Listen to the Rain

Blah blah hard to find time to write blah blah.

We've been taking advantage of Laila's youth and easy distractibility as long as there's food around to try to go to friends' for meals, since she's not old enough to get bored when adults are talking about grown-up things. On Saturday, bunnydelfuego invited us over to a combination Havdalah/birthday celebration, so we took Laila and grabbed a bottle of wine on the way. When we got there, Laila was fascinated by the layout of their apartment--unlike most Chicago apartments (and our own condo) which are a long corridor with rooms along their length, bunnydelfuego and benjieweiss's apartment is laid out in a square. Laila was fascinated by this, and she spent quite a while just crawling or walking through doors in a circle trying to find out where the "end" was. sashagee and I traded off watching Laila while the other sat at the table and engaged in grown-up conversation. Laila spent a lot of time in the bathroom touching the tile or the fuzzy bathmat, briefly met Nugget--the rabbit in residence--and gave everyone hugs. We ate gyōza and bruschetta and drank gin punch and got Laila home in time for bed!

Sunday we went out to brunch with aaron.hosek at Pauline's, a diner that's one of his favorite local restaurants. He expected it wouldn't be crowded but the lovely weather (20° and sunny) meant that it didn't matter we were late because the table wasn't ready until we got there. It was another lovely meal, though Laila got a little grumpy towards the end. The stand-out part was when she turned to the table of people next to us and shrieked, just a deafening scream (at baby scale), and when they turned to look at her she was just like Oh! Hello! How are you? Very cute but we're certainly going to have to civilize her a bit.

Perhaps uniquely, I didn't spend last night doomscrolling on the election. I have achieved zen detachment--無心 mushin, one might say--and thought that I had done what I could do and would have to let the world do what it could do. And B"H it turned out that the news is very good. In Illinois we put the right to collective bargaining into the constitution, the governor candidate who made repeated abortion/Shoah comparisons lost, and even the collar counties went Democratic which almost never happens. It turns out that the average voter is able to connect creeping fascism with the problems the country faces.

Does this mean I'm going to stop urging sashagee to renew her passport, and stop plans to get Laila a passport? No. There's a saying that "Jews don't have roots, we have legs" and it's always good to have a plan. I remember reading a tweet from a Ukrainian back in February saying that a couple days prior she had been laughing and chatting out at a sushi restaurant with friends and now she was eating cold sandwiches and happy she had that much. Things can change very quickly.

We took Laila to the dentist yesterday and she did great! She obviously didn't like having her mouth messed with, but she didn't cry and she still gave the dentist a hug afterward! What a good baby.