Listen to the Rain

Laila is four years old! Happy birthday Laila!

This year, sashagee decided to have a smaller party this year, with just family. Unfortunately, almost no one could make it--her brother and my sister had to work and her parents were out of town on vacation, so it was just my parents that came. Laila didn't care at all, though, since she'd been talking for days about wanting to go spend time with papa and nana at their house and she was overjoyed at an entire day of attention from them. While I worked (at home, since my boss had offered that I could work from home on her birthday), Laila and papa and nana disappeared into Laila's room and read books, listened to stories on her Yoto (a gift from her grandma and grandpa), and drove cars around on her roadscape rug. When dinnertime came around we asked Laila what she wanted and she said tacos, so the entire family went on a short walk to sashagee's favorite local Mexican place, placed our orders, and walked back and ate. Shortly afterwards, papa and nana had to go home, leaving Laila with more Cars cars to drive around her rug, books, and some other presents.

Laila really loved her butterfly decor:


In more general updates, I already wrote about how we're worried about Laila's speech and we're going to get her evaluated, but she's been doing better in other areas. Today sashagee heard noise and woke up to find Laila had gotten up and gone to the bathroom all by herself! She doing better in swim class, and while she still has a bit of trouble with waiting her turn and with not messing with the floating toys the teachers use for helping to teach lessons, she understands that the appropriate thing to do in class is to "take turns." Or at least, that's what she tells me when I ask her, so she remembers it. Getting her to do it is another thing. On the other hand, she stuck her head underwater on the lesson after the one where the teacher told me that she had been asking to wear goggles, so that's progress! Only once, but I took Laila to a lesson where the parents spent the entire time trying to convince their son to get into the water and he simply would not do it. Laila has never had a problem like that.

We used to keep her door locked at night so she wouldn't get up and get in trouble, but since we're trying to teach her to go to the bathroom on her own, we've stopped. She used to bust out of her room just after we put her down for bed all the time, but she doesn't do that anymore. She's transitioning into a period where she actually wants to go to sleep. I don't expect this to last but I'll enjoy it while it does.

Lately she's been really into her Yoto, which is essentially a radio-esque toy. It has a daily short podcast or music on it at base, and then you can buy cards that kids can put in with various short stories or songs on them. Laila has been listening to a lot of the Little Mermaid. I was initially very skeptical of it because we have a rule about no flashing lights and no interactive buttons for Laila's toys, but I was won over by being told that there weren't videos to accompany the stories, it was just pixelated images and no more than one per chapter--so Little Mermaid only has three pictures (one of Ariel, one of King Triton, and one of Prince Eric). The music only has the image of a radio. We have been stopping her from skipping chapter after chapter, though, in the same way we don't keep reading if she skips ahead in her books anymore. Teaching patience is very important, even though Laila is definitely not happy about having to learn it.

She's turning into a fashionista as well. After five years, sashagee started wearing her earrings again and Laila immediately decided she wanted to wear them too, so we got her some shiny stickers that we use for "earrings." A couple weeks ago while we waiting for the bus, there was a woman wearing a bear of high-heeled gogo boots, and Laila physically put her hands on my cheeks, turned my head, and she, "She [I] like her boots!" Only four and she's very concerned with cuteness.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Final image: the cupcakes that sashagee baked for Laila's birthday.

( Butterflycakes )

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

Today was another session of Laila's Hebrew school (called משפחתון Mishpachton, after the small-scale daycares that exist in Israel) today. I've been dreading going, because Laila is pretty wild and usually goes crazy in class. This time, I had the bright idea to make her walk all the way to the bus and then walk all the way from the bus to the Mishkan headquarters, and it worked! She asked a couple times for me to carry her, I always told her no, and by the time we actually got there she was willing to sit in my lap or have me hold her while the teacher sang the opening and closing songs and when it came time for activities (it was a Pesaḥ lesson), she went over to the tambourine-making station and picked out all the tambourine bells herself, ran to the "color a burning bush" station and did a bit of coloring, and then spent the entire rest of the lesson drawing on the whiteboard and asking me to draw in shapes so she could fill them in. I did draw this extremely sophisticated burning bush image of my own:


These are three and four years old. Not a lot of religious instruction at that age. We did sing dayenu briefly at the end, and there were some other songs in between, butwith young kids the important thing is to keep them engaged. They apparently did a lesson on keeping kids engaged at the Seder, because of course all the discussion and debate and talking about the lessons of Egypt and the wilderness aren't important to hungry children. It's only a benefit if you get to do any of the parts of the four children, and Laila's still a bit young for that. We'll see how she handles the Seder this year.

I do have one bit of sad news, though. We walked part-way back to the bus--I relented and carried her another part of the way--and got on the bus to go meet sashagee for lunch. I got off a little early to go to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to pick up some hummus for Laila, but on the way I noticed something on a nearby lightpole. And when I went closer to look, well:

( antisemitism )

This is the same neighborhood where I've seen people tear down innocuous "Bring them home now" posters about the hostages, though, so I'm not that surprised. I'm just glad that Laila is young enough she didn't notice it or care about it. I only wish that I could have faith that antisemitism would be getting better, instead of on an obvious trajectory to get worse and worse for the rest of our lives.

Just got back from the work popup of Tandoor Char House, previously written about here. Last time they gave me free dessert. This time I paid for dessert...but they gave me a free samosa. I'm not sure how they plan to make money if they constantly give away free stuff but I'm certainly not going to complain.

We got sick from the wedding we went to the weekend before last. At least, I assume that's why--we felt a little bad the day after, but while I recovered on Monday morning, I started feeling worse and took Tuesday off and worked from home on Wednesday. sashagee never felt better and it cumulated in us going to the doctor a couple days ago. Laila and I waited out in the waiting room, alternating between Laila being nearly comatose and laying on my lap, and her wanting to run around the waiting room only to give up and want to go back and sit down when I took her outside to give her more room to run (and also not disturb all the other patients). After an hour of waiting for both us and sashagee--she was updating me on her time just sitting in the exam room in back--a doctor came in, did some checks, diagnosed her with bronchitis acquired after a week of coughing, and sent us off with prescriptions for an inhaler and a couple medications. We went across the street to a place that had both burgers and shawarma, able to satisfy all parties concerned, and when our food came it is ludicrously large portions. None of us finished our food, but we ate what we could, took some takeout boxes, and went on our way.

We're also 2/2 on Middle Eastern places hearing that our daughter's name is Laila and giving us free baklava.

After her first couple swimming classes where she was very wild, Laila got very timid all of a sudden. Her next class she barely wanted to swim at all, just wanted to cling on to the instructor, and the next couple classes after that she tried to get out of the water. The instructor told me that they were going to work on Laila's confidence, though, and yesterday during the lesson she was a little wild but she managed to swim a bit all by herself and I was told she was talking more and did a much better job at swimming. She's slowly getting to the point of being independent--which is good, because we want to put her into preschool this fall and she needs to be conditioned to deal with other kids and with adults she doesn't know telling her what to do. She doesn't have a lot of experience with either of those right now.

Alright, post took me a few hours and now that work day's done. Time to head home. I got a transceiver ping from Laila at 9:30 a.m. saying she misses me so I'm sure she'll be glad to see me when I come home. Have to treasure Laila running to the door to say hi to me for as long as it lasts.

ae were originally planning to go visit sashagee's family in January, but her wisdom teeth removal took a lot out of her so she was down for almost a month. Recently she's recovered enough to actually travel, though, so we borrowed her parents' car and on Friday, after I finished work, I met her at a train station (she and Laila having already gone to her parents' house the previous day) and we drove down to Muncie.

We were there through Sunday and we didn't really do anything touristy or exciting. We were there to see sashagee's grandmother and mother, and that's what we did. Laila ran around her great-grandmother's house, grabbing pens and wanting to draw, playing with teacups, asking to watch Ghibli movies, while we played with her, ate some cheesecake that sashagee and her mother made, relaxed, and slept on the incredibly uncomfortable beds in the hotel room. The second day we were there, Laila was so wound up from having a fun time playing with everyone all day that she couldn't fall asleep until past 11 p.m.! And this after her first words when we got to the hotel room were "Go home" and trying to put her shoes back on.

She was definitely still glad to be home, though. Traveling is nice, but it's also nice to be home.

The most interesting thing to write about--having a three-year-old drag you away so she can make you "egg tea" is a lot of fun in the moment but about all I can write about it is what's in that sentence--was during Laila's nap on Saturday, when sashagee and I went to the nearby Minnetrista Museum to see the Bob Ross Experience.

( Happy little trees )

We've had it easy the last few years. The temperature rarely got below 0°C, and when it did it was only a small amount and only for a short time. Today, when I left the house the temperature was -31°C (with wind) and I saw almost no one on the way to work. The train was 80% empty when it's usually standing room only by the time I get to Belmont, and then when I got off downtown at Grand the temperature was even worse. My face nearly froze despite all my bundling and it was a relief to walk into the office, where well over half of my co-workers decided not to come in. sashagee was really hoping that I wouldn't have to go out into the cold, but I wasn't going to ask--even though apparently a bunch of my co-workers did--so I just waited and hoped that a message would come through saying we could stay home. None ever did, and so here I am.

Remembering how the conversation I had with my old boss at the end-of-year party where he grumped that basically every other department comes into the office like two times a month. I'm not sure I'd want to go in that infrequently, admittedly--during the summer I enjoy coming in twice a week because I can walk along the river every day--but this time of year, it'd be nice.

The weather also led to me laughing harder than I have in a long time when sashagee sent me a meme about "toddler science" that had the following quote:

Length toddler can run when:

Being chased: 5 miles
Asked to walk: 5 steps

When I took Laila out to the store with me yesterday, I got her all bundled up and ready to go and she just silently put her arms up and wanted to be carried. Halfway to the store she wanted to be put down, so I put her down, she took a few steps over to the gravel and crunched around for a few seconds...then silently turned around and put her arms up.

Well, it being so frozen, I really wanted something warm and filling. I wrote before about the quality of the rotating restaurants at work and didn't want that--I wanted something I'd appreciate. So I went out for ramen:


Ramen-san had brisket ramen, which is the best part of the local ramen place near the Red Line stop up where I live, and it's leaving the menu tomorrow, so I tried it. And it was...good. It wasn't as good as the local ramen place--the local place has big chunks of fatty brisket and Ramen-san had ground-up brisket bits, as you can see in the photo--but the broth and the noodles were both good. I feel like that's the problem with American ramen other than the price (ramen in Japan is like 600円 for a reasonbly-sized bowl, and in America they try to charge you $20). You can get two out of three: good noodles, good broth, good fillings. If you're unlucky you get one out of three. You can almost never get all three. This place had two out of three which is mostly what I hope for.

I got an extra egg though and the eggs were delicious. Slightly melty like they should be but not yet melted into the ramen when it was brought out. Perfect. Still didn't stop me from freezing when I walked back out into the cold, though.

How time flies.

The biggest news is that Laila is half potty trained! I say half because while she'll ask us to go to the potty, sit on the potty just fine and use it generally, she's a bit constipated because she's holding it in. I've read that this is pretty normal, that toddlers especially don't really understand and can feel like they're losing a part of their body. Laila doesn't seem scared--she didn't have any of the problems that show up sometimes like being scared of the toilet flushing or not wanting to sit because she's worried she'll fall in--she's just hesitant. She's always been an observer, someone who makes absolutely sure what's going to happen before she takes any action. It took her four months from standing up to walking, and after a couple months she put only the smallest amount of pressure on any surface she was holding on to. But it still took her a while afterwards until she would take a full step. I suspect this will be the same.

At her gymnastics class, sashagee ran into a nanny who said the kid she looked after was in that situation for a year! Hopefully it doesn't take Laila that long.

I've talked a lot about my worries about Laila's language development--speaking only, she understands us just fine--but she's been speaking a lot more. After she said "bread please" at dinner and I said, "Can you use a full sentence Laila please?" she said, "Can I have some bread please!" without any hesitation, so I gave her some bread. We can have more back and forth conversations now, and while she still only uses a few words at a time, we an have full exchanges of information. She'll say "Abba do" and hand me a pen, I'll ask, "What do you want me to draw Laila?" and she'll say, "Heart. All the hearts" and then I'll say, "I'll draw one, Laila, then you can draw another one, okay?" she'll say "mmhmm" and try to draw after I draw a heart. She'll follow along with multi-stage instructions. I can ask her what she wants for breakfast and get a reply. And sure, she's a kid and sometimes she'll say she wants eggs and do an excited dance in the kitchen when I start making eggs and then when I put the eggs down in front of her she refuses to eat them, but that's just being a kid. The important part is that she's starting to give us insight into her mind.

Speaking of her gymnastics class, she's still doing that and having a great time. As time as gone on, she's gotten more used to being in a situation where there's no family member around and a strange grown-up is telling her what to do. She's started doing somersaults herself around the house!

Since it's fall, sashagee has been dressing Laila in extremely fall clothing. This is probably the most obviously fall outfit she's been in, and one of the ones she likes the best because of the skirt:


She's slowly losing her baby face. Soon she'll be totally a little girl. This is why they say treasure every moment, because time only flows one way.

The one sad piece of news I have to report is that her seizures are more frequent now. She had a medicine change and it doesn't seem to be working, though part (most?) of it is also the potty training--apparently that's a seizure trigger in a majority of people. They don't know why, but it's definitely difficult for us to explain to her how important it is not to hold it in. She doesn't know she has epilepsy, she just "wakes up" confused sometimes to see abba and mama there holding her hand and being happy to see her. We have another appointment soon with the doctors to see if we can figure this out, and hopefully it's just a rough period at the moment. Until recently she didn't have a seizure for almost a year at home, only at the grandparents' house, and holding it in was the cause. If we can get past that, maybe we'll be in the clear.

What other ways will she grow and change?

Today was Laila's first day of Hebrew school and it went...okay. For the early part of it while people were singing, she had an extremely hard time sitting still. She didn't like any of the singing, she didn't want to sit still, and she didn't want to participate in the dancing or the movements that went with the songs. Once we moved on to the activity portion of the time, though, she had a great time making a Rosh Hashanah card with her wishes for the New Year as suggested by sashagee--"Go in the potty", "Drama-ma-ma-ma", and "Draw." Then when the songs at the end started, she was more interested in participating while a couple other children started getting very fussy. The culprit revealed itself when we got home, though. She hadn't taken a nap at all over Shabbat and she went down for a nap at 1:30 p.m. today and didn't wake up until 5 p.m.! No wonder she was so cranky. She must have been massively sleep-deprived. Poor baby.

sashagee was out at a girls' brunch, so I was making dinner and when I did, I put on the song in my Listening section. After about half a verse, Laila came over to me and said "Hold you [me] abba" and held her arms up to me. She hugged me super tightly and kept putting her cheek up to my lips to kiss, and when I asked her if she was okay, she said "Uh uh" but she wouldn't tell me what was wrong. When the song was over, I put her down and asked her if she wanted different music. She didn't answer me, but when I put on Zelda & Chill she was soon boxing with her Ariel the little mermaid plushie and giggling, so it all worked out in the end.

She didn't understand the words, but she knew it was a sad song.

My next post will have no Laila news and will instead be about music.

Laila is out at the grandparents for an entire week--first at sashagee's parents, then at my parents. This will be the longest she's been away from us and the house already is so quiet. It doesn't help that sashagee isn't feeling super well so she's back in the room taking a nap. That means dinner is up to me. I'm not sure what she was planning, but there's thawed chicken in the fridge and I know how to make stir-fry so that's probably what I'm going to do. We've had pasta a few times this week and I need to clear it out with some rice.

Work is instituting a DEI curriculum for this year. While they've encouraged an equity element in continuing education for years, this is the first year it's been an explicit part of our evaluation and...well, you can tell it's the first year. They've already changed the requirements half a dozen times, we had a division meeting last week and over half of it was taken up by people asking questions about what the exact requirements were, how many items from list B are needed, if you can combine this item with that item into the requirement or does only one count for it...the list goes on and on and on. And then the other list of requirements is just "hours of content consumed" and you can just say "Trust me bro, I did it" as surety. Onm the other hand, this is probably pretty average in terms of new program rollout at a large organization, because at least they have a stated goal that has remained consistent the entire time. Anyone complaining about government dysfunction specifically has never worked for a large organization.

I have a lot of plans this weekend, what with the baby gone. Tomorrow I'm going to a learning in the park with Mishkan in the morning and then tom.hen.12 invited me to a board game meetup in the afternoon. Sunday the anime kids are having an art/crafting meeting and I'm planning to go to either work on my review of Dawntrail (this month's game) or work on some CDDA modding stuff. It'll be a nice weekend, slightly active, before going back to work.

And speaking of work, dinner won't make itself.

Poor Laila had the experience that so many language-learners had today. She ran up to me holding a dishtowel while I was preparing lunch and then the following conversation ensued:

Laila: holds up the dishtowel "How to do it‽"
Me: "How to do what, Laila?"
Laila: looks at the towel, then off to the side and lets out a heavy sigh
Me: "Do you not have the words to tell me what you want, Laila?"
Laila: another heavy sigh "No."

I tried to get it out of her, but she ran off. It wasn't cleaning, because she knows how to use a cloth for cleaning--just before this conversation she wiped it over the table while saying "Cleaning!" I still don't know what she wanted me to show her.

"Three old!"
-Laila

Happy birthday Laila!

sashagee has very strong ideas about theming and decorating, and she wanted a mermaid/ocean theme since Laila loves fish so much. So when Laila went to bed on Saturday night, we spent a while decorating the room, putting up jellyfish-balloons and opalescent streamers and balloons and inflatable mermaid tails, and when Laila woke up, after breakfast sashagee put her in her very cute party dress:


A bioluminescent mermaid. As usual, I took multiple pictures and when she was looking at me she wasn't smiling and when she was smiling she wasn't looking at me.

( The cutest little girl in the world )

Her black eye is because she can right into an open drawer before sashagee could stop her. And true to form, she cried for a bit, then said "All better" and went over to go draw on her easel.

Still a little tired because Laila went into an MRI yesterday at 6:30 a.m. It was originally supposed to be 1 p.m., then someone cancelled and it was moved to 11 a.m., then apparently everyone cancelled and it was moved to 6:30 a.m., so we all got up at 5 a.m., I walked [Bad username or site: @ instagram.com> name=] down to the bus stop--we got there about ten seconds before the bus did--and a few hours later I walked back to pick them up and we got pastries at the local bakery.

We got the results today, and they're hopeful if still a bit concerning. There were no serious problems noted, no brain tumors, no serious abnormalities, and the list of "[X] is normal. [Y] is well-formed" is long. There was one mild (their words) abnormality, but of course we already knew she had seizures and they had to be caused by something. Fortunately for our state of mind, their suggested course of action is "Wait another year and do another MRI when her brain has grown a bit more," implying that this isn't something that requires immediate action. When we first reported her infantile spasms symptoms they wanted us in for an EEG that night so we know what it looks like when they're worried about a serious issue.

Right now, Laila has entered her princess phase--she discovered a Princess Peach amiibo on my desk after I got my new desk (about which more in another post), and has been carrying it around everywhere, along with Bowser. Poor Mario sits neglected on my desk. Just a few minutes ago, [Bad username or site: @ instagram.com> name=] put some long socks on Laila's hands to act like Princess Peach's gloves and she's absolutely loving them. Maybe I'll have to show her a Mario game.

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.