Listen to the Rain

Yesterday, we went over to a friend's house and her almost four-year-old was using short but full sentences and interacting with her mother in a conversational fashion. All this morning, Laila was barely saying anything. She was throwing tantrums at the drop of a hat, and when we asked her questions she just didn't answer. She would wordlessly whine if anything went wrong and would refuse to do anything by herself, just crying or at most saying "need help! " if anything offered any resistance at all. It was so bad that sashagee called in to the pediatrician and asked them if we could have another speech evaluation. I'm convinced that there's something the first speech evaluator missed and she should have had speech therapy this entire time.

However, this post is much more hopeful than it could have been. Just before lunch, Laila had an accident and we had to spend a bunch of time cleaning her up...but once that was done, it was like the floodgates had opened. At lunch she wanted to spoon miso soup into her cup "all by self!" and she was chatty the entire rest of the day. On the walk to swim class she talked to me the entire time. She went back to using sentences and telling me about things. It was like night and day. She had apparently been using like 80% of her brainpower on holding everything in.

We're still going to get her evaluated because I think it would be good to have confirmation (or not), but we're not nearly as worried as we were. She's just extremely stressed from potty training, the poor girl.

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!

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.

I've got some discussion of money including some exact dollar amounts, so I've put this behind a cut:

( Read more... )

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!

The title is a bit of a misnomer because I already get dental.

I've been worried about this year's work evaluation for a while, not because I had anything specific to worry about, but because I had nothing specific to focus on at all. I wrote about this earlier this year, but due to the switch to the new system, everything was thrown into flux. We were told that part of the impetus for the switch was that the new system would keep metrics itself, and then after its implementation it turned out that it didn't. By that point (much later in the year), I hadn't been keeping my own personal metrics at all, so I had no idea what to base my performance review on. I just put in what I had and hoped for the best and...it worked? On the one hand, I'm glad that my worries didn't come to pass, but on the other hand, this just reinforces my conviction that my performance reviews are mostly unrelated to my actual performance. I get about the same rating no matter what I do.

The real interesting thing is that my boss seems to be pushing me towards management. She randomly had me take a class about being an authentic manager earlier this year, even though I'm currently not in management (though it turned out that half the people in the class didn't have any reports even if they had management-level titles, so maybe it didn't matter) and she reiterated it during my evaluation. She pointed out that she didn't ever think of herself as being a manager until her manager came and asked her if she had considered it and yeah, I can see the parallel she's trying to draw here. I'm not sure--on the one hand, I've been doing my job for a while and a change and promotion would be nice, but on the other hand, with a child on the way am I going to want to be sitting in meetings and otherwise not as able to step away from the computer? But I don't want to turn down this opportunity because that's implicitly turning down every future opportunity that comes.

I'll have to give this a lot of thought.

I'm not online for Shabbat, but I still knew exactly what was happening yesterday. It's unseasonably warm in Chicago, above 20°C for days, and so we had the windows open and we could hear cars honking and shouting and cheering from outside. lisekatevans texted me at 11:30 a.m. telling me that it was basically over. Later, I went out for a walk to see the fall colors and see what was going on, and when I walked into Clark Street there were cars going up and down the street, honking their horns and cheering:


Brought to you by gay communists for socialism. There were literally people dancing and singing in the streets. As I've seen multiple places, it was more like the population celebrating the fall of a dictator rather than the election of a new president. Which isn't half-wrong--with Trump's repeated statements about not accepting the results of the election, and maybe seeking additional terms past a second one if he was elected again. He was very clearly angling for additional power and the Republican Party and their voters was perfectly happy to let him.

That's the real issue here--the environment that gave rise to Trump still exists. More Republicans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, meaning they looked at incipient fascism and decided that they wanted more of it. Deliberate cruelty as the primary driver of government policy. As the tweet says:

Conservatives haven’t understood yet that when they got everything they wanted, that also meant we all saw what they always wanted, and our disgust is genuine and enduring, and consequently millions of us will never respect or trust you again.

Feel however you want about it.

— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) November 8, 2020

We have to show that their attitudes are unacceptable while allowing them an opportunity to change their mind. As frustrating as it might be, giving them no path back means they'll just double-down repeatedly. A lot of them will do that anyway, but it's important for the future of the country that we reduce the prevalence of fascist beliefs in the Republican Party without compromising our own. Progressive policy did well in the election--people want change that helps them. A big chunk of them just apparently want a tyrannical blowhard to do it.

Still, we are in an objectively better situation than we were a few days ago!

I went out to the suburbs yesterday to help my sister wanderluster_kp put most of her possessions in storage. She's taken a spot in a year-long veterinary oncology fellowship in Colorado, and while she's not entirely sure how all of that is going to shake out with the current plague occurring--since people in the fellowship need a certain number of hours and a lot of non-essential surgeries are being cancelled even for vets, they might need to stay on longer to get enough hours--but she thinks her current job can keep her on a bit longer if necessary. So, she's sticking with the plan as it is now.

I was a bit worried about going, because my father is 67 and my mother is 69 and most of the people with coronavirus are asymptomatic carriers. But, there really wasn't a good option here. Either I go, risk that I am infected, and risk infecting my family, or I don't go and risk that my father or sister or both will get injured while moving a bunch of heavy furniture and have to go to the hospital, where they'll probably be exposed anyway. The timing was just bad all around. My sister hired movers to help on the Michigan side, but I don't think that would have worked here--I have another friend who was supposed to move during the lockdown and her movers are suspending all operations until it's over.

But it's done now, and I'm home and listening to my wood-wick candle burn as I sit in front of the fire.

My parents sent me home with a giant amount of food, including three pounds of salmon and a bunch of frozen soup and chill from their basement freezer. They make huge meals and freeze most of it, so I got to be the beneficiary of it. Guess it's soup and bread for lunch tomorrow!

I've been reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and recovery from same. There's a lot in here that I wish I had known about earlier, though I don't know that it would have made a difference. I don't have the kind of deep-seated, serious trauma that this book is talking about. schoolpsychnerd does, but other people can't solve that for her. Still, it might have helped me understand better what she was going through.

This post isn't about that, though. One of the major points the books makes is that the ways traumatized people behave mark them as strange, cause them a lot of pain, and get them shunned or mocked by their peers, but those habits continue because they were protective against the source of their trauma. At one point, in a certain context, they were useful habits, even if in every other context they cause nothing but pain.

When I read that, I immediately thought of some of the habits I developed in my marriage to deal with schoolpsychnerd's behavior. I don't want to go into exhaustive detail (and it would be lashon hara anyway), but one simple example is how I'm often leery of offering a suggestion because there's a part of me that thinks it creates an obligation in the listener. schoolpsychnerd would often treat it that way, because she was a people-pleaser and always tried to accommodate herself to what other people wanted. I didn't want to run roughshod over her, so sometimes we'd end up in a stalemate where each of us tried to get the other to state their opinion first, me so I'd know that her opinion was purely her own and her so she could take my opinion into account when making a decision. That led to me being anxious about asking people to do things, including even inviting them to go out for pie or come to a party, because I've learned over years that merely suggesting something is often treated as a command. So in order to avoid applying undue pressure, I often avoided suggesting things. Most of what this did was isolate me from my friends, but maybe it made schoolpsychnerd feel better.

On Tuesday, though, I thought about hosting a party for Shavuot, since the "eating dairy foods" aspect of the holiday makes it easy to secularize for a gathering. And after about twenty minutes of thought, I made an event and invited sixty people. A Facebook event invite is not a binding contract. It's not pressure in any way. And hopefully people will come and eat delicious ice cream and cheese and have a lovely time.

And this is something I should be aware of in the future, and examine my own actions, and try to figure out what impulses I have that were once an adaptive response but no longer are.

Looking back today at my post after last election, and the one I made for the inauguration. In some ways it's not as bad as I thought, because some of the worst excesses have been contained by judicial restraint. In other ways it's worse, because the last two years have revealed that the sheer inability of punditry and much of politics to understand that America is not magically immune to tyranny and that much of what we considered the rules of our political process are just customs and there's really no recourse if the Republicansfascists decide to ignore them. To say nothing of the open appeals to racism and antisemitism this election--if they work, the fascists will take that to heart and 2020 will be a nightmare.

Years ago I would have said "if there are elections," but of course there will be elections. Even dictatorships have elections. They just, like the fascists are trying to do right now, make sure to rig it so that no one else has a chance of winning.

I voted early last week, but I forgot to bring my pre-tutoring snack today. Hopefully that's not an omen.

( Stomach health problems )

I'm also on edge because of the Tree of Life massacre, obviously. I went to the interfaith service at the local synagogue on Friday, which was nice. Standing room only, and I saw two people in collars leaving as the service ended. It didn't do anything to help the underlying worry, but for the moment, it was nice. There are times I think applying to JET is flipping the table, a moment of desperation I'll come to regret, and there are times I look at the news and think I need to get out of here before it gets worse. I've been reading articles from people born in pre-war Germany saying "I never thought I'd be going through this again" for two years now. I'm starting to think I need to listen.

I started playing Darkest Dungeon over the last weekend since I didn't have anything scheduled other than a work session at a local cafe with some friends. I should have been working on my JET essay, and I'll definitely do that this week, but I spent it delving into catacombs and dark forests and slaying the abominations therein. ping816 bought Darkest Dungeon for me two years ago and it took me until now to get to it because of playing all those Legend of Zelda games.

Well, now I'm drawn in. I didn't play Breath of the Wild at all this weekend.

Back to work and trying not to check twitter every few minutes.

The caption on that image is a reference to the world's fair and to the appearance of the Wrigley Building, but every once in a while it's a bit uncomfortable. This is one of those times.

I spent part of Friday looking up responsa about protesting on Shabbat, and as with most issues of halacha, I found out the answer is, "It's complicated." The Families Belong Together March took place in Chicago, so there's no question of leaving city limits, but there's the issue of carrying on Shabbat and of engaging in conversation similar to that carried out during the rest of the week. There's also the perennial problem of marit ayin, the warning about carrying out actions which look like they might be forbidden even if they are technically permitted. I don't follow all the halacha strictly, but I suppose it's that I like to know what laws I'm breaking, so I came to the accommodation of not making a protest sign, not following along with the chants, but lending my presence and participation in the march as a mark of my support.

The subject is the most common (mis)-quote of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel, who, when asked on what basis he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., replied with, "I felt my feet were praying."

I arrived slightly late and missed the speakers, but I was there when the march set out and I joined on for the full length. We walked south on Clark for a while into the South Loop, past the Federal Building on S. Clark, then turned east for a block before turning north and coming back up Dearborn. I did not take many pictures--taking pictures of a protest seems inconsiderate to me barring explicit consent from the people being photographed--but there were these signs hanging from the L as we crossed Van Buren:



In lieu of taking pictures, I wrote down the signs that I particularly liked, which I'll now put behind this cut:

( Read more... )

I was really nervous about going, just this kind of inchoate worry gripping my stomach without any consistent basis. Part of the reason I missed the speakers is because I was wrestling my worries into shape until I made a snap decision, threw on clothes, and walked out the door, relying on momentum to carry me forward. And as is the way of it, I'm glad I went. It's good to remember that at least 60,000 other people just in Chicago care enough to come on a day where the temperatures hit at least 35°C.

I don't know how much good it will do. I remember the protests on the lead up to the Iraq War, and they had absolutely no impact at all at the time and then the 2004 election proved to the American fascists* that no one really cared that much. As the sign I saw says, don't just march, vote. Even if the votes are rigged such that we have to win by 10% to win, as may well be the case, it's still a vital part of civic change. But I can't help but remember that most modern dictatorships still have elections because the notion of the popular will is heavily ingrained into the definition of political legitimacy. With Kennedy retiring, things get a lot darker even if we do win big in November.

So yes, there is no guarantee that things will not get worse. But damned if I'm not going to be one of the people trying to make them better. Something I keep telling myself, over and over again, the words of R. Tarfon:

It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.
Pirkei Avot 2:16

And I don't think I did very well.

I was doing fine until the listening section. But the JLPT listening section never repeats anything and has all dialogue at faster-than-native speed (I'm listening to an interview with composer Hiyamuta Takushi literally right now and he's speaking about half as fast because it's not a rehearsed script), so you have to pay laser-sharp attention for forty minutes straight and if you ever lose focus even for a second, you've probably gotten the question wrong. That happened to me more than once because maintaining focus that long is extremely difficult and also my listening is just not that good.

Well, it's possible that I did better than I thought. When we were passing up answer sheets, I noticed that the person behind me and the person in front of me had answers that were broadly similar to mine. I'll find out in February. Until then, I'll keep practicing.

It took me an hour and a half to fall asleep last night and then I had horrible dreams for most of the night, but it did lead me to empirical proof that sometimes movie cliches are real. In my dream I was exploring a run-down mansion or house, by myself, and at some point I went upstairs and saw someone else. Being a dream, I went over to talk to him and he turned around and had a fleshless skull for a face, much like the strange woman from the NES game Uninvited. He said something spooky, I screamed...and apparently screamed in real life as well, loud enough to wake up both schoolpsychnerd and myself. Fortunately, she rolled over and went back to sleep, though it took me a while to fall back asleep and then I woke up before my alarm.

I did not suddenly start up in bed with a gasp, though I have done that when I lived in Ireland, when I dreamed about a zombie cat trying to tear off my face. Eventually I will combine these two stereotypical incidents and have a real picture-perfect horror movie waking up moment.

Part of the reason I had such a hard time getting to sleep is that I was worried something would go wrong at work today. So far, nothing has, and I even got all of my vacation I need to take before the end of the year approved. Hopefully the day remains uneventful!