Listen to the Rain

I'm more well-rested and cuddled because we managed to get Laila to sleep in her bassinet! When I came in at 3:15 a.m. or so, I suggested that we wrap her up in her sleeping sack and see if she'd tolerate sleeping apart from us. sashagee told me that she'd been thinking the same thing, so we put her in the sleeping sack and Laila quietly accepted being swaddled up and then laid down to sleep. She muttered a few times but never cried, and sashagee and I got to sleep in the same bed, without her nest of pregnancy pillows!

We tried it again tonight and she cried, and sashagee has a headache so Laila is asleep on my lap. Parenting is like that.


Photos may be a little different this time, since I couldn't eat until 10 p.m.


Chicken adobo rice bowl from Pecking Order. I wasn't sure I'd be able to find anything this week because I once again forgot to actually order due to having to take care of an infant, but when we got there it turned out that the seller I was intending to order from last week who wasn't there came this week. sashagee also grabbed coconut mango custard and some cheese-and-fruit-filled carioca which I tried and they were delicious, but the rice bowls are what I was looking forward to.

I know very little about Filipino food, but this was delicious. It tasted a little soy sauce-y to me, and looking up what adobo is, that's because unlike Spanish adobo, Filipino adobo has soy sauce. Wikipedia says that they're actually two separate cooking methods but the Spanish called it "adobo" because they thought it was similar to their own adobo style and the name stuck. Wikipedia tells me that:

Vinegar, in particular, is one of the most important ingredients in Filipino cuisine

No wonder I liked it so much.

My only complaint is that the dish really wasn't anything other than chicken and rice, with maybe 25g of other vegetables scattered amongst them. I wonder if I could buy this and add more vegetables to it? I couldn't replicate the exact sauce, but vinegar and soy sauce together I can do. And negi go well in anything, to be honest.


Lavender-lemon baklava from Sheekar Delights. I admit I primarily bought this for the novelty, since the Middle Eastern Grocery Store, featured so often in these posts, makes their own baklava and sells it at $10 for the pound and these was $12 for six pieces, so that small arrangement in the picture is like restaurant-level dessert prices. So you can imagine my surprise when I took one bite and it was delicious. The lemon blended perfectly with the honey--of course, the two ingredients are often used in tea--and even the lavender fit in when I took a bite of the center where there was a little bit of it on top. sashagee was very skeptical of lavender being anywhere near baklava, and I wish she had been awake when I was eating so that I could have offered her some. I think her skepticism would have been cured.


I've been slowly plinking away at Final Fantasy VIII over time, but it's hard going. The Japanese is a lot more complicated than it was in Final Fantasy VI, so it takes me longer to get through a conversation, and every once in a while I'll hit a point where I'm faced with a giant brick of text and my brain melts. That happened when I played through the Timber Owls mission, where I had to decipher the instructions given to go on the presidential car heist, and most recently it happened when I was in the Shumi village and I was slammed with a full-screen dialogue box about how amazing mumbas are. It was like 2:30 a.m. when I hit that and Laila was asleep on my lap, so I read the whole thing, then immediately thought "that's enough," went to the save point, and just read RPG blogs for thirty minutes until Laila woke up.

Speaking of Laila sleeping on my lap, I'm having real trouble as I write this. I've never been diagnosed with anything but I have restless legs, and while fortunately they usually don't keep me from sleeping (though I do very occasionally have to get out of bed and tired my legs out), the symptoms get worse when I'm sleepy. Early in the day I can have her sleep on me without any problems, but as the day goes on it gets harder and harder. Sometimes I even have to pick her up and walk around because it's the only way I can prevent myself from having to clench or twitch my legs so much that I'd wake her up, which of course has its own danger of possibly waking her up. I'm not sure what the solution is yet, other than the obvious one of getting her to sleep in her bassinet more. It'll take some doing.

Another post where my awake in the night icon might make sense. I feel like I'll be make more and more of those.