important to feed babies spices when they're younger, because what they eat when they're young helps set their tastes as they get older. If so, she'll at least be used to having a bit of extra flavoring in her food!

Not sure what taste this is setting though:


She still doesn't have any teeth, though she's chomping on everything. She can sit up all by herself and keep herself up with the support of one arm!. Her balance isn't the best, and she still can't crawl yet, but she's working through all the pathways to get there. Her nine-month baby update is probably going to be full of exciting news!

The days are long but the months are short indeed.

The last month has been defined by a lot of "almosts." Laila can almost sit up by herself, and can hold herself up for quite a while if we help her sit up. She can almost crawl--she'll scoot along the floor a little bit, and can easily get up into the crawling position or even do planks, but can't quite figure out what her arms are supposed to do when her legs are moving. She almost has teeth too--she has rosy cheeks and a lot of drool and chews on nearly everything, and you can feel that the teeth are right underneath the gums, but none of them have come out yet.

She is, however, big enough to sit all by herself in the shopping cart!:


I mentioned previously that she has her own room now, and mostly it's been going very well. I usually go to sleep after sashagee, and when I do I always open the door to Laila's room (closed previously to help her sleep while we're still up) and check to make sure she's breathing and not in distress. Every single time I look in on her, she's in another part of the crib. She obviously loves the freedom to move and roll around that having a big sleeping space affords her. Just a couple days ago she had rolled over onto her stomach, with her head on her arms, all the word like a very tired adult who had just laid down for a nap.

Or maybe, as sashagee says, we're all just big babies.

One thing that is very new is that Laila has started to have separation anxiety. A couple nights ago sashagee woke me at 4 a.m. because Laila was crying. Not just crying, but shrieking like she was in terrible pain and sashagee was worried something was wrong with her! Something was wrong, but I solved it by going into the room and holding her for a few minutes and then singing to her. What was wrong was that Laila woke up, all by herself, and didn't know where we were or if we would come if she needed us. Once I came in, she was able to go back to sleep. I won't judge other parents on how they raise their children, but I don't like to let Laila cry for very long. Maybe 5-10 minutes max, to give her time to sort herself out. Beyond that, I go in to give her a hand. She's still very small and sometimes I think her emotions are too big for her to handle!

When will Laila sit up, or crawl, or chew food? We'll see if I have updates next month!

Been a bit since I had a general update post. Time to drink my tea and write another one.

Saturday was Laila's naming ceremony at Mishkan. There's a standard ritual for giving baby boys their Hebrew name, but no standard ritual for girls, because historically women did not have separate Hebrew names. One's Hebrew name was used to summon them for an aliyah, and that was only afforded to men--and still is, in some streams of Judaism--but nowadays we're more broadminded and so Sasha and I, as her parents, received an aliyah for parashat Vayishlach. I didn't read from the Torah because my Hebrew is awful and it would have taken forever--something else I need to work on--but I did get to hear the entire congregation say "awwwwww" as they saw me carrying Laila up to the bimah. The rabbis gave Laila a blessing and told Mishkan her Hebrew name, בינה בת ברק Binah bat Barak (meaning "Wisdom, daughter of Lightning"), and unlike the bat Mitzvah or the couple given an auf ruf (Yiddish: "Calling up"), they did not throw candy at us. But I got to save some for later!

I really like Mishkan's approach to tradition, which I can sum up as: they have female rabbis, but during the part of the prayer service where the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) is recited, they had the rabbi who's a descendant of the Kohanim priests do it.

A bunch of people came to the service--thosesocks, britshlez, my family, and sashagee's family, but after it was over everyone went home. We put Laila down for a nap and when she woke up, we drove out to the suburbs and played games with sashagee's parents, brother, and his brother's girlfriend until Laila couldn't take it anymore and was nearly an exploding kitten herself. Fortunately, since I was the car, so when Laila got fussy I was able to put a hand back and calm her down. She was angry for maybe twenty minutes and then fell asleep for the rest of the ride home.

Monday was the end of the Scum and Villainy game that thosesocks has been running for a while--what was originally supposed to be a simple three-session game or so turned into fifteen sessions, but a changing work schedule meant that there wasn't enough time left for game. Having crashed on a quarantined planet and recovered the ensouled hoverbikes we were looking for, we escaped the traps set by the things from the Dark Between the Stars and took shelter in a Precursor ruin, where we found a still-functional Precursor ship and learned at last what the Precursors looked like (spider-geese, basically). We took the ship and flew off into space, past the Hegemony ship that certainly wasn't expecting a flying Precursor artifact with possibly the last still-extant Precursor group-mind. It's all set up to be lead into a glorious new chapter of the game that...might not happen. Or it might?! I guess we'll see.

I've also beaten Shadowbringers and sashagee and I have been watching the Wheel of Time TV show, but I'm going to make separate posts about those.

Tomorrow we're going out to my parents for Thanksgiving and staying the night, and then the next day we'll be at sashagee's parents' house. On Saturday we're going to a parents' group that Mishkan is starting as well as visiting sashagee's old roommate who's currently laid up with an injury, and on Sunday we're going to the zoo! The last few days have been quiet, but we're entering the busy period of Thanksgiving week.

It is a well-known fact that being Jewish is a result of being born to a Jewish mother, or converting. There are groups who don't adhere to this standard: I read a post from a Kaifeng Jew talking about how the Kaifeng Jews traced descent patrilineally--as he put it, for them descent was patriarchal, just like everything else in China--as do the Beta Yisrael of Ethiopia, and the American Reform Movement's official position is that a child needs to have one Jewish parent and be raised Jewish to qualify as Jewish. But theory is not always the same as practice. schoolpsychnerd's father was Jewish (the reason I lit a yahrzeit candle for him back in 2018) but her mother was Christian, and any number of times in a Reform setting she'd run into someone who would say she wasn't Jewish. You can change old traditions on paper, but it takes a much longer time for that change to actually be enacted by the community, and I didn't want Laila to feel out of place in a Jewish setting. Her level of observance will be up to her--maybe she'll cover her hair and demand separate plates when she visits us, and maybe she'll chow down on a delicious bacon cheeseburger during Yom Kippur--but I wanted to provide a place for her in the Jewish people. So, we went to the mikvah on Friday

When she heard what would happen, sashagee said it sounded like baptism, and my response was that the Christians got it from us. The mikvah represents a life transition--women will go after their periods or after giving birth, people go before they get married or become a b'nei mitzvah, and some people even go every Shabbat, maybe to prep for the extra soul we get that day. Laila went to mark her entry into the Jewish people, and as a baby she didn't have to go through most of the hurdles that stand in the way. The Talmud lists three requirements for conversion:

1. Circumcision for men.
   
2. Immersion in a mikvah before a beit din of three observant Jewish men.
   
3. A sacrifice at the Temple.

Nowadays, we obviously can't offer that sacrifice, and non-Orthodox Jews are mostly fine with women on the beit din (Members of which are usually rabbis today). Most converts have to undergo a long course of study, learning Jewish law, how to read Hebrew, and so on, but of course a baby doesn't need to spend hours studying Talmud beforehand. It's my job to make sure she knows all of that. She just needed to be in the water once, out of my hands, completely surrounded so that the water could touch every single part of her and bring her into her new life stage.

The time I saw her floating in the pool before the rabbis called out כשר‎ ( kasher, "Fit, correct") and I could scoop her up was the longest three seconds of my life, but once I picked her up, I recited the blessing for immersion in the mikvah, the Shema (suggested by Rabbi Lizzi), and the shehechayanu prayer for a transition in life, and then the beit din sang Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov ("Good omens and good fortune") and gave Laila her Hebrew name--בינה (binah, "Wisdom, understanding").


You're supposed to go for a festive meal after immersion in the mikvah, but we went out to Ethiopian food for Sigd on Thursday so we counted that. We went home and let Laila sleep, spent the day in a relaxed manner, went to services on Saturday morning, and then went home again. To Laila, it was just another day--but to me, it was the first step of passing down the tradition to her. Hopefully she'll want it.

How is it five months already?

Laila is big enough now that we can't in good conscience call her Little Baby Laila anymore and have started calling her Big Baby Laila. I can't carry her in the crook of my arm when I'm walking around with her, but she's wiggly enough that even if I could hold her there it wouldn't work. She can't crawl yet--she still doesn't have the muscle coordination to move her arms and legs in the right pattern--but her attempts have her slowly scooting backward when she's on the floor, and she'll often drift in a circle when she's rolling over. She can't sit up on her own either but she needs less and less help as time goes on. Even though she can't do it on her own, she loves standing up and jumping.

She has much more interest in our comings and goings. There are times when I'll enter the room and she'll clearly have been wanting to see me because she starts wiggling much harder and smiles at me. She doesn't know how to laugh yet, and she's actually pulled back from some of her earlier attempts to. She used to have a strange gasping laugh that sashagee is pretty sure from trying to imitate her, but she hasn't done that in weeks. She just silently giggles, but that doesn't mean she's silent. She's over in her swing babbling right now as sashagee plays with her.

The biggest change though is that now she's eating!


In the last month we served Laila her first meal and reviews were mixed. She loved eating it but her tummy had a lot of trouble with her food--the oatmeal was especially bad but even the applesauce didn't go down smoothly--so we waited a couple weeks to try again. When we went to the apple orchard last weekend, sashagee's father offered Laila an apple and she spent several minutes just sucking on it and trying to get as much of her mouth on it as she could, so yesterday sashagee made some pumpkin purée and Laila eagerly ate it, and she didn't have any more stomach trouble than usual! All of her fussing at night was well within the expected degree of night fussing.

She has more awareness of the world around her. Originally she used to stare at mirrors and probably thought there was another baby there looking at her, but recently sashagee saw her looking at various objects in the mirror and then looking at the objects around her, so she's realizing that the mirror reflects the world rather than being a portal to another one. She loves watching the sky, and when we go for walks in the evening she'll often stare up at the clouds rather than looking at us or the buildings around her.

What changes will come next?

Yesterday evening, as sashagee and I were sitting down to dinner, we decided that it was time for Laila to have dinner too. We went to the doctor on Wednesday and she told us that it was okay to try real food, and Laila has been reaching for anything we're eating when she's been sitting in our laps for about a week now, so yesterday sashagee puréed some oatmeal, cooked it, and we sat down to feed her! She took it without any trouble at all, though she doesn't really know how to eat--she'll just try to suck on the spoon like it's a nipple and it was hard for her to get any oatmeal off. And when she did manage to suck the oatmeal off, she ended up coughing a couple times and it put her off having any more. But she ate!

The problems came later, though--apparently her suction-eating pulled in a lot of air because she had an extremely upset tummy and cried for almost an hour when we went to put her to bed. I ended up walking around with her until she burped a few times while she stared off in the distance like a zombie. After that, she finally went to sleep almost an hour past her bedtime.

I think we'll wait a little bit before her next meal.

Normally I would have posted this yesterday but sashagee and I went out to visit her parents and her grandmother yesterday in the suburbs. Her parents are going down to Florida to help her other grandparents move and will be gone for two weeks, and the grandparent who is here is in poor health. But only poor physical health--she said she didn't want to carry Laila because she was worried she might drop her, but there was nothing wrong with her mind. sashagee's parents cooked fish and made a salad with feta, walnuts, strawberries, blueberries, and put the fish on top, and most of the time we sat around and talked. At one point sashagee went with her stepmother to Costco and I sat outside talking with her grandmother until Laila got sleepy. Then Laila got angry, so I had to retreat into the bedroom to let her sleep on my lap. We can still do things even as new parents, but we're at the mercy of a tiny, very angry tyrant.

Speaking of Laila, she's able to independently grab things now! Not very well, and she can't hold on for very long, but we have some teething toys and when we hand one to her she'll hold it up to her mouth and nom on it. Most of the time. She's still figuring out her hands but as I write this she's over in her swing, holding on to her toy and chewing it. Delicious.

( And speaking of delicious )

Laila can also fold her hands, which she's doing now. It's so cute, you don't even know.

Going to walk down to First Sip, where I used to go with meowtima for weekend morning coworking sessions, with thosesocks and get some drinks! I haven't had one of their gold milk teas or ubae noir tea in years at this point. Years. Now's the chance.

It's been a long time since I had enough stuff happening to write a full post about it, but this last weekend I did! sashagee asked me to take Wednesday off because Laila had a doctor's appointment where she would get her first round of vaccines, and she was worried that Laila would have a bad reaction to it. And since my boss had called me on Monday and basically said "Hey, you have six weeks of vacation, please take them," I took Thursday and Friday off too so I had a full long weekend filled with events!

( Just like old times )

It was a little rough on me--this used to be every weekend for me but it's been a long while since that was true--but it was a lot of fun! Next weekend will be lower-key, but I still do have a lot of vacation to use. Let's see what I can do with it before the Delta variant wreaks its vengeance upon us.

Saturday morning, we woke up earlier than usual, showered, and got dressed to prepare for the day's events--sashagee's parents had offered to come into the city, pick all of us up, take us out to their house in the suburbs, and watch Laila to give sashagee and I some time to go on a date! I suggested going to Geneva and walking around the shops, since I haven't been there in years and certainly not since the Plague Year began. After arriving and making sure Laila was all set up, that she was fed and changed and calm and we wouldn't be leaving a screaming sad baby with sashagee's parents, we borrowed their car and set off:


The first priority was finding food. sashagee still can't eat anything too spicy and doesn't want anything that causes gas--Laila had an extremely bad day after the farmer's market dinner on the 10th and it turns out it's because sunchokes can cause gas--and also we didn't want a contemporary American deal because that's where we were going for dinner, so we skipped a few restaurants until I noticed a place called Egg Harbor tucked away in the back of a courtyard plaza. It's a local breakfast chain (and also in Georgia? ) that had a lot of omelets and skillets and so on. That's usually a downside, because American breakfast food is full of either pork, mixed milk and meat, or both, but as soon as I saw they had shakshuka I new what I was getting. It was good, with chunky tomatoes and slightly spicy, and I even appreciated the English muffin they paired it with after sashagee suggested that the English muffin pockets would efficiently carry the shakshuka to my mouth. They paired it with jam so I didn't do that, but maybe in the future I should.

After we were done eating, we went over to Graham's so sashagee could get some coffee. There were very few people in masks--I'd estimate around a third or less, including a third or less of the staff at the stores we went to--and almost every store had a sign saying that masks were optional for vaccinated patrons. I've been fully vaccinated for months but sashagee just got her first shot a couple weeks ago, so she kept her mask on whenever we were indoors. I went by staff practices--if the people working at the store weren't wearing masks, I didn't either.

We didn't have a lot of time because we had left a milk bottle behind but had no idea how Laila would take to it, so we only got to go to a few stores. The first stop was when sashagee noticed a huge collection of plants in the window of a store called GROW. Still mourning the loss of all the herbs we bought, which were devoured by aphids probably blown in from nearby trees the one time we opened our windows on a windy day, she picked out a stromanthe plant for its pink leaves--it's in the office right now, the room which previously didn't have many plants. We left and went further down Third Street before I asked if we could stop in at Harvey's Tales when I saw it was a bookstore. sashagee made a beeline for the children's section and wanted to buy a copy of The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, so our current plan is to get one more copy so we'll have three--the Japanese copy I already own, the English copy we just bought, and a French copy as well. If we can raise Laila to be trilingual, she'll appreciated it--to this day I'm sad that my father never taught me German growing up, back when he was much better at it than he is now after almost fifty years of it being barely used.

By this point is was almost 3:30 p.m. and we had been gone for three hours, so we stopped at Graham's one more time for ice cream--I got a coconut and almond ice cream malt--and checked into a store that had a bunch of small stalls because they promised a tea collection, but didn't find any tea or even the store that was supposed to sell it. Then we went back to the car and drove back to sashagee's parents' house, where we discovered Laila fast asleep on sashagee's stepmom. They said that she had taken to the bottle just fine--when they initially gave it to her she looked incredulous and screwed up her face to cry right until milk came out, at which point her eyes got wide and she devoured it all and then fell back asleep. What a good baby.

We stuck around a bit before going to Hardware for dinner:


Maybe it's because it was talked up to me so much, but I thought it was nice but not amazing. The Brussels sprouts depicted in the picture were good but not the transcendent experience I was promised--though even sashagee's father, who had expounded on their virtues many times, was a bit disappointed in them--and the smoked salmon salad I got was delicious but too heavily dressed for much flavor other than creamy dill to come through. The baked goat cheese, however, was excellent, with a pickled jalapeño compote on top of the cheese and crispy bread to put it on. Amazing.

Then we went back and sashagee's parents drove us home where she immediately collapsed into bed and I stayed up for the spectacular thunderstorm that smashed into the city around 11 p.m., an event which Laila slept through. Not a surprise, though, since it was the first day she'd had a bottle, the first time she'd been away from us for an extended period, the first time she'd spent a lot of time outside (in sashagee's parents' yard)...so many firsts. Anyone would be tired after that.

What a lovely day!